Abstract

Abstract- Politicians, in legitimising their ideologies exploit language. They consciously produce specific kinds of speech acts in order to covertly authorise their beliefs and persuade their audience. A plethora of studies exist on propositional meanings in Nigerian political speeches nonetheless paucity exists on utterance meanings in foreign political speeches and on discordant concept of Religion and politics. Therefore, this paper investigated the kinds of speech acts Obama employed in legitimising his ideology about religion in his 2006 political speech titled Faith and Politics. The mixed method was adopted. A total of 182 sentences in the speech formed the population of the study while only 18 purposively selected sentences tagged utterances (UT) constituted the sample size of the study. Allan Speech Acts Theory was employed. The findings revealed that Obama used both direct and indirect speeches. In the direct category, the speaker used a preponderance of Constative Assertive acts 10 (94.4%) and only 1(3.57%) directive act for affirming his beliefs about religion and the interconnection between religion and politics. However, for the indirect category, the eloquent speaker employed verdictive acts (55.5%), 1(5.5%), directive requesitive acts (33.3%) and assertive act 1(5.5%). The indirect verdictive acts were used to covertly judge the aberration of religion-its reduction to a tool of discrimination, terrorism, and manipulation of believers’ minds etcetera. Obama thus, employed the directive requesitive act in imploring his listeners to turn a new leaf to religion and rather exploit religion to teach moral values-discipline, tolerance and ultimately give hope to the people thereby making religion serve as a panacea to critical social ills, and thus a veritable complement for global politics. This paper, therefore, concludes that the combination of religion and politics is required for an effective global politics. This paper recommends that religious-political discourse should not be parochial so it can cater for the needs of the pluralistic world.