Altar gladiators? Discussin the strangeness notion in the religious discourse of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God

Abstract

Nowadays, not rarely has the term “gladiator” been applied in certain discourses, like the religious, the business, the sports, among other ones, which corresponds to a knowledge element coming from another place, as a consequence of history movements and, thus, of senses. In this article, I analyze the occurrence of the term “gladiator” in the religious discourse  of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, or, better yet, the strangeness, according to Ernst-Pereira (2009), caused by the presence of this term in the linearity of a discourse to which, at first, it would not belong. For the analysis, I take as corpus three discourse sequences extracted from a report, published on the Folha Universal of 03/08/2015, concerning the Project “Altar Gladiators”, which consists on preparing young people to propagate the religion. In the theoretical review, I mainly consider the notion of discourse formation, developed by Pêcheux, focusing on the instability of its borders, which results in the discourse heterogeneity.