Ethos Pathos Logos At Church

In this week's posting I'm discussing the arguments of ethos pathos and logos that are made by the University Christian Church.

Ethos
Just as a quick recap, an appeal to logos is an appeal to credibility or character. It includes things like diplomas awards and medals, but there are a lot of other ways to appeal to credibility. Let's take a look at how the University Christian Church pulls it off. I stayed mainly in the sanctuary and the lobby just outside of the sanctuary. In this area the floor is tiled very nicely, the furniture is all wood of the best quality and all the pictures are framed in ornate frames with gold prevailing as the dominant color. This atmosphere gives you the impression that you're in a place that's successful, the stuff around you is expensive and you realize that whoever runs the church must be pretty credible to have that kind of support.The pictures inside the frames are all of Christ or at least biblical stories and they are from all time periods and cultures. This is an appeal to ethos because you think, "Well, if they have pictures from all these places they must have studied them and therefore they must really know their stuff."  Inside the sanctuary there are huge pillars, enough seats for maybe a million people and all kinds of crazy symbols and words that make a very strong appeal to anyone who is able to decipher them.

Pathos
An appeal to pathos is an appeal to emotion. The lighting in the lobby is dimmer than usual and that immediately invokes a sense of reverence and quietness. No one that I encountered in the lobby or the sanctuary ever spoke loudly or harshly. A quiet reverence always prevailed. Also the pictures are mostly of Christ as he is dying, which is definitely designed to invoke emotion. To someone who doesn't understand the Christ story it would probably be an emotion of disgust' while those who are familiar with and believe the story will experience an emotion more along the lines of gratitude.

Logos
When you make an appeal to logos you're appealing to someone's logic. In the lobby of the University Christian Church there is a TV that is hung from the ceiling that is constantly flashing appeals to logos. Some of the more notable ones are ads explaining their charitable causes. You would obviously want to attend attend a church that had plenty of charitable endeavors, that's just common sense. Also, next to all the pictures is a little framed caption that has the date, artist and title of the piece, an appeal to logos because of the dates. One last appeal to logos is on the number of seats available in the sanctuary. It is simply logical that if that many people go to church there every week it must be a pretty good church.

Now we would consciously weigh very few of these things in our minds if we were trying to decide whether or not this is the place we wanted to attend church. Most of these appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos happen subconsciously and instantly. We would usually just walk away from a place like this feeling impressed not really able to explain why. After spending hours observing this place I have realized that there is a lot more that goes into designing that good feeling than I ever knew.