ABSTRACT
The most significant theme that emerges from these chapters is a will to dialogue. And while Edge’s “ non-judgmental dialogue” is perhaps chimerical, we can at least see here an attempt to understand, to unpick the stereotypes, to ask “both sides” of these debates to avoid reductionist accusations. And yet I have several misgivings here: the first is that we have to have this discussion at all. As Ashis Nandy (2006) notes, after the secularity of the twentieth century, nobody expected religion to emerge from the shadows to occupy center stage at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And for many of us this is not a welcome return. Now, in the twenty-first century we are still arguing about religion? It is not that I follow Dawkin’s (2006) scientific rationalist dismissal of religion (though he reveals much that is deeply foolish in religious belief), nor Hitchens’ (2007) attempt to show that, as he puts it, religion poisons everything (though he does mount a strong case about the culpability of religion for so much that is distressing in human history); nor that I do not welcome discussion of spirituality, belief, philosophy, and ethics. But to have to engage with ancient organized religions in their new incarnations, with claims to the existence of an almighty being still, after so much, seems a desperate regression. In the same way that evolutionary scientists have recently been obliged to return to old and hapless arguments invoked under the name of Intelligent Design, so I wonder why in ELT or the social sciences more broadly, we are obliged to return now to issues that surely should not have much space in current intellectual debate. For those of us who have ourselves been critics of humanism and the arrogant assumptions of European Enlightenment, it has been a sadly regressive step to have to return to much earlier debates about belief. If these can be raised to the level of discussion of values, ethics, responsibilities, cultural difference, and politics that Johnston (2003) achieves in his thoughtful book, we can move forward; but while this sinks back into the mud of faith, we are lost. And this touches on the second misgiving, which is the sheer incommensurability of the worldviews on display here. The arguments pass each other by, misunderstanding and misrepresenting each other, with little common ground to move forward. What can we salvage from all this? Johnston’s injunction for evangelicals to stop hiding, acknowledge their political complicities, and admit others may be right, and for non-evangelicals to avoid essentializations, not to dismiss others’
viewpoints, and also to admit that others may be right, is a fair and reasonably balanced starting point. And he is surely right that this can only be conciliatory dialogue rather than exploratory dialogue since we are talking across too great a divide here. Loptes’ attempt to balance the discussion by showing the diversity of Christian English language teachers, to “challenge the missionary stereotype of CET” is useful but is marred on several counts. Above all, the study lacks reflexivity, especially with its terminology; the use of phrases such as “limited access countries” and so on surely cannot just be used as if they were self-evident. Where respondents report their position as “Don’t have a scalp counting mentality; these are real people, not notches on your evangelical belt,” such statements surely speak to the bigger problem that for many CET, students are indeed notches on your evangelical belt. The phrase makes me shiver. Clearly, however, we get a useful picture from both Loptes’ and Chamberlain’s studies of the pernicious work of the large missionary organizations and the need, as one respondent put it, for more research “on how the Christian church/mission is manipulating ELT.” CET, this respondent continued, should “seriously consider the ethical implications of being a member of a mission organization.” Perhaps most interesting is Chamberlain’s attempt, like Johnston’s, to produce a balanced message to both camps. He is certainly to be commended for his critique of missionary activity. If such work could open the gates to critical, reflexive, work by CET, we might be able to move forward. Yet Chamberlain’s chapter falls apart in its second part: while Johnston produces a balanced call to both sides by keeping his feet in a secular camp that allows for a diversity of views, Chamberlain, by contrast, boldly tries to argue from two positions and, in doing so, reveals in the second part many of the weaknesses he critiques in the first. Of course, it might be argued that my reading of this is the result of a closer alignment with Johnston’s stance, and that my own position inevitably leads me to an accord with Johnston and the first part of Chamberlain’s chapter. Yet to argue along these lines of relative partiality would be to fall into the trap of the relativism Chamberlain decries. I therefore wish to suggest that there are broader reasons for rejecting a number of Chamberlain’s later contentions. In the rest of this chapter I will discuss four concerns arising from this and the other chapters: relativism, anti-intellectualism, political accountability, and linguistic ideologies. The hardest issue here is one of relativism and incommensurability. It is clear that at one level, we cannot avoid this: one side says the other does not believe in an Almighty Being, the other says there is no Almighty Being to believe in. Or one side says they have the right path to access this being while the other claims that theirs is the true way. With such divides based at heart only on belief, there can be no discussion toward reconciliation of views here. Chamberlain takes secular critics to task for the belief that “all religions are fundamentally the same but superficially different when, in fact, all religions are superficially the same but fundamentally different (Zacharias, 1997).” There seems no escape here from the point that from the outside religions look very similar, yet from the inside, they of course look different. Coming from the first position, this is why I wondered at some point if we were to believe the claims to intercultural understanding
made by Loptes and Chamberlain, which seem to express a certain multiculturalism, an appreciation of difference, an acknowledgment perhaps that there are other and equal ways of doing things, this could not also be extended to other belief systems: why cling to one set of beliefs and practices when another seems to be trying to get at the same thing in a slightly different way? But no, as Chamberlain asserts, following Zacharias, from an internal religious point of view, the fact that all religions are at their core exclusive (not in fact the case) and do not claim similarity with other religions (also not the case), renders such pluralism impossible. Yet here, Chamberlain falls into two traps that he accuses others of: anti-intellectualism and relativist tautologies. Unfortunately, by adhering to the views of Ravi Zacharias, President of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, Chamberlain gets caught in bad philosophy, where atheism is misunderstood as a worldview, and Nietsche’s philosophy is misrepresented as a secular precursor to Nazism. One aspect of the “furtive” Christian activity that Johnston critiques is the tendency to publish in littleknown presses and journals (well known in Christian communities but little known outside). This is also, I would like to suggest, part of the antiintellectualism of the movement, an anti-intellectualism that goes deeper than Chamberlain’s account: they publish in these presses not only to hide but because other presses would not publish their work (hence in part the struggle to get this book published). And Zacharias is not going to assist us much in working through these issues. The point is this: if one wishes to dismiss a view of the relativity of religions (that is, that they sit in relationship to each other), it is hard to also maintain a vision of respect for non-religious viewpoints, other religions, or even other cultures. If one wishes to adhere to this exclusivist interpretation of religion, then it is not plausible also to claim a position of respect for others. What Chamberlain does here is to conflate a strong epistemological relativism (an absolute relativism, as it were) with other, more inclusive relativistic viewpoints. The fallacious argument that relativism-as a way of thinking that acknowledges the position of the other, rather than a position that suggests inherent incommensurability-is impossible, since if everything is relative, then nothing is, is itself tautological since it only acknowledges an exclusivist and non-relativist position. Loptes’ and Chamberlain’s chapters constantly reveal this tension between on the one hand a will to acknowledge others’ perspectives, to accept the possibilities of pluralism, of difference, that the other may be right, and on the other hand, the need to assert a righteousness about their own beliefs. Another concern here is that the call by Johnston for some self-disclosure about political agendas is still absent. Again, it is not enough here to follow Zacharias’ arguments that conflict and violence are an illogical product of religion but a logical product of atheism (a disgraceful claim). It is surely a profound denial of responsibility to simply dismiss the Christian role in the invasion of Iraq, or in the abuse of children by priests, or in the persecution of non-believers, as an atheist problem. Unless Christians confront the deep connections between their religion and the many atrocities done in its name, between extreme right-wing politics and evangelical Christianity, between subjection and abuse, belief and ignorance, rather than disclaiming any connection, dialogue will remain imposs-
ible. In this context, Chamberlain’s claim that Jesus “was apolitical, absolutely pure in His motivations and sacrificial love” and yet “always found Himself at the center of controversy” is a strange description of a man who supposedly struggled against religious orthodoxy and political domination. Missing in all this is a sense of power, and an understanding that to operate in the name of Jesus can never be to behave with apolitical purity. This emerges in Chamberlain’s argument against the notion that missionaries prey on the weak. His argument is problematic when he suggests that to describe people as weak is to disenfranchise them. He is right that to talk in terms of “the weak” is to overlook questions of agency, but given that he has already cited Slimbach’s (2000) description of the relation between the “characteristically poor, nonwhite, non-English-speaking women and men who live marginalized lives within multiethnic urban centers” and missionaries who “are typically affluent, white, monolingual (in English) persons raised in homogeneous suburban communities with individualist cultural values and conservative (if not reactionary) political views,” it seems to me impossible to remove issues of power and politics from this. The Somali women he discusses are of course not individually and universally weak in terms of their possibility for action, but the relations of power by which they are positioned do render them politically weak. And as long as any discussion of power is absent, as long as a belief in apolitical purity of motivation is claimed, we need to continue to demand, as Johnston does, “to acknowledge who you are in bed with.” A related concern is that connections between religion and culture are not explored in any depth. One aspect of this that has received little attention in ELT circles is the relation between religion and language ideologies. At issue here are the ways in which different Christian groups understand the role of language. Most obviously, of course, a fundamentalist orientation to religion often equates to a fundamentalist orientation to language. I recall here a story told to me by a colleague teaching in the American Mid-west who dared to suggest that texts had multiple readings. He did not stay long in the job. As Heath (1983) observed with respect to the literacy practices of the communities she studied, the white working-class (Roadville) religious practices linked to the ways their children dealt with texts:
The church insists on verbatim performance as a prime way of showing off knowledge; parents demand verbatim performance from their children at home as a way of showing they are learning. The church imposes memorization tasks from simplest to most difficult; parents buy educational toys according to their graded difficulty and introduce these to their preschoolers with demonstration and question-and-answer drills.
