ABSTRACT
This volume on the role of Christian educators in English language teaching (ELT) is very welcome, as the topic has long been a “hidden” one in TESL/TEFL/ ELT. (Hereafter, for convenience, I will generally use the term ELT-English Language teaching-as the most inclusive term to refer to this field.) Fortunately, the topic has just recently been increasingly discussed, sometimes in very heated and controversial terms. The book’s concern with the role of fundamentalism is particularly relevant in today’s world, where religious fundamentalism of all kinds, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise, has played an increasingly large role on the world stage. Before I respond to the often very candid chapters in this book, and in particular to those in this Part II, it is only fair that I reveal, as many of the authors have, my own background and stance regarding religion. In this response piece, I draw-as I have in past writing on the topic-not only on my own research, but also on my personal experience, attempting to be as candid as some of these contributors are. I am not a Christian, nor do I practice any other religion. I do care very much about issues of ethics, values, and morality, as most educators do, and I have written about these as they apply to ELT (e.g., Hafernik, Messerschmitt, & Vandrick, 2002; Messerschmitt, Hafernik, & Vandrick, 1997; Vandrick, Hafernik, & Messerschmitt, 1995). I believe that it is very possible to live a moral life without being religious. However, I do have a background in religion, as I was raised in a fairly strict Christian Protestant family. I presume that I was asked to write this response in large part because of my own explorations of my “missionary kid” background in India in the 1950s and 1960s and its connection to my ESL teaching and, by extension, to the field of ELT in general, and my remarks here are informed by that background, as well as by the literature on postcolonialism and English language teaching (e.g., Canagarajah, 1999; Pennycook, 1998; Phillipson, 1992) and the current controversy in TESOL about evangelical Christians teaching English as a foreign language (e.g., Edge, 1996, 2003; Pennycook & Coutand-Marin, 2003; Pennycook & Makoni, 2005; Varghese & Johnston, 2007). These articles provide a powerful exposé of a largely hidden part of the ELT field, one in which some Christian organizations and often untrained individuals use ELT teaching as a pretext (some might call it a ruse) to obtain entry into non-Western countries and do forbidden missionary work there.
