Abstract
This chapter ethnographically investigates how ideologies of whiteness and missions interact in an evangelical English language school in South Carolina. Using discourse analysis of classroom observations and interviews with five teachers across eleven classes, the chapter explores how whiteness is central to but unmarked in the presentation of American culture that students are socialized into, and how legacies of colonialism and assimilationist strategies are upheld in the presentation of white evangelical culture as equivalent to American culture. The ideologies described here demonstrate how contemporary practices of evangelical ESL programs continue to reflect a lingering history of colonialism and white supremacy in which the field of English teaching has long been implicated (Han & Varghese, 2019; Kim, 2019; Kubota, 2001, 2021; Pennycook, 2002; Vaccino-Salvadore, 2021; Vandrick, 1999). It is important to note where the legacy of these movements remains so that biases and harmful practices can be confronted and ameliorated.
TopColonialism And The Church
While the project of colonialism was largely an economic venture, the dominance that colonial powers maintained for centuries, and still maintain today, was not achieved by economic control alone. In conjunction with the competition for resources was the pursuit of cultural dominance and civilization of the colonized: colonial nations achieved and maintained economic dominance through cultural, religious, and linguistic promotion that was predicated on the erasure of indigenous cultures, religions, and languages. Religion was a critical vehicle for the imposition of the colonizer’s culture onto the colonized. At first, the religion being exported was Catholicism, but with the Protestant Reformation, Protestantism became more culturally relevant and ultimately replaced Catholicism as the primary source of missionaries. In particular, Protestant missionaries became intrinsically linked with British imperialism (Gearon et al., 2020). In this context, teaching literacy was highly valued, as the doctrine of sola scriptura (Gearon, 2013) stated that God’s written word is the only authority and only means of revelation from God, and thus reading God’s word was crucial to salvation. This value resulted in the teaching of English reading and writing being strongly promoted across the vast British empire. Oftentimes, missions work and the teaching of English were one and the same pursuit as the lines between the pursuit of colonial dominance, Christian proselytization, and civilization of the native3 blurred.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Missions: The intentional work of evangelizing people who are not Christians, especially non-Westerners.
Colonialism: The system of domination of one power, or group of powers, over other nation(s) and people(s), historically related to the West’s domination and exploitation of the Global South.
White Listening Subject: An ideological position that reflects the dominance and normativity of whiteness as the standard by which and for which language must be produced.
Multiculturalism: The coexistence of multiple cultures in one society or dynamic.
Raciolinguistic: Of or relating to the co-construction of race and language.
Missionary: An individual who engages in the work of missions as a dominant activity.
Translanguaging: The multilingual act of accessing one’s full repertoire of linguistic resources and/or moving fluidly between languages; a pedagogical framework that honors multilingual students’ full linguistic repertoires as valid and valuable within the classroom.
Hegemony: The system of influence by which the dominant cultural group maintains its power.
Common European Framework of Reference: A six-point scale used to rate language ability, originally and primarily used in Europe.
Assimilation: An ideology that promotes conformity to a particular cultural norm, at the expense of one’s original culture, language, religion, etc.