Linguistics, markup languages, and ethical myopia.
(Note: numbers in square brackets refer to entries in the Bibliography at the end of this post).
I’ve been thinking about how ethics play a part in our professional lives. For some kinds of profession, ethics are close to the surface. If you’re a medical doctor, you have a fairly explicit code of ethics, and professional bodies which, ideally, will hold you to that code. If you’re an aid worker, or a teacher, if you’re a scientist working with human or animal subjects, if you’re a lawyer or a priest, the ethical dimension of your profession is clearly and constantly relevant to everything you do. That’s not to say that people in these professions always behave ethically, of course. But there’s no question about the importance of ethics to what they do. Even professions which don’t subscribe to some clear ethical code may still be unavoidably associated with questions of ethics. Tobacco manufacturers, advertisers, oil companies, arms traders, and so many others are constantly subject to questions about the ethics of their professions. The professions themselves may not want to discuss these issues, but investigative journalists, scientists, medical researchers, and the general public all work to force the ethical questions into the light.
I work at the intersection of two fields: linguistics and markup technologies (particularly XML). And it’s occurred to me recently that the importance of ethics to both these fields is much less clear than it would be if I worked in psychology or journalism or the pharmaceutical industry. And yet, I want to propose that ethics is always relevant, to anything and everything we do in our professional lives. I’m going to argue that the failure to place a clear ethical code at the centre of our work makes us vulnerable to an unthinking slide into complicity with ethically questionable ideologies and practices.
In order to make this argument, I’m going to make a case study of a dirty little secret of academic linguistics, and particularly of the field of endangered languages. This case study also overlaps with some of my experiences in the field of markup technologies. It’s primarily a case study of an organization which is at the forefront of documenting endangered languages. Many linguists are unaware that this organization is first and foremost an effort for fundamentalist evangelical Christian missionary work. It is part of a constellation of institutions which use their wealth and political power to take Bibles and evangelical teachings into impoverished, marginalized communities around the world.
Despite the provocative title of this essay, I’m not proposing to call evangelical missionaries Nazis. The allusion is to a viral social media post in which a man describes a bartender taking one look at a customer, who has entered quietly and is bothering nobody, and ordering him out of his bar. The bartender explains that the man was wearing Nazi insignia, and that if he doesn’t show a no-tolerance policy for Nazis, they'll start bringing their friends, and soon he’ll be running a Nazi bar. It's a parable, if you like, about the paradox of tolerance.
The question I want to ask is how we can try to ensure that we aren’t working in the Nazi bar. This doesn’t mean refusing to work with anyone whose philosophical views we dislike, or using personal beliefs alone as an excuse for ostracization or harassment of our colleagues. It does mean asking where the line is drawn.
And there is always a line to be drawn. But we are, as a whole, bad at drawing it. We have been encouraged to equate faith with action motivated by that faith, as though questioning faith-based action is no different from bigotry against the faith itself. We have been taught that mentioning religion and politics is vulgar. We have been enculturated to be polite. To be civil. If racism or misogyny or authoritarianism come in a good suit with academic credentials, and speak calmly and reasonably, it would not be genteel to throw those nice people out of our bar. After all, they’re not saying anything racist in front of us; they’re telling us about their fascinating new XML hack, or describing their fascinating research into educational reform. Where’s the liberal left’s fabled tolerance, huh?
But there’s always a line to be drawn. Unfortunately, for the civility fetishists, that line too often appears when someone points out that the affable man in the good suit is actually a political fanatic or a religious supremacist; an ideologue whose work may look like some ideal of scientific or technical neutrality, but is actually a cog in a machine of oppression or ethnocide or ideological warfare. Saying this part out loud is not genteel. It violates the “go along to get along” ethos that civility fetishists place at their moral centre. But civility makes a very unstable moral centre for anyone who doesn’t want to find themselves working in the Nazi Bar.
I first became aware of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL—now SIL Global) as an undergraduate. They created some really good fonts for displaying and printing the characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which I used extensively. I think I probably used some of their linguistic analysis software on a few occasions, too.
At the time, I had no idea that I was using tools created by a missionary organization. I would certainly have felt differently about using those tools if I had known.
I first became aware of ClearBible, an organization now absorbed into Biblica, in 2022, when Jonathan Robie spoke at Balisage, the Markup Conference, about his work for ClearBible. Robie later became “Senior Research and Development Fellow at Biblica, Inc”. He was also instrumental in developing XQuery, a crucial part of the modern XML technology stack.
It was after listening to Robie and taking a look at the ClearBible project that I realised something important. The point of these Bible translation projects is not to represent the texts as clearly and objectively as possible, giving equal space to the different traditions (including, notably, Judaism) which have a stake in their interpretation. The point is to evangelize.
Having seen somewhere that Robie formerly worked for SIL, I was intrigued at the shift from scholarly linguistics to a project which had the hallmarks of fundamentalist evangelical proselytism. My presumption that SIL was just “scholarly linguistics” didn’t prepare me for what I found when I dug a little deeper.
Since starting my reading and research in 2022, I’ve come to some conclusions about the power of ethics to jump up from dusty corners and scare us when we’re least expecting it. To explain how I came to these conclusions, I need to give you some background about SIL and its affiliates and partners, their history, and the work they are doing today.
SIL is partnered with Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT). In fact, the two have, throughout their history, been more or less the same organization [5]. I’ll largely refer to the organization as SIL from now on, with the understanding that we are, in fact, talking about the conjunction of SIL and WBT in many cases. As critics have pointed out, it proved convenient for the organization to maintain two separate faces: the scientific, scholarly SIL, and the evangelizing, proselytizing, and (crucially) fundraising mission of WBT [5, 17].
The two organizations were founded by William Cameron Townsend, a Bible salesman and missionary who learned Kaqchikel, an indigenous language of Guatemala, in order that he could translate the Bible. Townsend founded SIL in 1934 as a linguistic organization supposedly focused on documentation of indigenous languages, preservation of indigenous oral literature and history, and improvement of the material conditions of indigenous communities. SIL had to be careful to avoid the appearance of missionary work, since national governments in Latin America, where Townsend began his operations, often looked unfavourably on explicit religious work amongst their indigenous people [17]. Wycliffe Bible Translators was therefore formally founded in 1942, having begun in 1934 as a training camp for young men wishing to become missionary-linguists. WBT was the fundraising face of the organization, which appealed to rich fundamentalists eager to place their wealth at the service of North American colonialist Christianity.
Soon, Townsend was being given substantial support to develop an aviation and radio network across the jungles of South America, both from cheap sales or donations of U.S. military surplus [5], and from the governments of the countries in which SIL operated. (Protestant missionary aviation networks are still the main means of traversing the Ecuadorian Amazon [3]).
It would take far too long to itemize all the evidence suggesting that SIL collaborated with political regimes worldwide whilst also serving the interests of the U.S. government (and, incidentally, U.S. business). The works by Calvet, Colby and Dennet, and Stoll listed in the Bibliography of this post are well worth reading for a full picture, although many of their conclusions are disputed by SIL. Townsend was keen to gain U.S. Government approval for his work (and, in particular, to lobby for expansion of the donation or sale of government surplus property to SIL). In lobbying the U.S. Congress, Townsend indicated his willingness to place the resources of SIL at the service of U.S. political and business interests.
Townsend indicated that he had spoken with the governor of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, who “was very cordial, extremely so, toward the idea of American investors coming in and participating in the program of development for the Amazon river country” [quoted in 21]. Townsend promised Congress that SIL’s aviation and radio service was already serving “everyone in the jungle—scientists, government officials, missionaries, businessmen and so forth. And that, of course, is winning friends for the United States” [quoted in 21]. In Peru, indeed, SIL’s aviation network was placed at the disposal of the national government, carrying out tasks which included flying political dissidents to jungle penal colonies [5]. SIL had a virtual monopoly on aviation services in some jungle areas in South America, and its planes therefore brought the first U.S. geological prospectors to previously inaccessible parts of Ecuador, which were subsequently the site of Texaco-Gulf oil operations [4]. SIL has received funding from expatriate coffee growers, Standard Oil, and timber merchants Weyerhaeuser, as well as U.S. AID [3]. And during the Vietnam War, SIL was funded by the CIA-backed Asia Foundation to produce primers for hill tribes in strategic areas in the Philippines [5].
Townsend also promised Congress that “when a knowledge of tribal tongues all over the world is useful for the defence of our country, we shall show our appreciation by placing in your hands dictionaries, grammars, and bilingual texts” [quoted in 22]. In 1965, at the height of American interference in Asian politics, this was clearly not an idle promise.
Alongside direct collaboration with both external and internal military-political forces, the political slant of SIL's work raises questions about its role in endangered language preservation and revitalization. SIL teaching has been geared towards inculcating an assimilationist mindset in indigenous communities. This includes teaching the national, majority language (usually a colonial, European language such as Spanish or English) as part of a programme of bilingual education [7]. On its face, such a programme offers benefits for the students, allowing them to participate in the cultural life of the nation which now governs them. And yet, such integration must be carefully managed, to give opportunities for growth for the minoritized languages. SIL’s programmes appear not to have prioritized the preservation of indigenous languages, instead being satisfied with documenting their demise while promoting the benefits of the dominant tongue.
In a novel written by Townsend, a Kaqchikel convert to Christianity proclaims that their indigenous language “ought to be destroyed”, because “we Indians are divided by the many languages we speak. Spanish will unite us” [1981, cited in 17]. Given this attitude, it should come as no surprise that Townsend cheerfully promoted the tendency for SIL’s “bilingual” education programmes to lead to the disappearance of indigenous languages. In North American communities, “through our [...] bilingual primers and other bilingual materials, we speed up the tendency for English to supplant [the indigenous language]” [quoted in 22]. Townsend also praised the linguistic Russification he found in the Soviet Union where, “out of the hodgepodge” of linguistic diversity “has come one predominant and useful language” [1972, cited in 1]. For Townsend, the ability of a dominant language to fracture previously coherent cultural groups and facilitate their assimilation into the culture of their colonizers appears to have been a feature, not a bug.
SIL’s programmes have been criticized for encouraging very limited domains of use for indigenous languages, relegating them largely to religious spheres, while the majority language is used for most other purposes [4]. The indigenous-language publications produced by SIL, apart from Bible translations, often tend to be “himnos protestantes o mitos nativos convenientemente distorsionados según los intereses ideológicos y religiosos de los misioneros” (“Protestant hymns, or native myths conveniently distorted in line with the ideological and religious interests of the missionaries”) [6]. This domain restriction is a classic problem in language minoritization, and revitalization efforts often focus on elaboration of domains of use, which gives the minoritized language status and encourages its wider employment.
There are also questions about the quality of SIL's work in one of its major areas of supposed expertise, that of developing alphabetic scripts for previously unwritten languages. The SIL unified orthography for Mayan languages, for example, drew heavily on the orthography of Spanish, the dominant language of the nations where Mayan languages were spoken. This, of course, makes sense if the main aim was to introduce the indigenous people to Spanish as quickly as possible, and to make their own languages into a stepping stone to Spanish. Subtle phonological distinctions were either never noticed or ignored by SIL’s linguists in their rush to get the languages into written form [7]. More accurate orthographies, designed by speakers of Mayan languages themselves, lacked the political power of the SIL-backed orthography, however [7] and it would be many decades before the work of primary-language speakers of the Mayan languages would begin to overtake the Hispanicized orthographies of the SIL linguists and others.
The picture of SIL’s work that arises from these criticisms is at odds with the praise heaped upon the Institution by Congressman Curtis in 1974, on Bible Translation Day (a designated day for which Cameron Townsend had lobbied the President [5]), when he claimed “it goes without saying” that, after Bible translation into an indigenous language, “there would follow the translation of books to provide them with all the learning of the world” [quoted in 23]. The reality is that SIL was interested in two major linguistic goals: translating the Christian scriptures into indigenous languages; and educating minoritized-language communities in majority, colonial languages. Enriching the literature of the indigenous language with a library of its own has not been apparent on the agenda.
This, in turn, leads to a related issue: the education given by SIL to the people with whom it works is clearly neither comprehensive nor unbiased, throwing significant doubt on the Insitute’s claims that nobody is coerced into conversion to Christianity [1]. SIL claims to offer “the opportunity of intelligent choice” [9] to its potential converts. It asserts that “every human being has the right and the need to hear of the love of God in a culturally understandable way, so that intelligent choice can be made on that knowledge” [8]. But this is clearly a laughable claim, since SIL, like other missionary translation projects, has no interest in presenting Christianity in its true intellectual and philosophical context. Rather, they show up with impressive resources including modern medicine (which may otherwise be unobtainable), and provide training, healthcare, and education, often under contract to a national government. They then claim that improvement in the community’s health is the result of belief in Jesus. This is hardly an appropriate, sensitive, or objective way to promote “intelligent choice”, particularly when the cultural traditions of the people in question may predispose them to feel more comfortable with supernatural explanations than scientific ones.
This is not to denigrate the intelligence of these people, or to assert that their cultural traditions are inferior to those of any other community or nation. SIL’s apologists are keen to accuse its detractors of paternalism towards “supposedly gullible” [1] indigenous peoples. Yet I do not suggest that these people are unintelligent or inherently gullible. Neither do I wish to depict them as lacking in agency [10]. It is not gullibility to fail to see an explanation that you had no reason to think was possible, nor is it lack of agency to make a decision based on information from what you believed was a trustworthy source.
Many of the indigenous communities contacted by SIL were previously extremely isolated, spoke no language other than their own endangered one, and were largely non-literate. They therefore had little or no access to worldviews other than their own. People who have only ever known a worldview that assumes a role for the supernatural in assuring wellbeing or punishing wrongdoing are not well prepared to question a second supernatural worldview when it is presented to them hand in hand with apparently miraculous (but actually scientific) advancement. After all, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” [Clarke], and to a significant fraction of the communities approached by SIL, almost all technology woould have seemed highly advanced in comparison to their own. Little wonder if SIL’s deity looked far more powerful than anything they had encountered before, when SIL had no particular urgency to give them the education that would have enabled them to recognize the scientific nature of medical and other “miracles”.
On SIL Global’s homepage, the organization is described as a “global, faith-based nonprofit”—but this information is placed well below the fold. The dominant message on the site’s landing page is that “Language is essential to human life”, followed by “25% of the world’s people are left out because of language-related barriers”. For a “faith-based” organization which lists “Scripture translation” as the first of its major contributions to language revitalization, SIL Global buries the lede on its homepage. A quick scan of the most conspicuous text on the page would tell you nothing about the religious agenda of SIL Global.
SIL’s web presence is geared towards eliding the missionary character of its work, encouraging linguists to treat it like any other scholarly institution despite the clear bias of everything it does, which runs contrary to scientific ethics in many ways. SIL avoids giving the impression that its primary motivation in studying indigenous languages is Bible translation, with the goal of converting thus-far unchristianized peoples. Its extensive provision of linguistic and language-technology resources used by the academic community does not come with any overt religious message. It certainly does not attempt to use its academic reach to try and convert its colleagues and fellow scholars. It saves its proselytizing efforts for people from vulnerable, marginalized, impoverished, non-literate cultures, and hides its light under a bushel when it presents its scholarly face to the academy.
Many of SIL’s partners, such as the aforementioned Biblica, are far more upfront about their faith-based motivations. Biblica is not a direct affiliate of SIL. However, the organizations work closely together, for example as members of illumiNations which is, according to its website, “an alliance of Bible translation agencies and resource partners working together with generous givers like you to eradicate Bible poverty.” WBT, SIL, and Biblica are three of the organizations who have a “shared goal”: “To see ALL people gain access to God’s Word in a language they can clearly understand BY 2033” [illumiNations—emphasis in original].
Let’s focus on that term, “Bible poverty”.
“Bible poverty” is lack of access to a Bible in one’s primary language (one’s “heart language” as it is often called by organizations like those involved in illumiNations). These organizations work with communities devastated by natural disasters, war, famine, and other types of acute crisis, as well as those whose crises are chronic: malnutrition, lack of healthcare, lack of education, neglect or active oppression by their governments.
In 2023, WBT had revenue of $802,171 (U.S. dollars), as well as total assets of $4.1 million. Biiblica had revenue of $27.6 million and total assets worth $12.9 million. illumiNations had revenue of $46.3 million and total assets of $5.04 million. SIL had revenue of $49 million and total assets of $127 million. It’s not clear how much of the hundreds of millions of dollars these (tax-exempt) organizations control goes to their missionary and Bible-translation work, and how much is dedicated to aid work such as providing medical care, housing, sanitation, and so on. But, for example, illumiNations promises donors to its “12 verse challenge” (who sponsor translation of one verse of the Bible a month, for $35 each time) that “100% [of their donation] funds Bible translation work”.
What might these organizations’ millions of dollars do to alleviate poverty, rather than this tendentious construct “Bible poverty”?
I’m not primarily here to discuss the morality of spending millions countering “Bible poverty” while genuine poverty is killing people every minute of every day. The ethics of fiddling while Rome burns, though I do think it’s an important aspect of the problem with the missionary linguists, is not my greatest concern. I’m more interested in looking at the ideologies at play in missionary-linguistic and missionary-technological work, because those ideologies are the thing that make me draw my line in the sand, and refuse to call these people colleagues.
In order to explain why the work of ClearBible, represented by its employee Jonathan Robie, particularly caught my attention in 2022, I want to look at the ideological construction by Biblica (and, previously, ClearBible) of its own work and of the people it “serves”.
On visiting Biblica's website, the first thing I saw was a popup telling me that “Former Muslims are coming to Christ in record numbers across hostile nations. But there aren't enough Bibles.” This sets the tone for the organization’s fundraising efforts, which appeal to fundamentalist Christian donors with the tantalizing prospect of Muslim conversion.
Biblica’s website makes unsourced, unverifiable, scientific-sounding claims such as “The best predictor of spiritual health in young adults is that they regularly read the Bible as children” [Biblica]. The website also makes claims couched in medical-psychological jargon. The Asha programme, for example, is “a nine-week trauma healing program that uses the words of Jesus to address the long-term symptoms of chronic or post-traumatic stress for women.”
When we look at some of the text describing Asha, however, it raises questions. Each week of the program contains a “story”:
These fictitious stories reflect the real experiences of pain and suffering of women from all over the world. They tell of the many ways in which women can experience abuse and how their bodies and minds may react. [Biblica]
The testimonials from women who have apparently used the programme, however, suggest that the “fictitious” nature of these stories may not be entirely clear to participants. “As a group, we heard so many testimonies, and we learned from them about the problems in the world”, says one. “I read about women who had gone through much worse situations than me”, says another. I find myself, at the least, uncomfortable with the notion that women who have faced abuse and trauma are being told fictional stories to make them feel that others have it worse than them. I’m no psychologist and I don’t claim to be one. But I would like to know the psychological theory behind applying the “think of the poor starving children” tactic as a tool for recovery from PTSD.
The Survivors programme is part of the same suite of “Adversity, Crisis and Trauma” materials published by Biblica, and is aimed at children aged 6–11 working with “a Trained Facilitator”. It is described as “a crisis response resource to help children work through the immediate effects of a traumatic experience or repeated, ongoing trauma”, and it “encourages children to know that they were created by a God who loves them and cares for them”. A testimonial from one missionary states that most of the traumatized children with whom she used the programme “were not Christians”. Under the heading “Kids in Crisis”, Biblica boasts that it helps to “make disciples in parts of the world that are youth-rich but Bible-poor”. The term “youth-rich” imagines these traumatized, deprived children as some kind of natural resource to be extracted in the name of Jesus.
There are serious questions of ethics with these “Adversity, Crisis and Trauma” programmes. The phenomenon of “value conversion”, in which clients tend to adopt the values expressed by their therapists, means that an ethical therapist is obligated to tread very carefully when expressing religious beliefs to a client [19, 12]. The therapist is in a position of considerable emotional and psychological power over the client. When a therapist is explicitly aiming to pass on religious values, therefore, there is the real potential for an abuse of power to occur. And, I would argue, working with traumatized people in a programme explicitly designed to address their trauma puts one, at the very least, in the role of pseudo-therapist.
Although I couldn’t find the full content of Asha or of Survivors to review them in more detail, another Biblica programme, Reach4Life, is available in the form of a free app, which I downloaded. It’s advertised on the website as the “flagship discipleship program for young people aged 12 to 18+”, with a particular focus on issues of sex, relationships, and identity.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that same-sex relationships are not demonized to the extent I’d expected. Reach4Life also places an admirably strong emphasis on countering sexual coercion. The text is clear and unambiguous: “In some circles, women aren’t treated as equals with men—and men feel as if they can demand sex when they want it. This is rape. Plain and simple.” This is an excellent and very important message, and it’s marvellous to see Reach4Life setting it out so clearly (although it is very focused on traditional views of men as aggressors, and as such contains no such clear statement about the importance of men's consent).
Nonetheless, there is content in Biblica’s Reach4Life that I do find troubling. For one thing, it has a clear abstinence-only approach to sex education. This approach is not evidence-based, and has been found to promote victim blaming and to bolster systemic gender inequality [15]. By withholding accurate and complete information, abstinence-only approaches to sex education for adolescents ultimately “threaten fundamental human rights to health, information, and life” [16].
However, as much as its ideologies about sex, I was struck again by questions of how informed the readers are as to what is true and what is a useful fiction in Biblica’s content. Consider this passage, which appears in one section of Reach4Life’s app:
An angry teenager pointed a gun at 17-year-old Cassie. ‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked? ‘Yes, I believe in Jesus,’ were her final words. At her funeral, 75 of her friends became Christians. They saw her faith was real enough to die for and they wanted something that great for themselves.
My best assessment is that this passage is referring to the death of Cassie Bernall, who was murdered during the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. A survivor who had been in the same room as Cassie during the massacre initially identified her as the student who affirmed her faith in God. However, that witness had been unable to see Cassie, and investigators discovered that he had misidentified the student from her voice alone. The student in question had actually been Valeen Schnurr, a survivor who confirmed that she had been asked about her faith. The representation of Cassie Bernall as a martyr persisted in evangelical circles, however I can find no specific source for the claim that 75 of her friends became Christians at her funeral.
(If there is another “17-year-old Cassie” murdered by an “angry teenager”, 75 of whose friends converted at her funeral, then of course I apologise to Biblica for questioning this passage in Reach4Life.)
Like SIL when it claims not to be a missionary organization and hides its religious fundamentalism behind an academic mask, Biblica’s tactics call into question its integrity in the most profound way. Biblica is knowingly promulgating, to an audience of children, a lie about a teenage murder victim. It represents itself as a morally-centered purveyor of truth, and education, and knowledge. Yet it shows itself willing to manipulate its audience of materially- and educationally-deprived children with lies and propaganda designed to win them for Christianity at any cost.
Biblica doesn’t respect the people to whom it ministers. It doesn’t respect their right to modern, scientific information about their own health. It doesn’t respect their right to non-partisan, evidence-based therapy when they have experienced trauma. It doesn’t respect their right not to be fed propaganda and misinformation in their schools. These are assaults against its targets’ fundamental human rights.
As I mentioned, my introduction to Biblica came via the organization ClearBible. Although the ClearBible website is now gone after its absorption by Biblica, the Internet Archive’s WaybackMachine preserves snapshots of the way it looked a few years back. Here’s the extract that caught my eye at the time:
Don and Carol Richardson risked their lives to share the gospel with the Sawi people of P[apua] N[ew] G[uinea]. The Peace Child book and movie told their unforgettable story of living among these headhunting cannibals who valued treachery, fattening victims with friendship before the slaughter. In fact, they initially viewed Judas as a hero since he betrayed Jesus.
Compare these words to a panegyric to SIL, which appeared in Reader’s Digest in 1958, describing the organization’s ministering to “wild Indians”; “backward tribes”; “disease-prone tribes people” who “have known little but want and savage superstition”, [reprinted in 21]. Through modern medicine, assimilationist doctrines, and religious proselytism, SIL was enabled to “convert 5,000 Tzeltals from sun worship to Christianity” [reprinted in 21].
These two short extracts, written over fifty years apart, have so much to say about the multi-million-dollar missionary-linguistics industry. The image of indigenous peoples is lurid, patronizing, racist, and demeaning. The white-saviourism of these movements is evident, however much they may try to involve local people as translators alongside Western-educated missionaries. (I am aware that there are also many non-white missionaries, whose stories have often been overlooked—see e.g. [2]). Look at the photographs on the websites of organizations like Biblica and WBT, and you’ll see the stereotypical images of “exotic” people of colour in traditional clothing, and the ubiquitous poor Black children receiving medicine or books or water.
How much is being lost when endangered cultures are presented to the world through the mediating, colonizing lens of SIL or of Biblica? I’m fascinated to know more of a worldview in which Judas is the hero—it’s not even such an alien worldview to someone brought up on the music of the great Leon Rosselson. I would love to know how sun worship expresses itself in language. Are there liturgical texts in the oral tradition? Are there songs—something akin to what a Christian might call “hymns”?
But we can’t trust these “linguists” who have, often, been the only people officially authorized to work with endangered languages and cultures [7]. We can’t trust them to tell the truth to the people with whom they work. We can’t trust them to tell us the truth, particularly when they document cultural and religious traditions which do not line up with evangelical Christianity. After all, if they give the sun-worshippers or the Judas-lovers their own religious texts in their own language, they will give those texts the same power—of easy reproduction and storage; of reification as immutable objects—as is given to the Christian scriptures.
We cannot trust SIL or Biblica or any of these organizations not to suppress, distort, or outright lie in the service of Jesus.
Evangelical missionaries like to claim that they are bringing freedom from supersitition and fear. The communities in which they work “live in fear” because they “believe implicitly in a spirit world”; the solution for this, naturally, is to “know about Jesus’ love and peace” [14]. This claim is yet another which is not evidence-based. While religious or spiritual beliefs (in general) may provide some people with resources for coping with distress, for others, religious belief is a source of stress: “religious beliefs and doctrines may reinforce neurotic tendencies, enhance fears or guilt, and restrict life rather than enhance it” [13].
Christianity is not unique amongst religious beliefs in providing solace; neither is it unique in being a source of neurosis and anxiety. Replacing sun worship with Jesus worship is not bringing freedom from superstitious anxiety; it is merely replacing one faith-based worldview with another. And all faith-based worldviews are superstition, unless they happen to be the one you believe is true.
The ethics of conversion, proselytism, and missionary activity are complicated, raising difficult questions for modern democratic nations:
How does the state balance one community’s right to exercise and expand its faith versus another person's or community's right to be left alone to its own traditions? How does the state protect the juxtaposed rights claims of majority and minority religions, or of foreign and indigenous religions? [20]
Human rights instruments like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) recognize various rights relating to freedom of religion. Amongst other rights guaranteed by the ICCPR: “No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice” [ICCPR 18.2]. In addition, “the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions” is also protected [ICCPR 18.4].
Missionaries like SIL and Biblica cross the line here. When the only schooling available for your children comes from evangelizing missionaries, do you truly have the ability to choose the religious and moral character of your children's education? And when missionaries teach misinformation rather than facts, they are applying coercion; denying their students the right to make an informed choice about what they believe.
So the beliefs of the missionary-linguists are not the point: their actions are. By their own admission, they choose the world’s “least-reached and least-resourced communities” [Biblica] as the most likely places to find new converts. The training guide (link opens a pdf file) for missionaries spreading Biblica’s Reach4Life programme tells them “Always prioritise economically challenged areas as this will be a rare gift to the recipients”, adding that “such areas are usually densely populated meaning we will reach more youth”. When calling a school to make an appointment, they are to “Emphasize that everyone who participates in the programme will receive their own Reach4Life book free”.
Free books for “economically challenged” school children in developing countries. Modern medicine for indigenous people dying of diseases. Counselling for traumatized children and women. I’m not denying that the material and practical support brought by the missionary-linguistic industry is sometimes very real [17]. Missionaries have brought with them useful tools, seeds, insecticides, kerosene, and trade goods [5, 17]. SIL has saved lives with medical care and brought literacy to many people. The missionaries’ practical knowledge of the wider world has also, no doubt, helped in countless smaller ways, as when SIL missionary Marilyn Laszlo describes helping a Papuan indigenous leader understand that he is being cheated by white traders who are taking advantage of his lack of knowledge of Australian currency [14]. The missionaries of SIL helped some indigenous groups to understand and assert their political and territorial rights [1, 3].
There has always been this paradox in Christian missionary work: it has brought all kinds of lifesaving and life-enhancing services to people throughout the world; yet it has equally been implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism, including ethnocide and genocide [3, 11] . More than that, missionary work is ultimately enacted with the selfish motivation of increasing the religion’s headcount, which entails denigrating and destroying existing spiritual and cultural practices of the missionary’s target populations. The aid work, whether it is linguistic or medical, is not an end in itself. It is a way in so that they can pursue the more important task of evangelization.
For all the help they have brought, the programmes run by SIL and their partners are exploitative and manipulative. They target people made vulnerable by conflict, trauma, oppression, and poverty (real poverty), feed them propaganda in the guise of education, and bribe them with improvements in their quality of life which are inseparable from fundamentalist Christian propaganda.
According to illumiNations, “when a community receives the Word of God in its language, people start acting differently—wisely and more graciously” [illumiNations]. If that is true, we can only hope that someone will bring the personnel of SIL and Biblica the Word of God in their own language some day.
Linguists and markup technologists have a choice to make: do we want to work in the Religious-Fundamentalist Bar? This is not a choice about whether to shun people based on their religious faith. It’s a choice about whether we will accept as colleagues people whose professional and academic ethics are so bad that much of their work consitutes an assault on fundamental human rights.
If you are of the belief that politics and religion are beyond the purview of your professional life, then I have news for you: the professional is political. There’s a reason that technology as a profession has huge demographic imbalances; those reasons are political. There are reasons why numerous recent technologies have been found to discriminate against Black people; those reasons are political. There are reasons why universities have ethical review boards to ensure that people are not harmed by researchers, and many of those reasons are also political. They are to do with the way academics and scientists have treated other human beings whose human rights they did not recognize, and that is absolutely political.
Too often, equity and the rights of non-dominant demographics are labelled “political” issues, whereas the status quo and its power hierarchies, are brushed off as “neutral”. But from its foundations, SIL used its scientific credentials as a way to gain access to potential converts, as even its apologists admit [e.g. 18]. The professional is political because the professional offers access to power. The scholarly is political because the scholarly is assumed to adhere to standards of integrity and objectivity which give its words weight. It’s a trust system, and SIL and other missionary-linguistic organizations abuse that trust, using their academic and professional credentials to prey on some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
They use their connections with us to whitewash their exploitative, manipulative agenda.
So, will we work with the employees of these fundamentalist organizations? Will we call them colleagues? Or will we be uncivil, and rock the boat of professional gentility? Will we point out that their methods are, at best, ethically questionable, and their “academic” work untrustworthy? Will we say that the projects for which they use their linguistic and technical skills, however interesting and innovative, cross an ethical line beyond which we do not wish to follow them?
Because there’s always a line. If you’re asked to welcome as a colleague someone whose entire professional or academic efforts are put towards misinformation and abuse of power in the service of the cultural hegemony of fundamentalist evangelicalism, and you choose not to rock the boat, then you draw a line, just as surely as you do if you refuse to extend that welcome.
You can’t avoid drawing the line; you can only choose which side you’re standing on when you draw it.
[1] Aldridge, Boone (2018) For the gospel’s sake.
[2] Andrews, Edward E. (2013) Native apostles : Black and Indian missionaries in the British Atlantic world.
[3] Brysk, Alison (2004) “From civil society to collective action: the politics of religion in Ecuador” in Edward L. Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga, eds. Resurgent voices in Latin America.
[4] Calvet, Louis-Jean [V. Manfredi, trans.] (1998 [2007]) Language policy and imperialism: the Summer Institute of Linguistics [downloaded from https://people.bu.edu/manfredi/CalvetCh14anglaisSIL.pdf].
[5] Colby, Gerard with Charlotte Dennet (1996) Thy will be done.
[6] Colegio de Etnologos y Antropologos Sociales C. C. (1979) Dominación ideológica y Ciencia Social: El I.L.V. en México.
[7] Errington, Joseph (2008) Linguistics in a colonial world.
[8] Fry, Dick (1984) “Anthropological subterfuge” Third Way, May.
[9] Fry, Dick (1985) “Wycliffe: no deception” Third Way, January.
[10] Hartch, Todd (2006) Missionaries of the state.
[11] IWGIA [International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs] (1971) Declaration of Barbados.
[12] Jadaszewski, Stefan (2017) “Ethically problematic value change as an outcome of psychotherapeutic interventions” Ethics & Behaviour 27.
[13] Koenig, Harold G. (2009) “Research on religion, spirituality, and mental health: a review” The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 54.
[14] Laszlo, Marilyn with Luci Tumas (1998) Mission Possible.
[15] Lewinger, Sarah and S. Garnett Russell (2021) “Embodied experiences of abstinence-only education: a case study of women in Uganda” Gender and Education 33.
[16] Santelli, John, et al. (2017) “Abstinence-Only-until-marriage: an updated review of U.S. policies and programs and their impact” Journal of Adolescent Health 61.
[17] Stoll, David (1982) Fishers of men or founders of empire?.
[18] Svelmoe, William Lawrence (2008) A new vision for missions.
[19] Tjeltveit, Alan C. (1986) “The ethics of value conversion in psychotherapy: Appropriate and inappropriate therapist influence on client values” Clinical Psychology Review 6.
[20] Witte, John, Jr. (2001) “A primer on the rights and wrongs of proselytism” Cumberland Law Review 31.
[21] U.S. Govt. (1959) Hearings before a special subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate (Eighty-sixth Congress, first session, July 29, 30, and August 10, 1959).
[22] U.S. Govt. (1965) Hearings before the Subcommittee on foreign aid expenditures of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate (Eighty-ninth Congress, first session, August 26 and 27, 1965: Part 2).
[23] U.S. Govt. (1974) Congressional Record (Proceedings and debates of the 93rd Congress, second session) Vol. 10 - Part 25.