Religious Metaphors in Media on “Science of Reading”

• In Event: The Seductive Power and Harm of Religious Rhetoric in Literacy

Abstract

In this paper, the authors consider how rhetoric in the media conflates reading education with related agendas of the current Christian right (such as book banning). In effect this rhetoric deconstructs barriers between church and state while also obscuring what should be productive connections between research and evolving knowledge generation around the current status of reading education. The most recent round of media messages about what is known as “the science of reading” (SOR) often depend on secondary reports or research by advocacy groups (Bomer, 2006; Malin & Lubienski, 2015) diverting attention from a complete examination of reading science as a broad body of research (Authors, 2021; Goodwin & Jiménez, 2020).
We present a critical metaphor analysis of media reports published between 2017 and 2023 on the SOR to reveal covert (and possibly) unconscious intentions found in the language (Charteris-Black, 2004, p. 34). This critical analysis, where metaphor provokes “understanding one thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 5), reveals media metaphors that we argue influence readers’ perspectives in ways that reify reading education as a simplistic, binary set of practices (Authors, 2021).
We analyze media containing SOR in the title and/or the main topic with a specific focus on an emerging metaphor: READING EDUCATION IS RELIGION. This metaphor reinforces a long-standing relationship between sociopolitical agendas of the Christian right and reading education (Luke 2004; Thogmartin, 1994). In particular, simplistic approaches to reading education connect to ideologies and practices of reading as literal adherence to the “word” – decoding through simple phonetics was used in missionary contexts to teach many in the world to read the word of the Bible (Luke, 2004). In addition, literalism in textual practices diverges from interpretive reading and writing pedagogies. A focus on “the word” places the reader in a passive position (as a follower) as opposed to active problem solvers, interpreters of text, and text critics. In the 1980s, conservative activists such as Phyllis Schlafly associated the latter with socialism and progressivism – that is – too relativistic in terms of “right and wrong” or “truth” as contained in a text rather than made through interactions between reader and text (Cohen-Cole, 2014).
While most researchers would agree that science is a process of identifying and understanding systems and phenomena, in media reporting on the SOR, science becomes reified as an unquestionable thing such that zeal replaces evidence (Thomas, 2020). Accordingly, media reports ask readers to accept a single settled solution to reading education as an act of faith – ignoring research architectures that bind in favor on research architectures that divide.

Authors

• Patricia C. Paugh, University of Massachusetts - Boston

• Lara J. Handsfield, Illinois State University

• Deborah Ann MacPhee, Illinois State University