Religion is a prominent, if not central, domain of most human societies, and therefore easily becomes a natural locus for intercultural communication. With a domain being “a sphere of activity representing a combination of specific times, settings, and role relationships” (Romaine 2000: 44), clarification of its parameters is requisite for examining discourse that occurs within it. In the case of something universal like religion, this would appear to be an easy task, for “as far as we know, all societies have possessed beliefs that can be grouped under the term religion … [which involves] any set of attitudes, beliefs, and practices pertaining to supernatural power, whether that power be forces, gods, spirits, ghosts, or demons” (Ember and Ember 2007: 263). Humanity gives every appearance of being incurably religious.

However, a conclusive definition for religion is strangely elusive, for what typifies one faith may be contravened by another. A religion might be classified by its theistic orientation (e.g., mono-vs. polytheism) or conversely by its interest in a multiplicity of lower spiritual beings (e.g., animism), or even by human interaction with ostensible spiritual forces (e.g., divination, magic) – or, in the case of humanism, by denial of otherworld divinities altogether. Some religions are notoriously exclusive while others are characterized by their eclecticism (e.g., Baha’ism, Taoism). Major religions usually honor established canons of truth composed in ancient writings which authoritatively put forward defining stories and concepts, though certain others passionately resist the concept of a prioritizing canon and opt for privatized experience that is highly resistant to such traditional constructs and classification (Wicca, Shamanism). While the concept of spirituality inhabits most religions, particular varieties seem even to confound this notion: secular humanism constitutes a defiantly self-oriented positioning; cargo cults are property-focused; and even the remembrance of civilians killed in national tragedies sometimes reaches a level of veneration (cf. Wollaston in Davies and Wollaston 1993: 37) with hero stories morphing into virtual hagiography. Add to all of this the fact that religion can be viewed from the point of view of individual faith and belief, or from that of organized cultus or bureaucracy, and the multifold paths of pursuit appear bewildering.

On the other hand, ascertaining the concepts of cross-cultural and inter-cultural is not as daunting. The former usually involves making comparisons of culturally differing communities while the latter implies the dynamics that result from actual contact between them. All inter-cultural communication theories are relatively new, being at most a few decades in the making (Gudykunst and Moody 2002: 25–6).

Religion is Necessarily Intercultural

Despite the difficulties that accompany such definitions, the characteristics that tend to emerge within the rubric of religion make this domain a compelling realm for language inquiry. Religions encourage belief in something distinct from, even counter-intuitive to, routine daily existence. They hold to a transcendence of being or purpose while offering some sort of bridge between the here-and-now and reality beyond. Religions talk about extraordinary beings, events, values, or potentials, and they evoke callings and relationships that distinguish themselves from the customary courses of life.

However they are viewed and practiced, religions possess a profound interconnection with the culture that harbors (and perhaps even created) them and which they often come to represent to other cultures. Religious concepts and the cultus that expresses them cannot survive apart from culture, nor can they be articulated and conveyed apart from language and discourse. Geertz (1973: 89) observed that

sacred symbols function to synthesize a people’s ethos – the tone, character and quality of their life … their world view – the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are. … In religious belief and practice a group’s ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the world describes, while the world view is rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of life.

Human culture, whether overtly religious or not, operates simultaneously at both deep and surface levels: the deep level consists of mostly unarticulated perceptions, assumptions, and values held by a community, while the surface level involves the materials and activities that can be directly observed, heard, or touched. The deep level involves worldview, and as a general rule it drives what goes on at the surface level. The close relationship between these levels explains why culture is often defined in a singular stroke, such as “a fuzzy set of attitudes, beliefs, behavioural conventions, and basic assumptions and values that are shared by a group of people, and that influence each member’s behaviour and each member’s interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour” (Spencer-Oatey 2000: 4; emphasis mine). Religions, like business organizations, develop an internal culture, such as Harris and Nelson (2008: 225–6) describe:

Culture is the shadow side of formal organization as reflected by its unique character, style, energy, commitment, and way of doing things. It provides the glue for cohesion and the oil for lubrication. As people perform their culturally sanctioned behaviors, their actions assist in creating and maintaining the organization. In addition, culture prescribes how we are to respond to a variety of situations with culturally specific rewards and penalties possible depending on our performance.

Religious cultures, like their ethnic or business counterparts, have a history and construct a worldview and, via religious discourse, mingle and collide with activities of other cultural domains. Religions prompt a recurrence of intercultural collisions due to the fact that, once they move from their original and formative settings to the new environment of a group or society that adopts them, old culture meets new culture. Given that “language represents the deepest manifestation of a culture, and people’s value systems” (Clyne 1994: 1), it could be said that religions are driven by an unavoidable intercultural impulse. Of necessity, then, religious language involves intercultural discourse, for even a solitary individual in the act of reading religious materials crosses cultural barriers – be they ethnically, linguistically, historically, or perceptively defined – and, more often, groups encounter “others” in this essentially intercultural realm. People are simultaneously members of different cultures as surely as they are of varying discourse systems (Scollon and Scollon 2001: 3). Religious discourse often involves participants whose surroundings differ from the system that birthed their faith. At its most basic level, religious language conveys the tenets and expectations of a religion born in one social setting into quite different and diverse loci in other places.

By virtue of its claims of transcending customary human experience, religion implicitly positions itself to operate supra-culturally, potentially wielding an enormous capacity for unification of diverse peoples. Religious language couched in its original or imported culture aims to influence whomever it embraces and, not surprisingly, religious persons are widely seen as anything but value-neutral. From all of these observations, then, we can begin to identify features of religion that bear upon intercultural discourse.

The Language of Religion as Intercultural Common Ground

If the maxim “Life is religion” holds true, then religious discourse opens a window into the very essence of what it means to be human. Regardless of how one defines religion or what constitutes a religious activity, cultures have always interpreted and conveyed their values and underlying truths to successive generations by using religious terminology. Religious language attempts to frame human experience beneath the umbra of transcendence. Combining Ferdinand de Saussure’s observation that “language is a social fact” (quoted in Halliday 1978: 2) with anthropologists’ assertion that religion is the standard fare of societies, it is no surprise whatsoever that religious language is to be found at all levels of society. Whether one considers the propositional contents or doctrines of a religious group (i.e. truth claims) or the values and implications attached to them (i.e. perceptions), religious language links culturally diverse people, or at least has the capacity to do so. This is evident in the fact that so many of the world’s ancient texts are religious in nature, and their impulses and institutions have animated the complex civilizations of history. “Speech … is the primal and indispensable medium. It made us human, keeps us human, and in fact defines what human means” (Postman 1985: 9) – and religious speech is all the more so.

The social science researcher of religious language need not aim to assess a religion’s propositions and doctrines, but should be concerned to accept at face value the fact that people past and present give expression to their convictions and experiences in language that appears to be distinct in form and function in its domain. Unfortunately, an anti-religion bias has haunted empirical studies in the post-positivist tradition, and Omoniyi and Fishman (2006: 4) observe that the field of linguistics appears to have suffered this bias as well: it is only “quite recently that scholars have started to take note of the possible overlap between the study of religion and the study of language.” Fishman (2006: 13) specifically laments that “we stand now in the sociology of language and religion just about where we were relative to the sociology of language per se some 40 or more years ago.” Spolsky adds that the “interaction between religion and language is an area relatively little explored to date” (2003: 81), while Sawyer, at the 2001 publication of his Concise Encyclopedia of Language and Religion, called it “the first of its kind.” Though religious language has been granted much attention, according to Spolsky (2003: 81) “the way that religion and language interact to produce language contact is virtually virgin territory.” Wolterstorff (1995: 18) states bluntly that, for those who search for talk about God, “It’s unlikely that they will spy the practice at work in the modern academy.” One wonders whether a contributing factor in the avoidance of religious themes in linguistics may be the overtly cross-cultural necessity that lurks within it, for truth and transcendence claims held by one culture make implicit demands upon others as well.

This life–language–religion nexus is apparent in the maintenance of dead or former languages in new language settings of a religious nature. For example, traditional Roman Catholic Latin masses draw many followers with little or no knowledge of the language, just as Hellenistic Greek is central to the liturgy of Orthodox congregations even throughout the non-Greek-speaking world. Judaism has promoted the learning of Hebrew with considerable energy in the English-speaking world; parallel Hebrew Bible texts with phonetic transcriptions for English speakers are customarily available for synagogue services. Qur’anic Arabic is standard fare in public and private Muslim worship settings, and builds substantially upon the idea that the language of heaven is Arabic – hence, the need for persons who speak other languages to learn Arabic if they are genuinely to encounter Allah and his will (Watt 2002). This sort of ideology demonstrates that disjunctions of time, language or culture that would be roadblocks in other domains become permissible, even desirable, in religious domains. Religious language promises to transcend the customary and merely functional. When modern-language-speakers encounter texts built on ancient codes, they promote what is otherwise unthinkable (the bridging of massive gaps in experience) because of the power potentials implied in religious language. As with folk etymologies, religious perception ascends to virtual reality. Words are the essential, albeit imperfect, expression of how the world is seen, and despite their limits they reach for what is transcendent. Tennyson suggested: “Our little systems have their day; /They have their day and cease to be: /They are but broken lights of Thee, /And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.” – thus, even mortal language reaches for eternity.

That mortal language of ancient times holds perennial relevance, as Goodman (1994: 99) observes of Hellenistic Judaism and the Hebrew Bible:

No one doubts that … a select core of texts … was recognized by all Jews as the main foundation of their theology and the source of authority for almost all of their civil, criminal, and religious laws and customs. These texts were taken so seriously by Jews that everything written in them was assumed to be valid and important in contemporary life.

What generally holds true for Judaism throughout history applies to other religions as well. Herein emerges another side of religious language’s cross-cultural possibilities: the potential for cultural criticism. Religious texts that articulate norms of doctrines and ethics promote judgment calls on individuals and soci­eties, inviting cooperation and conformity or offering separation and judgment for noncompliance. In either case, views of truth and reality claim cross-cultural application. Religion is, necessarily, intercultural.

Language Conservatism in Cultural Crossover

This nexus of worldview and language has a parallel with culture, in the maintaining of old world languages in new world religious settings. Portuguese immigrants to New England, for example, and Korean immigrants to Western Pennsylvania, often maintain their former national languages in their religious services, even into the second and third generations, and even when English would work. The Old Order Amish in various North American locations continue to practice Bible readings in archaic Standard High German in their worship services despite the admission by many of their lack of comprehension, as they rely on Pennsylvania German translations and explanations of the antiquated, standard German text.

These kinds of language conservatism appear to come from certain assumptions about life and religious language. Use of ancient languages from the foundational texts implies authenticity and, even to moderns with no understanding of them, the popular assumption is that archaic words set in religious texts inherently offer benefits to the listener and represent greater respect for God. With religion in general being a conservatizing impulse – religions tend to resist social innovations and lend themselves to anti-modernization (whether or not that was their original intent) – so retention of older codes implies a strong link between present experience and foundational reality. Quite interesting is the way conservatizing language plays a similar role amongst certain conservative Protestant North American groups which prefer older forms of English pronouns (e.g., ye, thee, thou, thy, etc.), especially in prayers, reflecting their preference for the King James Version of the Bible (often partly updated from its original 1611 language). Archaic languages and styles are perceived as respect for what is holy and traditional, even if they are performed inconsistently with the original grammar. To many minds, conservatism in religious language means conservatism of values, and it shows up not only in translation traditions but also in religious groups around the world. Religious language spans cultural divides by its echoes of marked grammatical forms.

Religious Doctrine Breeds Philosophy of Language

The world’s major religions adhere to a substantial corpus of sacred literature which was written in one or more classical languages and requires translation for the benefit of subsequent generations, including current practitioners of that faith as well as converts. Beyond the general connection of life and language mentioned already, religions tend to foster – consciously or not – particular views toward language and usage. In other words, religious corpora breed linguistic ideology. A corpus functions as one of the domain’s “anchor points for distinct value systems embodied in the use of” language (Romaine 2000: 33). Ferguson (1982: 103) put it strongly: “all religious belief systems include some beliefs about language.” Through the translation policies pertaining to their scriptures, transmissions of related religious materials, or engagement in communal religious activities such as worship, religious groups adhere to practices and policies which seem commensurate with their religious tenets. This tendency, as discussed in the foregoing section, becomes intensified if the sacred materials talk specifically about God and language.

This correlation is apparent, for example, in what has been called the “logographic impulse” of Judaism, and it derives from within the religion’s own creation narratives: God brings the world into existence ex nihilo with eight rounds of speech (Genesis 1 – “God spoke …”), maintains its operations by speech (e.g., Psalm 33: 9 – “He spoke and it was done”), and conveys his ongoing will for the creation through speech in the shape of commands and divine desires. Expanding upon this, Jewish-Christian tradition described Jesus as “the Word of God” (John 1) from “the beginning” in an unmistakable allusion to Genesis. The gospel writer continues by describing the Spirit of God as “speaking what he hears [in heaven]” and conveying that into human environments (John 16: 13). Both religions simultaneously commend depictions of God in word as they resist visual representations (e.g., “You shall not make for yourself an idol,” Exodus 20: 4).

As to why Jesus was called the Word, theologians suggest (see citations in Watt 2003: 59) that this wording by the evangelist was an expression of the hidden mind of God (Hendriksen), the truths of God (Morris), that it might have been an accommodation to Hellenistic Jewish speculation, or a claim that Jesus was the ultimate in a sequence of “gradually ascending forms” of revelation, as someone has put it. Calvin attributed the unusual terminology to the claim that Jesus was “the eternal Wisdom and Will of God … the lively image of His purpose; for as Speech is said to be among men the image of the mind, so it is not inappropriate to apply this to God, and to say that He reveals himself to us by his Speech” (Calvin 1847: 29). Why is the Judaeo-Christian tradition, or for that matter Islam, so intentionally logocentric? Postman muses on this very question in the context of Judaism:

I wondered, then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of thinking.

(Postman 1985: 9; emphasis mine)

The veneration of language as the central means of divine revelation runs deeply through Jewish and Christian streams and holds implications for one’s understanding of divine inspiration and the origin of holy writ. Not only do religious texts talk about God, some attribute speech activity to God as well. Wolterstorff (1995: 9) puts it tersely: “Audacious, but common: the attribution of speech to God.” For example, the ancient prophetic formula “Thus says the Lord” claims that divine thoughts can be adequately expressed by a natural human language. While a few writers have hailed Hebrew as the literal language of heaven, most have opted for a more moderate stance: divine thought is conveyed through a living language – the two concepts are neither equal nor inseparable. Many Islamic theologians appear to differ, though (see citations in Watt 2001; also Bush 2005): the claim is that Allah’s words are inscribed in classical Arabic on golden tablets in heaven, being articulated verbatim by the angel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed who, speaking in trance, conveyed them to followers who subsequently transcribed. In this construct, the Arabic of the Qur’an (meaning “that which is recited”) is the language of heaven, so the true words of God can be expressed only in that one language. Not surprisingly, in Muslim realms, second-language learning of Qur’anic Arabic is prized. “Classical Arabic dominates the religion linguistically. The Qur’an – believed to be the actual word of God – can only be read or recited in Arabic. There is some dispute about the permissibility of translation. Prayers must be recited in Arabic five times a day” (Spolsky 2003: 84).

All of this becomes relevant to cross-cultural contact because not only is religion inherently supra-cultural, as described previously, but the language ideology that was housed in that religion becomes transported to the new cultural setting. Catherine Hezser observes (2001: 4–5) that “religions of the book” tend to be world phenomena rather than national or ethnic, and membership tends to be defined not on the basis of territory but on commitment to what is written. Despite the differences that exist between world religions and their particular portrayals of deity, their religious corpora undoubtedly breed an ideology of language, and their interaction with the words of heaven tends to drive views of exegesis and translation. Whereas the life–language–religion nexus discussed in the previous section is more sensed than articulated, an ideology of language lends itself to specificity. God is both subject and object of language. Locutionary acts that describe and report the divine appear alongside illocutionary acts in which God creates, commands, promises, and accomplishes. As Wolterstorff notes (1995: 17):

The person who engages in the practice of interpreting Scripture for theological content, and the person who engages in the practice of interpreting Scripture for literary qualities, each looks around for allies in the attempt to resist the hegemony of excavative scholarship. What they see first is each other. But if they continue looking, eventually they’ll spy another practice of Scripture interpretation which also requires close attention to the text, a practice far more ancient and enduring than either of theirs – the practice of interpreting Scripture for divine discourse.

For their part, readers may participate in the doctrines pertaining to divinity and speech by their orientation to language styles that are as marked in their form as dogma is marked in its concepts. “Religious observance tends to demand highly marked and self-conscious uses of linguistics resources” (Keane 1997: 48), and this holds implications for cultures in contact. For example, Hiebert (1994) suggests that missiological viewpoints come to be defined differently depending upon views of text. What he calls a “bounded set” approach involves assent to propos­itional religion in the form of traditional creeds and practices whereas a “centered set” approach requires relationship to a dynamic core found within that religion and its text (be it a person such as Jesus Christ, or a concept such as the kingdom of God). A complicating factor then arises with cross-cultural contact: bounded-set constructs are likely to convey religion-as-culture and promote boundary-defined socioreligious interests instead of the supra-cultural truths which ought to typify genuine religion.

So, religions directly and indirectly express philosophies of language in connection with their understanding of the divine. From foundational perceptions of God and language, to secondary derivations relating to cross-cultural missions, certain religions of the book (at least) package doctrine and ideology together. This also tends to mean that when a world religion is brought from one culture to another, it will likely come with a mechanism for literacy. Knowing a religion thoroughly usually requires one to read its texts. When these texts arrive in the new culture, they bring a vocabulary and set of concepts into the new environment, and begin to influence language production in other domains too.

Language Change Due to Intercultural Religious Contact

Religion is always interconnected with culture; often there is no wall of separation, or perhaps it is just a fence. As shown already, intercultural discourse occurs when moderns read ancient religious literature: they cross chasms of history, culture, and language and, inevitably, their encounter with the transcendent is mediated through another cultural dimension. Modern Jews are no more familiar with the interactional complexities of Canaanite clan rivalries than today’s Christians are with a Greco-Roman paterfamilias or Asian Muslims are with ancient Meccan–Medinan urban rivalry. Yet these artifacts of ancient societies necessarily greet every reader of an ancient text.

Even apart from a religious corpus, the practices of cultus are rooted in distant traditions; to be religious is to exegete life interculturally to some degree, and missionary efforts only expand and intensify this intercultural contact. Missions initiated by a person who has adopted an ancient corpus (e.g., a Pakistani Muslim) and then enters a secondary level of intercultural contact (e.g., he moves to a North American city), when conveying that corpus and its doctrines to a new culture (e.g., he practices the Five Pillars and talks about them with his coworkers), brings his religion into contact with the new culture’s language. This is the stuff of history.

What are the results of such intercultural religious contact? They include borrowing of language at the lexical and other levels (Keane 1997), literacy (Errington 2008; Watt and Fairfield 2008), language maintenance and loss (Spolsky 2003), and cultural valuations and even issues of nationalism. As for the first of these, English is a monument to borrowing with its waves of Latin and Greek loans repeatedly washing onto the British Isles’ shores over the centuries (Baugh and Cable 2002, passim). This tertiary intercultural discourse paralleled what happened centuries earlier with the Hellenistic Greek of the Jewish Septuagint being aggressively spread by the early Christian church: the result was the proliferation of semiticized Greek from two to three centuries before the time of Christ to the Greek-speaking world for centuries afterward. The language shift to the lingua franca of the Mediterranean that had originally prompted translation of the Jewish Scriptures subsequently opened the doors to a broader audience, ironically, via Christian hands (Jobes and Silva 2000: 82–5). Jewish religious expression became planted in Greco-Roman soil, and those who accepted the religion acquired its vocabulary along with its literacy.

Literacy involves choices made by religious groups when they select what they consider to be the most appropriate code for religious activities and literature for the target culture. What is deemed “appropriate” derives partly from function and partly from an ideology of culture. The three obvious options include: (1) maintenance of the source culture’s language (e.g., English, Spanish, Portuguese); (2) adoption of the prestige language of the target culture; and (3) adoption of a local dialect in order to target a particular ethnic subgroup. Each option carries its own benefits and baggage. Source culture provides a wealth of literature and international connections, but those who adopt it place a barrier between themselves and their cultural cradle. Adoption of a local prestige language broadens the potential audience for religious materials and, like source culture language, may unite peoples divided by differing regional codes; however, this choice implies negative connotations for local dialects. The English Bible translation trend that emerged in the later twentieth century, influenced heavily by the Wycliffe Bible Translators, has been to promote local dialects. This kind of contact promotes whatever language or dialect is chosen. “Religion is an important contributing factor in language maintenance and loss” (Spolsky 2003: 89; see also Ferguson 1982; Errington 2008; Omoniyi and Fishman 2006).

When the source language becomes the assumed code for a targeted culture, it is important to consider at which level it is operating: written or spoken, formal only or also informal. Goody (1987: 161) writes:

The written word belongs to the priest, the learned man, and is enshrined in ritualistic religion; the oral is the sphere of the prophet, of ecstatic religion, of messianic cults, of innovation. For it is one of the contradictions of the written word that at one level it restricts and at another it encourages innovatory action. The two different paths to knowledge that we noted in oral societies become increasingly separate; the conflict between priest and prophet, between church and sect, is the counterpart of the fixed text and the fluid utterance.

The parameters of language choices in such contact, and the functional distribution that results, will influence the outcomes. Multilingualism (or more specifically, diglossia) may result, or converts may simply adopt the source language in preference to their own, probably to flag the adoption of their new religion and to distance themselves from their past. While Japanese informants known to this writer who converted to Christianity from various family religions prefer Bibles and devotional music in translation, certain Kenyan and Nigerian converts report a preference for English Bibles and English-speaking worship services, especially when they enter church leadership. This may indeed align with high regard for Western culture and recognition of their North American support base. Such persons often become competently multilingual, thereby affirming Cooper’s (1982) observation that intercultural religious contact can be an effective tool for language spread, although as Jule (2007) discusses, groups face an array of language decisions when they relocate to a new world.

Religious Language: Intercultural Connector or Divider?

Religious persuasion has always fueled passionate conviction and prompted extreme action. At its best, religion unites people of diverse cultures; in the wake of its worst manifestations lies violent wreckage. The era of globalized information we now inhabit could accentuate the positives by allowing people of different cultures easy access to a new worldview, although electronic media in this soundbite age tend to broadcast dislocated information. Historically, language contact has been mostly incarnational: communities encounter each other face to face. Increasingly, though, traditional domains of interaction are displaced by information dissemination, as speed and efficiency trump quality and depth. Intercultural communication about religion may soon exceed communication of experience from within religion; that is, discourse originating from a living practitioner of religion is easily replaced with objectivized third-hand discourse-cum-diatribe. Though religion is hardly new to conflict, electronic religious language may become divisive rather than transcendent, a sword of schism rather than an embracing prophetic plan. The internet facilitates the most efficient acquisition of information and misinformation though, in either case, religious truth claims are being disseminated in a skeletalized “domain” that presents religion with an ironic reversal of divine incarnation. It is an extreme form of what has been called “entextualization” (see Keane 1997 and his citations), that is, the removal of discourse from its original context and interactional setting. If religious language is to have any role in the unification, or at least peaceful cooperation, of modern societies, it will need to become embodied. Media present the appearance of a domain, but true sociological domains involve full-orbed human presence in a space–time continuum. Moving images and word streams approximate human relationships but are no substitute.

A welcome alternative is described by Bowman and Woolf (1994: 13) as they contrast Jewish and Christian attitudes toward writing with those of Greek and Roman religions, and the potential the difference in concept offered societies in contact:

Pagans set up painted boards in temples to commemorate vows, and the dedication of votives, altars and temples involves inscriptions. Writing was itself probably a cultic activity … Nevertheless, texts never occupied the same position as the Jewish or Christian scriptures. Pagan priests asserted their authority by claiming privileged roles in cult and an expertise that was rarely based on the exegesis of holy writ, while the religious unity of communities centred on common participation in sacrifice rather than on common possession of and by sacred texts. One manifestation of this possession was communities whose life and identity revolved around reading, writing and living in accordance with particular texts … [W]ritten texts may be used to unite groups, and to provide a medium for the establishment and entrenchment of relations of dominance. (Emphasis mine.)

What would be the result of communities of religious reading? The inter-cultural possibilities range from hegemony to harmony to hegemony. The former is evident in this viewpoint, offered by Bush (2005: 325):

The live-and-let-live standpoint is not an option for Christians, whose Scriptures command them to shape culture by means of a model that accepts cultural differences on the basis of its doctrine of grace on the one hand, but which seeks as well to transform the world’s diverse cultures by means of the communication of the essential reality of its religious teachings on the other … [Religious paradigms] do not remain merely conceptual but continually shape the cultures in which they are espoused, believed and practiced.

The latter possibility, perhaps with more harmonious implications, was observed recently by this writer in a situation that developed at a discreet location in the Middle East where eight men huddled privately to discuss the Christian religion. The host of the meeting began the discussion with a short English Bible reading in his native East London accent, though subsequently he did only a little of the evening’s talk. Most of the dialogue belonged to the other seven, all of whom were raised Muslim. An Azeri-speaking Iranian translated the text into Turkish, then another man paraphrased it into his native Kurdish dialect (Kermanji) while adding some explanations in Turkish. When the three “readers” had finished, a spirited discussion erupted in Arabic, Turkish, and even some English, though Kermanji commanded the evening. The Kurdish participants were in possession of printed Kermanji gospels, but their formal education had been in Turkish or Arabic so they were unable to read their own native language. Although they reported little sympathy toward Turkish (or Arab) interests in the region, their use of Turkish was pragmatic, enabling them to clarify and argue about the Judaeo-Christian materials put before them. Religion had become an intercultural connector despite their prevailing differences of opinion.

Religion in cross-cultural interaction illustrates nicely what Spencer-Oatey (2000: 2, citing also Brown and Yule) identifies as the two main functions of language: transactional (i.e. information transfer) and interactional (i.e. maintenance of relationships). When religions cross cultures, then, various possibilities present themselves, and the specific formulary will be determined by a consortium of personal motivations with participants and circumstances of culture and community. The foregoing account indicates a willingness to move freely between languages on the part of refugees and immigrants; language was function. On the other hand, Nieves and Rosati (2007: 32–3) reported that Hispanic immigrants’ tendencies to separate from Anglo churches involved more than pragmatic communication concerns and the customary “pressure to communicate in the language that their followers understand and speak,” for they were experiencing “the need to fulfill not only religious sentiments but also to preserve ethnic, cultural, and linguistic attachments to their roots.” In short, religious language at an intercultural nexus can be a means of inwardly directed preservation or used as a mechanism for outwardly directed asseveration. With so much remaining to be explored in the domain of religion and intercultural discourse, the role of language at this intensely human nexus offers boundless opportunities for research.

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