Facilitating the Interpretation of Christian Images Through the Use of Film in the ESL Classroom
Peggy Hull, phull@dc3.edu
Editors' note: This article is based on a presentation made during the CETC Colloquium at the 2007 TESOL Convention in Seattle, Washington, on "Images of Christianity in the Media." We are thankful that we can share it with you here.
Students of ESL or EFL very often come from countries where religion plays a more central role than it does in the West. Such students often perceive Western culture to be godless and immoral, and in a secular setting, it's difficult to know how to approach the topic. Christian educators often view the separation of church and state as a hindrance to discussing religion in the classroom, but I hope to show here that this need not be the case. Every professor professes his or her worldview; it's unavoidable. Who we are comes through in every decision we make in the classroom, whether we articulate our position or not. Christian educators are often singled out (unfairly, I believe), but no religion or worldview should ever use the classroom as a bully pulpit. Education should never be about teaching students what to think, but how to think.
In this article I hope to show that we can use film as a medium to present students with images of Christianity that are so woven into the culture that they could easily pass unnoticed. Then we can help them identify the influence that Christianity has had on shaping our culture, without manipulating or coercing them. Indeed, there is no need to use religious language or speak of matters of faith. Reality, when portrayed in a fully human way, helps us interpret images of Christianity in any film, and we need only serve as a guide to show our students where to look for these images in film. To the extent that film is a representation of real life, we must look for the divine in the same places we look for God in real life: in relationships and in the unfolding of the human story that we call history. And if our point of view rings true, it will be convincing on its own without any professorial authority behind it. When we don't force our viewpoints, our students can relax and just enjoy discussing because they know that the discussion won't get ugly or one-sided. And research in second language studies tells us that the opportunity for output is a key ingredient in language acquisition, so discussion need never be seen as an inappropriate use of time in a language classroom.
Choosing a Film
The choice of film is crucial. I believe religious films are simply inappropriate. The purpose is not to indoctrinate but to accurately portray the role Christianity has played in shaping secular culture. Furthermore, it's not appropriate to spend an inordinate amount of class time watching films, so one must choose carefully and take into account how the film fits with the rest of the curriculum. As director of a four-level ESL program in a community college, I have integrated one film into each of the reading classes, and three into the high-intermediate Listening and Speaking class. Finally, films should accurately portray life in the culture, with all its depth and diversity, without being "edgy" or marginal in their portrayal.
First, one caveat is in order. The Church has played some very ugly roles at times throughout the world, and to say that films that portray the Church when at her worst do not conform to reality would be tragic. There are, unfortunately, many examples of this throughout history, and although I prefer to show the Church in a better light to those who are just making her acquaintance, I would not shy away from speaking the truth if asked. Many Latin American and European films portray the church in an uncaring, predatory light, and with good reason. The film La Lingua de la Mariposa (Butterfly) is set in Spain as the country was choosing sides for civil war. The protagonist in the film, a dear old agnostic schoolteacher, displays many of the characteristics that I and others in North America would attribute to Christians, while the Church helps the government murder its own people in the name of God. Because power corrupts, we should not be too surprised to see a warped parody of Christianity when the Church wields the power of the state. However, even here, if we teach our students to look beyond labels to the real heart of what it means to be human, we will see how images of Christianity can become distorted, both in real life and in film.
It is important to determine the bias of the movie's creators before deciding on a film to show. If a movie appears one-sided—the characters from one group are fully developed and display their full range of humanity, but the characters from the opposite group are flat and caricatured—then we know that the creator of those characters identified him- or herself more closely with the group that appears more believable. That doesn't necessarily mean that the movie is bad; it just gives away the bias of its creator, which should always be taken into account when trying to reason logically rather than allowing our emotions to be manipulated by the screen. A movie can be well-done, entertaining, even rise to the level of art, yet still contain untruths or exaggerations that need to be analyzed before we swallow them as reality. To illustrate this point, I'll mention three movies I've recently seen that form a nice continuum from deliberately manipulative to delightfully balanced.
The Continuum and Three Examples
If you've ever spent much time watching movies on the Lifetime channel, it doesn't take long to figure out that it has an agenda. All the movies were made specifically for that channel, which advertises itself as "the women's channel." All the scenes depict men taking advantage of women in one way or another, and women going to any length, even murder, to regain control of their lives. A lot of that goes on in this world, but when it is used to slander groups that advocate a patriarchal society, we must take note of it and not allow it to cloud our judgment.
In the Lifetime movie The Plain Truth, an Amish family is torn apart by the father who rules with an iron fist and refuses to allow gentleness and forgiveness to heal the drowning accident of their youngest daughter. The acting is superb, and the final twist is a real shocker, a tour-de-force of a thriller. Nevertheless, we must realize that we are meant to walk away with a strong prejudice against the Amish for being a patriarchal society that supposedly fosters this kind of iron-willed perversion of family love. Even though it is not logical to deduce that just by being patriarchal these groups foster the abuse of women, it appears that we are meant to think just that. However, an awareness of the bias of the movies on this channel combined with a real-world knowledge of Amish faith and customs reveals blatant inconsistencies. At one point, they all enter a church, but the Amish don't have church buildings. More to the point, the father's cruel behavior toward his wife would have been censured by the bishop, so the community would have intervened before the situation led to murder.
That brings me to my second example, a movie that falls between manipulative and balanced in its portrayal of Christians. In the made-for-TV movie Reversible Error, Tom Selleck portrays a cop who rolls his eyes at the testimony of an ex-con who has "found Jesus" and gone straight. It's a very entertaining film that has as its agenda to give middle-class couch potatoes like myself a glimpse of the more exciting, glamorous world of homicide trials. There is no deliberate manipulation of the plot to pull on our heart-strings, but it's very easy to see the one-sidedness of the portrayal of Christianity. Throughout the film, people are seen jumping into the sack with each other with alarming frequency, lying, murdering, covering up evidence, and getting hooked on heroin, all in the name of love. Then an ex-con tells the truth, gets a guy off death row, and he's portrayed as a holy roller who's been suckered into Christianity by people who are just using him to get what they want. We're seeing life through the eyes of a cynic, which is where postmodern morality has led much of modern society. Everybody is in it for themselves. Sin is still the problem, so this is an accurate portrayal of reality from a Christian perspective, and people are dealing with the sin by giving in to it and calling it love, which is also the reality many modern people live in. However, the movie is clearly one-sided. The screenwriter portrayed a caricatured, ridiculous Christianity, possibly because that's the only kind with which he or she was familiar. The man may truly have given his life to Christ and found the strength to face his past and make a clean break with it, but we will never know because the writer didn't portray him as a fully human person capable of meeting a God who became fully human.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Hallmark film Harvest of Fire, which I show as part of a listening unit on the various ethnic groups of America, is wonderfully balanced. Both the Amish and the "English," as the Amish call Americans, are portrayed as real human beings, with a full range of strengths and weaknesses. Both are believable: We come to know both groups intimately and identify with them, and they come to know each other as they realize that, despite the very different ways they deal with reality, they share a common bond of humanity. The Amish aren't always right, but neither are the English seen as perfect, and we come to doubt some of our "modern" wisdom, without necessarily wanting to trade our cars in for buggies.
The women in this film are portrayed as strong, with a high degree of emotional intelligence, without demeaning the men. When the Amish protagonist, Annie, tells the FBI investigator, Sally, that she should "put the one she loves before herself," we know Annie well enough to know she isn't encouraging yielding to a demanding, sadistic relationship. Sally recognizes this and concedes, "We could learn from you—I have," despite her vocal disapproval of the Amish practice of shunning. Both sides recognize that sin destroys, and that confession and reconciliation have the power to heal any wrong. They disagree on the means, but the basics of the reality remain the same regardless of belief or custom.
Ways of Integrating Film Into the ESL Classroom
In teaching the civil rights movement in high-intermediate Listening and Speaking, I use a video of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech after we study the speech in depth. I point out that its persuasive power comes from the fact that King wove into his speech quotes from sources that most Americans in the 1960s revered: the Bible, the Constitution, and Christian hymns from both the White and Black communities of faith. Many people today don't even recognize the passages taken directly from the book of the Jewish prophet Isaiah, whose prophecies were fulfilled in the coming of the Messiah.
I also show Driving Miss Daisy to help students see the changes that took place in society that were mirrored in the relationship between Miss Daisy and Hoke. This story gives flesh and bones to the "I Have a Dream" speech, as the images of Christianity in both are images of reconciliation and healing of past wrongs through building cross-cultural relationships. I particularly like the scene in which the Jewish family attends the African-American funeral service out of respect for the African-American woman who served their family as a maid for most of her life.
Along these same lines, Dickens's A Christmas Carol rights the wrongs of the Industrial Revolution in England, not through violence, but through seeing where one went wrong in relationships and making amends. In intermediate Reading and Writing we read the story in simplified English then watch the movie at the end of the fall semester.
In conclusion, the most moving stories show people refusing to throw life away just because it isn't perfect. They depict sacrifice and struggle and conflict ending in healing and restoration and joy. Think of Seabiscuit, in which a horse, a trainer, a jockey, and an owner are all given a shot at new life through giving new life to a horse that everyone else had thrown away. Think of Sarah Plain and Tall, who brings healing and new life to a father and his two small children who had lost their wife and mother and their hope. (I link this scene with a chapter in our reading text about overcoming obstacles.) Their theme is God's theme, rendered beautifully in Eugene Peterson's translation of John's gospel, The Message:
Jesus said, 'Every person the Father gives me eventually comes running to me. And once that person is with me, I hold on and don't let go. I came down from heaven not to follow my own whim, but to accomplish the will of the One who sent me. This, in a nutshell, is that will, that everything handed over to me by the Father be completed—not a single detail missed—and at the wrap-up of time I have everything and everyone put together, upright and whole.'
Peggy Hull serves as professor and program director of ESL at Dodge City Community College in southwest Kansas. Her favorite film is Chariots of Fire starring Ian Charleson and Ben Cross, and her favorite line is, "I believe that God made me for a purpose: for China. . . . But he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure."
SLW & CALL October 2007 Volume 11 Number 3: Table of Contents
