Fundamentalist Religiosity: An Obstruction to Critical Literacy

Religious literalism has high potential of creating pseudo-intellectualism by encouraging literary interpretations of religious texts. The practice has a proclivity of degenerating into the antithesis of critical literacy. The focus of the article is on the explications of how fundamentalist religiosity with reference to Christianity, stifles the development of critical literacy in andragogic situations. Fundamentalist religiosity which is nurtured both explicitly and implicitly in religion-intiated academic institutions is manifested mainly in literalism of religious texts and subsequently in all secular-academic texts. Religious literalism is anchored in historicism whose adherents claim to know the will of the Creator. The qualitative research methodology guided by the social constructivist paradigm was considered for generating data. The research design for this study was phenomenology and the data were generated through interviewing andragogic learners in teacher education. The informants were selected purposively on the criterion of active participation in religious activities at college. Research findings show that superficial religiosity has retrogressive influences on the extent of critical literacy. Religious literalism is employed for indoctrinating the religious adherents. Criticality of religious texts is considered as blasphemous and provokes Divine retribution. In andragogy, one of the criteria of quality education is critical literacy thus learners should be encouraged to interrogate fundamentalist religiosity and expose its vices.