Vessel of God/Access to God: American Sign Language Interpreting in American Evangelical Churches

Abstract

ABSTRACTAccording to professional understandings, American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters provide language and communication access. This article draws on ethnographic research and interviews with ASL interpreters in the United States to analyze the category of “faith‐based” interpreting in relation to “professional” or “secular” interpreting. Through such a comparison, and through attention to the ethical, linguistic, and communicative practices of faith‐based interpreters, this article explores the stakes of foregrounding the concepts of access and agency in the context of disability. The concept of disability access is tethered tightly to secular epistemologies that deny the possibility of differential, distributed, or divine agency as well as forms of mediation that are not focused on language or communication. In centering principles of equal participation and inclusion, and the need for interpreters to have linguistic skills and specific orientations toward deaf people, the field of ASL interpreting has ignored a range of skills and competencies that exist outside the realm of the secular. Through an engagement with scholarship from disability studies and the anthropology of Christianity, this article argues for attending to and valuing extralinguistic forms of interpretation and the need for more capacious understandings of access and agency in the context of disability and beyond. [deafness, interpretation, accessibility, disability, Christianity]