Proselytisation: an Indian perspective - by P.N. Benjamin

Proselytisation: An Indian Christian Perspective
P.N.BENJAMIN
Since colonial times to the present, the impetus for Christian proselytizing work in India has largely emanated from Western Christian Church groups and missions. The latter's continuing obsession for promoting religious conversions under the aegis of India's Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom has triggered a raging debate among religious and political leaders of my country. Over seventy years ago, Mahatma Gandhi stated that: "proselytizing under the cloak of humanitarian work is unhealthy, to say the least. It is most resented by people here"[1]. The resentment that Gandhi alluded to has increased in India over the years, mostly due to the persistence of religious conversions engineered by Christian evangelists who derive their financial support from foreign sources. Fundamentalist Muslims too have entered the fray in recent years with substantive financial contributions from Muslim countries interested in furthering the spread of Islam in India. Some Hindu groups have resorted to reverse conversions. All these trends are destructive to India's time-tested culture of religious tolerance. The muteness of liberal Indian Christians, both in India and overseas, is indeed surprising. I hope that liberal Indians of all faiths will debate this issue with their fundamentalist counterparts in a similar vein to prevent the spread of inter-religious conflicts in that subcontinent. The Indian tradition of allowing people of diverse faiths to seek their own spiritual centering is now under attack in India at the hands of fundamentalists of all religions.I am not a religious scholar. But, I do value and cherish the teachings of Jesus as conveyed to me through my early religious influences in my childhood. Therefore, I am able to empathize with the angst of an adherent of any religion when he or she is confronted by the caricature of one's personal faith as portrayed by a fundamentalist of another religion. Like all my non-Christian friends, I too am annoyed when a well-meaning Christian fundamentalist knocks on my door and asks me whether I am "born-again" and whether I would like to be saved! I can internalize the frustration of a non-Christian subjected to such an intrusive interrogation. My reading of the history of early Christianity leads me to believe that the Western churches' obsession for converting others to Christianity is based more on their historical tradition of using proselytization as an instrument of statecraft for the extension of their political and mercantile influences, than in furthering the spiritual welfare of their flocks. Even in today's post-Communist Russia with its newly established religious freedom, the Russian Orthodox Church does not look upon kindly at proselytization undertaken by any religious sect. In Greece, its Constitution also prohibits proselytization. Whenever it is flouted by a religious sect, the Greek Orthodox Church seeks governmental intervention to suppress it. I am not holding up either Greece or Russia as a model of democracy. I am merely citing Greece and Russia as examples of two western nations that do not tolerate proselytization even when they are undertaken by Christian denominations. The fundamentalist Christians both in India and abroad have been too quick to condemn as draconian the recent anti-conversion legislations enacted by a few Indian states. Proselytization was not a distinctive hallmark of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches of early Christianity. Jesus himself appears to have condemned proselytization when he said, "woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more than the child of hell than yourselves". I often think of those verses whenever I hear of mass conversions of Dalits and tribals in India. They often seem to become outcasts twice! Conversion to Christianity does not eradicate caste prejudice in India any more than it eliminates racial discrimination in the US. P.N.BENJAMINCoordinatorBangalore Initiative for Religious Dialogue(BIRD)