My involvement
Now that the dust has settled, let us have a look at the
problem of Christian missionary activities which raised a storm during the
past autumn and winter. In a debate on conversions, it may be useful to
hear the voice of a convert. I was raised as a Roman Catholic in Flanders,
the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, which was for centuries a Catholic
frontline region against Protestant Holland and Masonic-secularist France,
and a top-ranking provider of missionaries.
One of my uncles is a missionary in Brazil, another was a
parish priest in Antwerp until his death. We were raised with the example
impressed on our minds of countrymen like Father Constant Lievens, who
built the Jesuit mission in Chotanagpur in the 19th century, and of Father
Herman Rasschaert, the Jesuit who was martyred there in 1964. He had tried
to prevent a tribal, largely Christian mob from killing some local Muslims
in revenge for the mass-killing of Garo tribals, also mostly christianized,
by Muslims in nearby East Pakistan. His death is included as number 2 in
the list of "atrocities on Christians" circulated by the United Christian
Forum for Human Rights. I still have the highest regard for Father
Rasschaert, though I have become skeptical of the claim made in all the
press reports and literary narrations of his martyrdom that he was killed
by "Hindus": in the Christian version, tribals are emphatically "not
Hindus", except when they misbehave.
In a sociological sense, I am still part of the Catholic
community, meaning that my children go to a Catholic school, I am a member
of the Christian-Democratic trade-union, cultural foundation and so on. I
have also retained my sympathy for the causes of Catholic nations, like
Quebec's sovereignty and the Irish cause, and I can still argue the
Catholic point against Protestantism or refute the allegation that the
Inquisition killed millions of people or that Pope Pius XII was a Nazi
collaborator. I still think highly of the Catholic social teachings and
occasionally reread passages from Saint Thomas Aquinas. And I would still
feel at home in the company of a Lievens or a Rasschaert, or their
successors. Nevertheless, I am no longer a Roman Catholic. I am a secular
humanist with an active interest in religions, particularly Taoism and
Hinduism, and keeping a close watch on the variegated Pagan revival in
Europe. The reason why I became an apostate has nothing to do with revolt
against Christian morality, nor with indignation at the inhuman
persecutions of unbelievers in various countries and ages, nor with a
rejection of the Church's political alliances, Left or Right. The real
reason simply is that the basic doctrine of Christianity in all its
denominations is untrue. While ultimate truth may elude us, it remains
perfectly possible to decide on the untruth of a given doctrine, when it
is found to be contrary to reason and to observable facts.
Christianity, a mistake
The essence of Christianity is a belief, a particular
truth claim: that Jesus was the sole son of God and that he redeemed
mankind from sin by his crucifixion and resurrection. Modern Bible
scholarship has made that belief untenable. Jesus was a troubled
personality whose beliefs were entirely within the Jewish tradition, at
least within its extremist fringe of people who expected Judgment Day to
arrive within their own lifetime. He never founded a new religion, Saint
Paul being the real inventor of Christianity as a sect separate from
Judaism. The Gospels are highly doctored texts, rewritten to suit the
theological developments and political needs of the budding Church. Thus,
the injunction to pay taxes to the Romans ("give unto Caesar...") and the
depiction of Roman governor Pilate as innocent of Jesus' crucifixion were
included to mollify the Romans after the defeat of the Jewish revolt in
AD 70. Most importantly, Jesus never rose from the dead. The decisive
difference between the dead and the living is that the living are
someplace in this world, while Jesus, like all dead men, is nowhere to be
found in this world. He was spirited away in the "Ascension to Heaven",
which amounts to dying: he left this world. Of course you could say that
"his spirit lives on", but that is equally true of other inspiring
characters, both historical and fictional.
The reason why Christians are a shrinking minority in
Europe is that an educated population, which applies its mind to religious
questions, cannot keep on managing the contradiction between this faith
and reason forever. This is not for want of trying: generations of
Christian intellectuals have tried to harmonize faith and reason. The
Saint Thomas institute (Leuven, Belgium) where I studied philosophy was
founded in 1889 as an instrument to prove the basic unity between
Aquinas's Christian philosophy and modern science. But to no avail: most
professors teaching there now are no longer practising Catholics
themselves. Many moderns including myself have discovered that religion is
still relevant, that the religious urge has survived the interiorization
of the scientific worldview, that "the 21st century will either be
religious or not be at all" (Andr� Malraux); but the Christian belief
cannot satisfy that religious need, because we cannot base our lives on
fairy-tales anymore.
One of the great surprises which Indian "secularism"
offers to people familiar with genuine secularism, is that it totally
shuns and even condemns the fundamental questioning of Christian (or
Islamic) dogma. For ten years I have closely followed the Indian
communalism debate, and not once have I seen a "secularist" mentioning the
debunking of Christian beliefs, still the single most revolutionary
achievement of the secular study of religions. Even non-essential
Christian fairy-tales like the story of apostle Thomas's arrival and
martyrdom in South India are repeated ad nauseam in "secularist" pieces on
the current missionary crisis.
If Christianity were true
No less surprising is that even the Hindutva campaigners
against Christian proselytization are silent about what ought to be their
strongest, most peaceful yet most devastating weapon: the fictional nature
of Christian dogma. On the contrary, quite a few of them have lapped up
Theosophical stories about Jesus having come to India for his spiritual
training, and returning there after his resurrection. Their point is that
Jesus' message has been "distorted" by the Church (which is true but
hardly proves that he was somehow a Hindu), and that Jesus himself would
therefore have abhorred the missionary subversion in India, his Gurubhumi.
It is probable that Jesus' injunction to "go and teach all nations" is a
Pauline interpolation, repellent to the Jewish Christians led by Jesus'
brother James, but it is quite certain that Jesus was a preacher who
wanted people to follow him.
The entire Hindutva argument against the missionaries
ignores the question of the truth of Christianity. Yet, the answer to that
question makes all the difference when we want to evaluate the practical
problems underlying the present crisis. Consider the allegation that
missionaries use material rewards to induce conversions. This is
absolutely correct, as anyone from Christian countries can testify: in
religion class, we were told that "material help is a necessary
prerequisite for spiritual help", so we should put some of our
pocket-money into the donation box for the missions. On the Evangelical
programme of Dutch television, an evangelist recently boasted how he
converted Nepalese tribals at a fast rate by giving them a kind of walkman
reciting the whole Bible in their own language, a modern equivalent of the
trinkets given to African chieftains by Vasco da Gama. It is likewise
well-attested that missionaries use deception to over-awe illiterate
people, e.g. staged miracle healings. This material inducement or
exploitation of gullibility may seem unethical from a non-Christian
viewpoint, but it looks very different once you assume that the Christian
belief is true. In that case, remaining a Pagan means eternal damnation,
while conversion brings eternal salvation, and the greater good of eternal
salvation amply justifies the minor evil of bribes and deception needed to
lure people into the true faith.
The Sangh Parivar alleges that conversion is
"anti-national", a position supported in part by the historical fact of
Christian separatism in the Northeast (and, less well-known, of 1947
intrigues between Jharkhand leaders and the Muslim League). But here
again, anti-national designs should be evaluated differently if
Christianity is true. In my country, secular nationalists recall with
sadness that in ca. 1600, Belgium failed to gain independence from
Catholic Spain while Holland succeeded, so that Holland turned Protestant
while Belgium remained Catholic. The Catholic position on this national
defeat is different: the Dutch heretics may have won their national
struggle but they are now burning in hell, while the Belgians lost their
freedom but won their eternal salvation by remaining in the true faith.
Certain things are more important than nationalism. If Christianity is
true, we must support the strengthening of the faith in all Christian
pockets in India, if necessary by separating them from Hindu India. But
the best would then be to convert the whole of India, which would turn
Indian Christians into the greatest patriots.
Failure of the Hindutva critique
The Sangh Parivar is disinclined to educate its cadres on
the illusory nature of Christianity, possibly because this would entail
the tedious job of clearing the superstitious deadwood from Hinduism as
well. It avoids polemicizing against Christianity as such and prefers to
focus on the historical and contemporary misbehaviour of Christian
missionaries: the Goa inquisition, the destruction of the Mylapore Shiva
temple near Chennai, the expulsion of Riyang tribals from
Christian-dominated Mizoram. These arguments about Christian fanaticism
are valid and deserve being repeated by secularists, but to Christians
they miss the point. They are well aware that all men are sinful, a basic
Christian doctrine, so the sins of the missionaries do not nullify the
truth of Christian dogma.
Moreover, their money and media power and their alliance
with "secularist" and Islamic forces allows them to trump any reference to
Christian misbehaviour with impressions of far worse sins on the Hindutva
side. When over a thousand Hindus are killed and a quarter million Hindus
ethnically cleansed in Kashmir, the world media doesn't even notice, but
watch the worldwide hue and cry when a few local riots take place and a
few missionaries are killed by unidentified tribal miscreants. Christian
Naga terrorists have been killing non-Christians for decades on end, and
this has never been an issue with the world media, except to bewail the
"oppression" of the Nagas by "Hindu India". The clumsy Sangh people cannot
hope to outdo the Christian lobby at the blame game when you consider how
well-crafted the recent Christian media blitz has been, how aptly designed
to satisfy the needs of the world media. The India-watchers abroad were
standing shamefaced because the predicted "fascism" of the BJP government
had failed to materialize, yielding instead a year of communal cease-fire
with the lowest number of riot victims in decades. So they welcomed the
"persecution" of Christians as a gift from heaven.
An additional reason why Hindutva spokesmen cannot expect
to convince world opinion, is that some of their allegations against the
missionaries are demonstrably wrong. Most importantly, they are denying
the plea that the missionaries are rendering a "selfless service". To
appreciate how this criticism is mistaken, let us first understand on what
it is based, and in what respects it is right. The Churches as such are of
course not investing all their money and manpower in Indian schools and
hospitals as a matter of selfless service: they do want to gain from it,
viz. a harvest of souls. The missionary network is willing to give, but
just like the Devil, it wants your soul in return. Even in the elite
schools where no direct proselytization is attempted, Hindu pupils are
subtly encouraged towards skepticism of their own religion, and are also
used as political pawns when Christian demands (e.g. reservations for
Dalit Christians) are aired through pupils' demonstrations or school
strikes. This way, Christian schools become a power tool rather than a
service, and it was to serve as a power tool that these schools were
created in the first place. When the Sangh Parivar, without the benefit of
foreign funding, opens schools in tribal areas, this is decried as
"infiltration", as creating channels of "indoctrination", but such
suspicions are at least equally warranted in the case of Christian
schools.
At the individual level, there is yet another gainful
element in the missionary vocation except for the satisfaction of
converting people. In many Protestant denominations, the mission is
actually a profitable career, but more than the material aspects, there is
a psychological stake involved. People who would be nobodies in Germany,
the US or Australia, can derive enormous ego gratification from a
missionary career: suddenly they are promoted to a frontline post in the
war against idolatry, they are praised back home as messiahs to the poor
lepers even when stationed in non-leprosy areas, they are revered by some
of the illiterate villagers for teaching them beliefs which would only
provoke laughter back home, and strangest of all, they are applauded by
"secularists" whose Western counterparts would prefer to put an end to the
whole circus of the Christian Churches. It is rewarding to be a missionary
in India, and much safer than China or Pakistan.
And yet, the element of "selfless service" in the
missionary project should also be acknowledged. Firstly, it is a fact that
quite a few Christians sent for work in the missions in India are
genuinely not interested in conversion work. A Flemish nun said on Flemish
TV early this year: "I went to India to convert people. But it is India
which has converted me." Not that she turned to any Indian religion
herself, but she is doing sterling social work among housemaids in Mumbai
regardless of religious identities. Of course, Church strategists
calculate that in spite of their non-missionary vocation, such social
workers are helpful in creating goodwill towards Christianity, preparing
the ground for future work by real missionaries.
Secondly, even the proselytizers are altruistic, at least
subjectively: eventhough their desire for "harvesting souls" is
objectively a peculiar type of greed, they are convinced that they are
only rendering a service to
their converts. It is for the love of God and
their fellow-men that they leave their comfortable lives in the West
behind and settle in the heat and dust of a jungle village there to
destroy the tribal religion. Yes, for love. If you believe that Pagans are
bound for eternal hellfire, baptizing them is the greatest gift you can
possibly give them. They are not evil but simply deluded, and the evil
they work is the result of lack of knowledge (as Socrates already
understood). So, we are again face to face with the basic issue: Christian
belief. The Hindutva spokesmen are completely misconceiving the problem of
proselytization unless they inform themselves about the modern evaluation
of Christian beliefs.
Proselytizing and politics
Another mistake often made in Hindutva polemic against the
missionaries is to deny that their motive is Christian religion. It is
said that their real motive is political, that they serve the interests of
a secular entity, typically European colonialism or American hegemonism.
There is a historical basis for this suspicion, e.g. the militantly
secularist French Third Republic (1870-1940) encouraged the missions as de
facto French outposts and agents d'influence in the colonies. Conversely,
tribal anti-British rebellions in India typically started with attacks on
mission posts. It is also likely that during the Cold War, the CIA
supported attempts to set up a Christian state in India's Northeast as an
American foothold in Asia. Yet, apart from being largely anachronistic
now, such scenarios simply don't represent the main thrust of missionary
activity.
The Churches have a history of accomodating all kinds of
political forces and regimes, and they can be quite patriotic too. In some
countries where society was very decentralized, esp. the Germanic and
Slavic parts of Europe, the Church played a decisive role in
nation-building, and it is now quite hard to separate Russian patriotism
from Orthodox Christianity. Even with India being predominantly
non-Christian, the Churches have largely accepted the fact of India and
are abstaining from risky involvements in separatism or American intrigue.
It is a simple calculation: if Nagaland would manage to break away, this
could hurt the position of the Churches in the rest of India.
Another historical development is that with the
demographic stagnation of Christendom in Europe and North America, and
with the emptying of the churches in Europe, most Churches have mentally
prepared for the shift of their centre of gravity to the Third World. Very
soon, the average Christian will be non-white. Already, one third of all
new Jesuits are Indians. For the Catholic Church in particular, priestly
recruitment is targeting India more than any other country: while most
other peoples tend to dislike or ridicule the celibacy imposed on Catholic
priests (which is why in Africa, many priests do have a common-law wife in
defiance of Church rules), Indian culture holds it in high esteem. Of
course, none of this alters the historical fact that Christianity is a
foreign religion, but depicting it as something which the West is trying
to force on India is anachronistic. The indigenization of missionary work
has advanced to the point that all over North India, you find Christian
institutions manned by Kerala Christians.
It will not do to say that "Christianity is not a religion
but a political ideology masquerading as religion", for even where Church
interests are closely intertwined with certain political forces, the
deeper motivation of most Church agents is definitely religious. Moreover,
if American power collapses and there is no political danger anymore in a
foreign connection of the missions, would that make the replacement of
native religion with Christianity acceptable? At this point, the Hindutva
movement has to decide whether it is a nationalist movement (as frequently
proclaimed in its efforts to sound secular) or a Hindu movement. From a
Hindu viewpoint, the Indian Republic's unity and integrity are necessary
to provide Hindu civilization with a home, but lose their importance if
India ceases to be Hindu. The problem with Christian proselytizers is not
their degree of patriotic or foreign loyalty, but their determination to
destroy the native culture.
Is violence warranted?
An aspect of the current crisis which no "secularist"
would dare to mention, is that the Churches have a fawning respect for
strength. They lick the boot that kicks them, and bite the hand that feeds
them. When millions of Christians were persecuted in the Soviet bloc,
Christians in the cosy West started the quasi-Marxist fad of Liberation
Theology. Now that Christians are oppressed in Islamic countries, the
Christian media are full of sugary rhetoric on Muslim-Christian dialogue.
In India, the Christians have formed an anti-Hindu front with Muslims and
Communists, as has been obvious once again in the support which the
Christians have received during the recent missionary crisis from Imam
Bukhari, A.G. Noorani, Syed Shahabuddin and other veterans of the Babri
Masjid cause, who gratefully remember how the Christian media supported
the Muslim side in the Ayodhya conflict.
These media give far less coverage to the numerous acts of
terror against Pakistani Christians, because it would only make things
worse for them. So they save their fire for the propaganda war against the
Hindus, who have given Christians hospitality for a full sixteen
centuries, and who today give them facilities and constitutional
privileges which contrast with the restraints imposed on them in most
Asian countries. Since the missionaries have no hope of converting
Pakistan, they concentrate on converting India and consequently vilify
Hinduism much more than Islam.
So, there seems to be a connection between beating the
Churches and gaining their friendship, as also between generosity to the
Churches and earning their hostility. There is a name for this peculiar
psychological disorder, but that need not detain us here. The point is
that one could understand impatient young Hindus who conclude that force
is the language which the missionaries understand best. Beat the padre and
he will start praising you, right? Yet, they would be mistaken to think
that force will further the Hindu interests.
First of all, there is a moral problem. Hindus are right
to be skeptical of Mahatma Gandhi's unbalanced and masochistic rejection
of the use of force in all circumstances, which amounts to submission to
the aggressor. But they should not go to the other extreme. Let us take a
leaf here from Saint Thomas Aquinas's "just war" theory. The doctor
angelicus taught that the use of force should not be ruled out altogether,
but should always be subject to strict conditions: it should be a
defensive war, all peaceful means of achieving the war aims should be
exhausted first, there should be a reasonable chance of victory, the
non-combatants must be spared, and so on. To a mature mind, these
conditions ought to be self-evident, especially to Hindus who should
recognize something of their own notion of Dharma-Yuddha here (contrary to
Khalistani and "secularist" usage, Dharma Yuddha is not a Hindu equivalent
of Jihad, but a war restrained by a code of ethics and chivalry). How do
these principles apply in the present conflict? The Hindu side is
definitely on the defensive, but it cannot claim to have exhausted all
peaceful means of countering the missionary offensive. It has not even
challenged the missionaries to a debate on the irrational beliefs in which
they try to indoctrinate Indian tribals. In Sri Lanka in the 1870s, the
Buddhists challenged the Jesuits to public debates, and it is generally
acknowledged that their good performance in these debates has stemmed the
tide of conversions to Christianity.
Why are Hindus too lazy to follow their example? As for
the chance of victory, this moral condition brings in a strategic
consideration: can Hindu society gain from violent attacks on the
missionaries? Lenin has observed that it is necessary to gain the moral
ascendancy before starting the next phase, that of forceful action.
Obviously, the Hindus do not enjoy the moral ascendancy. Destroying Hindu
idols is a standard ingredient of the conversion process in tribal
villages, yet it is only when a Christian church is damaged for once that
the incident is even registered. There has been plenty of violence by
Christian converts against their Pagan neighbours, but they have been
getting away with it, their crimes go unreported and remain unpunished.
Already in the 1950s, anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and Christoph von
Fuehrer-Haimendorf described how conversions destroy communal life in
tribal villages, yet even mentioning this widespread phenomenon is
denounced as "anti‑Christian hate propaganda". Christian clerics
subverting tribal culture are "rendering selfless service", Hindu sadhus
encouraging tribals to stand by their own traditions are "communal
hate‑mongers". Clearly, it is the missionaries who have the moral
ascendancy, and consequently, it is they who will reap the moral and
political harvest of any physical conflict between Hindus and Christians.
If Hindus want to win the war against the missionaries,
they will have to start using their brains instead of their itching fists.
They will first of all have to define the problem correctly. Thus, no more
breath should be wasted on the discussion whether Christianity is a
foreign religion. Of course, Christianity originated in distant Palestine,
and the first Christian community came as hapless refugees seeking asylum
in a country which they did not arrogantly claim as their own. But if some
people want to deny these facts and insist that Christianity is
indigenous, just let them. The question is not whether a belief system is
indigenous. As Bal Thackeray has aptly said: we shouldn't take the
Swadeshi idea too far, for then we would have to do without the electric
lightbulb. The law of gravity was discovered by some paleface in distant
Europe, yet even RSS schools teach it. If Christianity is true, then we
should all embrace it, no matter where it originated. Conversely, if
Christianity is untrue, we should inform everyone that a quack belief is
being promoted, in violation of the Constitutional injunction that Indian
citizens should develop the scientific temper. And we should imitate the
missionaries in extending our heartfelt love to them by patiently
liberating them from their false religion.
A question to the Christians
In the 4th century AD, Christianity became the dominant
and then the established religion in the Roman Empire. The Sassanian
rulers of Iran wisely foresaw that the Syrian Christians within their
borders would develop into a fifth column of their powerful neighbour.
Their solution was to persecute the Syrian Christians. Some of these
Christians fled Iran and one group, led by Thomas Cananeus (whose name
would later get confused with that of Thomas Didymos the apostle), arrived
on India's Malabar coast and asked for refuge. The generous and hospitable
Hindus granted the wish of the refugees and honoured their commitment of
hospitality for more than a thousand years. The Christian world has no
record at all of any such consistent act of hospitality: the only
non-Christian community which they tolerated in their midst were the Jews,
and the record of Jewish-Christian co‑existence is hardly bright. The
Hindus, by contrast, have likewise welcomed Jewish and Parsi communities.
Unfortunately, the Portuguese Catholics gained a foothold on the Malabar
coast and started forcing the Malabar Christians into the structure of the
Catholic Church. Even so, the Christians, who had gotten indianized
linguistically and racially, tried to maintain friendly relations with the
Hindus. This attitude is not entirely dead yet, a recent instance is the
statement by a Kerala bishop denying the false allegation that the BJP was
behind the gang-rape of four nuns in Jhabua, a lie still propagated by the
missionary networks till today. However, many other Malabar Christians
have been integrated into the missionary project, and are now gradually
replacing the dwindling number of foreign mission personnel. My question
to them: don't you think that working for the destruction of the very
religion which allowed your community to settle and integrate, is an odd
way to show your gratitude?
Conclusion
To conclude, I must say that I find it sad to see
something dying, especially when the dying entity is the religion in which
I grew up. Yet, it is mathematically certain that this will happen. Just
as the belief in a flat earth cannot survive mankind's inquisitive
interest in the fact of nature, the beliefs underlying Christianity will
not survive the advancement in knowledge. It is painful to lose your
faith, to find your beliefs untenable or disproven, to feel like you have
been fooled for all those years, often in good faith by your beloved
parents. But then, losing an illusion is also liberating. And to avoid
being trapped in that illusion is even better. The Indian tribals can save
themselves the trouble of outgrowing Christianity by not becoming
Christians in the first place. Therefore, all peaceful and legal efforts
to stop Christian conversion work in India's tribal regions deserve our
support.
� Dr. Koenraad Elst, 7 June 1999.
