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Article Excerpt
Missionary activity always holds an implicit psychological violence, however discretely it is conducted. It is aimed at turning the minds and hearts of people away from their native religion to one that is generally unsympathetic and hostile to it ... Missionary activity and conversion, therefore, is not about freedom of religion. It is about the attempt of one religion to exterminate all others. Such an exclusive attitude cannot promote tolerance or understanding or resolve communal tensions. The missionary wants to put an end to pluralism, choice and freedom of religion. He wants one religion, his own, for everyone and will sacrifice his life to that cause. True freedom of religion should involve freedom from conversion. The missionary is like a salesman targeting people in their homes or like an invader seeking to conquer. Such disruptive activity is not a right and it cannot promote social harmony ... the conversion mentality is inherently intolerant ... conversion is inherently an unethical practice and inevitably breeds unethical results.(1)
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Those statements are extracted from an article, cheekily entitled "The Missionary Position", which has been displayed for over two years on the website of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the governing party of India. The author is David Frawley, or Vamadeva Shastri, an American, who, it should be noted, is himself a convert, viz. from Catholicism to Hinduism. Frawley's statements are characteristic of Hindu attempts to brand missionary religions, and Christianity in particular, as intrinsically intolerant, and conversely to claim for a Hindu monistic perspective on religious truth a monopoly of the virtue of tolerance. In the name of "pluralism, choice and freedom of religion", Frawley is implicitly supporting the right and duty of the Indian government to take legislative action to curb Christian evangelistic activity in India. (2)
By way of comment on these claims by a Hinduized American, we may refer to a native of India who is now a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. In her provocative book, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief, Gauri Viswanathan argues that religious conversion is profoundly threatening to dominant communities, for it possesses the potential to destabilize the equilibrium between majority and minority. In such contexts of disparity, she points out:
Dominant communities prefer to use the term "proselytism" rather than "conversion" to indicate the forcible nature of religious change. The term also carries with it a baggage of associations that identify religious change as an effect of manipulation, propagandistic activity, loss of individual self-control and will power, and sustained political mobilization. The use of the term "proselytism" further denies subjectivity, agency, or choice to the subject and replaces individuals with masses as the unit of analysis. (3)
Viswanathan's observations can be given a broader application. It can be said that Frawley's identification of a commitment to conversion with the proselytism that denies religious freedom and toleration is representative of majority opinion in Western pluralistic societies, whether in intellectual circles or at the level of generally received wisdom. Beneath the placid surface of the current pluralist orthodoxy in religious studies, currents of an essentially illiberal kind flow. It is assumed that, for the sake of ethnic harmony and mutual human understanding, religious affiliation should, and even must remain confined within the traditional territorial boundaries of particular communities of faith. Missionary or conversionist religions that refuse to acknowledge those boundaries as sacrosanct are deemed guilty of the sins of "proselytism" and "intolerance".
The main thrust of the secular academic case against Christian missions is no longer that missions have been besmirched historically by the extent of their complicity with the expansionist or exploitative designs of Western colonial governments. Although the damage done to Christian mission by the extent of its historical compromises with the colonial project is self-evident to Christians, there is now discernible in secular scholarship what one historian has termed "a gathering swell of reaction against binary models which assume that Christianity was little more than a tool of imperialism, and that it is best analysed within the context of colonial imposition or capitalist machination". (4) This realignment reflects the weakening hold of classical Marxism on historians, who are now less inclined to locate the heart of the imperial impulse in the grand designs of colonial governments or their subservience to capitalist interests. Rather, the focus of attention has shifted from politics and economy to culture, mentality and language. This reorientation has led analyses of Christian missions in two potentially divergent directions.
On the one hand, following the example of Edward Said's massively influential Orientalism (1978), (5) historians and postcolonial theorists are now more concerned to expose the intellectual and discursive structures of representation and mentality that underpinned assumptions of European superiority over the oriental or pagan "other" in the colonial past, and continue to do so in more subtle form in the postcolonial present. The colonization of the mind through the inculcation of Western education, literature, and religion is now seen to be logically prior to, and ultimately more destructive than, the colonization of material resources and the territory which contains them. From this perspective, conversion to Christianity has invited attention as the alleged symbolic moment of capitulation to the cultural and ideological power of the West.
The Congolese philosopher, V. Y. Mudimbe, presents a stark example of this approach. Mudimbe has made the sweeping claim that, "Missionary speech is always pre-determined, pre-regulated, let us say colonized". (6) It should be noticed that any understanding of evangelization merely as the transmission of a fixed body of propositional truth will tend to reinforce the conviction of opponents of Christian mission that it is intrinsically about the colonization of consciousness. Mudimbe concludes:
A person whose ideas and mission come from and are sustained by God is rightly entitled to the use of all possible means, even violence, to achieve his objectives. Consequently, "African conversion" rather than being a positive outcome of a dialogue--unthinkable per se--came to be the sole position the African could take in order to survive as a human being. (7)
The possibility of a genuine dialogue between missionary and hearer that leads to conversion is thus dismissed as "unthinkable". In Mudimbe's indignation against the missionary programme of "domestication", he deprives Africans of any independent will or agency except the inclination to collaborate in their own domestication through acceptance of the "social engineering" of training an indigenous priesthood. The climax of the conversion process is thus assimilation to an alien identity:
... the phase where the convert, individually a "child", assumes the identity of a style imposed upon him or her to the point of displaying it as his of her nature; the conversion has then worked perfectly: the "child" is now a candidate for assimilation, insofar as he or she lives already as an entity made for reflecting both a Christian essence and, say, a Dominican or a Franciscan or a Jesuit style. (8)
For Mudimbe, as for many other commentators today, to be confident that one has God on one's side legitimates coercion or violence in the pursuit of one's divinely sanctioned aims. In his view, as also in Frawley's, the illusory certainty of faith leads inevitably to the unethical outcome of psychological domination.
It is doubtful, however, whether such monochromatic interpretations as Mudimbe's represent the majority view, at least among scholars who take historical evidence seriously. The growing emphasis on the cultural and linguistic fabric of imperialism has promoted the study of missions as inter-cultural encounters, and hence has stimulated the asking of questions about the perceptions and aspirations of those to whom missions were directed. From this standpoint, the phenomenon of conversion to Christianity or Islam in modern Africa, or other primal societies, has demanded investigation of it as an instance of unusually sharp cultural discontinuity, i.e. as a "great transformation" in which individuals or, more commonly, groups reformulate their identity in response to major changes in the scale and contours of their social environment. (9) Such a line of inquiry invites the scholar to seek to inhabit the mental framework of the indigenous receptor. As such, it tends to undermine interpretations of conversion as the colonization of the mind, for, once an indigenous standpoint has been adopted, what is no longer politically correct (and quite rightly so) is to deny any independent agency to indigenous actors. Thus, Gauri Viswanathan, once a research student of none other...
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