Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India

224 Pages·2015·1.75 MB·English

by  Chad M. Bauman

Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian
Violence in Contemporary India
GLOBAL PENTECOSTAL AND CHARISMATIC
CHRISTIANITY
Series Editor
Donald E. Miller
Executive Director, Center for Religion and Civic Culture,
University of Southern California
PENTECOSTALS, PROSELYTIZATION, AND
ANTI-CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA
Chad M. Bauman
Pentecostals, Proselytization,
and Anti-Christian Violence
in Contemporary India
chad m. bauman
3
1
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations xi
Map xiii
Introduction 1
CHAPTER 1 Who Are India’s Pentecostals?: History,
Definitions, Deliberations 24
CHAPTER 2 Pentecostalism in the Context of Indian History
and Politics 42
CHAPTER 3 Where the Spirit (of Violence) Leads: The
Disproportionate Targeting of Indian Pentecostals 70
CHAPTER 4 Force, Fraud, and Inducement?: Recuperative
Conversions and the Growth of Indian Christianity 94
CHAPTER 5 Missions and the Pentecostalization of
Indian Christianity 131
Conclusion: Conversion Activities, Metaphorical
Cockroaches, and the Question of Culpability 173
Works Cited 195
Index 205

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book, like nearly every other, is the textual manifestation of mani-
fold collaborations, large and small. Most of them will, unfortunately,
go unacknowledged in the short paragraphs that follow, but I am grateful,
nonetheless, for every single one.
The majority of the research for the book was conducted during a year-
long sabbatical in 2011‒12. Butler University, where I work, funded half
of that sabbatical, and to the university I am grateful for the opportunity to
engage in the kind of sustained scholarly reflection that sabbaticals allow.
Financial support for the other half of the sabbatical, as well as for a good
deal of research and travel support, came in the form of a grant from the
Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative (PCRI) at the Center for
Religion & Civic Culture (CRCC) housed at the University of Southern
California, and from the John Templeton Foundation, which funded it.
Aside from the material support provided by PCRI, I would be remiss if
I did not express my gratitude to the CRCC staff for planning two utterly
stimulating workshops that brought together all of the PCRI grantees in
Quito, Ecuador, and Nairobi, Kenya. To all of the grantees I am indebted
for helping me grasp the global dimensions of the Pentecostal movement.
But I am particularly grateful to Donald E. Miller, Executive Director of
CRCC and Editor of the series in which this volume appears, and to Brie
“Aguardiente” Loskota and Richard “Fireball” Flory (Managing Director
and Director of Research, respectively, at CRCC), for their wit, wisdom,
and ongoing friendship and scholarly guidance.
In the collection of data, and in the arranging, conducting, translating,
and transcribing of interviews, I was aided by a small army of research
assistants, both at Butler University (Ariel Tyring, Katie Kilgore, Matt
Miller, Douglas Manuel, and Stephanie Cheuvront) and in India (Naveen
John, Yehova Das, and Abel Raj). Without them this project might have
never come to fruition.
For scholarly support, I am indebted to participants at conferences
sponsored by the American Academy of Religion, the Conference on the
Study of Religions of India, the European Association for South Asian
Studies (EASAS), and the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies, who pro-
vided feedback on some of the material that appears in the volume. Among
EASAS colleagues, I would like to single out Eva Ambos and Davide
Torri for their scholarly friendship and support, and for their endearingly
“mind-buckling” polylinguistic abilities. Similarly, I am grateful to fel-
low scholars of Indian religions, Jacob Cherian, Joseph Prabhakar Dayam,
Satish Gyan, Paul Parathazham, Gyanapragasam Patrick, James Ponniah,
and Nandini Ramaswamy, who influenced my thinking on the issues dis-
cussed in this book in various ways, and who provided me with valuable
contacts and guidance throughout North and South India. Similarly, while
I was at work on the project, Sarah Claerhout, Richard Fox Young, Robert
Frykenberg, Brian Hatcher, Roger Hedlund, Arun Jones, Tamara Leech,
Reid Locklin, Brian Pennington, Nathaniel Roberts, Charles Ryerson, and
Kerry San Chirico stimulated my thinking, filled in gaps in my knowledge,
critiqued my presentations, and read first drafts of sections of the book.
A reviewer at Oxford University Press provided invaluable comment on
the entire manuscript, as did Corinne Dempsey, who regularly embodies
the best of scholarly collegiality by combining thoughtful, informed, and
careful critique with equally thoughtful and effusive encouragement. I am
additionally grateful to Theo Calderara, editor at OUP, for his reasonable,
calming, and thoughtful work with me on this project, and to OUP’s edi-
torial assistant, Glenn Ramirez (and his team), for their help in seeing it
through to publication.
Engaging in research on this controversial subject required an attempt
to sympathetically apprehend the views of prominent critics of Christianity
in India, and in this regard, I am particularly grateful for the assistance
of Koenraad Elst and Mihir Meghani, co-founder of the Hindu American
Foundation (HAF). The latter helped me refine my understanding of HAF’s
positions on these matters (though I don’t discuss them much in the book),
and also put me in touch with R. Venkatanarayanan, former Secretary of
the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha. I owe Venkatanarayanan himself a
debt of thanks for a series of thoughtful and engaging conversations in
Delhi, and for elucidating the statements of his close associate, Swami
Dayananda Saraswati, who makes several appearances in these pages.
viii | Acknowledgments
A number of pro-Christian and pro-Dalit leaders and activists in India
spent time with me, corresponded with me, and helped me understand
the topic from their perspective, and among them I would like to express
particular appreciation for John Dayal, Richard Howell, and Asha Kowtal.
Similarly, the data and analysis appearing in c hapter 5 is better and more
complete because of the assistance and advice of several Christian mission
scholars and practitioners, among them Jonathan Bonk, William Burrows,
Darrell Guder, Wilbert Shenk, and Erica Johnson.
I am particularly grateful to Cambridge University Press, for allowing
me to republish material in chapter 2 that first appeared in the Journal of
Asian Studies, and to Brill, for permission to reprint parts of my chap-
ter that appeared in Richard Fox Young and Jonathan Seitz’s Asia in the
Making of Christianity: Conversion, Agency, and Indigeneity, 1600s to the
Present (Boston: Brill, 2013).
I am, additionally, indebted to a number of friends and colleagues at
Butler University. Members of my department, including our departmental
administrative specialist, Mary Proffitt, helped maintain my sanity through
professional collaboration, intellectual stimulation, and scholarly commis-
eration. I would also like to express my gratitude to Travis Ryan, for help
with (metaphorical) breeding, and to Terri Carney, for regularly reminding
me to keep my priorities straight, and for encouraging me—borrowing the
words of another—to practice at failure.
Speaking of priorities, my first monograph ended with an acknowledg-
ment of the “sisters B,” who accompanied me through the often lonely
hours of writing, and who just happened to be canine. Those sisters, sadly,
have since then passed on. But my life now is perpetually enriched by the
presence of a new pair of sisters, our (human) daughters, Annika Priya
and Nadya Sonali, who surely made sacrifices for this book in ways they
couldn’t possibly know or understand. To borrow and adapt a line from
a character in George Saunders’s Tenth of December: Stories, all I want
from my life is to feel, at the end, like I did right by those magnificent little
creatures. And finally, both to and for Jodi, my wife, who may have known
the many sacrifices she had to make, but who nevertheless made them with
characteristic grace and poise, I am, as always, grateful.
Acknowledgments | ix