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the-south-asian.com September 2003 |
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September
2003
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Heaven and Hell
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FREEDOM OF RELIGION AND CONVERSION by Valson Thampu Freedom of religion, understood properly, implies not only the freedom to practise one’s own religion freely, but also the duty to respect the freedom of all people to practise their faiths. We are not free to practice our religion unless we understand it. Those who understand their faith or even want to understand it are few and far between. Organised religions have become indifferent to their spiritual core, and are being used increasingly for vote bank politics and communal mobilisation. Religion has become, besides, an industry than a vocation. Industry is driven by profit motive. The friends and enemies of religious freedom are country cousins: both are driven by profit. The latter, if anything, profits more than the former. There are two modes of understanding and practising religion: the spiritual way and the worldly way. Spiritually, a religious tradition is seen as a holistic and organic entity, which cannot be reduced to certain attractive parts. A religious tradition must be understood in its totality. Understood and practised in secular terms, the practice of conversion, though spiritually and legally legitimate, is never safe from the aberrations of force, fraud or allurement. These may operate in subtle ways: psychological, economic and social. There is a worrisome chance the worldly understanding and practice of conversion degenerate into an ‘unspiritual’ and objectionable activity. The religious roadblocks to freedom of religion stem from our religious plurality; chiefly from the two genres of religions: the propagating and non-propagating religions. It does not have to be argued that a non-propagating religion cannot be expected to endorse the full implications of religious freedom, especially the freedom to propagate. It cannot subscribe to religious freedom to the extent of allowing a person to choose the religion of his liking. The only freedom it can sanction is the freedom to stay on in the religion to which a person is born. No birth-based religious system can afford unqualified freedom of religion. Whether or not such a religious system is just or tenable is a question that has been debated earnestly in this country by men of substance: Maharshi Dayanand and B. R. Ambedkar are two examples. The very purpose of propagation is to persuade others to understand and embrace one’s religion. For the Supreme Court to insist that propagation should not result in conversion is to take a very curious stand indeed. On the face of it, the conclusion that the right to propagate excludes the right to convert implies a Hindu perspective rather than a strictly legal perspective. The current war-like scenario in respect of religious conversion points to a serious problem common to all religions. All religions are reductively understood today. For several Christians, for example, the practice of Christianity is nothing more than the mandate to convert. Increasingly, for Hindus, Hinduism is nothing more than building a temple in Ayodhya. Even more lamentably, the Vedic faith is nothing more than the caste system. Any egalitarian or humanistic critique of caste is misconstrued as an attack on Hinduism. Muslims create the impression, unwittingly or otherwise, that Islam is a religion of privileges like polygamy and easy divorce. It is an insult to Islam to admit to that faith those who want only the luxury of polygamy. Such reductionism is a greater threat to a religion than its external enemies are, and this limited understanding of religion corrupts religious freedom. Reductionism points to the domination of vested interests who edit a given faith tradition to suit their convenience. Reductionism is a rebellion against spirituality. Religious freedom becomes a hated category when religions decay spiritually. In times of religious decay, the validity or otherwise of a religious advocacy is measured in terms of frenzied popular fervour than by its scriptural or spiritual merit. For the ruling government, for instance, the national perfidy in Ayodhya was a heroic event that exemplified nationalistic fervour. This is to legitimize and romanticize anarchy in the name of religion. Uninformed or misguided emotionalism is a sign of irrational religiosity: the very opposite of true spirituality. To glorify this into even a semblance of legitimacy is to launch a fatal attack on religious freedom, especially for the minorities. It is to mistake anarchy for revival. The fact that you feel genuinely and powerfully does not prove that you are right. Shakespeare’s Othello felt passionately convinced about Desdemona’s fidelity and went to the extent of killing her. But he was most lamentably wrong for all that. Faithfulness to Hinduism must be more than anarchic demagoguery. The Vedas are not about being Hindus but about becoming noble human beings. In place of this universal humanism, today we are treated to narrow-minded religious bigotry that, fortunately, a majority of Hindus recognise to be anti-Hindu. Jesus rebelled against this reductionism and counter-pointed Judaic parochialism with spiritual universalism. His idea of the Kingdom of God transcends ethnic, territorial and cultural barriers. The predators of European nationalism and denominational militarism, however, degraded Christianity into a territorial mockery and unleashed serial blood baths in the name of the Prince of Peace who came to die that others may cease to kill. Religious freedom can only be a paper-promise as long as religions remain as their ethnic and territorial caricatures. Shifting from communal religiosity to shared spirituality is, hence, the bottom-line of affirming religious freedom. Religious freedom: a Christian perspective According to Jesus Christ, the cornerstone of religious freedom is the freedom to doubt and debate. Responsible scepticism in matters of faith, as against blind and mindless faith recommended by the religious establishment, is the quintessence of religious freedom. But for this, there would not have been a Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was killed only because he claimed the right and duty to be free and he was killed by the religious establishment of his day. Prophets, says Jesus, will be persecuted only because they are a clarion call to true freedom. All through history, the religious elite have been greater enemies of religious freedom, not only the freedom of those outside of one’s religious constituency but also of those within. For centuries the Church denied Christians the right even to read the Bible! The Dalits and lower castes are asserted to be within the Hindu community. The enemies of their freedom of religion are their fellow Hindus. Muslims of various sects are prevented from worshipping by their fellow Muslims. No religion grants, much less encourages, the right to choose one’s faith freely. True religious freedom is the last thing that the religious establishment wants to grant to its followers. It is a dishonest thing to equate freedom of religion exclusively with the right to convert. In a multi-religious society, religious freedom has to be exercised spiritually, not communally. The spiritual discipline in this regard involves the duty to understand the essence of one’s own religion and the duty to respect the sentiments of those who see things differently. Above all, spirituality implies the duty to be totally free from profit motive. Religious freedom is incompatible with profit motive. No aspect of religion, including conversion, is compatible with force, fraud or allurement. Today Hindutva (not Hinduism) is a multi-core business. Trishul diksha, we are told, was to yield a profit of not less than 35 crores. Bricks meant for Ram mandir were sold at exorbitant rates. Christian entrepreneurs too are making millions in the name of conversion and healing ministry in a way that would have made Jesus of Nazareth use the whip against them, if he were around physically. At the heart of the Christian faith is the sacred mandate to preach the Good News to the poor. But the Gospel of Jesus does not warrant the reduction of this sacred duty to the practice of conversion understood as the migration of people from other faiths into the Christian fold. Poverty has a thousand faces. The foremost among them, in the Indian context, is the degradation effected by caste. None can be poorer than those who have suffered humiliation and exploitation for generations under the caste system. But to proffer liberation from this oppression and to lure them into the Christian fold and to subject them thereafter to caste segregation is to practice outright fraud. And I agree with the politicians who opposed this, whatever their ulterior motives are. But I have a serious concern here. The impossibility of ascertaining the genuineness of the motive to convert on the part of individuals lends credence to the canard that all conversions are spurious and mercenary, and along the way, at times, the Christian faith also gets criminalized. Recently, a Christian group in Delhi was conducting an AIDS awareness programme using a film. This was attacked and disrupted, alleging that it was aimed at converting people. Many assume that the humanitarian services that Christians provide are conversion traps. It was this malicious propaganda that cost Graham Staines, the friend of the lepers of Baripada and Manoharpur, his life. Religious zeal kills the freedom to do good and enlarges the license to do evil. But Christians need to ask themselves. Why do we feel free to preach the Good News only to the poor and the vulnerable? Is not the Gospel of Jesus relevant also to the upper caste and the rich? Brawling over religious freedom smacks of spiritual decay. Those who are free spiritually improvise innovative way to express the light of their faith. In times of difficulty and oppression, the creativity of their spirituality enables them to evolve ways and means to overcome the stumbling blocks and to pursue their spiritual mission fruitfully. The ideal thing, of course, is that all people should be free to practice, preach and propagate their faiths. But this ideal is more an exception than the rule. In no period in history and in no society in the world, religious freedom has been fully obtained. Those who are committed to their spiritual vocation pursue it in spite of all roadblocks. Others convene conferences, writes tomes and cry out in the street even if they have no clue as to how they would use their religious freedom even if it were to be given to them on a platter. The truth not to be spoken in respect of religious freedom, of course, is that we are ourselves the worst enemies of our religion. We are in no hurry to use the freedom for which we are ready fight to the bitter end. The seed of religious freedom is the freedom to shift from fighting to living, from profession to practice, and from propagation to internalization. The conversion of others must be a by-product of one’s own personal transformation. The scandal of conversion is that those who are busy converting others are not themselves converted. In this, as in other respects, physicians must heal themselves first. *****
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