Vedic Voice: By Hook or by Crook-Christians strategy of Conversion

(Mother Mary idol in Jharkhand dressed as Tribal women with Baby Jesus wrapped as tribal women wraps their babies)

Today as I opened the page of Times of India news paper, Delhi edition dated 19 June 2013 I came across a news heading

Mother Mary statue in tribal attire stirs row in Jharkhand

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Mother-Mary-statue-in-tribal-attire-stirs-row-in-Jharkhand/articleshow/20655458.cms?

The news was regarding depicting of Mary in tribal dress as worn usually by tribal women of Jharkhand with baby Jesus wrapped in similar way as tribal women wraps their babies. Few questions came to my mind that

Why do Christian organizations need such ways to spread the message of Christianity?

Do they lack self confidence or they do not trust in the beliefs, practices and basic teachings of Christianity anymore as they have to take company of unethical and unfair means in their missionary work?

Was Christianity established just to increase number if its followers or there was some different motive?

Whom will you like to call a true Christian- A person who is indulged in wrong and unfair means to convert non Christians into Christianity folds or Who just practices Christianity by ethical means and is not able to add anyone?

Is conversion the last and final motive of Christianity?

Is not conversion disrupting harmony and peace among different religions in the society?

Why Christians does cries foul when the converted persons are brought back to their original faiths or they are resisted from conversion by any means viewing their unethical and unwise methods?

Christianity is present in India since more than 1500 years which includes about 200 years of British rule over entire country apart from Portuguese rule in Goa region. There is a famous saying that Christianity and Business goes as hands in gloves. Christian missionaries will be supported economically by church which is well funded by business lobby as missionaries duty is not merely to converted non Christians into Christians folds but also to create a class of consumers who is merely native by its color or race while purely Christians in thoughts, dressing and conduct.

It is a remarkable fact," writes Fr. Bede, "that the Church has been present in India for over fifteen hundred years and has had for the most part everything in its favor, and yet in all this time hardly two in a hundred of the people has been converted to the Christian faith. The position is, indeed, worse even than this figure would suggest, as the vast majority of Christians are concentrated in a very few small areas and in the greater part of India the mass of people remains today untouched except in a very general way by the Christian faith. It is necessary to go even further than this and to say that for the immense majority of the Indian people Christianity still appears as a foreign religion imported from the West and the soul of India remains obstinately attached to its ancient religion. It is not simply a matter of ignorance.

With the rapid decline of Christianity faith in most parts of the Europe especially in the countries around the citadel of Christianity the Vatican the flag bearers of Christianity started worrying about their future.

Even after pouring billions of Dollars in form of donation on name of social services Christianity was not able to harvest new sheep’s for Jesus in the fertile lands of our country except in north east and tribal areas. So they decided to change their strategy. Most important limiting factor in their missionary work was alien resemblance of Jesus and Mary, method of worship, prayers, church, dressing sense etc.

A Hindu even if he or she may be illiterate or poor have deep regards nurtured for generations in his blood for a Hindu sage, Hindu deity, Hindu robe, and Hindu way of worship and Hindu temples.

Christian Missionary decided to exploit this very faith and started Indigenization of Christianity. What is the way out? It is obvious, say the mission strategists. Christianity has to drop its alien attire and get clothed in Hindu cultural forms. In short, Christianity has to be presented as an indigenous faith. Christian theology has to be conveyed through categories of Hindu philosophy; Christian worship has to be conducted in the manner and with the materials of Hindu pooja; Christian sacraments have to sound like Hindu sanskars ; Christian Churches have to copy the architecture of Hindu temples; Christian hymns have to be set to Hindu music; Christian themes and personalities have to be presented in styles of Hindu painting; Christian missionaries have to dress and live like Hindu sanyasi ; Christian mission stations have to look like Hindu ashrams. And so on, the literature of Indigenization goes into all aspects of Christian thought, organization and activity and tries to discover how far and in what way they can be disguised in Hindu forms. The fulfillment will be when converts to Christianity proclaim with complete confidence that they are Hindu Christians.

This very exercise proves that Christians have lost faith and confidence in the very practices of Christianity so that they have to mimic like a Hindu to spread the message of Jesus. Is not it shameful for those who calls themselves as Christians and says we believed in Truth and nothing else. It’s not like that these sorts of practices are entirely new.

(Robert De Nobili Dressed in Hindu Robe)

As per my knowledge they were first adopted by Robert De Nobili, He was made chief of the Madurai Mission in 1606, and worked there till his death at Mylapore in Madras in 1656.He did not got any success in his starting days of preaching so he decided another way. He left the mission house dressed as a Hindu sanyasi and set up an "ashram" on the outskirts of Madurai, an ancient seat of Hindu learning in South India. He wore a sacred thread and grew a Kudumi (tuft of hair on head) he painted his body with sandal paste; he took to sitting and sleeping on the floor and eating vegetarian meals prepared by a Brahmin cook; he began washing with water in the lavatory, brushing his teeth with a twig and bathing as many times a day as was prescribed in the Brahmin books; he stopped riding a horse on his travels in the interior.

Meanwhile, the ashram was coming up fast. De Nobili built a shrine which looked like a Hindu temple. He called it "kovil", the Tamil term for a Hindu place of worship. He celebrated Mass but described it as "pûjei". The fruits and sweets he passed around after the "pûjei" were termed "prasâdam". He composed Christian hymns and songs in Tamil and set them to the tunes of Hindu devotional music. The names of angels, saints and apostles which these compositions contained were translated into a kind of Tamil. Similar names were given to whatever converts he made. The hymns and songs were used for sacraments, which he called sanskars, at the time of births, marriages and deaths. Festivals like Pongal were also Christianized in the same surreptitious manner.
De Nobili composed several books and tracts in Sanskrit and Tamil but packed with Christian lore. His most brilliant performance pertained to the most sacred Hindu scripture-the Veda. Having heard a folk tradition that the true Veda had been lost, he produced a book in Sanskrit and proclaimed that it was the Yajurveda which he had discovered in a distant land and which he had come to teach in India. Later on, when he was found out, he would say with a straight face that what he meant was the Yesurveda, the Veda of Jesus.
The Hindus he baptized did not have the faintest notion that they were embracing another faith, least of all Christianity which they despised. The ritual they were required to perform was washing with water from a nearby well, a change of clothes, muttering of mantras coined by De Nobili, and eating of prasâdam. They did not suspect that the new names they were given were the names of Christian saints translated into Tamil. All they were told and knew was that they were being initiated by a Brahmin guru into his own sect.

Some Hindus suspected that there was something fishy about this stranger with a white skin. They asked him if he was a pharangi, that is, a Christian. De Nobili took advantage of the double meaning which the term had acquired. He replied that he was not a pharangi, that is, a Portuguese but a Brahmin from Rome. In his own words, "I professed to be an Italian Brahmin who had renounced the world, had studied wisdom at Rome and rejected all the pleasures and comforts of this world." He had the subjective satisfaction of being verbally correct, though in missionary ethics even this much was not necessary. Truth has always occupied a secondary place in missionary methods. What has stood uppermost is the saving of souls, even if it involves practicing fraud. "The end justifies the means", is after all a Jesuit maxim.

(Jesus in Europe in King's Robe)

(Jesus in India as Hindu sage)

(Jesus in Africa with African looks)

The current upcoming practices in church are more advanced in mimicking Hindu practices but the principle of fraud is as similar as it was in days of Nobili. It seems that the Christian healing/prayer service which are widely marketed to show that the patients are treated with prayers not medicines have lost its influence on general masses. As people are getting more and more educated and they questions healing power of church acclaimed saint Mother Teresa who herself went under heart and eye surgery in her life time and Ex Pope John Paul II who was suffering from parkinsonism that lead to his confinement on wheel chair for almost last decade of his life.

Readers can decide themselves that for increasing the numbers of believers of their faith Christians are adopting unethical and improper means. Honest word for such ways or means is Frauds and readers might use appropriate term for them.

Its duty of each and every person who loves our country, our culture, our legacy to protect our country from such frauds and expose those who are ignorant and wants others also to join the league of ignorant.

Dr Vivek Arya

Here I am posting few pictures which show how this work is going among Christians circles.