Anthropologist Neena Mahadev’s focus in her debut book, Karma and Grace, is to understand the conditions of possibility for religious antagonisms and the questions of religious belonging that have become a source of conflict in Sri Lanka. She explores how Pentecostal evangelical Christianity, particularly expansionary efforts of born-again Christians, has become one of the newest frontiers of religious rivalry, and the ways in which it has increased nationalist anxieties over Buddhist inheritances in the religious public. Examining the discourses concerning Christian conversion and Buddhist resistance and receptivity to it, Mahadev seems to suggest that the episodic violence against Pentecostal churches in Sri Lanka is not merely a resistance to the charismatics’ deft harnessing of new media publicization of “the Good News,” but that it is a conflict between two ontologies of religious difference in Buddhism and Christianity. While becoming born-again signifies a radical change and salvational orientation towards God’s grace, for Sinhala Buddhists, the rupture of conversion, “forsaking one’s karma in favor of Christian grace,” involves a deviation from a righteous trajectory of moral self-improvement across multiple lifetimes (30). Karma and Grace evocatively demonstrates the continuities and discontinuities in the differential logics that are politicized in discourses of conversion, highlighting how these have facilitated religious rivalries.
Sri Lanka is probably the most studied Theravada Buddhist country in terms of inter-religious antagonisms and conflicts, and of the conditions of possibility that enable them. Central to scholars’ discussions has been the relationship between Buddhism and modernity (see, e.g., Blackburn 2010; Gombrich and Obeysekere 1988; Malalgoda 1976; Scott 1994; Senevirathne 1999). These scholars’ work attempts to analyze Sinhala religious experiences and the development of the “religious public” during the colonial and the post-independence eras. They have shown that the religious public was marked by one important development: religious modernization, famously characterized as middle-class and nationalist transformations. For most of these scholars, the condition of possibility for religious modernism associated with Christian expansionary missions was colonialism, an era characterized as stimulation for nationalist adaptation, reform, and resurgence. Religious antagonisms and their possibilities and predicaments in millennial Sri Lanka, the central focus of Mahadev’s study, bear striking resemblance to religious modernization in which Buddhist “theocratic efforts to singularly recuperate the nation’s heritage became detrimental to a wide array of minority groups and created a crucible of violence” (19). Karma and Grace points to the extension of the modernist project, especially the newly emergent religiosities that follow the neoliberal transformations coinciding with the war, media, and mediation. As the economic crisis looms and the consequences of multiple forms of inequality are exposed and exacerbated by these transformations, the Christian evangelists find their way into the sociality of the religious public.
If the earlier condition of possibility for the emergence of religious pluralism and the violence that emerged with it was colonialism, Mahadev’s meticulously argued narrative implies the condition of possibility today may be seen as the neoliberal economic transformation and “mediatically attuned and stylized” (12) forms of religions— the press, money, charity, and miracles that coincide with it. Mahadev demonstrates that proselytizing Christian missions, the prosperity gospel, and the resulting religious conflicts found their grounds within neoliberal economic transformation in Sri Lanka. She claims that it is the “millennial urgencies and anxieties that mutually deepened religious hostilities” (73). Charity, gifts, and material support are perceived by majoritarian nationalists to be the main instruments in converting people in rural settings. In the context of nationalist anxieties that have grown alongside intensifying millennial urgencies, Christian evangelists hope to carve out sovereign religious domains while Theravāda Buddhist revivalists seek to retain their acclaimed inheritances.
Providing a historical sketch of two waves of conversions to Christianity in the modern religious history of Sri Lanka and marking the specificity of the “Third-Wave” Pentecostalism, Mahadev writes, “if the earlier two waves of conversion to Christianity and back to Buddhism can be characterized as “political” in motivation, this third phase of conversions to Christianity that began in the 1970s may be seen as more squarely economic in nature” (53). In other words, the modernization of religious revival that accompanied conversions from Buddhism to Christianity or back to Buddhism from Christianity is not something new. Rather, it is the reemergence of episodes of Christian conversions coinciding with Buddhist-Christian conflict and militant Buddhism, whose possibility persists within neoliberal transformations that extended the “consumptive habits of religious revival” within mass media platforms (13), that is new. Mahadev pointed out in terms of the conversions in the pre-1970s, the two waves had a lot to do with the elite sphere though there were some segments of lower caste and class groups that also remained a prominent portion of the colonial conversion project (48). However, the third wave of conversion to Christianity has become part and parcel of economic uncertainties and frustrations resulting in global economic fluctuations coinciding with neoliberal transformations. Thus the third wave could be mostly considered as economic in nature and the target of these conversions is the lower class strata and not necessarily the ruling elite. This observation may turn out to be a point of considerable importance in her book.
Yet, there is a significant omission in Mahadev’s claims that previous two waves of conversion to Christianity and back to Buddhism were political. The motivation behind the conversion cannot be merely characterized as political, as it fails to adequately capture the complexities of political economy in the colonial era. That is, this overly simple characterization misses a prominent fact about colonialism: Colonialism was not just a political project; it was an economic project too. Colonialists were the authority in power, and it was a project of producing men and women to continue their political and economic interests within the colonial country. The local elite produced their wealth by being part of the colonial clique, and their political interests were associated with both the political and economic spheres carved out by colonialists (see, e.g., Jayawardena 2000). Therefore, politics cannot be separated from economics if we want to understand the colonial or national periods. The emergence of a local capitalist class, their conversion to Christianity, and later their conversion to Buddhism for political reasons are closely linked to their economic interests. Even with Kumari Jayawardena’s work (2000) mentioned in Karma and Grace, one of Jayawardena’s main arguments is not taken seriously: the emergence of local elites and their deep involvement in conversion to Christianity is economic as well as political in nature.
Despite this slight shortcoming, the crucial contribution of Mahadev’s book lies in its analysis of ontological differences in Buddhists versus Christians. She views the religious rivalries that emerged out of conversions in the pluralistic society of Sri Lanka as a clash between two ontologies, Karma in Buddhism and the concept of grace in Christianity, “the competing economies of belief” (50). For instance, consider her discussion on Pentecostal ministers’ pronouncements such as “Jesus is the shortest way to overcome samsara” (samsara is the cycle of rebirth that Buddhists seek to escape from, in order to attain nirvana) and the Buddhists’ response to such a pronouncement that no one can escape from accumulated bad karma by deflecting them onto a savior. While acknowledging this crucial contribution, I find two theoretical limitations in her argument. First, the effort to portray the religious rivalries as a clash between two different ontologies implies that the conditions of possibility for conflicts between these two religions are latent in ontological differences, an implication which then reduces any resultant violence to an essence of those two ontologies. Put differently, such an argument does not take into account how religion or religious life changes in history, and it maintains an essentialized form of the category of religion. Second, it fails to explain newly emergent factions within Buddhism itself. For instance, it does not explain why the preaching of the monastics like Mahamevnawa or Umandawa (an extension of Siri Sadaham Ashramaya) have been able to stoke heated debates on concepts like samsara and karma within Buddhism. With rhetorical ease, the monks like Pitaduwe Siridhamma Thero—whose innovative efforts have been discussed in the fifth chapter—put forth pronouncements such as that the celebration of material life fully in this world does not delay one’s soteriological goals of better future lifetimes and ultimately attaining nirvana, adaptive efforts which Mahadev calls a “maverick innovation” (202). While Mahadev frames these efforts as far from “imitating Pentecostalism” (203), it is also important to note that they have sparked debates and rivalries within Buddhism itself, in addition to any tensions between Christianity and Buddhism.
Now my point here is not that the ontological differences of religions have nothing to do with the interreligious rivalries in Sri Lanka. Rather, privileging the ontological difference as the “enduring source of interreligious antipathy in Sri Lanka” (111) takes us away from deeply engaging with neoliberal logics and the postmodern sociality that seems to enable new forms of religiosities to rise as never before. That is, we live in a society where everything is marketized and the market promises immediate salvation or what we can call immediate pleasure through the commodification of life. However, it is impossible to acquire these promises as poverty, austerity, and anxiety have overdetermined the existence of the majority of people. Thus, people finding what Mahadev terms “salvational immediacy” in redefining the doctrinal concepts within their own religions or converting to another seems a ready-made and efficient answer. What I want to point out here is that not only Christianity but also newly emergent Buddhist monastic types promise salvational immediacy in this lifetime and that promise cannot be conceptualized merely as a “dialogical response to expansionary forms of Christianity” (203). Then perhaps the reasons for religious conversions for salvational immediacy and the resulting religious tensions lie not within religious ontologies but within the millennial urgencies, uncertainties, and anxieties deepened by uneven economic transformations. The theme of ontological differences that the author stresses seem quite secondary to the political and economic hardships involved.
Despite this limitation, one value of the book is in the discussion of charismatic performative religious activities of Pentecostal ministers that are popular rituals of conversion. The discussion of these religious activities indicates avenues for a new field of study. Once central to Sinhala Buddhism, rituals such as spirit cults, possession, trances, demons, miracles, and magic are now central to Pentecostalism. For the last few decades, these religious rituals which Gananath Obeysekere and Richard Gombrich (1988) call “religion of the oppressed” have not been prominently present in the country. A popular revivalist monk, Gangodawila Soma Thero, vehemently criticized and denounced divine worship and other forms of religiosity among Sinhala Buddhists (Mahadev analyzes the sentiments surrounding his death in detail in Chapter One).There is a long tradition of labeling and classifying these ritual practices as folk supernaturalism or idolatry (Senevirathne,1999: 3), practices which were marked as outside the boundary of doctrinal Buddhism. What is important to mention here is that even though these ritual practices are not prominent, the conditions for their existence and the mental and material benefits they provide for people may not have gone extinct. Instead, it might have exacerbated the need of these ritual practices by the anxieties, uncertainties, poverty, and economic hardships that Buddhists face during Sri Lanka’s austere import-substitution economy that evangelical Christians address.
Perhaps we can ask the question: are Pentecostal Charismatic performances fulfilling this lack of demonic and divine worship rituals among Sinhala Buddhists? Indeed, Pentecostalism has criticized the local practices such as the Sinhala yaktovil—merit transferring to ensure a safe passage for the spirits—as feeding or ‘entertaining the devil’ (140). Instead, the ministers delivering sermons advocate for vanquishing such practices once and for all. Through social media we often see scenes of demonic exodus led by pastors and their followers. Following Mahadev’s insights that “in rivalry, certain Christian and Buddhist leaders transform their traditions” by “reckoning, mirroring, and commensurating between incommensurate soteriological goals, [such that] innovations may also arise” (268), we can ask: do these charismatic performances of Pentecostalism become the condition of possibility for the reemergence of “religions of the oppressed” as a prominent part of Sinhala Buddhism again? Do Christian Pentecostalist groups invest in what Sinhala Buddhist traditions are giving up? By raising and articulating such questions, Karma and Grace will be of immense value to all scholars of religion and political economy in South and Southeast Asia as a tool to study resistance, receptivity, and religious intermingling enabled by inter-religious competition. More importantly, this valuable book shows the importance of investigating the interreligious mingling or the category of ‘daily peacekeeping’ in a pluralistic but antagonistic religious public.
