I am grateful for the generous responses to Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Milllenial Sri Lanka from Angie Heo, Justin Henry, Geethika Dharmasinghe, and Alicia Turner. Each of them asks important, probing questions of the work, and I hope I have done justice to their thoughtful inquiries and critiques. Along with my reply to them, I will offer a brief synopsis of the book and a short discussion of my “multicameral” ethnographic approach. I also address the specific matter of political theology, to speak to the interests of readers of this blog.
As noted by the four commentators, Karma and Grace sets out to illuminate an intensification of conflict over Buddhist-Christian conversion through ethnographic attention to pluralism and perspectivism in millennial Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka’s Pentecostal deliverance ministries, sermonic discourses commonly encourage born-again conversions and expansion of Christianity’s hold over the country. Responding to this heightened visibility, beginning in the early 2000s, Buddhist monks and laypeople lobbied the state to criminalize such vigorous proselytization efforts, and Sinhala Buddhist nationalists commonly alleged that the conversions were taking place “unethically.” Analyzing this dispute, I show that underlying these allegations is the “nativist contention that conversion to Christianity appears as an insidious socialization process that transforms citizens into subjects who are hostile to the majoritarian ethos of the nation” (45). As Pentecostal evangelists worked to spread the “Good News,” Buddhist nationalists produced bad press, sting operations, rumors, and episodically destroyed properties and threatened physical violence, in an effort to prevent new churches from taking root.
To understand these conflicting theopolitical forms, I outline how these disputes proliferated in large part because Buddhism and Christianity in Sri Lanka has historically tended to track with radically opposed economic ideologies and partisan political alignments. An adversarial politics of Buddhist nationalist perception was fed by privileges that accrued to Christians during various phases of mission. But the revival of Christianity through neo-Pentecostalism that grew in the 1970s went against the grain of nationalistic efforts to recuperate Sri Lanka’s Buddhist heritage in the postcolonial era. Neoliberal prosperity gospels, Christian charity and Western humanitarian aid, charismatic miracles, and new styles of Christian publicity, all chafed against established, modernist Sinhala Buddhist pathways to propagating the Dharma and to ensuring national flourishing and sovereign self-sufficiency.
Tensions over conversion were exacerbated in the aftermath of humanitarian disasters, both natural and man-made; in the context of ostensibly ground-clearing catastrophes of tsunami and civil war, Western humanitarian aid and political interventions converged with antipathies over unmitigated growth of “foreign” Christian influence. This constellation of events in the early 2000s compounded perceptions that Christianity is a force for “neocolonialism”—even though it is ethnic Sinhala and Tamil ministers who seek new converts within Sri Lanka. In the crosscut, I show how Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists alike saw the matter of conversion as tantamount to a battle over religious sovereignty.
Through what I call a “multicameral” approach, I sought to develop a sensitivity to the entanglements that emerged over different sets of rituals, aesthetics, and ethical postulates that were shaped by distinct Buddhist (Theravadin) and Christian (Pentecostal, Protestant, and Catholic) institutions, sensibilities, and theologies. I also attended to the sharp gradients of political and economic power that have fashioned the uptake and the endurance of these varied religious forms. To respond to Angie Heo’s fruitful line of questioning, I would say that all of these things taken together—rituals, aesthetics, ethical postulates, structures, theologically-inflected sensibilities, as well as the differential channeling of these religious forms through political economy—are core aspects of “religious difference.” These differences stood as sources of contention between Buddhists who sought to retain sovereign domains, and evangelists who aspired to create new ground for Christian sovereignty.
For example, I found that the differential between Buddhist and Christian doctrinal sensibilities even gives shape to the legalistic contentions over what constitutes “ethical” and “unethical” means of persuading a person to convert. I analyzed the widespread complaint among Sinhala Buddhists that Christian “fundamentalists” use the material allure of charity and promises of miracles to induce conversions “unethically.” From the vantage point of Sinhala Buddhists embedded in a Dharmic moral discourse, material things are “fetters” that cause attachments that are liable to impinge upon the mind. In this line of reasoning, a mind persuaded to convert as an effect of receiving charity is therefore a “conscience” that is rendered “unfree.”
What is more, alongside of this religious reasoning, I show that Sinhala Buddhists are amply aware that “colonial missionary endeavors took place in, and engendered, an age of highly differentiated geographies of affluence and poverty. As a result, European Christians viewed generosity and altruism as a virtue critical to their sense of religio-moral accomplishment in the colonies” (86). This is to acknowledge that colonial extraction created a wealth gap which manifested locally and geopolitically. These inequities fostered mutual misunderstanding that transpired in the course of inter-religious interactions. For example, through my ethnographic observation paired with historical sources, I clarify how Christians and Buddhists each claim that the other’s practices of religious giving—Buddhist almsgiving directed from laity to monks (dāna), and Christian charity—are liable to generate “selfishness.” Analyzing the differential between them, I point to how, “Given their distinctively different systems of moral value and repertoires of giving, Christians and Buddhists engage very different criteria for judging and reckoning what it is that constitutes generosity” (79). In examining the local and geopolitical dynamics of why and how religious difference matters, I am emphatic that the doctrinal reasoning that enters into inter-religious sparring cannot be isolated from the sharp gradient of power that connects religious affinities to a wider economy of influences.
In addition to pushing me to discuss just what it is that constitutes “difference,” Angie Heo further asks me to parse “religious difference” from “inter-religion.” Perhaps I can put it this way: “difference” indicates articulations of two or more separate kinds, whereas inter-religion is an interactive space from which one can observe the interface between these different kinds. Specifically, I characterize “inter-religion” as the space in between these (Buddhist and Christian) religious forms, which include: a) phenomenological dimensions of conversion as a spiritual experience and as socialization process; b) perceptions of difference, as well as the politicization of difference; c) ambiguity, ambivalence, experimentation, and leniency with respect to categories, practices, and identities; d) the emergent and processual nature of religious mixing; e) practices of inter-religious sparring and “competitive theologizing”; and e) other creative transfigurations that occur within social intercourse—including interactions that can be conflictual, conciliatory, or neutral. As Heo frames it through her line of questioning, I would indeed aver that “‘inter-religion’ help[s] us see where and how religious differences are made.” As noted by Heo and Turner, I trained my eye upon “inter-religion” by way of what I call a “multicameral” ethnographic approach to study both plurality (actually existing differences) and pluralism (the political embrace, or rejection, of religious diversity). My method required situating myself as a participant-observer both within and at the interstices between distinctive Buddhist and Christian groups. Multicameralism is my riff upon political theorist William E. Connolly’s “bicameral orientation”—the cultivation of duality in one’s perspective that he argued was essential to develop an “ethos of pluralism.” Rather than theorize pluralism as a normative good, I developed the concept with an eye toward addressing empirical aspects of religious difference and plurality amid overarching conflict, so as to examine the conditions of possibility for pluralism.
Throughout the book, I offer multi-causal explanations for inter-religious conflict in Sri Lanka: I show how the reach of these religious forms is both sharply punctuated and inextricably shaped by transformations in the political economy. This brings me to Geethika Dharmasinghe’s surprising contention that I have reduced inter-religious conflict to competing ontologies or theologies. This claim of my preferencing of “ontology” in my analysis appears to be a misreading that neglects aspects of my multi-causal argument. While my book’s title might seem to imply a flat interest in theological and cosmological concepts, in fact, my foremost concern in Karma and Grace is to explore how material and ideological causal strands are imbricated, and ultimately inseparable.
I say plainly in my book’s Introduction that it is not the case that Buddhism and Christianity are inherently at odds with one another; rather, “When undergirded by political-economic disputes that are borne out through … Sri Lanka’s postcolonial, millennial, and postwar circumstances, these distinctive orientations to karmic continuity and grace-filled discontinuity bear the potential to materialize as mutual hostility.” Thereafter, I spend Chapter One detailing how Buddhism and Christianity initially came into conflict during the colonial era through the economies of conversion, materializations of Christian political and economic privilege, and the widespread perception that conversion trends in Sri Lanka have historically been driven by pragmatic needs and desires for upward social, economic, and political mobility.
Moreover, I contest the assertion that I don’t take seriously important scholarship on Christianity and Sri Lanka’s political economy. I show how, in the eras of colonialism, decolonization, and nationalization, religious and socio-economic sensibilities were structured by sharp gradients of power. To my eyes, Dharmasinghe appears to have taken my periodization of conversion waves out of context. She emphasizes that the colonial project was at once political and economic—and she is absolutely right on that count.
At the risk of belaboring my point, I offer a clarification: my intent was not simply to historicize, but to analyze the construction of religious stereotypes. Chapter One works to elucidate the politics of Buddhist nationalist perception concerning conversion and social habitus—a feature of personhood, and, indeed, of “ontology,” that is at once political and economic in its very nature. I cast the periodization in broad brushstrokes in relation to a set of jokes (told to me by a Christian of Sri Lankan-origin) which differentiated between established varieties of Christianity, and Pentecostal practices that arrived on the scene more recently. The periodization offered a distilled view of how Christianity was channeled into Sri Lanka as a perceptibly “foreign” religion: during the colonial era, Ceylonese Buddhist revivalists perceived the influence of Christianity to be directly authorized by Western imperialists’ political presence in the country. Subsequently, Ceylonese political aspirants converted “back” to Buddhism to secure electoral success toward the end of colonial rule; when dominion status ended and true decolonization in Ceylon was achieved in the 1970s, majoritarian nationalists realized the revival of Buddhism in legal terms: the Constitution granted Buddhism “the foremost place” in the new nation state. All of this is to explain that the essentialization of conversion waves was to remark upon the changed avenues through which Christianity gained influence at a time when foreign mission churches’ political authority was being phased out and established churches were being nationalized.
My joking interlocutor remarked upon how, in Sri Lanka’s postcolonial and neoliberal era, Christianity arrives through “economic” channels rather than through direct “political” influence of the foreign rulers. That framing fits my account, which addresses the uptick in anti-conversion sentiment by analyzing the public conversion narrative of an elite Sinhala businessman who converted from Buddhism to Christianity and in turn achieved prosperity in the 1970s, and who Sinhala Buddhist anti-conversion activists later suspected of killing a prominent Buddhist monk. I analyze this vilification alongside another emblematic conversion, of the highly-revered Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who had earlier converted from Christianity “back” to modernist Buddhism. Taken together, the explanation I offer is a testament to why analyzing these historical shifts in terms of a trajectory of the political economy of conversion is crucial for understanding both the historical depth and the newness of these inter-religious conflicts.
Concerning another elemental and time-worn level of my analysis of religious difference, Justin Henry remarks upon the ancient scriptural encoding of the Buddha’s “absence” and Christ’s “presence.” This corroborates what I render ethnographically as the basis upon which contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhists and Christians “competitively theologize” over the ritual efficacy and moral righteousness that stems from the fact that, on one side, the historical Buddha is conceived of as the “Thus Gone One” whereas Jesus as a “risen Lord” is portrayed as very much “alive” in the Holy Spirit. With the Buddha’s attainment of Parinibbana (ultimate release from cycles of life, suffering, death, and rebirth), there is an “absence” that Buddhists valorize; the Buddha is archetypically treated as an exemplar to follow. Aware of these Dharmic principles, Pentecostal-charismatic ministers juxtapose the imagery of an “empty” Buddha with their “living” God. Further, in incendiary forms of Pentecostal sermonic discourse, the “empty statue” leads to “idolatry”—and worse, to the inclination to “worship the devil.”
One of the core arguments that I make in Karma and Grace is that Buddhist modernism (famously referred to as “Protestant Buddhism” by Gananath Obeyesekere) had grown up in tight relation to the rationalization effects of Protestant Christian missions’ emphasis on scripturalism during the colonial era. This ideal-typical style of modernist religious comportment encouraged middle-class and elite Buddhists to focus on relatively austere practices of Dharma-following, and to dispense with various vernacular Buddhist practices (Gombrich and Obeyesekere). As I put it, this modernist movement “sought to ‘civilize’ the fears of spirits by classifying them as immaterial fears, fetters, and mere figments of the imagination.”
Yet, I demonstrate how Buddhist modernism is relatively ill-equipped to contend with the emergence of exuberant and ecstatic forms of Pentecostalism. Vernacular (or “traditionalist”) Sinhala Buddhist rituals—which religious modernism sought to suppress but did not extinguish—involve inspirited material manifestations and ritual aesthetics that are capable of drawing in ordinary Sinhala Buddhists. Ethnographic accounts illustrate that rural people and people of lower socio-economic backgrounds cannot easily afford to focus on “higher-level” pursuits of Dharma-following toward nirvana (Obeyesekere, de Silva, Mahadev). As I detail in the book, those Sinhala Buddhists who have not wholly been interpellated into modernist religious subjectivities, often persist in engaging vernacular Sinhala healing rituals.
Pentecostal deliverance ministers commonly characterize the deities and spirits of other religions as diabolical, ultimately evil “minions of Satan.” David Scott has shown how, in an earlier era, Protestant evangelists excoriated the so-called “demon worship” involved in Sinhala rituals like yaktovil. Missionaries maligned these rituals as akin to “exorcism,” and as ineffective cures. All of this is to indicate how Karma and Grace shows that there is a long-running practice of diabolization among certain strands and denominational varieties of Christianity. At the same time, I also show that vernacular Sinhala Buddhist rituals treat spirits and deities as materially real, much like Pentecostal Christianity does. Again, whereas Buddhist modernism is ill-equipped to contend with Pentecostal practices of deliverance and “spiritual warfare,” my ethnography illustrates that vernacular Buddhism has the ritual grammar and aesthetics to contend with Pentecostalism and therefore has the potential to withstand the allure of the charismatic Christian form.
There is a core difference, of course, between Pentecostal deliverance rituals and vernacular Sinhala healing practices: whereas the Christian ecstatic form treats other deities and spirits as “irredeemable,” vernacular Sinhala Buddhist rituals involve sharing “merit” (units of good karma) with the deities and spirits. I show how Buddhist merit is moral currency that allows one to expiate bad karma (or augment good karma), and it enables a person, spirit, or deity to be reborn with better conditions in the next lifetime.
The discussion of ritual sparring brings me back to the point about competing aspirations of religious sovereignty: for those Sri Lankans moved by Pentecostal ritual forms, it is clear that the atmospheric dimension of these rituals builds a felt sense that the Holy Spirit sanctifies corporeal, spiritual, and territorial entities in ways that “christens” and transforms them. Of course, that interpretative frame is repeated in Pentecostal Christian ministerial rhetoric. (I’d argue that there are other ways of interpreting the experiential charismatic form that are not exclusivist and are more conducive to pluralism.) At the same time, as I show in Chapter Three, Pentecostal ministerial rhetoric of “spiritual warfare” condemns Sinhala Buddhism as having a substantively negative impact upon people and urges Christians to “root out” territorial spirits and tutelary deities so as to christen the land. Third-wave Pentecostal deliverance ministers repeatedly enunciate the aspiration to territorially entrench Christianity through ritual acts and ritual speech. This is an expression of a dominion theology.
The “materialization of the spirit” can be seen in the point that Turner comments on, about how the trace of a pastor’s grace is laid into the soil, imbued via the car tracks, and gathered up to “fertilize miracles at home.” Long-established and revisionist Buddhist rituals also set out to imbue land and territory, and dedicated Buddhist patrons, with Dharmic power by creating links to Buddhist deities and sacred, sovereign relics. They do so in ways that endeavor to sustain Buddhist sovereignty. In this complex milieu, I have tried to disentangle the disputed questions of sovereignty—of nation, religion, personhood, and persona—showing that it is tightly connected to ritualized practices of religious transmission. In this way, my take on “political theology” is not formulated along the lines of the singularity of sovereignty à la Schmitt. Growing out of my ethnography in a patently plural context, I conceptualize political theologies in terms of multiplicity and “agonistic” contestation (I draw upon Chantal Mouffe’s conception of “agonistic pluralism”).
Such ritualized, territorial assertions of religious sovereignty will no doubt resonate with, and cause concern among, readers who are familiar with the present U.S. context. Theologies of dominion asserted through charismatic Christian evangelists and Pentecostal deliverance ministers have been put to use in the U.S. to assert a supremacist theopolitics. Third-Wave Pentecostal logics of Christian spiritual warfare, which took root in the New Apostolic Reformation, spearheaded by figures like C. Peter Wagner (1930-2016), have deep political implications for the U.S. today. Melani McAlister has suggested that it is highly likely that Wagner was merely codifying and rearticulating Pentecostal practices of diabolization and deliverance that were already widely in use in Africa and elsewhere in the decolonizing regions of the world. Recall the moment in recent televangelical and comedy news memory when the “Prophet,” Rev. Paula White-Cain, sensationally summoned “angels from Africa” and Latin America to sanctify and ensure Trump’s “victory” in his 2020 election bid.
There are theopolitical similarities and differences to the milieu of Sri Lanka. The major difference is, of course, that Christians are a proportionately much smaller demographic minority than in the U.S. context, and therefore supremacist entailments of dominion theology are simply not as straightforward. In both locales, they fuel promises and paranoias of exponential growth, supersession, and anxieties about majorities becoming minorities and vice-versa. In Sri Lanka, however much rhetorical claims about seismic shifts in religious demographics might cause a stir, wholesale supersession is far from a totalizing reality. The growth and the minoritized beleaguerment of Christians is at once very real and overstated. It is important to not only take evangelizing Christians’ claims as an indication of “Christian persecution complexes” but, given that reactionary anti-pluralism is also prevalent, it is important to regard persecution as complex.
Even in a time of heightened conflict, I found that “religious difference” does not only lead to overt politicization. I also found that ritual is “dialogically responsive” to its rival forms. This can be seen in a maverick strand of Buddhist revivalism wherein the lead monk concocts a new ritual to accelerate the arrival of the Buddha Maitreya. This is also seen in the Catholic leadership’s efforts to place guardrails around charismatic forms within the Church—modulating the effusiveness of the Holy Spirit in ways that are at once theological, liturgical and political. I deeply appreciate Turner’s response, wherein she points to another case of competitive theologizing in the context of her research on Burmese Buddhism: the Burmese Buddhist monk Ledi Sayadaw negatively appraised Christianity as limiting human agency precisely because of its reliance upon divine revelation. In tandem with this rivalrous assertion, the monk spurred the Vipassanā meditation movement in Burma, Turner explains. Interestingly, although Burmese Christians might have experienced the revivalist monk’s comparison as disparagement, we don’t see a reactionary response from either side.
Turner asks whether Vipassanā meditation became part of the repertoire of responses to external competition in Sri Lanka, as it had in modernizing Burma. To my knowledge, Sri Lankan monastic traditions have not centrally focused on meditation but rather emphasize learned interpretation of Pāli texts. The Vipassanā movement isn’t as prominent in Sri Lanka as it is in Myanmar. However, lay Buddhist leaders (especially famous figures including Anagarika Dharmapala and Godwin Samaratne) have, at times, spurred modernist sub-movements that center meditation. A focus on Vipassanā has often not endured in a widespread way in Sri Lanka, although adjacent modernist practices, like Pāli chanting, are widespread (among laity and monastics alike).
Having said this, after the time period during which I undertook my study of the “maverick monk” Siri Samanthabadra Thera (primarily between 2009-2011; see Chapter 5), other scholars have recently observed that under the tutelage of this “influencer monk”, meditation has actually become central to the practices within his newly developed temple complexes. To the point made by both Dharmasinghe and Henry, this very maverick monk has added to his repertoire of Buddhist innovation by preaching about “eternal prosperity” (which is distinct from a simple neoliberal prosperity gospel).
Methodologically, my multicameral approach involved engaging in participant observation within Buddhist and Christian devotional spaces and media worlds. It also entailed doing fieldwork among religious revivalists and converts, learning from the experiences of people who felt pulled, due to social obligation, to settle into a commitment to a singular religion or another. Yet Karma and Grace also reveals trajectories of experimentation and multiple religious belonging, whereby religious affinities are not fixed strictly on an identitarian basis. “Conversion” implies the act of settling into a new religious identity; but for a highly variable set of reasons, that is not always the consequence of religious mixing. In other instances, multicameralism allowed me to see the unfolding of an “agonistically plural” relationality rather than one mired in chronic hostility. I place emphasis upon the “non-dialectical” features of the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity, so as to acknowledge the entanglement and the dialogical aspects of the encounter. In doing so, I avoid the assumption that the upshot will be “overcoming,” supercession, or even a “reconciliation” or merging of the religious forms. Focusing upon inter-religion in this way enabled me to observe the in-between spaces, between fixed identities—even in the face of starkly identitarian conflicts over religious being and belonging. Relatedly, I would concur with Turner’s insight too, that staring at the phenomena of pluralism for too long—or doggedly probing and seeking fixity of an answer that codifies it in identitarian terms—might itself serve to transform the dynamism of the living phenomenon into something else altogether.
My heartfelt thanks, again, to all four commentators—Angie Heo, Justin Henry, Geethika Dharmasinghe, and Alicia Turner—for these robust, complementary, and critical engagements with Karma and Grace.
