Reader JohnC911 – I believe this is the same reader who runs the JJ Podcast, on which I appeared a few weeks ago – asked a question related to the spread of Christianity in India that is worth answering in some detail:

In your experience you think their [sic] is a chance of India ever becoming mostly christian?

As I said at the time, and will say again now – nope. Not gonna happen.

I do not state this so bluntly because I am a pessimist. I state it because the entire weight of history and all of the evidence that we have at hand shows us very clearly that India does not want salvation, and Indians do not consider Christianity to be anything much more than a “special” form of a general truth.

That they are wrong about this is consequential but irrelevant. That is what Hindus believe, and they will insist on defending that belief in spite of the very plain evidence that their belief system leads to stratification, societal lassitude, poverty, misery, and dysfunction.

I was curious myself about why it was that Christianity had made so little impact on India, even though one of Jesus Christ’s own Apostles reportedly landed in Kerala, in southern India, almost 2,000 years ago and started his ministry in the country. So I went looking for the answers a few months back. You would think that, after twenty centuries’ worth of trying, and after being conquered and folded into an empire led by a Christian nation, the True Faith would have a far greater presence here than it does.

But in fact the percentage of the Indian population that is Christian amounts to about two percent.

And that number has stayed more or less stable for decades.

The inquiring mind must therefore ask… why? Especially given the vast resources poured into trying to convert the pagans and Muslims of India to the True Faith?

There are several parts to the answer, but before we get started on that, take a look at this long article here, which is probably the best explanation of the failure of Christianity to penetrate deep into the Indian heartland that I have ever seen – and it’s written by an atheist who thinks that Buddhism is a good idea, no less:

A full answer is beyond the scope of this article, but if one were to pick out one reason, it would be this: Christianity, probably for the first time, came up against a philosophy and culture that did not feel the need to persecute other faiths, did not find the Christian messiah and his teachings either objectionable or exceptional, and therefore, didn’t see why anyone should convert either. This embrace-cum-rejection was such a novel experience for it that Christianity probably didn’t know quite how to respond. After all, the Church is so used to growing amidst persecution that theologian Tertullian’s statement in second century AD that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” has not yet been forgotten.

There is no better way to bring this situation to life than to quote the knighted Sanskrit scholar Monier Williams, an avid supporter of Christian evangelisation in India, who wrote this in 1878: “The chief impediment to Christianity among Indians is not only the pride they feel in their own religion, but the very nature of that religion. For pantheism is a most subtle, plausible and all-embracing system, which may profess to include Christianity itself as one of the phenomena of the universe. An eminent Hindu is reported to have said: ‘We Hindus have no need of conversion; we are more than Christians already.’”

The article goes on to explain that:

There are evangelical activities that pose serious irritation to Indians of all religions (or no religion). For example, there are cringe-inducing videos up on Youtube and other social media of Christian pastors moving around poverty-stricken areas, talking into the camera for the benefit of potential donors in the West, patting their own backs about the great job they are doing of converting Hindus to Christianity, and explaining why they need support in terms of ‘prayers’ and perhaps, some greenbacks as well. A new breed of independent, evangelical churches that has sprung up in recent decades, unaffiliated to the long-established mainstream churches such as the Catholics or the Anglicans or the Protestants, are particularly to blame. In their single-minded focus on money-raising, they seem no different from some of the godmen who have gained notoriety for their devotion to mammon.

There are also other practices that some proselytisers resort to that are either dubious or deeply annoying: holding ‘faith-healing’ meetings that are indistinguishable from plain old quackery, for example. It is perhaps time for the mainstream churches that are not into these practices, but are probably feeling tempted to use them as they lose some of their own flock to these new-fangled churches, to wield their influence and powers of moral suasion to create a code of ethics for all Christian organisations or, if that is not feasible, at least create a public distance between themselves and those who violate that code, in order to put more social pressure on them.

And it concludes by stating:

To sum up, the Hindutva right-wing narrative of a growing, serious threat from Christianity to Hinduism does not stand the test of data and evidence. In fact, India is that exceptional country that listened to all that Christianity had to say without feeling threatened, and we know from history that this confidence was justified and it continues to be so. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that aggressive proselytisation efforts of a limited number of new evangelical chu­rches is causing annoyance, but that is probably not reason enough to start a concerted hate campaign with violent overtones against a mini-minority of the population. Cons­titutional amputation for remedying what is essentially irritation to public order and good sense would probably be an over-reaction; but fanning hatred against fellow citizens of a different faith is indeed an abomination not worthy of us.

The first starting point must therefore be a brief examination of the nature of Hinduism itself, to explain why Christianity has failed utterly and completely to make any sort of recognisable impact on the country.

To begin with, Hinduism is a highly syncretic and adaptable faith – that is exactly how it is marketed, in fact. Hinduism holds a lot of appeal to people who don’t like the idea that there is one truth, one true way of doing things, and instead want a more flexible and personalised approach that suits them and their needs and wants.

Hinduism provides exactly such an approach.

Unlike other major world religions, every single time that a major heresy or schism has developed within Hinduism, that heresy has been absorbed right back into the faith because Hinduism simply adapts and accepts the heresy. That is why Buddhism originated as a heresy of and direct challenge to Hinduism, and spread like wildfire throughout Southeast Asia – which had been mostly Hindu or animistic up to that point – but was eventually simply reabsorbed back into Hinduism itself within India.

Today the Buddhists have a presence in India – in fact there is a giant Buddhist temple somewhere in southern Calcutta – but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the country.

The reason for this adaptability lies in the fact that Hinduism itself has no solid core. From a Hindu’s perspective, this is a strength. From a Christian’s perspective, it is a glaring weakness.

Unlike the Semitic religions, there is no central doctrinal creed in Hinduism. There is no one set of ultimate sacred texts. Some sects of Hinduism take their doctrines from the Vedas, but others prefer to use the Upanishads, while yet others take their inspiration from the teachings and ideas of the mystics and sages who put their own very personal spins and interpretations on what they read.

Hindus subscribe to the philosophy – if they can be said to subscribe to anything at all – of “one God but many gods”, or OGMG, if you will. The astute Christian reader will note that this is not exactly incompatible with Christian teachings, as the Old Testament states very clearly, and repeatedly, in Genesis and elsewhere, that there are entities both within and outside of Creation that have powers that we mere mortals would consider godlike.

That is why Hindus worship so many different Vedic gods – there are thirty three listed in the Vedas, but apparently there is some contention as to whether the Sanskrit word for “class”, which is also the same as the word for “10 million”, so there could be as many as 330 million such gods. This strikes me as more than a little absurd and implausible, but it might not be that surprising once you learn that various different bits of the country worship various different avatars of various gods and goddesses.

So, for example, the goddess Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music, wisdom, arts, and learning, has a number of avatars or forms, all of which go by different names. And the goddess is worshiped in some parts of India as a primary goddess, but as a secondary one in others. And that’s before we get to Durga, Lakshmi, Parvati, and the ways in which those goddesses transform into different entities under duress, and so on and so forth.

To those of us used to the orderly and sensible world of a Universe created by a single loving and benevolent Creator, the whole thing seems spectacularly messy and chaotic – and, if you have any familiarity with Hindu rituals and holy days and festivals, extremely noisy, disorderly, and downright irritating.

To a Hindu, though, it’s just business as usual. The Hindu mind has no problem whatsoever holding multiple mutually exclusive and highly contradictory concepts in parallel and accepting them all. To him, these are just different perspectives on the same issue and not worth getting overly bothered about.

That is why Hindus have no issue with claiming that their view of the Universe and its Creator are a superset of Christian beliefs. And as such, Hindus simply accept Christianity as a different branch of their own faith – or at least, they try to.

The result is that one Hindu’s idea of what it means to be a Hindu can be diametrically opposed to another’s – but they can, and will, call themselves Hindus without any irony whatsoever. They will even accept atheists and agnostics as “Hindus”, provided that those same people accept a few core ideas such as karma (roughly speaking, “fate”) and dharma (also roughly speaking, “good conduct” or “duty”).

Christians, of course, have no interest whatsoever in being suborned within the practices of a pagan idolatrous faith which we rightly see as blasphemous and inimical to the True Faith. And that has inevitably led to serious conflicts.

Christians see Hindus as being led astray by colossal lies, blasphemies, and idol-worshiping, into a culture that devalues human life and locks people into castes while denying them a personal relationship with a loving and benevolent God who wants to be close to His children. We see Hindus resorting to propitiation of their gods through rituals and sacrifices, rather than genuine repentance and forgiveness, and we shudder at what we see. We see Hindus who treat daughters as a curse and women as a burden, and we are horrified. We see their fatalism and acceptance of predetermined outcomes as simply nuts.

But Hindus look at Christians as being more than a little absurd and ridiculous. As far as Hindus are concerned, they have nothing to learn or gain from Christian texts and scriptures. The very idea of Christian forgiveness and salvation is totally alien to them.

If Hindus commit an offence against their gods, their answer is not to communicate directly with their gods to figure out what went wrong and try to fix themselves. No, instead they insist on using rituals and sacrifices to achieve the same ends.

It is to be noted that this is precisely what God the Father commanded the Israelites to do in the Pentateuch for centuries, until it became clear that Mankind’s sins were so great and so numerous that simple ritual no longer sufficed.

As far as Hindus are concerned, this world around us is something of an illusion, and each of us is the sum of many reincarnated past lives, so why bother trying to fix or improve things? Just try to be a good person, according to the moral codes taught by the Vedas and the various texts of the Hindu culture and mythology, and you’ll be fine. Pick and choose what you want to do and follow – you aren’t bound by any code or creed.

Furthermore, as far as Hindus are concerned, you’re born a Hindu and you die a Hindu. You don’t get to “convert” out. They are rather like Jews in this respect; once you are in, you don’t get out, no matter how hard you try. Or so they would like to believe, anyway.

It should be clear by now that these two views of the Universe are utterly irreconcilable. It is simply not possible to get the two to line up. In order for a Hindu to become a Christian, he has to abandon literally everything that defines his culture and community. And that is a tremendously hard step to take for most people.

And that brings us on to the second major problem that Christianity faces in India: the desire by far, far too many proselytisers to make Christianity “acceptable” to the native population.

There are plenty of churches in India, if you bother to go looking for them. In the former Portuguese colonies on the southwest coast, such as Goa, you will find quite a lot of Christians and plenty of churches. But they are “Christian” in the same way that the current Catholic Pope Francis Bergoglio is – in a very misinformed and lax way.

In Goa, it is quite normal to find people creating little shrines with idols and crosses in them, which are treated almost exactly the same way that pagan Hindu shrines are. Here’s a great example:

Compare that, with this:

Obviously the Christian shrine up there is on a much smaller scale. But you can see that the practices are basically the same.

And they are not Christian by any measure. Recall that His Hugeness had a few rather pointed things to say about worshiping idols of any kind:

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

— Exodus 20:4-6, English Standard Version

Now, as far as I’m aware, there is nothing wrong with putting an image of the Cross into an altar or shrine. If there were, then I cannot imagine any church anywhere on Earth standing for very long, for they would all be blasphemous in the eyes of the Lord.

But there is plenty wrong with worshiping the Cross itself, in lieu of trying to have actual conversations with the Eternal Father directly through prayer and fellowship.

This phenomenon is repeated throughout most of India, as far as I am aware. It does not matter where you go in the country; the kind of Christianity that you will find is severely watered down, especially compared to what most American Evangelicals or hardcore Catholics would expect

The reason why this sort of laxity has been permitted by church leaders in India may well have a lot to do with one woman:

Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

If you spend much time driving around Calcutta – which is about the only way to get around that city, given how truly awful its public transportation network is – you cannot escape her visage. She died in 1997 and was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003 and sainted in 2017. Yet she is the subject of ferocious criticism from both the Left and the Right.

The Left cannot stand her because she did not actually help the suffering and the sick very much. Her philosophy on life was that it is good for people to accept their lot, which is to suffer, as Christ accepted His suffering.

That this is a ghastly and totally flawed reading of the Gospels is obvious. That her worldwide fame and name recognition, combined with the fact that her missions in India did little to actually alleviate people’s suffering, therefore greatly affected Christianity’s image in India, is less so.

But on the Right, conservative and evangelical Christians cannot stand her because she made no serious effort whatsoever to convert and baptise Hindus into the True Faith. In fact, she believed that simply accepting God was all that was required to make people better:

If in coming face to face with God we accept Him in our lives, then we are converting. We become a better Hindu, a better Muslim, a better Catholic, a better whatever we are. … What God is in your mind you must accept”

— Mother Teresa: Her People and Her Work, by Desmond Doig, p. 156

We never try to convert those who receive [aid from Missionaries of Charity] to Christianity but in our work we bear witness to the love of God’s presence and if Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, or agnostics become for this better men — simply better — we will be satisfied. It matters to the individual what church he belongs to. If that individual thinks and believes that this is the only way to God for her or him, this is the way God comes into their life — his life. If he does not know any other way and if he has no doubt so that he does not need to search then this is his way to salvation.

— Life in the Spirit: Reflections, Meditations, and Prayers, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, pp. 81-82

So basically, the most publicly visible symbol of Christianity in all of India for over 40 years said that it doesn’t matter whether you worship Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, or Kali, his consort and the goddess of black magic and dark arts;  all that matters is that you accept God.

Now, I’m nobody’s idea of a good Christian and no one in his right mind should accept a single word that I say on the subject without scepticism and inquiry. Even so, I do recall from my Bible that the Big JC was quite clear when He said:

I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.

— John 14:6, English Standard Version

It is important to note the poetic irony involved here. Pay special attention to to the broader context of that quote from Jesus. He said it in response to a question from Thomas – I presume, but am not sure, that this is the same Thomas the Doubter who became the Apostle who landed on Indian shores – about how anyone can know the way to the Father.

Jesus told him, and us, in very clear language that He, and He alone, is the path to the Father. It is for this reason that Christians refer to Christianity as the True Faith – because it is true.

Yet there was Mother Teresa, telling anyone who cared to listen that there are multiple paths to God, therefore multiple truths, and it doesn’t really matter what you believe, as long as you believe in something approaching God.

It is not possible to overstate how utterly destructive this was to the cause of the Christian faith in India.

Look at what Christianity has achieved throughout the last 2,000 years wherever it has come to pagan lands. It has set people free from superstition and slavery. It has brought the wonders of modern medicine and scientific innovation in its wake, because Christians know and understand that the Universe has an underlying structure and order to it that the Lord put in place so that we might find it and thereby come back to Him. It has brought clarity and truth and understanding to places where these things did not exist.

Christianity has been rejected, however, in places where its insistence on God as Sovereign clashed directly with the native beliefs in the emperor or local lord as ruler. That is why it foundered and was eventually banished in places like Japan and China.

And the True Faith has had an extremely hard time in places where polytheistic syncretic faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism took root, because those faiths tried, and failed, to suborn Christianity into themselves. Christianity is a remarkable faith in that its doctrine is sound and true, but as such it utterly resists subjugation into other modes of belief and thought.

The other thing to keep in mind is that religions spread when rulers adopt them. That is certainly how Christianity spread. It went from being a reviled and persecuted faith in the Roman Empire, to the state religion of the Byzantines, all because of one man – the Emperor Constantine. But no equivalent exists in India of a ruler of a large segment of the country seeing the light and kneeling before Christ – therefore, few if any of the local peoples ever followed suit.

The final point to remember is that India has had long and painful experience with foreign rulers who followed alien monotheistic religions – most notably, Islam.

Almost all of India was once under harsh Islamic rule under the swords of the Turko-Mongol-Afghanis who became the Mughals. The suffering of the Hindu population under Islamic occupation was horrific; one rough estimate that I have seen reckons that 80 million Hindus died under the 500-year occupation of India by the Mughals. And most Indians still regard the British Raj with great distaste and bitterness, and choose to remember that the Brits took a great deal from India – while rather conveniently forgetting, of course, that they also gave quite a lot back.

But the Brits, for all of the good that they did, never really bothered with mass conversions of the populace, or with serious proselytising. They were far more content to administer the Raj using a small cadre of highly competent civil servants and bureaucrats with a vast Indian privileged class to sit between them and the natives, and used a very effective “divide-and-conquer” strategy to keep the Hindus and Muslims at bay by ensuring that the various local rulers were always at each other’s throats. They divided India along sectarian and caste lines, and used tohse divisions to govern with great efficiency.

The Brits did a lot of things right during their occupation of India – all but the most hard-core Anglophobe will admit this fact. But the Brits never really went in for serious proselytisation and conversion of the natives – not least because doing so would have meant adopting many of the same tactics and techniques used by the conquistadores against the Aztecs and the Incas.

But that was true conversion at the point of a sword – because the conquistadores were so horrified by the pagan practices of ritual slaughter and bloodletting that they encountered, that they regarded the Mesoamericans as little more than savages and beasts.

The Brits, by contrast, were thoroughly outnumbered in the Raj, and they damned well knew it. They therefore sought to keep the native population in line without antagonising them too much.

None of this changes the fact that, in the main, Christianity has basically failed in India. Not only that, but under the resurgent Hindu nationalist government that India currently has, persecution of Christians is at its highest level in decades, perhaps ever. The Christian faith is rapidly being chased out of India by radical Hindus who want to believe – contrary to all of the evidence – that Hinduism is the answer to all problems, and always has been, and that Hindus discovered everything long before those stupid cave-dwelling barbaric Europeans had even figured out how to light fires. (I paraphrase minutely.)

So what does this mean for the country that one of the Apostles tried so hard to convert to the way, the truth, and the life?

Well, from a Christian’s point of view, it means that over a billion souls are lost – and cannot be recovered, because of their own free will they refuse to accept Christ’s hand and offer of salvation.

I am well aware that this opinion will provoke a violent reaction from Hindus everywhere. Nobody likes to be preached at about how he is going to Hell, especially if he believes that he already has a perfectly acceptable relationship with whatever gods that he accepts as his own. This is not a kind opinion, and it is certainly not a safe one to hold in India itself – which is why most Christians who live there have learned to keep their mouths shut where possible.

But truths are not supposed to be kind. Truths simply are what they are, and quite often they are deeply unpleasant. That, after all, is what makes them true.

In conclusion, the reality is that India will not be converted to Christianity anytime soon, if ever. The influence of Christianity is waning in the country, and has been for quite some time. Anyone who thinks that Hindus or Buddhists are pacifistic and non-proselytising will be in for a very rude shock if he ever comes to India to see what the people really think about the Christian faith. And the fact is that some of Christianity’s most visible and influential practitioners in India have done the True Faith tremendous harm by trying to water it down or make it more “palatable” to the locals, in the same way that Episcopalian and Anglican churches in the US have been stupid enough to allow female and even gay pastors to lead congregations.

Make no mistake, this is a sad state of affairs. My non-Christian readers won’t understand what I am on about when I write that, if you actually try to feel what God feels, then you will feel His overwhelming sadness at the way things are down on the Subcontinent. But, take it from me, it’s true. He feels such grief at what He sees that simply to touch upon it is more than a mere man can bear.

But it is what it is. God gave Man the freedom to choose which side to take – with Him, or against Him. When you think about it, that is the only choice that really, truly, deeply matters. Most of us – even Christians – end up going against Him.

What is amazing is that He forgives us, endlessly, for that fact, and still takes us back, every time.

And that is the part that Hindus simply cannot understand.