International Yoga Day was held on 21 June with hundreds of people doing Yoga at different iconic locations around the world, including the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Rajpath in Delhi. It was promoted by the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi and represented the spread of ‘Hindutva’ – understood as Indian culture, not necessarily Hindu religion.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s platform when he won his overall majority in the Indian Parliament was and is ‘development’. It was a simple and straightforward message, building on his achievements over ten years as chief minister in Gujarat. But this development is strictly limited to economic development.
When President Obama spoke at the Republic Day celebrations in India on 26 January he affirmed the importance of religious freedom, saying that India could not succeed without religious freedom and religious tolerance. On 17 February Prime Minister Modi affirmed equal respect for all religions and their freedom to preach, practice and propagate their faith.
Reciprocity
Rebecca Shah, a demographer from India and research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University, and at the Institute for the Study of Religion at Baylor University, Texas, has conducted studies of women in poor communities in India and followed their progress over a number of years. She asserts that development promotes dignity in so far as it fosters: (a) efficacious agency; (b) healthy relationships with family and community; (c) spiritual harmony or relationship with the transcendant. The barriers to this are fatalism, hopelessness and despair.*
Healthy relationships, Shah argues, are indicated by reciprocity and demand for equity in relationships replacing passive acceptance of injustice and violence. A major barrier to healthy relationships is a sense of ‘under-worth’. This is socially reinforced in India by poor people being restricted from entering religious temples or handling religious artefacts. The Pope in Gaudium et Spes argues that ‘... by his innermost nature man is a social being; and if he does not enter into relations with others he can neither live nor develop his gifts’.
Human freedom is often crippled when a person encounters extreme poverty, just as it withers when he indulges in too many of life’s comforts and imprisons himself in a kind of splendid isolation. By contrast, development and freedom increases as people serve people and interests outside and beyond themselves.
Secularism a hindrance
Denis Goulet argues that people are called to be more rather than have more. Authentic development can only take place when the yearning for mystery and transcendence is met and satisfied. Spiritual harmony can be undermined by the secularist denial that human beings are constituted as spiritual beings. There is a lot of talk about values in development, but values are not free-floating. Economics literature is full of values, but these are not tethered to any religion.
Values must be and are rooted in a view of life and the world. This takes us to issues of culture and to religion as the root of culture.
Measures of development that are solely material are inadequate. Richard Hooker wrote: ‘A gross error it is to think that regal power ought to serve for the good of the body and not of the soul, for men’s temporal peace and not their eternal safety; as if God had ordained Kings for no other end and purpose but only to fat up men like hogs and to see that they have their mash?’ (Laws, VIII, 3.5)
Harmony is indicated by an environment of spiritual affirmation and freedom in place of an anti-spiritual materialism and secularism. Spiritual freedom is indicated by the freedom of religious reform and conversion in contrast to passive and coerced acceptance of received religion.
Research shows that a person can come to Christ in many ways, through healing, a vision or a dream. But the entire process of transfer gives the individual a new identity, meaning and direction. A complete cognitive restructuring takes place. It is not simply spiritual, but physical and emotional.
A rational, logical or consistent presentation of the gospel to these poor women does not produce conversion. Conversion is an experience which gives people hope – they have a person to rely on. The experience tells people that God cares about them. And those who pray end up finding Jesus.
Poverty is a spiritual evil – it is a soul-killer. Conversion is the issue of the primary identity of a person. Religious freedom matters about those things that non-religious people do not care about. If we restrict religious freedom it hurts the poor. Imagine if these women were prevented from converting or forced to reconvert.
