Gandhi's Truths in an Age of Fundamentalism and Nationalism

Sathianathan Clarke, Stephen Pickard, Sathianathan Clarke, Stephen Pickard

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506469980
• eBook ISBN: 9781506469997
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

The twenty-first century has seen violence thunder back onto the stage of history. Religious, political, social, cultural, and economic constituents and interests thus contribute to the local and global manifestations of violence in our interconnected and contracting global world. Firmly embedded within the field of religion, the authors of this volume concede that religious motifs and impulses are alive and well in this unfolding of bloodshed. It is no wonder then that in our volatile historical age, religious fundamentalism and illiberal nationalism have emerged as dominant contemporary movements.

Against this backdrop, the contributors to this edited book look back in order to move forward by reflecting upon the truth-force ( Satyagraha ) that grounded and guided Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948).

On the heels of several commemorations in 2019 of the 150th anniversary of Gandhi's birth, we reexamine the truths of his philosophy and nonviolent strategy to resist religious and political fundamentalisms. Embracing truth was, for Gandhi, the only way to achieve complete freedom ( poorna Swaraj ). The goal of freedom, which Gandhi conceptualized as profoundly personal, expansively communitarian, and organically ecological, emanates from a firm grasp of truth.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Sathianathan Clarke and Stephen Pickard

Our world is struggling with Covid-19. It arrived like a global invasion in 2020. The virus took the uncommon pathway of an interspecies mutation as it made its visitation upon our worldwide human family.1 The age-old virus of fear and hatred, however, did not need the help of other species. Such violence has a long history of violation against religious, ethnic, and cultural others. Religion unfortunately plays an ambivalent role in dealing with feared and despised others. It sears even as it heals, ruptures even as it sutures, severs even as it reconciles, and kills even as it brings life. It is ironic. Religions profess to bring peace on earth and goodwill among men and women. Yet they are often identified more with violence than with peace through our twenty-first century. Of course, there are many economic, social, cultural, political, and psychological triggers for the spread of violence in the world today. Religion, however, is also responsible for justifying violation and nurturing violence. “This does not mean,” according to Mark Juergensmeyer, “that religion causes violence, nor does it mean that religious violence cannot, in some cases, be justified by other means. But it does mean that religion often provides the framework, mores and symbols that make possible bloodshed—even catastrophic acts of terrorism.”2 So even if religion is not the only source fueling violence on the world stage, some of the assault on peace stems from extreme religious agents. Violent this-worldly tactics are justified to shape transcendent ideals.

Religious fundamentalisms of various stripes have had a field day in the twenty-first century. The shrinking world is imagined to be a sprawling theater of sacred drama. Such fundamentalisms, which we take to be religions driven to their extremes (religious extremism), are spreading effectively in some regions of the world. These religious ideologies draw creatively from brawny, inflexible, and imperial scriptural and theological storehouses to inspire movements in the public square that violently alter the world for their respective gods. The origin of the expression fundamentalism is narrow and parochial. It emerges from early-twentieth-century American Protestant Christianity.3 In that historical context, it was used to describe a high view of biblical authority based in literalism and the inerrancy of Scripture, partly in reaction to the wave of modern science, rational philosophy, and antireligious secularism escalating during the last century. However, even at that time, religious fundamentalism was deeply invested in politics. It exhibited a collective will in the United States to construct a strongly Christian nation. Over the last twenty-five years, though, the term is employed more widely across the world, used both in relation to other branches of Christianity and in relation to non-Christian religions. Other religions joined Christianity in leaving behind the “world-renouncing” form of inward religion and embracing the “world-conquering” form of muscular religion turned outward.4 While the former way of being religious retreats quietly into its own alternate domain, the latter “world-conquering” form of religion is especially prone to violent actions against those considered nonbelievers.

Violence associated with religious extremism is not a modern phenomenon. The history of religions is littered with instances of intrareligious and interreligious violence. Raimon Panikkar, who knows multiple religions well, says, “Religion includes what is best in human beings. . . . But religion has also produced what is worst, what is most wicked. Religion has not only been an opiate but a poison as well.”5

Perhaps what is most disturbing in our time is the way in which fundamentalist religions and nation-states collude with one another in the interest of serving high-minded ideologies of power. Religious fundamentalisms strategically and systematically in league with other economic, political, and cultural forces are in the business of seeking to carve out strong nation-states. Nation-states seek to capture extremist religious sensibilities for the purpose of enlisting them in the ascendancy of ideological nationalism. Indeed, it seems that religious fundamentalism and ideologically driven nationalism are deeply entwined in a self-serving manner. Thus Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim fundamentalisms need legitimate public platforms to translate hallowed belief into mundane practices. Upholding and cultivating strong belief in a comprehensive worldview is only one of the theological ingredients that go into the configuration of violent religious fundamentalisms. Cognitive assent within headstrong believers must also be accompanied by stringent mechanisms to shape everyday living in the real world. This is why the nation-state is needed for religious fundamentalists. On the one hand, religious nationalism craftily employs religio-cultural mantras and rituals to publicly endorse and reinforce common belief. On the other hand, the collusion between such religious fundamentalism and the nation-state greedy for power and control comes to its fulfillment when the nation-state secures the divine imprimatur for the enforcement of macrobeliefs as everyday micropractices of all persons. This often occurs by the use of violation and violence meted out against other religious and secular communities.

Propagators of absolutist sacred truths collaborate with stealthy promoters of fixed practices in the nation-state. Strong nation-states in the twenty-first century tap into religions across the world. As a 2017 Pew Research study states, “More than 80 countries favor a specific religion, either as an official, government-endorsed religion or by affording one religion preferential treatment over other faiths.”6 Differing compacts between the religion of the majority and a stable nation-state operate in the Christian United States and Zambia, Muslim Afghanistan and Malaysia, Buddhist Bhutan and Sri Lanka, and Hindu India and Nepal. While the protection and promotion of religion by the national state is mostly written into the constitution by countries where Islam7 and Christianity8 are majority religions, this volume focuses on majority-Hindu India and the majority-Christian United States. Both these countries claim to keep religion and state separate. However, increasingly, Hinduism and Christianity play a crucial role in influencing politics and inspiring citizens to carve out a Hindu (Hindutva) or Judeo-Christian (redeemer nation) sociopolitical order that violates the rights of those of other religious traditions.

Numerous scholars have analyzed the pact between strong nationalism and Hindu and Christian fundamentalism over the last 150 years.9 Without getting into the historical interlock of fundamentalist Hinduism (Hindutva) in India and fundamentalist Christianity (white evangelicals) in the United States, we merely point to the remarkable, even if alarming, hold they have on contemporary national politics. In the case of India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spearheaded a political resurgence of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) over the last couple of decades. With a sweeping majority won in the parliament in the 2019 election, his brand of Hindu nationalism equates being Indian with being Hindu (79.8 percent of the total population in the 2011 census). In the words of Anthony J. Parel, “Hindutva feeds on Islamophobia, and to a lesser extent on Christianophobia. Its long-term goal is the hinduization of the whole of India. Its short-term goal is the intimidation of the minorities, especially Muslims and Christians—their persons, properties and institutions—and places of worship are under constant threat from Hindu fundamentalists.”10 With regard to the United States, we draw attention to the confidence expressed by 63 percent of white evangelicals about the success with which Christian beliefs have transformed American national policies during the last four years. According to a Pew Research Center survey, “Heading into the 2020 election season . . . white evangelicals largely see Trump as fighting for their beliefs and advancing their interests, and they feel their side generally has been winning recently on political matters important to them.”11

Firmly embedded within the fields of religion, theology, history, and literature, the authors of this volume concede that fundamentalist religions do envisage and work toward state capture. Even if steeped in resources that can heal the world, religions have recast the capacity and credence of their own agency to affect our age adversely. On the one hand, they have channelized religious faith, which bubbled within enflamed hearts, to spill over calculatedly into the social and political world. Some of this has led to overt destructive actions of passionate believers against their neighbors. On the other hand, religions have reimagined their role in relation to the power-wielding nation-states, including when their constitutions have had a history of being secular. Such shrewd capture of the nation-states has led to the concerted, even if hidden, injurious actions of majority religions against religious minorities. It is no wonder then that in our volatile historical age, religious fundamentalism and strong nationalism have emerged as dominant contemporary movements that fire up spectacular violence and stealthy violation both locally and nationally.

The apparent self-serving nexus between religious fundamentalism and nationalist ideology is indicative of a systemic collusion that remains for the most part hidden to both parties. While the focus of this volume is religious fundamentalism, precisely because fundamentalism strives for embodiment in practices and cultural habits, it is most true to its own identity when it achieves political form. Conversely, it remains perennially restless to the extent that it falls short of this political goal. One consequence of this inbuilt drive for political power is that to discuss religious fundamentalism necessarily requires engagement with the nation-state and nationalist ideologies. Herein lies a real difficulty which concerns the fate of nation-states in the modern period (i.e., from the seventeenth century). The loss of a unitary sense of the state and previous compacts between state and religion has meant that in our own time, the governments of nation-states invest considerable energy in promoting the idea of social cohesion. The popular appeal to this concept betrays a deep anxiety about the impact of pluralism and the loss of a sense of societal unity. We no longer appear to know what holds us together. What are the options for the nation-state to secure a stronger and more secure sense of nationhood? In particular, what strategy might it adopt when it comes to the matter of religion? Here the nation-state will either (a) attempt to capture religious forces to assist in the repair of the fragmented social compact or (b) seek to negate the public significance of religious life. What options are available for religions, in particular the fundamentalist stream? For religious fundamentalism, secularist pressures and the emergence of a burgeoning and often radical pluralism mean that religious extremism seizes the opportunity to expand and enter into a struggle for political power. The stage is set for a systemic collusion between nationalist ideology and religious fundamentalism whereby each feeds the other’s desires in a mutually self-serving manner. Not surprisingly, violence is never far away.

Interestingly, even if not surprisingly, both religious fundamentalism and strong nationalism are vested in matters of truth. Together, they generate, catalog, and circulate a fixed registry of Truth that creatively and efficiently alters life for all communities living in their religiously imagined nation-state. Religious fundamentalism and strong nationalism are in the truth business. Truth works effectively to induce, unite, valorize, and commission convinced ideologues to become passionate activists. Resources to construe Truth are gleaned from all facets of human life, yet such conceptions of veracity are incubated and cultivated within the imaginary of religion. Religious truths, though, become most effective when they are enacted in the realm of politics. Conversely, the political domain receives its most significant endorsement when it receives a divine imprimatur.

Against this backdrop, the contributors to this edited volume look back in order to move forward by reflecting upon the truth-force (satyagraha) that grounded and guided Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948). Inspired by the occasion of several ceremonious commemorations of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary (2019), we reexamine the truths of his philosophy and nonviolent strategy to resist the hegemony of religious and political fundamentalisms. Pankaj Mishra reminds us of Gandhi’s investment in Truth, which sometimes contained “blunders,” mostly remained “restless,” and always strove to be “mutually satisfactory.” “Far from being a paragon of virtue,” he says, “the Mahatma remained until his death a restless work in progress. Prone to committing what he called ‘Himalayan blunders,’ he did not lose his capacity to learn from them, and to enlist his opponents in his search for a mutually satisfactory truth.”12 Embracing Truth and being embraced by Truth was, for Gandhi, the only way to achieve complete freedom (poorna Swaraj). The goal of freedom, which Gandhi conceptualized as profoundly personal, expansively communitarian, and organically ecological, emanates from a firm grasp of truth.

This edited volume examines and interprets Gandhi’s religious and political ideas of truth in his journey toward freedom for our times. Embedded in the political currents, especially those raging in India and the United States, the authors carefully excavate and creatively employ Gandhi’s thought and practice to help reimagine a religiously plural and broadly inclusive nationalism that is rooted in a universal yet many-sided vision of religious truth. It weaves together African American, white Australian, and Indian perspectives to engage Gandhian thought and practice to contest violent truth registries and regimes in our contemporary world. Rather than glorify the Mahatma (great soul), this book revisits Gandhi’s ideas of truth-force (satyagraha) in the face of fake news, nonviolence (ahimsa) in the face of religious extremism, and freedom (Swaraj) in the face of strong nationalisms.

The edited volume contains nine essays written from four continents: Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. Each of these contexts is different, and traces of the context of each of these regions will be apparent in the essays. Also, the communities or individuals that accompany the authors as th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Brief Biographical Information on Editors and Authors
• Chapter 1: Introduction (Sathianathan Clarke and Stephen Pickard)
• Chapter 2: Gandhi on Truth, Truthfulness, and Terrorism (William W. Emilsen)
• Chapter 3: Gandhian Truths of Yesterday, for Today, and Always: A Vision to Dismantle Violent Religious Fundamentalisms (Sathianathan Clarke)
• Chapter 4: Mediating Truths: Gandhi’s Illiberal Religionism and Ambedkar’s Liberal Nationalism (Anderson H. M. Jeremiah)
• Chapter 5: Gandhi’s Nonviolent Language for Resistance and Liberation: Spoken Words, Performative Action, and Communicative Silence (Suka Joshua)
• Chapter 6: King, Gandhi, and Jesus: Nonviolence in the Age of Covid-19 (Josiah Ulysses Young III)
• Chapter 7: Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, and the Sermon on the Mount (Peter Hooton)
• Chapter 8: Led by the Kindly Light of Truth: Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the Renewal of Sociality (Stephen Pickard)
• Chapter 9: Swadeshi and the Self-Sufficiency of Religions: Gandhi’s Thoughts on Conversion and Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialogue of Perspectives (Peter Walker)
• Chapter 10: Gandhi and Thurman: Religion, Resistance, and the Twenty-First-Century Quest for Peace (C. Anthony Hunt)
• Index