Is conversion a ‘colonization of consciousness’?

Defining the problem

There is no question that Christian missions frequently rode on the coattails of European colonialism, and it is equally well accepted that missions have not merely benefited from colonization but have often aided in both establishing and stabilizing colonial regimes. ⁴ Tracing the mutually enabling relationship between the evangelical project of European missionaries and the political-economic project of colonization is a matter of longstanding interest to historians of empire. It is also of obvious importance to anthropologists of much of the world – dovetailing as it does with a widespread disciplinary interest in the cultural aspects of the colonial encounter and in culture change more broadly. Some of the most theoretically sophisticated writings on the relationship between missions and colonization in the field of anthropology have furthermore sought to conceptualize evangelization itself as a kind of colonization – a ‘colonization of consciousness’. While this phrase comes from the work of John and Jean Comaroff (1992), I submit that the intuition it articulates is widespread in the field. It finds a ready fit, moreover, with many of the well-established tropes of culture talk that inform anti- and postcolonial nationalisms and indigenous rights discourses, such as ‘cultural colonization’ and its implied opposite, ‘cultural resistance’, as well as a whole host of models in which an ambivalent dialectic is posited between opposing colonizer and colonized subjectivities (Bhabha 1994; Nandy 1983). ⁵

The image of conversion as a form of conquest is continuous with the rhetoric of much missionary writing, which likewise uses metaphors of spiritual ‘conquest’ to describe the conversion process. This is true not only for the Salvation Army, whose use of military metaphors, e.g. conversion as the ‘capture’ of souls (Taiz 2001; Walker 2001), is well known, but also for mainstream denominations throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus Pamela Klassen offers the telling example of a medical missions journal entitled Conquest by Healing (2011: 105), and of a liberal Anglican Bishop who, even in a 1902 article lamenting the role missionaries had played in the service of imperialism, could nevertheless describe conversion in unselfconsciously positive terms as ‘the Gospel conquer[ing]’ native Americans ‘for Christ’ (2011: 109). ⁶ And even today Pentecostals often speak of evangelism as ‘spiritual warfare’ (Jorgensen 2005).

The fact that Christians themselves would conceptualize conversion as a form of conquest does not, however, constitute an argument that anthropologists should do so. In order to assess what is at stake in the decision to embrace this metaphor I propose to begin by marking an important distinction. On one hand, there is treating conversion and colonization as analytically distinct processes that have historically often gone hand-in-hand and whose interrelations are a subject for empirical investigation. On the other hand, there is the idea, which I wish to question, that conversion is itself a species of colonization that would count as such even if unaccompanied by political rule.

A lucid statement of the second possibility is provided by the historian Vicente Rafael, who writes that conversion and conquest identically entail

crossing over into the domain – territorial, emotional, religious, or cultural – of someone else and claiming it as one’s own. Such a claim can entail not only the annexation of the other’s possessions but, equally significant, the restructuring of his or her desires as well. Affective bonds are thus forged within a hierarchy of interests. For a conqueror consolidates his position over the people he has conquered to the degree that he persuades them to defer to his interests – converts them to the view that they serve their own interests when they serve someone else’s. To be converted in this sense is to give in by giving up what one wants in favor of the wants of someone else. (Rafael 2001: xvii)

In this theoretical statement Rafael describes conversion not merely as a complex historical process that augmented and shaped Spanish colonization of the Philippines (as the substantive chapters of his book convincingly demonstrate), but as being itself a kind of colonization – one that takes place not in ‘territory’, but in the domain of another’s beliefs and desires. It is interesting to notice, however, that the implicit philosophy of mind that Rafael relies on – in which minds are themselves conceived of as distinct from one another, clearly bounded, and sovereign – is itself ‘territorialized’ and, indeed, conceived in ways that seem to mirror the modern territorial state. ⁷

It is also worth noting that, while Rafael’s discussion begins as a gloss of the associations inhering in the Spanish terms for conquest and conversion (conquista and conversión), and ostensibly not the author’s own theoretical model, by the end of the passage the author is clearly speaking in his own voice. This shift from emic to etic is evident, for example, in the fact that the author describes conversion as persuading natives to substitute the foreigner’s interests for their own. But according to Roman Catholic teaching, the new structure of values that the convert is persuaded to accept are not those of the convertor but, first and foremost, of God; and from a theological perspective the interests these values imply do not stand in contrast to the convert’s own interests but are understood as indeed being those of the convert as well (correctly understood). The notion of interests, and the fact that interests are inherently subjective – not in the sense of being unreal, but in being connected to subject positions – is important to my argument, and I will return to it in a moment. But first I will say something about power.

The appeal of the conversion-as-conquest metaphor lies in its focus on power. Yet the way power is conceived in this model is as a force that operates upon subjects from without. Specifically, power is epitomized as the subordination or subversion of an ideally autonomous subject. A contrasting approach conceives of the relationship between the subject and power not in oppositional terms – that is, in which power is envisioned as impinging on a previously constituted subject from without – but recognizes instead that subjectivities are always formed by one or another regime of power relations (Mahmood 2005). The implication of this broadly Foucauldian understanding of subjectivity for the problem of conversion would be to see conversion not as the subordination of a previously autonomous subject but as a movement of persons from one subjectifying regime to another. Understanding conversion this way, incidentally, does not preclude comparing the two regimes and evaluating them against one another – indeed, it is a precondition of any such evaluation. Nor does it prevent us from passing judgement on the specific means by which people are pried away from one such regime and inducted into another. What it does not allow for, however, are statements that critique conversion programs in terms of a ‘self’ that exists prior to and outside relations of power, or in terms of self-evident ‘interests’.

The problem with recourse to the notion of interest is that interests exist only in relation to one or another explanatory scheme, or, to put it another way, interests are tied inherently to subject positions. There is no such thing as interests in and of themselves; as subjects change, so do their interests. Attempts have been made, of course, to ground notions of interest in supposedly objective terms – political or economic ones, for example – but this is question begging. For both the political and the economic can be conceived in a variety of ways, and encode values that are ‘objective’ only relative to a particular cultural scheme. But couldn’t we define a subject’s interests open-endedly, as whatever she was brought up with and accepts as natural – as determined by whatever values have been organically inculcated in her by her cultural milieu? This is also question begging, though in a somewhat less obvious way. What needs to be explained is why her subjective interests at one moment in time, point A, are truly ‘her own’ whereas those she conceives at point B are not. To treat the values inculcated in the convert by her cultural milieu as authentically her own, and those she accepts as a result of evangelization as illegitimate, simply re-states in a different form the very premise that needs to be justified. (And it does so, again, on the basis of a particular evaluative scheme – this time one that valorizes a notion of cultural authenticity – that is itself unexplained.)

Portrayals of conversion as a form of conquest are rooted ultimately in a political-moral universe in which autonomy is a paramount value. Secular liberalism is one such universe. ⁸ While private citizens may subscribe to other values, including religious ones like ‘submitting to God’s will’, their pursuit of these values must be freely chosen; the use of coercive force to bring about conformity to religious or other values is regarded as illegitimate (Asad 2003). Indeed, the state’s own monopoly on the use of force rests on its claim to protect and safeguard the subjective freedom (autonomy) of its citizens, with respect both to their own persons as well as their property, and a mainstay of liberal thought is that government is legitimate to the extent that it does not unnecessarily circumscribe subjective autonomy. Insofar as no competing value is allowed to trump that of autonomy, we may refer to it as a paramount modern moral and political value (cf. Christman 1989; Taylor 2005). ⁹ It was not always so. As J.B. Schneewind (1998) explains, since late antiquity morality had been defined in Europe as conformity to God’s will – always mediated by human authorities, both secular and ecclesiastic – irrespective of whether that conformity was freely chosen. If obedience were freely given, so much the better, but it was in conformity with legitimate, divinely-established authority that morality inhered. Only with the rise of liberal political theory did the legitimacy of political authority come to be seen as a function of a regime’s ability to maximize citizens’ freedom and subjective autonomy, ¹⁰ rather than in its relation to a transcendental moral source (Schneewind 1998: 1–9).

This is by no means to endorse the self-description of liberal regimes as being indeed more free than any that have ever existed – that is, if by ‘free’ we mean free from the operations of power. Both repressive and more subtle forms of power are intrinsic to the liberal state, as they are to the modern state as such. Where liberal states differ from non-liberal ones is in treating repressive power (and overt forms of coercion) as problematic. In liberal states repressive power thus operates chiefly at the margins, and targets those who challenge the state’s own monopoly on the use of coercive force (Weber 1948), whether these be violent criminals, revolutionaries, or simply religious groups whose practices are seen to impinge on individual autonomy (Asad 2003; Mendus 1986–7). Subtler forms of power – including, especially, those through which autonomous subjectivities are produced (education, advertising, discourses on child-rearing and the family, entertainment) – are pervasive. Indeed, it has been argued that freedom and power are by no means mutually exclusive, and that one of the most important ways governmental power operates today is precisely through the production of subjective freedoms (Rose 1999).

Vincit omnia veritas

When misconceptions about AIDS are displaced by reliable information on how HIV spreads, or when the importance of using boiled water in oral rehydration therapy is impressed upon the parents of infants with dysentery, it is rarely seen as a colonization of consciousness. ¹¹ Why the reflexive condemnation of missionaries who deliberately undermine pre-existing beliefs in order to replace them with new, Christian truths? I argue that it is not – or at least not most importantly – because anthropologists are prejudiced against Christians. While it may be true that Christians constitute, for many anthropologists, a ‘repugnant cultural other’ (Harding 1991; cf. Cannell 2006; Robbins 2007), the reason missionization is differently problematized than AIDS education is not to be sought in the domain of consciousness (including the unconscious) as bias theories suggest. ¹² Nor is it to be sought in residual feelings of guilt or anger over western imperialism. While anthropologists may indeed feel a responsibility to speak out against imperialism, past and present, this does not tell us why missionization should itself be regarded as a species of imperialism – let alone why religious conversion should be pictured as conquest in the realm of mind.

If the specificities of ‘colonization of consciousness’ theories are not adequately accounted for either by anti-Christian bias or by guilt/anger over imperialism, how best to understand them? The answer, I argue, is bound up with the disciplinary constitution of anthropology itself, and in particular with its relationship to modern secularism (Asad 2003; Scott and Hirschkind 2006). For it is only when one adopts a secular humanist perspective in which religious truths appear as mere ‘cultural representations’, but never potentially true as such, that conversion can be regarded as a fundamentally arbitrary movement from one belief system to another, and therefore as an ideological mask dissimulating an inherent conflict between one set of interests (those of the convert) and another (the convertor’s). As Talal Asad has observed, for the secular observer ‘religious conversion appears to need explaining in a way that conversion to modernity does not. There was a time when conversion didn’t need explaining. People converted because God had helped them to see the truth’ (Asad 1996: 263).

Yet even today converts rarely understand their conversion as a choice between alternative ‘belief systems’; more often it is a matter of discovery. Indeed, among the Dalit slum dwellers I have studied (who are a primary target of anti-conversion laws in India) religion is conceived not as a matter of belief primarily, but of knowledge. And it is for this very reason that the charge that Christianity is a ‘foreign’ religion carries little weight in the world of the slum. For to be true is by definition to be universal, an assumption neatly illustrated by an exchange I had with Mohan, a Tamil-speaking migrant who had come to Mumbai’s Dharavi slum some ten years earlier in hopes of escaping the grinding poverty of his home village. Mohan’s struggle for a better life has also entailed, as it does for most slum dwellers, an ongoing struggle to discern what in religion is true and what is simply a waste of time. Mohan converted to Pentecostalism, but considered himself knowledgeable about all religions, pointing proudly to some dozen books he has painstakingly collected and read over many years. When I challenged Mohan, as I have so many others like him, to justify his conversion to a western religion, he reacted in a typical manner by rejecting the premise that Christianity could be meaningfully described as ‘western’. Though it was common knowledge that Christianity originated in western Asia, Mohan explained, and that it was only recently spread throughout India by Europeans, he dismissed the idea that there was anything essentially western about it. ‘Do [people who reject Christianity as foreign] also reject tube lights because they come from the West?’ he laughed, ‘do they refuse to believe in airplanes? No! These things belong to everyone’. Christianity could not be western, according to Mohan, because it was true – and therefore could never be the property of any one people or place. Like other Pentecostals I interacted with, Mohan understood his relationship to Christian teachings not as the assent to a culturally-specific value system, but as the recognition of verifiable truth. The reason they converted to Christianity, my interlocutors explained, was because they realized the Christian god was the ‘true god’ – the only god who actually exists and the only one, therefore, that is capable of helping them in their lives.

I shall return below to the question of how such truths come to be established – a process that necessarily implies power. I will also attempt to say something about the power relation between anthropologists and those who perceive truths we do not. ¹³ But the description of conversion as mental colonization makes a stronger claim than simply that the convert has been hoodwinked. It claims that her very self – a self that, in the manner of secular liberal political theory, is defined in terms of autonomy – has been undermined. If conversion is regarded as a threat to autonomy it is because religious beliefs and desires are treated as definitive of the authentic self. Modern and Protestant understandings of religion converge (Bellah 1964) in locating religion in the intimate realm of an authentic inner self (cf. Casanova 1994; Keane 2007).

I have already noted that the idea of conversion being a ‘colonization’ of consciousness implies a philosophy of mind in which minds are pictured in spatial, or even territorial, terms. To this I would now like to add the thought that the interior ‘space’ of mind is itself treated as being divisible into distinct, hierarchically organized domains, such that subjective autonomy is only threatened when certain kinds of mental contents are altered, but not others. Thus for Mohan and others, recognizing the truth of Christianity was no more a threat to their autonomy than acknowledging the validity of the scientific principles that explain electrical lighting and airplanes. Those who see conversion as mental colonization, by contrast, treat religious truth as neither universal nor verifiable, but linked intrinsically to particular people and cultures. According to Swami Dayananda Saraswati ‘conversion is violence’ precisely because there can be no rational means for adopting one religion over another: ‘On the basis of reason, no non-verifiable belief is going to fare any better than any other non-verifiable belief. Therefore according to reason there is no basis for conversion in matters of faith’ (1999). Religion in Saraswati’s understanding does not describe a relationship between the human and a mind-independent (or non-cultural) reality; it is given in, and constitutive of, a psychologically and culturally constituted self. This is not how religion was always understood in India. On the contrary, the fact that religious discourse referred to an extra-human reality in pre-modern India meant that religious beliefs were in principle subject to verification (or rejection) by a wide variety of empirical and rational tests (Bronkhorst 2007; Granoff 1985).

Given the prominence in Indian anti-conversion discourse on protecting citizens’ autonomy – on safeguarding those beliefs people regard as most authentically their ‘own’ – it is appropriate to ask: do converting subjects themselves regard their ‘religious’ beliefs (current or previous) as essential to who they are? In point of fact none of the Pentecostals I have studied in either Chennai or Mumbai has ever expressed the view that becoming Christian required them to exchange one set of self-defining values for another. While many credited Christ with helping them to give up their craving for alcohol, for example, or their hot-temperedness, they described these as undesirable traits that did not accord with what they wanted for themselves. They certainly did not see Christianity as having undermined anything essential to their former, pre-conversion selves. Nor, significantly, did their slum-dwelling Hindu friends and neighbors regard their conversion to Christianity as such. Unlike Hindutva spokesmen like Swami Dayananda Saraswati, who envision Hinduism as simultaneously an ethno-national and psychological essence (Bauman 2011), these slum-dwelling Hindus did not see Christianity as a threat to their authentic selves. They merely doubted the verity of Christian truth claims. In other words, the normative picture that makes religion at once a matter of unverifiable belief and an essential component of an individual’s most authentic self, and on that basis defines conversion as mental colonization, had no currency among these slum dwellers. It was a norm that Indian lawmakers and anti-conversion activists sought to impose upon them – ironically, in the name of preserving their autonomy – from without.

At this point the objection may be raised that what worries anthropologists about conversion is not so much that it undermines the individuals’ subjective autonomy, but that of entire cultures – not individually paramount values, but those cherished by their natal culture ‘as a whole’. This, however, raises several problems, not least of which is that it reverts to a picture of cultures as bounded wholes that most anthropologists today officially disown as both reified and essentializing. Yet defining Christian ideas as essentially foreign to pre-conversion cultures entails not only drawing a fixed boundary around those cultures – to define is literally to bound – but also freezing those cultures in time (Robbins 2007) by making whatever ideas in their cultural repertoire Christianity displaces essential to them. The question this ought to raise is: who gets to say what the ‘authentic’ values of a culture in fact are (cf. Asad 1979)?

I have already noted that some converts insist that Christianity does not conflict with their own highest values, or, in John Barker’s words, ‘take it as axiomatic that indigenous cultures and Christianity are mutually supportive’ (2007: 18). Many other Christian converts, to be sure, proclaim the exact opposite – even to the point of possibly exaggerating the difference between their prior cultural values and those of Christianity, in order to bring their conversion narratives in line with evangelical norms of conversion as total transformation (Meyer 1998; Robbins 2003, 2007). The point is not, however, whether Christianity in fact dovetails with or contradicts prior cultural values, but that the question itself is a polemical one. That is to say, it is inextricably bound up with contested claims over the nature both of Christianity and of culture, such that no neutral ground exists from which to answer it.

So far I have focused on the conceptual difficulties that arise when we attempt to build an anthropology of conversion on unexamined ideas about autonomy. But there are substantive issues as well, which ought to be of particular interest to anthropologists who embrace the idea of a politically engaged anthropology. Beyond the oft-noted fact that we are not mere observers but are also powerful actors within the worlds we observe, there is a rather more specific relationship between anthropology and religion. For anthropologists are among the most important producers of authoritative secular knowledge of religion and religious subjects, especially in the non-West. If secularism, as Talal Asad (2003) and Fitzgerald (2000, 2003) have argued, is a characteristically modern form of power that operates by normatively constituting religion as a distinct domain of human existence, this puts the anthropologist and the religious subject on opposite sides of a highly asymmetric relationship. The reality of this asymmetry is obscured when the Christian convertor is assimilated to the colonial aggressor by a theoretical framework that defines conversion as conquest in the realm of mind or of ‘culture’.

In the next section we consider more closely the question of truth, and the largely hidden role of secular metaphysics in the production of anthropological knowledge. This in turn opens the way for us to consider the importance of truth itself, not only for modern forms of power, but also within the Christian tradition. For one of the sources of Christianity’s power is precisely that the Christian message is, for many people, veridical.

Anthropology and truth

Anthropology as such – by which I mean an account of man’s nature and capacities, and not the disciplinary field that arose in the 19th century – need not be secular. ¹⁴ Prior to the rise of secular humanism, as Pamela Klassen (2011: 33–5) reminds us, the leading form of anthropology was theological, and it took as its object the study of human nature in its relation to God. Thus, for example, the classical Augustinian doctrine

teaches us that man, created by and for God, is everything to himself and places himself at the centre of everything. Thus it is that disorder is born. … Each self would like to act in the role of tyrant over all the others because … its goal is to be alone at the centre of everything, and thus to demolish the pretensions of its adversaries, or at the very least to obtain from its adversaries the unilateral recognition that it is indeed at the centre of everything. This aim, however, is contradictory and impossible. Apart from anything else, no self can dispense with other people. In loving himself with that infinite love which was destined only for God, man does not love anybody else. … [S]ociety is a society of collective complacency that is, in reality, founded upon … concupiscence, which leads men to reap for themselves that which is due to God. (Bouchilloux 2003: 202)

As with the later humanist picture in which man is the author of all value and meaning, in the classical theological anthropology articulated by Augustine man is understood as a creator of values – but these values, because they fail to recognize man’s dependence on a source beyond himself, are false. Man is thus, according to theological anthropology, both existentially and morally dependent on God. He is also epistemologically dependent. For the truth of man’s existential and moral dependence on God is not one he discovered on his own, according to the classical Christian teaching, but is itself also dependent on a non-human source (divine revelation).

In secular anthropology, by contrast, God drops out of the picture. God is neither the creator of man nor does he intervene in human affairs. Qua cultural being, man is literally self-creating (Keane 2003: 227) within the limits imposed on him by nature. Nature is understood as inherently lacking in meaning; what meaning it possesses is imposed upon it by human beings. The notion of agency itself comes to be defined in terms of human subjectivity (Taylor 1985; Geertz 1973; cf. Asad 1993); beyond this there is only ‘behaviour’ and natural forces. And with divine revelation no longer playing an epistemological role, anthropology becomes, in Foucault’s (1973) formulation, a body of knowledge in relation to which man is simultaneously both subject and object. In secular anthropology God(s) exist only via human activities and the human traditions that posit them, and not as an independent causal force. ¹⁵

Several observers (Anidjar 2009; Asad 1993; Cannell 2005; Sahlins 1996) have drawn our attention to the ways disciplinary anthropology retains aspects of its Christian heritage. While I appreciate the importance of these observations, the break between theological and secular anthropology (Asad 1993, 2009; Harding 1991; Howell 2007; Milbank 2006; Robbins 2007) is nonetheless significant and, I argue, especially so for understanding the asymmetrical relationship between anthropologists and the Christians they write about and occasionally pass judgement upon.

At the same time, nothing requires us to write about religious truth in a way that implicitly presumes its falsehood by making it an ideological cover for something else or even, in the more subtle approach offered by Clifford Geertz, regarding it as the imposition of human meaning upon an inherently meaningless reality. An assumption endemic not only to Geertz’s writings on religion, but also to most standard anthropological theories of culture, is that meaning is essentially a human product projected onto a world that is meaningless in and of itself. ¹⁶ A hallmark of religion, according to Geertz, is that it ‘projects images of a cosmic order onto human experience’ (1973: 90); human experience, in its raw form, is characterized as ‘chaos – a tumult of events which lack not just interpretation, but interpretability – [that] threatens to break in upon man’ (1973: 100). Thus religious symbols are said to work by ‘denying that … irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole’ (1973: 108), and by ‘clothing [this denial] with such an aura of factuality, that [religious] moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic’ (1973: 90ff.). But the claim that the universe is inherently meaningless is no less dogmatic than the reverse – and the idea of nature as a meaningless ‘chaos’ is no less meaningful than the naïvely religious views it stands against.

So long as we continue to restage the familiar set-piece in which converts’ beliefs are treated as basically false or inauthentic, we miss one of the most profound ways power operates in the Christian tradition – namely, through the production of knowing subjects and the bringing to light of truth. In speaking of ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’, rather than ‘belief’ and ‘doctrine’, I do not propose simply to replace the latter with the former. Doctrine (meaning a body of established teachings) is indispensible to our understanding of the Christian tradition, as is belief (a complex relation of creedal affirmation that is central to defining membership in the Christian communion; Ruel 1982). But belief and knowledge are conceptually distinct, as are truth and doctrine. Knowledge is belief that is both true and well founded (but see Gettier 1963); Christians care about doctrine not for its own sake but in order to know the truth it refers to. Fideism, the epistemological theory that all religious teachings must be taken ultimately on faith and that faith is itself radically distinct from reason and knowledge, certainly has a place within the Christian tradition. Often polemically ascribed to the theology of the Reformation, and sometimes traced as far back as Tertullian’s apocryphal credo quia absurdum (‘I believe because it is absurd’), it is a serious mistake to attribute to Christianity as a whole the idea that the contents of religious belief are simply to be taken on faith and not as the object of knowledge. Far from being the norm, fideism is historically a minority position within Christianity that was confined in the past, as it is today, to a small group of heterodox intellectuals. ¹⁷

Thus the modern picture in which religious truth is reduced to doctrines that are clung to despite (or even because of) lack of evidence (e.g. Kierkegaard 2006) may be helpful in some contexts. But it seriously misleads in others – especially in the many contexts worldwide where believers readily cite evidence (or reasons) for their belief, and are quite prepared to adapt both their beliefs and sectarian affiliations when arguments or experience cast received teachings into doubt (Roberts 2008). To miss this feature of Christianity is to miss a large part of what makes it so compelling: that it is not just marker of ethnic identity (though it may also function as such) or an arbitrary cant. It is truth. And it is precisely this that allows Christian life to take the form of an ongoing process of inquiry and development. By conflating religious truth and doctrine, in other words, we render mysterious Christianity’s capacity to actively engage and transform subjectivities – or rather, to enlist subjects in their own transformation – an aspect that is especially prominent in conversion settings. ¹⁸

To illustrate this point I offer a brief ethnographic account of the ways concepts of belief, faith, and knowledge are both differentiated and complexly related to one another in the form of Christianity I have studied. I then describe some ways these concepts are operationalized through various ascetic techniques and existential ‘leaps of faith’. Finally, I relate these ascetic and existential practices to the rich discursive framework within which they are enacted, and to the teleological notion of truth toward which they are directed.

In my research on Tamil Pentecostals I have found clear distinctions are made among three closely related concepts: belief (nampikai), faith (vicuvācam), and knowledge (arivu). In brief, nampikai has strong connotations of trust, as in putting one’s trust in (or relying on) someone; vicuvācam means faith in the sense of ‘being faithful to’ someone or something; arivu is a cognitive relation based on immediate perception (terital) or understanding (purital) of truth. Belief, faith, and knowledge are systematically related in a process of ongoing development, via a fourth term, cāṭci, which refers alternatively to either evidence or proof. ¹⁹ This developmental process is intrinsically social and links self, other, and God in a three-way series of unequal relations.

In very schematic terms, these relations commence when the non-believer is presented with cāṭci (in the sense of evidence, but not yet proof) in the form of a believer’s testimony, for example, or in the non-discursive manifestation of the Holy Spirit in another person, or when a believer prays on his or her behalf and the prayer request (usually for some form of help) is apparently answered. On the basis of this cāṭci/evidence the non-believer may decide to put the Christian god to the test by placing themselves entirely, if provisionally, at his mercy. Those who are gravely ill, for example, promise not to pray to any other god. In this way nambikai (in the sense of trust) is linked constitutively to vicuvācam (exclusive fidelity and obedience). Most of the slum dwellers I knew lived with a persistent sense of existential uncertainty that is difficult to convey to readers who have not spent significant time among the very poor – will we have food tomorrow? will that ulcer on my child’s leg heal? will municipal water tankers fail again to deliver drinking water? how will I repay this loan? why am I treated as an inferior being? Also difficult to convey is the kind of courage required of a potential convert who relinquishes all the rituals, objects, and gods they have hitherto invested so much in, in order to place themselves entirely at the mercy of an unknown Savior. Not only does this make him (‘Him’) their sole safety net, but in doing so simultaneously requires them to be unfaithful to their customary gods and thereby open themselves to very serious reprisals. What is required of them is truly a ‘leap of faith’. Those who survive usually take it as proof that Christ is real, and that their old gods are not. Those who have taken such a leap frequently experience a direct and physically overwhelming encounter with the Holy Spirit soon after.

Thus a convert is made. But the leap of faith is not a one-time event; it is repeated in major and minor ways throughout the remainder of the convert’s life. Being faithful requires, moreover, not just abstaining from other remedies (including, in some congregations, biomedicine), but maintaining strict mental discipline. As long as one’s mind remains totally focused on Christ, Pentecostals say, neither worldly nor supernatural threats can harm you. ‘I see only Christ’, many have told me when I inquire about their fears. Often they illustrate with a characteristic gesture – hands first cupped on either side of their eyes, then extended slowly into the space before them – suggesting a kind of willful tunnel vision, a refusal to look either to the left or to the right. Ravi, a 30-year-old convert who has done well for himself selling scrap metal by the roadside, explained to me what it means to rely totally on Christ:

You drive a motorcycle, right? Well, it’s like when you’re weaving through traffic and you see a gap between two cars. Everything is happening very fast, and the gap is closing. You don’t know if you can make it, but can’t just stop and think, ‘will I be able to make it or not?’ No! You just go straight through. If you falter, you will never make it through. That is what living with Christ is like – all the time!

Perhaps only readers with first-hand knowledge of Chennai’s roads conditions, surely the most hair-raising I have ever experienced, will fully appreciate Ravi’s metaphor. But what he sought to convey was not that life with Christ is a hazardous one. The fact that life is full of threats is not due to Christ but to the nature of the world itself; the experience of confidence he describes in living with Christ is what allows him to fearlessly navigate this world. What is significant is that Ravi’s understanding of fear and its overcoming was not conceived in terms of abstract meditative exercises but as a kind of practical – and, indeed, bodily – mastery. Being a Christian in this context also entailed unlearning all manner of worldly habits and undertaking various physically difficult austerities such as regular fasting and lengthy prayer sessions. It is, in short, a commitment that engenders further commitment and that progressively deepens the convert’s relationship with their new god.

This relationship is not described simply as an abstract belief in something that cannot be seen, but as arivu – direct, first-person knowledge. Ascetic and existential components of Christian knowledge operate within a complex discursive framework. This includes the elaborate and improvisational oral text of Sunday services, prayer groups, and Bible study meetings throughout the week that provide an evolving conceptual apparatus for both the daily and extraordinary disciplines believers undertake, as well as an interpretive framework by which to understand events in their lives and across the world. The essential point to make is that the conceptual content of Christian truth is never given once and for all. Doctrines are conveyed and accepted, but the object of Christian knowledge and truth-seeking practices is reducible to doctrine. It is the truth to which doctrine refers. Certain texts – the Bible itself, of course, but also prophetic speech and God’s own voice as directly perceived by the believer’s mind – are understood to accord perfectly with that truth. But the believer’s understanding of these texts is never perfect, and thus the meaning of authoritative texts is a subject of ongoing study and exploration. It is the subject of perpetual interpretation, exploration and ongoing revelation, as fundamental ideas (‘sin’, ‘salvation’, ‘grace’, and so on) and the rich textual resources of scripture are worked through and applied to new contexts. And it is precisely because the truth of Christianity is not reducible to the discursive context of doctrines that could be simply memorized and assented to once and for all that it exerts an ongoing compulsive force upon the mind. This is the power of truth itself, and this is why an adequate anthropological account of conversion and Christian subject formation requires not just the categories of belief and cultural content, but also that of knowledge.

Truth is an irreducible element in the Christian project, and taking it seriously as such does not entail neglecting power. Truth and power are not antithetical, as models that treat religion as an ideological screen for ontologically prior ‘interests’ – or which picture it as an arbitrary imposition on converts’ consciousness in the manner of territorial colonization – make them out to be. Nor does identifying truth as a key modality of religious power entail neglecting how other forms of power help to persuade people to convert: the historical displacement and destruction of native life-worlds, subtle and not-so-subtle incentives, all manner of manipulation and browbeating, the use of coercive force, and so on. But the truth of Christianity is logically independent of the methods by which particular subjects are brought to recognize it. One can critically evaluate these methods – as Christians themselves do – without taking the additional and entirely counter productive step of treating the truth they impart as false, a view inherent to the ‘colonization of consciousness’ model.

Conclusion

Colonialism, in what I take to be its primary sense, describes a situation in which people come from outside a territory, subjecting previously self-ruling native populations to foreign rule. ²⁰ When colonization is said to occur in the realm of consciousness it is because ideas and values are pictured as similarly penetrative and as ‘taking over’ the internal governing structures of the convert’s mind. But the relationships that obtain among ideas – implicature, contradiction, encompassment, for example, as well as the virtually limitless possibilities offered by metaphoric and other tropical relations – are not best understood on the model of political rule, even if it is true that power relations are always invested with meaning and frequently depend on human representational capacities for their functioning (Asad 1979).

For these reasons, as well as those outlined in the first three substantive sections of this article, I believe nothing is to be gained and much to be lost in the way of theoretical clarity when the notion of colonization is extended to include religious conversion. Apart from the theoretical weakness of the ‘colonization of consciousness’ model, there is also an ethical problem stemming from the fact that colonization is a term of critique, heavily laden with moral condemnation that makes it a rather inappropriate starting place for an anthropological understanding of religious conversion.

Those who envision religious conversion as colonization are certainly right to recognize it as political, but they do not pursue this insight as far as they might have. The modern category of religion took shape in a context (the long European struggle between ecclesiastic and state power, early modern ‘wars of religion’, conquest of the New World) that made it irreducibly political from the outset. To portray a portion of human existence, ‘religion’, as normatively beyond the reach of politics is itself a political operation that is part and parcel of a powerful governmental programme, state secularism (Asad 1993, 2003). If religion cannot be methodologically hived off from politics, the same is obviously true of religious conversion. My doubts throughout this essay have been not with the idea that conversion is political ²¹ but with the rather more specific trope in which religious conversion is envisioned as an illegitimate intrusion into converts’ minds. The picture of the mind as a sacrosanct domain of authentic selfhood has a specifically European genealogy and is foundational to the public–private distinction on which the political project of modern liberalism rests (McClure 1990; Mendus 1986–7; Taylor 1989; cf. Asad 1996). Because Christianity has been historically associated with Europe and European colonization it is tempting to assume that anthropological critiques of conversion must be in some way counter-hegemonic. This ignores entirely the hegemony of secular reason with respect to religious truth, the secular state with respect to religious subpopulations, and liberal subject-producing regimes with respect to ways of life in which humans are understood as morally and existentially dependent on a source outside themselves. In India, moreover, colonization of consciousness rhetoric plays a central role in violent anti-minority politics that the secular state supports both passively and actively. ²²

The alternative I have proposed to thinking of conversion as a colonization of consciousness is to describe it instead as a process of wresting persons from one subjectifying regime to another. In this conception, power is understood as pervading both the source and the destination, as well as the process by which persons are persuaded to give up one and embrace the other. This is no less true for the fact that converting subjects participate actively in their own transformation. For power in this account is not conceived in repressive terms as operating on otherwise free subjects from without – as if subjects existed prior to the familial structures, educational institutions, and indeed the entirety of the ‘cultures’ in which they are formed – but as intrinsic to the institutions and relationships within which subjects are formed.