Caste, purity, and the gospel [Being Indian & Christian #17]
How the gospel purifies us and frees us from oppressive social structures
Hi friends,
I’ve gotten back into the habit of reading the newspaper. This made me confront the ugly news about a temple in Gollarahatti village of Karnataka. On January 1st, 2 temples were shut down because a Dalit had supposedly entered the village. My blog post for this week is an attempt at making sense of one of the principles behind why Indians care about the caste system in the country. Reading sociologist Louis Dumont’s book, Homo Hierarchus was helpful in seeing purity as an essential component of the caste system in India.
Here are the links for this week
1. Blog Post for the Week — We all want purity
The truth is that we all care about purity. Traditional society sought purity by assigning purity values to objects and tasks, and then by delegating impure tasks to impurity specialists. Modern society might seek purity through meditation, yoga, diet ‘cleanses’, digital ‘detox’, or any of the numerous other ways out there.
We all feel impure.
Because we are impure.
The lasting solution will not be found in the flawed logic of the caste system. It will not be found in the skin-deep measures of meditation, diet or digital detox.
The solution to our impurity can only be found in the blood of Jesus, who died for us. Only Jesus can purify us, by transforming our inner person — by creating a new heart within us.
2. Interesting read — Equality and Hypocrisy
This is an interesting, if also an old article on the hypocrisy of Western media after the brutal murder of George Floyd. Here are a couple of interesting bits:
All talk of “equality” begs the question “equality in relation to what?” Clearly not all human beings are equal in their economic status, physical fitness, intellectual endowments or artistic abilities. And, in most societies and cultures untouched by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, human inequality has been taken for granted as a fact of life. It has never been seen as a problem that needs to be addressed. In traditional Greco-Roman philosophies, some are born to rule and others to be subservient. Those outside the civilization of Greece are “barbarians”, “savages”. In the dominant Hindu and Buddhist schools of thought, no less than in folk religious culture, inequality is the just outworking of the cosmic unfolding of karma and rebirth.
and
Countering racism has also to go beyond confronting the ideology of racism. I may not believe in the ideology that says “whites are superior human beings to blacks”, but if I live within and benefit from a socio-economic-political system that has been constructed on such a premise, I share in the guilt of racism.
I wonder whether we Christians can replace the word racism with the word castism and think about what our response should be.
3. The caste system is a problem even for the church — Christianity Today
The fact that the church radically upends non-Dalits’ social circle makes it very challenging to do evangelism to this community, says Sanjay Kumar, a Dalit pastor who serves in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
“They are hesitant as to how the villagers and their nonbelieving families would react to their faith in Christ,” he said. “They directly say that ‘accepting Christ would mean that we will have to rub shoulders with the Dalit-background believers, intermarry, and such a binding is problematic for us.’”
4. Instagram Page of Being Indian & Christian
This is a reminder that you could follow Being Indian & Christian on Instagram if that’s a place where you hang out.
That’s all for this week, folks,
Cheers,
Caleb