One of my most terribly Americanized tendencies is to find out what’s going on in India mostly from non-Indian sources. For example, while editing an article about prison rape, I ran across a couple of press releases by a Southern Baptist organization that was trumpeting its success in Christianizing higher caste Hindus. Presumably their particular delight in making inroads in this sector of Indian society is not due to caste snobbery as such, but to missionizing’s generally having its best luck among marginalized groups rather than the mainstream. This is true not only for Christianity in India, but also of Islam in the United States, which found many more converts among African Americans, particularly those who were imprisoned, than among affluent whites.

My reaction to this news was complex. On one hand, I’m very opposed to the laws in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat that briefly attempted to ban mythical “forced conversions” and required people to register any change in religion with the government. If people wish to peacefully convince others of a particular belief, even one with which I don’t agree, they should be free to do so without fear of punishment or deportation.

On the other hand, I find conversion activity vaguely displeasing because it inherently pre-supposes the superiority of one religious faith over another. For whatever reason, I don’t mind thinking liberalism preferable to conservatism, capitalism to communism, but a similar judgment on religions tends to raise my hackles. Moreover, one could claim that the Indian government appears to treat all conversion activity as objectionable, even when it doesn’t involve Hindus. Ennis’s mention of Indian Jews two months ago neglected to note that the Indian government objected to having the previously-Christianized, long-ago descendants of Jews officially converted to Judaism on Indian soil.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office sent to India six rabbis, who converted 600 members of the tribe to Judaism to ensure they could immigrate to Israel under state law […] India had pressured Israel to stop the conversion activity, implying that it violated Indian law, Regev said. In response, an Israeli parliamentary committee asked Sharon to reconsider the location of the conversions, Regev said.

Another little-known fact about the Bnei Menashe members brought to Israel is that most were settled in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel recently evacuated.

I have seen religion give neither more nor fewer benefits to my Hindu family than it has to my Jewish and Christian friends, which is not something that I can say of my shallow observations of political and economic regimes. A good person seems to produce an equally generous Christian or kind Muslim, depending mainly on the culture in which that person was raised, whereas the same nation subjected to highly restrictive economic and social conditions versus reasonably liberal ones will turn out quite differently.

Thus the amount of effort expended in altering others’ beliefs about deities often strikes me as wasted. It is effort people should be legally free to waste, just as they can waste it on computer games and other things that give them pleasure. But it is nothing I can applaud regardless of what alteration has been made, though I encourage the work of missionaries who bring significant secular educational, medical and capitalist resources to India along with their tracts.

Of course, this is the inevitable viewpoint of an agnostic, and perhaps that of a person raised as a Hindu, if one remembers the infamous exchange between Gandhi and Jinnah: Gandhi – “I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew.” Jinnah – “Only a Hindu could say that.”