Religious Relics of the British Raj in India

On Good Friday I attended a service at Union Chapel on Lenin Street. The street and the chapel apparently live together in harmony here in Kolkata. Both are brave leftovers from bygone eras. Lenin continues to be revered by the Communist government of our city but the street named after him is a hardscrabble thoroughfare full of smoke-belching buses. During a recent political rally it was taken over by trucks full of cadres waving red hammer-and-sickle flags. The sight made me feel a tinge of the anti-communist fear instilled in me as a child during the Cold War.

Union Chapel is the remnant of a still more distant past. Missionaries from the London Missionary Society built it during the heyday of the British Empire in the early nineteenth century. It’s a solid, slightly crumbling structure dominated by an ancient pipe organ in front of the sanctuary. Plaques on the walls honor various nineteenth-century missionaries. One plaque in memory of a former pastor reads: “In memory of the Rev. James Keith, Joint Pastor of the Church of Christ assembling in this place and missionary to the heathen, died on October 8, 1822.”

The congregation that meets in Union Chapel puts on a brave face but keeping the building in good repair is a little beyond their means. The same is true of other British era church buildings in Kolkata. These once magnificent structures, now slowly crumbling, are relics of a past epoch with all its splendour and contradictions. Their foyers and churchyards have plaques and statues honoring past British governors and memorials to soldiers who died in various military campaigns.

I don’t want to demean the sacrificial service of early missionaries in India but can’t help raising questions about their relationship with British imperialism. To what extent does the phrase “missionary to the heathen” reflect such imperialism and the violence that undergirded it? It’s easy to understand why many Indians still see Christianity as a foreign religion. And it’s equally easy to understand why Indian churches still struggle with this colonial legacy that ended abruptly with Indian independence in 1947. Independence was followed by the often-chaotic departure of foreign mission agencies.

As a theologian in the Anabaptist tradition, I’m uncomfortable with such a convenient marriage of church and state. I empathise with the Indian grandmother in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines who is opposed to her granddaughter Ila moving to England because she doesn’t belong there. The grandmother protests:

“[The English] know they’re a nation because they’ve drawn their borders with blood. Hasn’t Maya told you how regimental flags hang in all their cathedrals and how all their churches are lined with memorials to men who died in wars all around the world? War is their religion. That’s what it takes to make a country. Once that happens people forget they were born this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi: they become a family born of the same pool of blood.”

For Christians this raises profound historical and theological questions? How has it happened that a religious faith born among marginalized people and slaves in the Roman Empire now sees little contradiction in being the consort of British, American, or other imperial powers. How have we been able to reconcile Jesus’ nonviolent life and vision with our participation in war and violence? It could not have happened without some means of trivializing or spiritualising the life and message of Jesus.

That brings me back to the worship services I participated in during Easter. The focus was on Jesus’ death as a sacrifice that atones for our sins and restores our relationship with God. For those of us in the Anglican or Catholic traditions, participation in the Mass or Eucharist becomes the means of grace. For Evangelicals it’s praying the sinner’s prayer and accepting Jesus as our saviour. In theological jargon, it’s different versions of the theory of “substitutionary atonement.” Jesus becomes the sacrificial lamb who died to save us from God’s wrath.

We conveniently forget to ask why the political and religious leaders in first–century Palestine found Jesus to be such a threat that they crucified him. Nor do we ask ourselves what it would mean to follow this radial prophet from Galilee. Thinking that who Jesus was doesn’t apply to us has allowed us to be involved in wars, racism, imperialism, and slavery while imagining that we are faithful Christians. We become blinded to the contradictions.

Christiaan Beker contrasts such church teaching and ritual in the service of empire with that of the first Christians. He writes that the early churches were “not an aggregate of justified sinners or a sacramental institute or a means for private self-sanctification but the avant garde of the new creation in a hostile world, creating beachheads in the world of God’s dawning new world and yearning for the day of God’s visible lordship over his creation.”

That’s what I so keenly felt to be missing in the worship services I participated in this Easter season. The following Sunday morning I opted out by staying home and reading. But that’s no answer even though I suspect it’s what many of us do. The challenge is to form or re-form congregations that have a vision of God’s reign on earth and, however incoherently, allow God’s Spirit to embody it in our fellowship. Only then—with great humility—will we have “good news” to share with our neighbors. It’s the antidote to empire.