WHAT RELIGION IS DOING TO US . . .

TWO FORMER STUDENTS OF MINE: CASE STUDIES IN CHRISTIAN DEFORMITY.

Valson Thampu

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To what extent does education, neutralised by religious conditioning, help individuals to be normal, factual and fair human beings? Consider the following real-life instances. The identities of the persons concerned are masked, as we are concerned not with individuals, but with principles.

The first instance goes back to the early ‘80s. I used to teach core English –very elementary course- to students of B.A. Pass course in St. Stephen’s. This course was meant largely to accommodate sports category students and others whose academic aptitudes were below par. Anil was one among them. He always sat in the back row of the class, with an evident look of harmless stupidity about him. Never asked a question; or answered one. He passed. Left the college. The next time I heard of him, he was a candidate for the office of the CNI bishop in Delhi. He won. Became the chairman of the Governing Body of St. Stephen’s College. I was the principal then.

He did two things. First, he admitted how overawed he was at being my student. Second, he started hounding me for not surrendering my conscience to him; in particular, for not letting him turn admissions to St. Stephe n’s into a short-cut to earning crores. How far he went in this and how low he stooped are indicated, in a softened form, in my memoir titled A Stormy Course.

The second case study pertains to the son of a priest in the Orthodox Church. Let’s call him Rasil. He, like Anil before him, used to look up to me with outlandish respect, which continued till I started taking a stand on the unedifying Orthodox-Jacobite stand-off. If and when I said anything inconvenient to his church, he would come out of his hiding and attack me with aplomb. Never once has he said that I said anything factually incorrect or ill-founded. He believes that my mentioning whatever his church does in full public view is an unforgivable offence. Doing what is unjust and boorish is fine; but making a reference to it is a crime. Great logic, this!

Both of them are Christians. Both are well-educated. That’s why we should worry about them.

Church nurture, as of today, produces unthinking parochial zealots, to whom truth is a non-issue. John Stuart Mill said something similar about British education. It produces conformists, not thinkers. Religion, conducive to human sanity, as I have argued in my just-published work (Beyond Religion, UK, 2021) must turn loyalists into thinkers, blind faith into sensible, well-founded convictions, complemented with open-mindedness.

The shaping principle of church formation is abject loyalty to denominational interests and to the hierarchy as its custodians. This formation/distortion is so deep-rooted that those who are infected by it become utterly incapable of fair and objective thinking. Place them in any situation. All they would consider is: what is there in it for my church?

The story goes that the government mooted a proposal to buy five warships. When this news item was being read out aloud, a church zealot reacted instinctively: ‘One of them must be given to my church’. (I don’t believe this story; but I see the point it makes.) In principle, he may be opposed to war. But when it comes to securing the interests of his church, everything else ceases to matter. Only the interests of his church remain.

The son-of-the-priest I mentioned, doesn’t say a word when I write about the spiritual degradation in other denominations. I won’t be surprised, if he secretly rejoices in it. But the moment I do anything similar about his denomination, he comes out raving resentment.

What is my concern here as an educator?

It is an unbearably sad reality that the religious formation that we impart to, and the parochial loyalties we inculcate in, our children are crippling them as human beings. The harm this is doing goes unnoticed. Our community is becoming intellectually mediocre. We are falling behind others. We are also becoming allergic to truth and justice. Our stature as human beings is being eroded. We have already become so communally blind that we cannot see the ridicule and contempt in which already we are held by the society at large.

Being Christian is today at risk of attracting social stigma.

Compare this with what Swami Vivekananda said about Jesus Christ. Centuries of human evolution, he said, cannot produce a Jesus. He has to be a divine intervention in the human condition. Swami Vivekananda also said that he would worship Jesus not by washing his feet with water (as the woman did in the house of Simon the Pharisee) but by pouring out his heart’s blood at his feet.

Let me not commit the sacrilege of saying: ‘Now put some of our methrans alongside Swami Vivekananda!’

We have utterly lost this sense of awe and wonder, this strength of holy reverence, about Jesus. We have reduced him to a pot-boy of parochial perversities and a cover-up of priestly hypocrisies.

In comparison, the Jews who crucified Jesus were fairer to him. Jesus became glorified through what they did, without knowing what they were doing, as Jesus said. Now Jesus gets defamed and deformed in the experience of others on account of us.

On that day Jesus will say to us: ‘I know you not. Depart from me, you evil doers.’

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Valson Thampu

Trivandrum, Kerala

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