Scandalizing Christian Witness in a Multi-religious Society

The reaction and responses of the church leadership to The Kerala Unaided Professional Colleges (Prohibition of Capitation Fees and Procedure for Admission and Fixation of Fees) BILL should be seen as a clear reflection of the changing role of the church in today’s world.

By crying wolf to the ‘bill’ the church leadership has exposed their moral insensitivity and their callous disregard of the primary responsibility of the church: to bear witness to the in-breaking of God’s rule through sacrificial service to the building up of a world of equity, justice, peace and harmony.

It is not enough to take credit for the missionary contribution to higher education, but to ask what their successors have made of higher education. Since the ‘60s, after the Vimochana Samaram (the liberation struggle), the church’s involvement at all levels of education has been without any sense of probity, responsibility, sacrifice, and mission.

Many of us have failed to realise that the Kerala society’s initiation to the self-financing of education was through the unaided, English medium, recognised schools. They gave the churches and similar associations, a taste of what one could accomplish without any capital of one’s own and yet make substantial revenue and profit to expand one’s clout in the educational field.

Though these schools were run for the children of the elites in society, gradually they began to be seen by the middle class and the lower middle class as a means for upward mobility and economic benefits. Thus, schools of various sorts that would suit the purse of the parents such as ‘international’, ‘residential’, ‘public’ and so on – began to spring up in every nook and corner of Kerala with active connivance of the powers that be.

The unbridled privatisation of education, led to the total neglect of the aided and government stream, which resulted in the children of the poor getting a raw deal. The guardians of social justice – including the politicians, church, and other socio-religious organisations – are only interested in their burgeoning profits.

Education is universally recognised as the primary instrument equipped to ensure equity and equal opportunity in this highly unequal and caste-ridden society. The churches in Kerala have the dubious distinction of having pioneered the transformation of education into a source and device of inequity.


Children of the socio-economically weaker strata cannot hope to better their lives in a highly competitive society. They are denied access to good education and hence cannot hope to benefit from the new economic opportunities. Can the Christian community absolve itself of this crime?

This unashamed mercantile nature of private-owned education have legitimised capitation fee under different pet names such as development fund, building fund, etc. It is this morally degraded cultural milieu that has become the fertile breeding ground for self-financing institutions and courses in higher education.

The church and their monastic orders, for which vows of chastity and poverty are fundamental, did not hesitate to take advantage of this opportunity for crass material aggrandizement. They have nowhere to hide after exposing themselves to be callously indifferent to the poor in their own churches and communities.

Self-financing in education is something unheard of in any civilised society, even in highly capitalistic ones such as the United States of America. This form of education should not be confused with private educational initiatives.

Most of the private schools, colleges and universities in the western world are built by the largesse of rich philanthropists. Such schools, though they may charge a higher rate of fees than the government run or supported schools, still provide a highly subsidised education. They do not force the capital costs of education on to the students, irrespective of their financial status. They also insist on a student composition that reflects the socio-economic realities of their societies. Through a well-evolved system of scholarships and financial support, the private schools in the west ensure that no student is deprived of educational opportunities for want of money.

The self-financing system of education is a negation of all values, particularly those Christian values for which the missionaries laid down their lives. They started schools for Dalits and other untouchable communities and also for women. Kerala owes a lot to the noble vision of the missionaries of the past, who saw education as a means of civilising and transforming the existing social order. The tireless efforts of the missionaries have been rewarded in the form of tremendous amount of goodwill towards the church.

Now, the church leadership is in a hurry to encash that goodwill. They unashamedly ask for minority rights to run these self-financed educational institutions, which are the worst form of commercialisation of education.

Greed can only breed more greed and trigger the destruction of the very values Christ gave us for safe-keeping. Why do Christians want to run these educational institutions? What values are they trying to live out? Who are the ones benefited by these institutions? What rights do they demand for running educational institutions of this kind? Is it to serve the most deprived students, or to admit students of their own communities? Or is it merely the desire to make a profitable business out of it? What disadvantage or discrimination as minority are they trying to redress by claiming this right?

By claiming the right to establish and administer educational institutions without specifying the disability or disadvantage or discrimination that they suffer in relation to the majority community, the church leadership is desecrating a sacred right conferred on them by the constitution. The Indian constitution represents the best democratic traditions of a civilized society, and which guarantees that brute majority will not obliterate the traditions, values and distinct identities of a minority.

What a Christian wants and should demand is the right to practice his/her faith, to live out values that are distinctly Christian – responsibility to one’s fellow human beings and creation, self-less and sacrificial service to humanity and intervention in history on behalf of the poor and the outcasts to the point of death.

The clamor for minority rights would appear ridiculous in comparison with the vision and commitment of the founders of some of the Christian colleges in India.

The founders of the Union Christian College, one of the oldest Christian indigenous initiatives in Higher Education in India, acknowledged in one of their earliest brochures (1921) that, "We have gladly engaged with the Travancore Durbar to accept the ‘Conscience Clause’ and to use no manner of compulsion in the matter of attendance at religious instruction. This is no way due to religious indifference on our part but to our conviction that the Christians in India are called upon to give of their best without stopping to stipulate terms for their service, that it is their duty ‘not to be ministered unto, but to minister’. We have no greater desire than that like our Master before us ‘who went about doing good’, we may, poor and despised as we are shoulder our humble share of the day’s burdens among the many tasks that confront the nation at the present time.”

They were even prepared to forgo their concern to teach scripture, "to shoulder the day’s burden among the many tasks that confront the nation at the present time." They never claimed any minority rights; nor did they stipulate terms for their service. But they were prepared to accept the restrictions that the government would impose and unconditionally put themselves at the service of the nation ‘in this great hour of trial’. This was a reference to the independence movement of our nation.

An understanding of the New Man (Human) congruous with the person of Christ, a form of Christian humanism, was fundamental to the educational enterprise of the Missionaries. Christ is understood as the prototype of authentic humanity. Authentic humanity is understood as fellow humanity, life in fellowship and responsibility to the rest of creation and fellow human beings. It points to the lofty goal of facilitating the growth and transformation of human beings into self actualizing beings who are capable of extreme self-sacrifices for the sake "a new heaven and a new earth". This humanistic tradition was at the back of the liberal arts and science tradition in Higher Education. According to this understanding, education is not an activity of acquiring knowledge and storing it but also one of developing a new human being with faculties, vision and commitment to reinvent and change the existing realties and the world.

The self-financing of education is not only against this understanding of the human but reduces human beings to sellable commodities in the job market.

The church, which should have raised its prophetic voice against commercialisation of education and the notion of education as a private good, is seen not only to have silently acquiesced with it, but to be actively engaged in promoting it and making profit out of it. The church by its active engagement with this form of education is proclaiming to the world that nothing else matters except Mammon (the god of wealth) and his project and there in nothing ennobling about human beings.

When our nation is threatened by divisive forces of sectarianism and religious fanaticism, the church by its claim on minority rights and differential treatment for illegitimate reasons and thus, putting majority communities on a disadvantage, not only justifies those illegitimate reasons but also communalises our already fractured social order. A Christian should be seen at this state of world history striving with all likeminded people for promoting social justice and equity, communal harmony, a more humane and sustainable world order and the integrity of creation.

The church leadership is compromising their integrity and moral stature and their most supreme apostolic calling to bear witness to the good news of the in-breaking of God’s rule to set the world and all its relationships right. It is quite obvious to all people in the pew except the bishops that our medical colleges and engineering colleges ‘sell seats’. It is obvious to all except the Bishops that the entrance examinations are conducted after seats have been sold. It is obvious to all except the bishops that they only serve a fraction of the rich in their communities and the majority of poor students from their own communities are left to fend for themselves. All know that these professional colleges have no noble motive other than financial gain and political and social clout. It is obvious to all that these educational institutions have no ennobling role in the lives of students as they also are there as investors who expect good returns.

While all these are crystal clear to all and sundry, the kind of public outbursts on minority rights will only demean themselves and the Christian community in general. True Christians will always remain a minority and it is their privilege and joy. It is their joy to embody the Kingdom values of love, justice, peace and harmony. It is their joy to be the vanguard of a new humanity and world order. It is the responsibility of all true Christians to rise up against the church leadership that is bent on scandalising Christ and his mission in the world.

Church, the Politics of Authenticity and the Lost Humanity of Christ

After much hue and cry from sections of the Catholic Church, the movie, Da Vinci Code, has been banned in five states and having watched the movie with some prominent members of the Church, the Indian government has directed the distributors to show a directive at the beginning of the movie, indicating that everything in the movie is fictitious and not factual. It is said that all this is being done in order to protect the interests of Christians around the world. Since, a heated debate has ensued on the movie and the novel by the same name. And as it is the case with any controversial movie or novel, much of this debate happens without one either reading the novel or watching the movie.

Much of the present controversy revolves around the critical treatment of the Catholic Church and the references made to the private life of Jesus Christ in the novel. More specifically, what has angered the ‘Church’ and the ‘believers’ is the portrayal of Christ as a married man, who not only fathered a child but whose lineage continues to exist even today. It is a fact that besides the Gospels, there are hardly any other historical sources, which give us details about the life of Jesus Christ. Since the Gospels themselves were written as faith proclamations of a faith community, it is also questionable as to what extent it can be treated as a reliable historical source. Besides, even the four Gospels found in the New Testament do not represent the entire body of Gospels that were written, but only of those selected by the Church to best define the parameters of its faith. As a consequence, only that representation of Christ inherent in these Gospels selected by the church is available to the believers. If this is the case, then a few questions can be posed: How can Church and the body of believers claim the sole right to define who Christ is and deny the rights of others to hold and propound a different conception of Christ? How does one explain the divinity of Christ? Aren’t there differences of opinion on these questions even in Christology? It is in the background of these questions that this article makes an effort to understand this novel.

The novel begins with the murder of Jacques Sauniere, the curator of Louvre museum. The investigation that follows holds Opus Dei, a sect within the Catholic Church, responsible for the murder. It is said that Jacques Sauniere knew certain secrets about Christ, which if revealed to the public, would undermine the conception of Christ held by the Catholic Church. Fearing this, the murder was committed. The novel discloses the secret that Sauniere knew about Christ. As mentioned above, it was the fact that Christ was married to Mary Magdalene and that a child was born out of the wedlock, whose lineage continues to exist even to this century. The novel then indicates how it is a life and death question for the Church to acquire and keep the evidence that support this information as a well guarded secret, away from the eyes of the public.

The main thrust of the novel is to explain why it so significant to understand this secret about the life of Christ that the Church wants to suppress. Through a consistent propaganda, powerful men in the early church “devalued the female and tipped the scales in favour of the masculine.” Robert Langdon explains to Sophia, another important character in the novel, the proclamation of ‘The Priory’: “Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever.” He then goes on to say, “Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice…woman.”


Witch-Hunt of the Church

According to the novelist, it is the consistent campaign on the part of the church that was responsible for such a transformation of the world. Through his characters, he argues that the Church nurtured and made a patriarchal world through a cover up of Christ’s humanity and sexuality. This is how the novelist reconstructs the history of Christianity through his principal character, Robert Langdon: “Nobody could deny the enormous good the modern Church did in today’s troubled world, and yet the Church had a deceitful and violent history. The brutal crusade to “reeducate” the pagan and feminine-worshipping religions spanned three centuries, employing methods as inspired as they were horrific.” Langdon presents his argument to Sophie by introducing to her a book published by the Catholic Inquisition, which arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history – Malleus Maleficarum or The Witches’ Hammer. This book “indoctrinated the world to the “dangers of freethinking women” and instructed all the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed “witches” by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women “suspiciously attuned to the natural world.”…During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.”

Langdon is of the opinion that the hatred Church has towards women and its dismissal of sexual desire as sinful has had an important role in shaping the modern world. Referring to ‘The Priory’ proclamation, Langdon argues that “it was this obliteration of the sacred feminine in modern life that had caused what the Hopi Native Americans called koyanisquatsi – “life out of balance” – an unstable situation marked by testosterone-fueled wars, a plethora of misogynistic societies, and a growing disrespect for Mother Earth.”

The Church kept the sexual-marital life of Christ a secret to maintain such a “life out of balance” world order. And the novel posits that, it would do anything, even murder, to possess the key to this secret and guard it from the public. According to Langdon, Leonardo Da Vinci, through his paintings, made an effort to provide us with the key to this secret. An interpretation of the secret codes embedded in his works provides leads regarding where the Holy Chalice – Holy Grail – is hidden. Langdon follows this lead and finds the key to this secret. But instead of using the key and making the secret his own, the novel concludes with Langdon bowing down in worship in front of the Holy Grail. And these forgotten words echo in his ears: “The quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one.”

The novel does not provide us with any clear evidence regarding whether Christ was married. To assert the fact that Christ was married, references are made to Gospels of Philip and Mary Magdalene. But, as was said earlier, Gospels are more faith proclamations of a faith community rather than well researched historical documents. Therefore, the author depends more on the narrative techniques of fiction writing to persuade the readers that Christ was married. Leaving that aspect aside, the novel, more importantly, takes a clear position on the many on going debates taking place among theologians and Christian denominations on issues related to the Bible, Church History and Christology. The novel, therefore, is either appreciated or criticized according to the position a reader holds in these debates. What then are these positions that the novel takes?

Jesus was a human being rooted in history and whose humanity had threatened the established religion and the ruling classes. To assuage this threat, the established religious forces and the ruling classes, following his death, made efforts to co-opt him, the new way of life, community and thinking he represented. With the conversion of Roman emperor, Constantine, to Christianity, the real Jesus was lost to us.

Another character in the novel, Teabing explains this. According to him, the Christ that we know today is a creation of the ruling classes. He points out that “The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.” He “was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed.” To top it all, he was the head priest of Rome’s official religion – sun worship. Teabing goes on to say that “Constantine was a very good businessman. He could see that Christianity was on the rise, and he simply backed the winning horse. Historians still marvel at the brilliance with which Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity. By fusing pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties.”


Empire Building

There is another issue that Teabing explains which needs to be taken note of. “Establishing Christ’s divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman empire and to the new Vatican power base. By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable. This not only precluded further pagan challenges to Christianity, but now the followers of Christ were able to redeem themselves only via the established sacred channel – the Roman Catholic Church.”

“Christ as Messiah was critical to the functioning of the Church and state. Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power.”

When Teabing claims that he has written several books on the topic, Sophie asks, “And I assume devout Christians send you hate mail on a daily basis?” To this, Dan Brown anticipating the controversy that his own book is likely to bring about responds through the character of Teabing: “Why would they? The vast majority of educated Christians know the history of their faith. Jesus was indeed a great and powerful man. Constantine’s underhanded political maneuvers don’t diminish the majesty of Christ’s life. Nobody is saying Christ was a fraud, or denying that He walked the earth and inspired millions to better lives. All we are saying is that Constantine took advantage of Christ’s substantial influence and importance. And in doing so, he shaped the face of Christianity as we know today.”

Teabing explains how Constantine was able to do this: “Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status almost four centuries after Jesus’ death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man. To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke. From this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history. Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.” Such were the efforts of the Vatican to erase the real Jesus from human memory.

Dan Brown presents the quest for the Holy Chalice as an allegory to the quest for the sacred feminine and the goddess, which was suppressed by the Church. “The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred, but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominantly male Church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized and called unclean.” Langdon says, “It was man, not God, who created the concept of ‘original sin,’ whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race. Woman, once the sacred giver of life, was now the enemy.”

It is important, at this point, to remember that the formulation of the Catholic Church which holds sexual desire as being responsible for the original sin is not something that is accepted by most mainstream protestant churches today. The approaches to portray sex as something sinful; to hold women responsible for the sexual desires of men and thereby, demonize women and distance her from church life; to hold chastity as being superior to marital life; to simplify the divinity of Christ as just some demonstrations of super human miracles; and to uphold the authority of the Pope and the Church have all been contested issues in history among different sections of the Church. These are not issues which were invented by Dan Brown. But issues, which have been debated much in the past and which needs to be openly debated further.


Re-reading the Bible

The existing white rich male portrayal of Christ, theology and biblical studies, to maintain and legitimize its own power and vested interests, had silenced the authentic Christ and his relevance. However, in the latter half of the previous century this came to be critiqued by Liberation Theology, Dalit Theology, Black Theology and Feminist Theology.

As a result of which, the need to re-read the Bible increasingly became prominent in various churches. Bible was always read from the standpoint of men, the rich and the ruling classes. But this dominant way of reading the Bible came to be challenged and today, one is being called to read it from the standpoint of women, the poor and other marginalized sections of society. Alongside this theological shift, many protestant churches today have begun to ordain women as pastors and even consecrate them as Bishops. The debate over whether priests, especially of the Catholic Church, should remain celibate is also getting much sharper and is bound to intensify in the days to come.

There exist deep differences among theologians on Christology. The early church saw those ideas that rejected the humanity of Christ and considered material life and bodily desires as sinful (Docetism, Gnosticism, Nestorianism) as heresies. But interestingly, today, the Christian commonsense seems to be much akin to those ideas. The tendency among large sections of the Christian church to do away with the humanity of Christ, to objectify and make him an idol to be worshipped, and to pass of Christ’s divinity as mere exhibition of miracles is much strong. There are plenty to ‘worship’ him today but very few to follow him. In the early church, councils and theologians had spent much time to reflect on the question how Christ could be man and God at the same time. And most theologians came to the conclusion that Christ’s divinity lay in the fullness of his humanity. In the novel, the author’s intervention in this discussion is interesting. How can one talk of the fullness of Christ’s humanity by rejecting his sexuality? Who has interpreted sexual desires as the original sin? Even if Christ was married, how is it going to affect his divinity? Doesn’t it become obvious that in all this, what looms large is the effort of a dominant section to control women and sexuality?

The novel introduces to the readers a Catholic sect that has taken a vow to cover up all truth that would be a threat to the existence of the Catholic Church – Opus Dei. Members of this sect are portrayed as people who would be willing to go to any extent, even murder, to make sure that certain truths are not revealed. This again is something that is well known. The Church has always feared the truth. In the past, all those who dared to speak the truth and question the church were branded as heretics and burnt at stake. Even today, the Church guards its secrets with high security in order to maintain its power.

No monastic community becomes ‘holy’ just because it has taken a vow of chastity. Today, we are all too familiar with the Church leaders, who on the one hand take a vow of chastity while on the other hand illegally extract capitation fee to build more and more medical colleges for the rich. Then they teach the masses not to question the sinfulness in such acts of hypocrisy. Alongside, they also encourage religious movements like Charismatic movement to ‘manage’ the masses and keep them bound to the Church. Interestingly, for such movements, Christ’s divinity is not in his humanity but in extravagant displays of miracles and magic. A faith that reduces the divinity of Christ to performance of miracles is nothing but a faith that rejects the cross. Today neither the church leaders nor the believers are ready to follow that authentic human named Jesus Christ, who became part of our history, who took strong positions on issues, which confronted that history, who was prepared to risk his life for the sake of love and who finally gave his life so that the entire creation would have life. Today, in the name of that same Christ who stood in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, who was rejected by the religious community, who was crucified on the cross and who showed a new lifestyle for the world, a religion has been made. It is to these contradictions that Da Vinci Code points its fingers at – yet another search to discover the authentic Christ.