Introduction
Christianity came to India and Sri Lanka from other countries at various periods ranging from ancient times to the present. Therefore a general view of the link between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) is necessary in order to understand how the specific relationship between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) developed in these two countries. The first section of this paper will present a general view of Christian attitudes to poverty, wealth and capitalism in early Christianity, during the Reformation, and in the modern period; the second and third sections will look at the shapes and forms these attitudes took in India and Sri Lanka respectively; and the conclusion will sum up the findings of the paper.
Attitudes to poverty, wealth and capitalism from early Christianity to the present
Christianity arose in a pre-capitalist world, but early Christian writings, including the gospels (the four books of the Bible which tell the story of Jesus) had a great deal to say about wealth and poverty. The so-called ‘Beatitudes’ are part of an early sermon in which, according to the Gospel of Luke (6: 20–25) Jesus says, ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied… But woe to you who are rich, … Woe to you who are well fed now’. In the story of the last judgment (Matthew 25: 31–46), the Son of Man comes in glory and separates people into two categories. He invites the righteous into his kingdom, saying to them, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ When they ask in astonishment when they did all this, he replies that inasmuch as they did it to the least of his brothers (and presumably sisters!), they did it to him, whereas the others, who are rejected, did not. It is notable that in this story, people are judged not according to what they believe but according to what they do.
The story of the last judgement could be interpreted as an injunction to be charitable towards those who are less fortunate and cater to their needs, but the Beatitudes suggest that poverty as such is an advantage and wealth an impediment to being a follower of Jesus. The latter interpretation is supported by another Gospel story, in which a rich young man comes to Jesus asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus recommends that he sells all that he possesses, gives the proceeds to the poor, and comes and follows him. The young man declines, and Jesus comments that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Luke 18: 18–25; Matthew 19: 16–26). There has been much debate about whether Jesus meant this literally, or was referring to an extremely small gate in the city wall opened at night when the main gate was shut (Morris 1992: 493), or that in Aramaic the word for camel and rope was the same, with the meaning determined by the context, and therefore easily mistranslated into Greek (Lamsa 2002: 167). Regardless of which interpretation is correct, it seems clear that having wealth in a world full of poverty was seen by Jesus as a disqualification for entry to what he called the kingdom of God. His aphorism that you cannot serve both God and Money (Matthew 6: 24) confirmed this message.
Given these teachings, which were propagated as Christianity spread, it is not surprising that early Christians were drawn predominantly from the working classes and poor. However, this profile began to change when the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, after which bishops and clergy were exempted from some taxes and from corvee labour building roads and city walls, collecting firewood for the public baths, driving herds of horses for delivery to the Roman cavalry, and so on. It changed even more with the entry of the rich into Christian communities, which gathered pace from 370 onwards. After this watershed, the imperative of being poor was gradually transformed into the imperative to give to the poor, either directly or by giving to the churches, which thus were able to become increasingly wealthy along with their wealthy donors (Brown 2012: 35–44). ‘Charity,’ understood as donating to church leaders, who then had the option of using the donation either to provide relief to the poor or to build up their own authority and resources, including church buildings and property, was a key mechanism responsible for building up the church as an institution (SanPietro 2014: 29–31).
However, the original identification of Christianity with the poor survived, leading to a split which was perhaps most striking in North Africa, where the Donatists (named after their bishop Donatus Magnus) persisted in rejecting bishops who had collaborated with Roman imperialism during the period when it was persecuting Christians. The dispute continued even after Constantine converted to Christianity, because the Donatists saw the empire as being identified with wealth, which they rejected as being incompatible with Christianity (Encyclopædia Britannica n.d.). The population from which the Donatists were drawn included the ‘Circumcellians’, gangs of harvest workers (including women) who preferred to call themselves ‘Agonistici’ (‘those who struggle’); the more state-aligned bishop Augustine of Hippo accused them of spreading terror in the countryside with their militant struggles against employers and money-lenders (Banaji 2010: 124–125; Brown 2012: 328–333). Christianity first came to India and Sri Lanka during this early period.
While Catholicism[1] allowed the church as an institution to get rich, more was required for the accumulation of capital. Weber (2002: 39–45) argues that Martin Luther’s Reformation (1517 onwards) took a step in this direction by proclaiming that all work constituted a ‘calling’, or task given by God; however, in other ways Luther was an economic traditionalist, objecting to any striving for material gain that went beyond one’s own needs, including money-lending. Calvinist Protestants proclaimed the idea that individuals are predestined to ‘everlasting life’ or ‘everlasting death’ ‘before the foundation of the world was laid’ (Weber 2002: 55–57); the assurance that an individual was one of the ‘elect’ was sought to be gained by incessant hard work and an ascetic life-style, which in combination could lead to the accumulation of wealth. Calvin lifted the prohibition on usury, arguing that money-lending for interest was lawful so long as the rate was reasonable, excessive security was not exacted, and the poor were given interest-free loans (Tawney 1966: 112–115). The Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries, many of whom were themselves entrepreneurs, carried this argument further: They restricted consumption and fought against the enjoyment of possessions, yet freed the production and investment of wealth from any moral condemnation (Weber 2002: 115–117).
Leaving aside the issue of whether capitalist accumulation influenced Protestantism or Protestantism assisted the accumulation of capital (and these are not mutually exclusive arguments), it is evident that the conversion of money-making from an activity which had been regarded as contrary to Christian social ethics to an activity which could be ‘carried on for the greater glory of God’ made Christianity compatible with capitalism (Tawney 1966: 238).[2] However, Protestantism is a very broad category, encompassing Anglicanism, Methodism, and many other churches, and there continued to be critics of the spirit of capitalism from within it. John Wesley, who founded Methodism in the 18th century, preached that those who ‘gain all they can and save all they can’ would succumb to pride, anger, and love of the world unless they also give all they can, that is, give away anything that they do not need for subsistence (Fullerton 1973: 29–30). Furthermore, there was a split within Methodism itself between Orthodox Wesleyanism, which preached submission to the powers-that-be, and breakaway radical factions, which used the forms of self-organisation taught by Methodism to fight for the rights of the working classes (Thompson 1968: 44–49); for example, ‘The Primitive Methodists, thoroughly proletarian and lay in their attitudes, made a direct contribution to the workers’ movement by articulating the demands of the discontented population of town and countryside and attracting them to its side’ (Vester 1975). Both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism came to India and Sri Lanka during the colonial period, while Evangelical and Pentecostalist sects arrived in the post-colonial period.
This radical split in Christianity, cutting across the doctrinal disputes that have received far more attention, has survived into modern times. Thus the SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) published Christianity and the Market: Christian Social Thought for Our Times by John Atherton (1992) and The Enterprise Culture: A Challenging New Theology of Wealth Creation by Peter Sedgwick (1992), both of which maintain that capitalism is compatible with Christian values. Atherton argues that the operation of the market-related values of self-interest, efficiency, freedom of competition and individualism lead to the most effective distribution of scarce resources and to the satisfaction of needs, even while he acknowledges that the market also breeds social evils such as poverty, unemployment and the destruction of the environment, and therefore needs regulation and the provision of safety nets. Sedgwick endorses the development of an enterprise culture encouraging the proliferation of small businesses on the grounds that it promotes freedom and creativity in work, even while he recognises the catastrophic effect of the recession on small firms and the growth of poverty and environmental degradation. These authors do not seem to see social evils such as poverty, inequality and destruction of the environment as intrinsic to capitalism, or, if they do, cannot imagine the possibility of a more just and equitable social order.
By contrast, Capital and the Kingdom: Theological Ethics and Economic Order by Timothy Gorringe (1994), published by a Christian publishing house, Orbis Books, in the US and by the SPCK in Britain, sees poverty, inequality and environmental destruction as inseparable from capitalism, and the capitalist organisation of both work and leisure as incompatible with the human fulfilment promised by Christianity. He argues for a rejection of capitalist individualism, which divides people and sets them against each other, and affirmation that humanity consists in working together in solidarity against alienation and for social justice. He concludes that while there is nothing wrong with enterprise, initiative and ownership as such, they become destructive when harnessed to profit, power, self-aggrandisement and inequality, as they are under capitalism. This is a view explicitly worked out in dialogue with Marxism, and clearly antithetical to the views of Atherton and Sedgewick.
Christianity in India
It is impossible to discuss Christianity in India without referring to the caste system and the large degree to which it overlaps with class divisions.
The arrival of Christianity in India is shrouded in mythology, according to which St Thomas the apostle arrived in Kerala in 52 AD and converted a number of landowning Brahmin families. There is historical evidence for the existence of thriving Syrian (Orthodox) Christian communities in India by the 6th century. Syrian Christians were well integrated into Hindu society, and enjoyed a social status on par with the upper-caste Nairs. Their observance of rituals for upholding caste purity and exclusion of lower castes, even lower-caste converts to Christianity, indicates that they too saw themselves in this way (Mathew 2014: 29–31). Along with the desire to maintain the difference in status, there was also an economic interest involved in the case of landowning Syrian Christians who owned Dalits belonging to a slave caste, seen as even lower than other Dalits. This economic profile suggests that Syrian Christians were not converted in 52 AD, when missionary activity would have been directed towards the poor, but in the 4th century or later.
Slavery in the territories in possession of the East India Company was not abolished by the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, but only by the Indian Slavery Act of 1843, and persisted even after that, as accounts by missionaries reveal (Mathew 2014: 93–94). This was not domestic slavery, as purity laws did not allow lower castes to work in the vicinity of upper castes; instead, Dalit slaves worked in the fields for their owners. The British had mixed motives in abolishing slavery, since this measure created a proletariat which was needed to work in the plantations (Mathew 2014: 115–117). Entrepreneurial Syrian Christians also moved into the capitalist plantation and banking sectors (Heller 1999: 209).
Given these caste dynamics, it is not surprising that the conversion of lower castes to Christianity took place only much later, with the advent of European missionaries during the period of colonialism. Portuguese missionaries began conversions to the Roman Catholic church in the 16th century, mainly along the Western coast. Many converts were from the fishing castes: not the lowest of the low, but lower than the Syrian Christians, some of whom were also absorbed into the Catholic church. Dalit conversions were carried out mainly by Anglican and other European Protestant missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries (Mathew 2014: 11). Right-wing Hindu nationalists alleged that the medical and educational services provided by missionaries to Dalits and Adivasis (i.e. tribals who were also outside the caste system) were ultimately aimed at conversion, and Mahatma Gandhi agreed. However B.R. Ambedkar, who chaired the Constituent Assembly and was himself a Dalit, questioned this argument, asking why it was not possible to believe that missionaries served suffering humanity as an essential requirement of their religion (Mathew 2014: 81–82). Dalit Christian accounts of missionary activities ‘do not identify the missionary actions as mere attempts to gather more “sheep for the fold” or as the imperial agenda to win over the indigenous, but also as morally and ethically charged actions that are based on the ideals of love, equality, justice, etc.’ (Mathew 2014: 83).
This dual character of European (and in a few cases American) missionary activity – on one side offering material benefits like healthcare and education along with a doctrine preaching equality and social justice, on the other being associated with the colonisers and working with them – resulted in some scepticism among Adivasis in the Dangs in Gujarat, although they were glad enough to make use of the medical and educational services provided by missionaries. Conversely, opposition to missionary activities, including that of nationalists like Gandhi, was not simply in order to oppose the colonisers, but also to maintain upper caste dominance over tribal communities and in the larger society, as well as to uphold the status of tribal elites and exorcists (Hardiman 2002: 5–9).
Post-colonial missionary activity by Indian Christians, who sought to build a church free from links to imperialism, elicited a different response. While building schools, hostels and dispensaries, they developed indigenous forms of worship and were more tolerant of other religious traditions, making no effort to proselytise. They were accepted and respected by the Adivasis, most of whom did not, however, convert to Christianity. This changed in the last two decades of the 20th century, with the advent of Pentecostalists and Evangelicals and the conversion of many thousands of Adivasis in the Dangs. Predictably, the Hindu nationalists were alarmed, and in 1998–1999 launched a wave of violent attacks against Christians, beating up and even killing them, and burning down their churches (Hardiman 2002: 13–14).
There is considerable hypocrisy in Hindu objections to Dalits and Adivasis converting to Islam and Christianity, given that prior to the British colonisation of India they were considered outside the pale of Hinduism altogether. Dalits in particular were excluded from temples, villages and wells used by caste Hindus, and explicitly classified as non-Hindus by both Hindus and themselves. Indeed ‘when Srinivasa Raghavaiyangar, a prominent Madras Brahmin and civil servant, advised the colonial state in 1892 that “the best thing that can happen to [the untouchables] is conversion to either the Christian or Muhammadan religion,” this highly publicized remark provoked no hue and cry from Hindu religionists,’ because they shared his belief that Hinduism was the religion of a ‘superior race’ that had erected ‘moral barriers’ against the inferior race (Roberts 2016: 133). But this changed in 1909 when the franchise was extended, and representation of different communities became linked to their demographic strength (Roberts 2016: 125–128). At this point, it suddenly became critically important to claim Dalits and Adivasis for Hinduism. As Hindu nationalist U.N. Mukherji argued in a 1909 pamphlet, ‘the very survival of Hinduism in the face of a putative Muslim threat (and later a Christian one) depended on its ability to incorporate Dalits and tribals within its fold’ (Roberts 2016: 129). The very same belief drives Hindu nationalists to this day, although it hides behind arguments that Hinduism is a non-proselytising religion whereas Islam and Christianity are proselytising religions, and the former is tolerant while the latter are aggressive. None of these arguments are supported by evidence, yet Gandhi also propagated them, along with the belief that conversion is disruptive of local communities and attacks the converts’ innermost identity and sense of self. Modern liberal elites who try to explain Hindu aggression as a perversion of Hinduism’s tolerant tradition by the “semiticized” version of Hinduism espoused by Hindu nationalists share the same belief (Roberts 2016: 132–134).[3]
At first sight this struggle over the incorporation of marginalised strata into Hinduism seems to have little to do with capitalism, but its relevance to class becomes evident when it is recognised that Dalits and Adivasis are even today pushed into the most menial and exploitative occupations, and their attempts to break out of these conditions are met with systematic discrimination and endemic violence. Gandhi’s arguments against conversion reveal an underlying class-and-caste-racist attitude when he says, as quoted in a biography written by an admirer while he was alive, ‘The poor Harijans have no mind, no intelligence, no sense of difference between God and no God… they have not the intelligence to distinguish between Jesus and Mahomed and Nanak and so on… They can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than can a cow’ (Tendulkar 2016: Chapter 8, ‘Constructive Revolution 1936,’ pp.1, 5, 6). In his view, apparently, such people cannot be educated and are suited only for the least skilled and most menial jobs. His patron, the big industrialist G. D. Birla, agreed with him and funded his Anti-Untouchability League, which sought to eliminate untouchability (but not caste) in order to keep Dalits within the Hindu fold (Roberts 2016: 138). It is not an accident that the vast majority of child labourers in India are Dalits and Adivasis, condemned to perpetuate their own marginalisation from one generation to the next, and that in 2016, upper-caste-dominated trade unions failed to defeat a child labour law amendment that facilitates child labour and thus makes it easier to deprive them of an education (Gupta 2016).
In an interesting contrast, the class implications of the Gospels were first highlighted not by a Christian but by K. Damodaran, the eminent Marxist scholar, writer and leader of the Communist Party of India (CPI), who was himself an atheist. In the early 1950s, he wrote a pamphlet in Malayalam entitled ‘Jesus Christ in Moscow,’ in which he drew parallels between quotations from the Bible and from Marx’s writings to portray Jesus as a communist revolutionary who worked for the poor and for slaves, and had been crucified as punishment for his political activities (Sasi 2012). As Sasi (2012) points out, the connotation of ‘Moscow’ was the Russian revolution, and ‘At that time, the communists did not know that the real architects of the revolution, their families and followers were butchered and killed in that wonderland’. What was most extraordinary was the fact that an atheist communist interpreted the Bible from the same standpoint as liberation theology, but more than ten years before liberation theology was a movement in India or, indeed, anywhere else in the world.
In his extraordinary ethnographic study of a Dalit slum in Chennai (formerly Madras), Nathaniel Roberts (2016) debunks the myths about conversions propagated by both Hindu nationalists and Gandhi, and draws a vivid portrait of anti-capitalist Christianity in an Indian setting. There was no communal conflict in the slum where he lived, Anbu Nagar, or surrounding slums, ‘because Christians and Hindus were not distinct communities there. Slum dwellers identified individually as following one or the other of these mutually exclusive faiths, but they lived within households in which, more often than not, someone else followed a different religion than they did. And all slum dwellers had close kin whose religious identity was different from theirs… Men and women both insisted religion was the individual’s choice, and neither tried to pressure the other to conform, even as everyone continued to insist that their own path was best’ (Roberts 2016: 153). If religion did not define the collective identity of slum residents, neither did it ‘define who they were, their very selfhood. They did not, in other words, share Gandhi’s view that a person’s religion is “a more integral part of one’s self than one’s body”’ (Roberts 2016: 154).
The absence of communal conflict was partly a consequence of the fact that they shared what Roberts calls a ‘slum religion,’ different from both mainstream Hinduism and mainstream Pentecostal Christianity. Thus the Hindus and Christians of Anbu Nagar both ‘defined sin not primarily as rebellion against divine will but as harmful action. Though sins came in a great variety of forms, their defining feature was the harm they caused to others, to oneself, or to the relationship between self and other. Stealing and murder were commonly cited examples of the first; drug taking and other harmful habits, of the second; promise breaking and cheating, of the third’ (Roberts 2016: 164). They shared the belief that the caste system was ‘virtually the paradigm of immorality,’ which meant that slum Hindus denied that caste had anything to do with Hinduism, characterising it as a human creation, and slum Christians agreed, despite having no vested interest in defending Hinduism (Roberts 2016: 173–174).
Therefore what distinguished Christians from Hindus in the slum was not so much their espousal of a completely different morality, but their belief that their God was the one true God, who was both loving and powerful, and who cared for the poor and was especially likely to help ‘people like us’ (Roberts 2016: 168–169). They also participated in collective worship. The various churches in the slum were established by pastors, most of whom had been ordinary slum dwellers prior to their ordination, and all of whom were Dalits. All the pastors were male and claimed to have extraordinary spiritual powers, but 85 to 90 per cent of Christians were women, who formed quasi-autonomous organisational networks among themselves and believed that it was their own direct relationship with Christ that was central. These networks actively supported women who were in some kind of trouble – in terms of their health, finances, or family relationships, for example – by praying for them collectively and offering help; and by contrast with most religious leaders, the pastors supported the women’s networks by bringing their concerns into their own prayers and sermons and providing an opportunity for the women to speak in the services they conducted, which were broadcast in the slum via loudspeakers. In this way, the burden of a woman’s suffering was construed as being the responsibility of her whole congregation, and not something she was forced to bear alone (Roberts 2016: 185–213).
Thus ‘The critique and transformation of existing social relations were central to the discourse of the slum church. The problematic social relations Christianity addressed – those between slum dwellers and others, and among slum dwellers themselves – were not clearly distinguished from one another. Both were subsumed within what slum Christians called “sin” … To encounter the Bible in Anbu Nagar was to discover a book that reverberated with the drums of revolutionary justice and the promise of human equality’; furthermore, this liberation was promised not just to Christians but to all who were poor and whose humanity had been rejected by others (Roberts 2016: 221–224). They believed the revolution would be brought about by divine agency alone; in the meantime, slum Christians were called upon to affirm their own dignity and worth, to suffer without retaliating, and to care for one another (Roberts 2016: 230–232).
The residents of Anbu Nagar, both Christians and Hindus, had developed a conception of religion far more sophisticated than Gandhi’s, in that while they distinguished sharply between their beliefs, these differences of belief did not disrupt their shared morality nor their sense of shared community with the oppressed and exploited in the slum and throughout the world.
Jesuit priest Stan Swamy took more active steps to bring about social transformation. He spent three decades of his life engaged in non-violent struggles for the rights of Adivasis in Jharkhand, supporting their resistance to dispossession and pauperisation by government-backed corporations, and publishing research showing that the vast majority of alleged ‘Naxalite’ tribals in jail had no links to the Maoists. This put him on a collision course with the Narendra Modi regime, which arrested him on fabricated charges in October 2020. Despite being 84 years old and suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, he was neither brought to trial nor given bail, but was incarcerated in a Covid-infested jail and subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment; consequently he suffered pain, lost the ability to walk, write and look after himself, and contracted Covid-19. By the time he was admitted to hospital in mid-June on the orders of the Bombay High Court, it was too late, and he died on 5 July 2021 (Ellis-Petersen 2021). He had said ‘I am ready to pay the price whatever it be’ for his activism, and lived up to that commitment to the end.
Christianity in Sri Lanka
Both archeological findings and written records provide evidence of ancient Christian communities in Sri Lanka established by Persian Nestorians in the 5th and 6th centuries, but there is no mention of these after the 7th century (Li Tang 2014). The main waves of conversion occurred with colonisation, first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch, and finally by the British. The ruling elites in Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was called at the time it became independent in 1948, were less resistant to Christian conversion than the elites in India; for example, prominent political leaders J.R. Jayawardene, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and Ranil Wickremesinghe were all born into Christian families and were baptised (Somasunderam 2005). However, when it became more politically expedient for Sinhalese politicians to be Buddhists, they duly declared themselves to be Buddhists. Whatever religious beliefs they had did not prevent them from promoting capitalism in the island. While Bandaranaike’s politics were more state capitalist, and were even seen by a section of the left as socialist because they entailed state ownership and control of large sectors of the economy, Jayawardene and Wickremesinghe promoted a particularly virulent form of neoliberal capitalism from 1977 onwards. Subsidies and other elements of the welfare state were slashed, public services were privatised, and there was an all-out assault on the trade union movement. Much of the thrust of their industrialisation agenda lay in the establishment of free trade zones in which a large majority of employees were women, and where the state aligned itself very clearly with authoritarian employers (many of which were multinational corporations) and clamped down so severely on trade union activity that there was effectively no freedom of association or right to bargain collectively (Biyanwila 2010: 56–60).
Trade unions outside the zones were not in a much better position, with workers being harassed, intimidated and threatened with dismissal if they did not join the ruling United National Party’s corporatist ‘union,’ the Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya (JSS), which more resembled gangs of thugs used to crush worker protests and carry out anti-Tamil pogroms. Other unions set up the Joint Trade Union Action Committee, which called a strike on 18 July 1980 in support of their demands for higher basic wages and cost-of-living allowances. Jayawardene announced that some 80,000 workers who had not reported to work that day would lose their jobs, and although some of them were subsequently reinstated, this constituted one of the largest-scale victimisations in the history of Sri Lanka (Rasseedin 2011). After the outbreak of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) uprising in 1987, state intimidation and victimisation turned into outright murder and enforced disappearances of trade unionists and worker activists (Biyanwila 2010: 61). Plantation workers of recent Indian origin, disenfranchised and denied citizenship shortly after Independence in 1948 and suffering the worst forms of exploitation and most abysmal living conditions of all Sri Lankan workers, were further hit by the privatisation of plantations in 1992 and 1995, which undermined their already weak bargaining power (Biyanwila 2010: 61–64).
If these concerted attacks on the working class in the interests of neoliberal capitalism were carried out by politicians who had once professed to be Christians and were supported by affluent Christians, the presence of Christians in the opposition to these policies was also quite evident (Somasunderam 2005). The Christian Workers’ Fellowship (CWF), founded in 1958 by Vijaya Vidyasagara and others, was an early example of an organisation which embodied the belief that Christianity and socialism are intertwined, and Christians must be part of the trade union movement (Nesiah 2017). The CWF worked hard to counteract the forces dividing Sinhalese and Tamils, as did Bishop of Kurunegala Lakshman Wickremasinghe, who also supported the strikers of July 1980 and presided over a mass for justice for them organised by the CWF (Abeyasekera 2008; Kadirgamar 2010). A historic challenge to the outlawing of labour organisation and activism in the free trade zones was mounted by the 1982 Polytex strike, led mostly by women workers. They managed to withstand an onslaught by the employers, who mobilised the local police, politicians, thugs and the media to discredit and intimidate them. In this the women workers were assisted by local Christian (mainly Catholic) organisations, which put their facilities at their service (Biyanwila 2010: 60).
Paul Caspersz, a Jesuit, set up the Satyodaya Centre for Social Research and Encounter in Kandy (located in the central hill country of Sri Lanka) in 1972, with the objectives of improving the appalling living and working conditions of the Tamil plantation workers and creating bonds between them and the local Sinhalese villagers. He believed that the Beatitudes are the beatitudes of the poor and oppressed, and his writings reveal an explicit sympathy with Marxism; for example, ‘I have sometimes said and it is worth repeating now, that the God whom Marx rejected is the God whom I also reject… The God I believe in is the God who in Jesus became a human, a colonized and anti-imperialist human, a worker immensely concerned about the loss of human freedom and the oppression of the poor’ (Caspersz 2005: 100, 195). He was a vehement critic of the neoliberal model of ‘development’, arguing that, on the contrary, development must be conceived ‘in terms of the centrality and primacy of the human person in community… It means economic growth, but such economic growth as promotes humanization and is never at the expense of equity’ (Caspersz 2005: 253). His belief in the God of justice and love inspired both his acceptance of Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his own activism, and he remains ‘one of the most important influences in the radicalisation of the Christian social conscience in Sri Lanka’ (Somasunderam 2005).
Michael Rodrigo was a priest, who in 1980 moved to a remote village near Buttala in the southeast and set up Suba Seth Gedara, a centre for Buddhist-Christian dialogue. He shared the hardships of the rural poor, living in a wattle-and-daub hut without electricity or running water. He also shared their struggles against the multinationals threatening them with dispossession. The JVP insurrection that began in 1987 was used by the government as a pretext to eliminate many nonviolent critics and opponents of its policies, and on 10 November 1987, Rodrigo was shot dead while celebrating mass (Shanie 2007; Hensman 2012).
None of these Christians were interested in converting people to Christianity; they saw their work for economic, social and political justice as an end in itself, and a requirement of their faith.
Conclusion
Since Christianity emerged as a movement of the poor, it is understandable that early Christianity was hostile to the wealthy and powerful, and this hostility has been transmitted through the ages to anti-capitalist or socialist Christians[4] in India, Sri Lanka and other countries. However, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the faith was interpreted in ways that made it compatible with wealth and power. During the Reformation, Protestantism was embraced and developed by businessmen who were budding capitalists, and argued that the accumulation of capital could be a way of serving God. These beliefs have been transmitted to some Christians in India and Sri Lanka.
In India, where a high proportion of Christians come from oppressed groups, the very act of conversion is an act of rebellion against the ruling elite, and is often linked to a critique of wealth and power. In Sri Lanka, many among the elites converted to Christianity during the colonial period, but reverted to Buddhism when that became more expedient, while a significant section who continued to be Christians espoused socialism. It is a matter of historical interest that the combination of socialism and Christianity, which became known as ‘liberation theology’ when it swept through Latin America after 1968, made its appearance in India and Sri Lanka in the 1950s.
It is evident, therefore, that ‘Christianity’ is not a monolithic entity with a unified attitude to capitalism or wealth; within the same denomination, different and even diametrically opposed attitudes to capitalism and wealth can be found. In India and Sri Lanka, where Christians are a minority who are subjected to persecution from time to time, the faith has more adherents among lower castes and the poor than among the ruling elites.
(This article was published in the Indian Journal of Secularism, Volume 24, No.3-4, October 2020-March 2021, but publication was delayed to August 2022 due to Covid disruptions.)
[1] In the 11th century, the Catholic church split into the (Eastern) Orthodox church and the (Western) Roman Catholic church.
[2] Of course, considerable violence had to be done to the teachings of Jesus to construe them as ‘business-friendly,’ and even to the teachings of the Old Testament, which is not as consistently opposed to wealth as the Gospels – see Peter Brooke: http://www.peterbrooke.org.uk/p%26t/griffiths/christian%20faith.html#anchor66556
[3] I cannot go into this issue in greater depth here, but these assumptions, which many secular political and intellectual leaders from a caste Hindu background share with aggressive Hindu nationalists, perhaps explain why the former have failed to combat the latter effectively.
[4] ‘Socialism’ can be defined broadly as the struggle for cooperative production to satisfy human needs in a non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian society.
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