The Guardian and the Dalits of Nepal

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/aug/15/they-use-money-to-promote-christianity-nepal-battle-for-souls

In the Hindu sphere it is almost natural that the Dalits or Untouchables would be the most likely group to embrace Christianity with its message of universal salvation and its largely egalitarian ecclesiastical construct. I use the term egalitarian with hesitation because it is used by others in different ways and I don't want to be misunderstood. Biblical Egalitarianism does not mean the elimination of male and female roles both in the family and in the Church but it certainly does mean an elimination of class distinctions, something at the core of many Asian societies.

The Early Church was a blessing to the underclasses, a reality some have in our own day tried to exploit for their own political purposes. Women were treated as full members and many male slaves were able to hold ecclesiastical office. Patrician status, familial, blood or economic ties did not grant privilege in the Church. This would of course change in the Post-Constantinian framework and sadly even the many missionaries who brought the gospel to Asia and elsewhere in the 18^th and 19^th centuries did so in a colonial framework. Race played a significant part in this structure and in the whole outlook of colonialism. While class no longer has the same structure in the West that it did a few generations ago, it still infects the Church through various means. The racial divide is all but self-evident.

The Guardian article as might be expected is hardly friendly to Christianity. Much of the modern secular world finds such evangelism to be offensive, except of course when it is their worldview which is being advocated. Feminism, sodomy and secularism which have all taken on a religious component are actively promoted. The advocates of such views falsely believe their ideologies represent legitimate developments born of science but in fact represent Scientism.*  

That said, there is a real danger in Christianity being used as a bridge to Western access and all that it entails.

There are well meaning Christians who fall into financial traps, there are others who disingenuously 'use' Christianity for financial gain. Sometimes these are the 'converts' and in other cases these are the bureaucrats and those involved in 'ministry'. Corruption is as old as the Fall. Financial corruption existed before Constantinianism. The Shift which began in the 4^th century only made it worse and created new opportunities for it to flourish.

There is bitterness in the fact that Dalits are turning to Christianity and this reality is turning the Hindu Caste system and Hindu Sacral society on its head. One hardly needs to shed tears for the false religion of Hinduism. That said, as Christians suffer difficulties and outright persecution in places like Nepal and India I continue to hope and pray that their identity is not wed to Western culture. In other words I hope that Christianity is not identified with Western capitalism, imperialism and decadence. In the minds of many Christianity is a force for evil. It is corporations stealing their resources, often utilising violence in the process. Christianity is equated with colonialism and the militarism of the Western Empires which since the end of World War II is largely the province of the United States.

Christianity is also associated with Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the music industry. Because religion is often thought of in holistic-cultural terms, the culture of the West including its sodomy and promiscuity are associated with Christianity. The fact that so many Western Christians have bought into this false construct of the Kingdom of God has not helped, even though they would obviously reject the various evil aspects of modern Western culture. I say that even while acknowledging they will in many cases fail to reject many evil aspects of pre-modern Western culture... the very culture they would return to, romanticise and celebrate.

This article is cause for some optimism and yet it requires caution. The Guardian is of course completely hypocritical and wishes to shine light on the misdeeds of Christian missionary movements. However I am confident that if the Dalits were converting en masse to homosexuality and feminism the UK editors would report the story in triumphalist tones.

* I define Scientism as the metaphysical and transcendent conceptualisation of an often materialist oriented scientific method applied to and imposed upon questions of being and existence that fall outside the realms of empirical inquiry and verification. It is in effect the religion necessarily born of extremist empiricism, an attempt to extract a unified theory or coherence from the inevitable nihilism inherent in materialist cosmologies. Like all religions it has its own anthropological and soteric meta-narratives, messianic elements, eschatology, epistemology and ethics.