Pentecostalism And Religious Conflict In Contemporary India

Conversion and the shifting discourse of violence -- Spreading like fire: the growth of Pentecostalism among tribals -- Taking refuge in Christ: four narratives on religious conversion -- Becoming believers: Adivasi women and the Pentecostal church -- Encountering the alien: Hindutva politics and anti-Christian violence -- Beyond the competing projects of conversion

Every year, there are several hundred attacks on India's Christians. These attacks are carried out by violent anti-minority activists, many of them provoked by what they perceive to be a Christian propensity for aggressive proselytization, or by rumored or real conversions to the faith. Pentecostals are disproportionately targeted. Drawing on extensive interviews, ethnographic work, and a vast scholarly literature on interreligious violence, Hindu nationalism, and Christianity in India, Chad Bauman examines this phenomenon. While some of the factors in the targeting of Pentecostals are obvious and expected-their relatively greater evangelical assertiveness, for instance-other significant factors are less acknowledged and more surprising: marginalization of Pentecostals by "mainstream" Christians, the social location of Pentecostal Christians, and transnational flows of missionary personnel, theories, and funds. A detailed analysis of Indian Christian history, contemporary Indian politics, Indian social and cultural characteristics, and Pentecostal belief and practice, this volume sheds important light on a troubling fact of contemporary Indian life.

In Global Visions of Violence, the editors and contributors argue that violence creates a lens, bridge, and method for interdisciplinary collaboration that examines Christianity worldwide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By analyzing the myriad ways violence, persecution, and suffering impact Christians and the imagination of Christian identity globally, this interdisciplinary volume integrates the perspectives of ethicists, historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers to generate new conversations. Taken together, the chapters in this book challenge scholarship on Christian growth that has not accounted for violence while analyzing persecution narratives that can wield data toward partisan ends. This allows Global Visions of Violence to push urgent conversations forward, giving voice to projects that illuminate wide and often hidden landscapes that have been shaped by global visions of violence, and seeking solutions that end violence and turn toward the pursuit of justice, peace, and human rights among suffering Christians.

This book explores the identity, context and features of Pentecostalism in Rajasthan, India as well as the internal and external issues facing Pentecostals. It argues for an indigenous origin of Pentecostalism in Rajasthan, as it is a product of local Spirit revivals in the existing churches and the missionary activities of Indian Pentecostals. It also reveals that both the intra-church as well as extra-church issues place Pentecostals in a 'missio-ethical dilemma.' The book aims to suggest 'a contextual missiology of the Spirit,' as a new model of contextual missiology from a Pentecostal perspective. It is presented as a glocal, ecumenical, transformational, and public missiology.

Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity is one of the largest religious movements in the world today. It is a recent form of Christianity that emphasizes direct personal experience of God through baptism with the Holy Spirit. While the literature on Pentecostalism is constantly rising, they mostly focus on Western societies and are from a theological perspective. There is a dearth of well-researched studies that critically analyse the phenomenon of Pentecostal–Charismatic Christianity in India. Addressing this gap, Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames focuses on groups at the periphery of the religious space in Goa, while locating them within Christianity globally. It broadens our understanding of Pentecostal–Charismatic Christianity in Goa as a rapidly expanding and overtly evangelistic movement within a pluralist, non-Christian society. Abreu assesses the impact of religion on society, analysing how the symbols, beliefs, rituals, and organizational structure of the neo-Pentecostal sects and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal influence religious identities, world views, and the everyday life activities of individual adherents. This the author does by drawing on extensive fieldwork, concepts, analyses, and interpretations provided by scholars of religion in sociology, anthropology, history, as well as theology.