In a little over a month, the Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony and his organization, the Edmund Burke Foundation, will convene the fourth National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC. The event has sometimes been regarded as a gathering place for conservative Christians seeking political alternatives to progressivism and civic libertarianism, a space for such Christians to try and think together about what it would mean for socially conservative Christians in the west to actually use political power to advance the good, as understood by Christianity. Yet there has always been an ambiguity about this too.
A Christian vision of national life can mean an attempt to bring Christian moral teachings to bear on questions and problems of national identity and political life. It can also mean a political vision in which the "nation" is preeminent and "Christian" is sometimes a descriptor of that nation's folk religion. In this latter understanding, certain Christian critiques of the nation are categorically excluded because the nation comes first. The key question is this: Is the life of the nation answerable to the moral teachings of Christian faith or must Christianity's moral teachings be relativized to accommodate the life of the nation?
The tension between these two conceptions of "Christian Nationalism" within the National Conservatism movement seems to be diminishing with time with the latter vision winning out. Increasingly for the national conservatives it would seem that the life of the "nation" takes precedence over the teachings of Scripture.
Christianity, in this vision, is less an all-encompassing account of reality that helps humans discern the true and submit themselves to the creator and is more one instance of the religious impulse in mankind, an impulse that is universal but manifests itself different from place to place. "Nationalism" in this sense, then, must account for that religious impulse, but the religions impulse cannot be allowed to undermine national identity, which is to say religions cannot make ultimate truth claims that are universally binding.
Thus, for example, Christianity is the folk religion in the west and so is part of the "national" identity of western nations. Meanwhile, Islam is the folk religion of northern Africa and most of western and central Asia. Hinduism is the folk religion of India.
Why do I say that the National Conservatism movement is now increasingly committed to nationally constrained folk religion? A perusal of the speakers list at this year's event provides an answer. Amongst evangelicals, the list includes both Moscow ID pastor Douglas Wilson and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler.
On the website, both are presented to readers as Christian authorities. Mohler in particular is touted as the president of one of the world's largest seminaries. So they are clearly being invited to the event because of their authority and presence within the American church. Now consider a third speaker who will be joining the Christian minister Wilson and trainer of Christian ministers Mohler this July.
His name is Ram Madhav and he is a close, long-time associate of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi's administration has become notorious in global politics for its own Hindu Nationalist vision for India. A core element of this nationalism has been the systemic targeting of Muslim and Christian populations in India. Indeed, Modi himself was the Chief Minister of the Gujarat region in 2002 when a pogrom broke out in which over 200 mosques were destroyed, around 150,000 people were displaced, and as many as 250 women and girls were gang-raped and burned to death. (There were also notable instances of persecution of Christians in Gujarat from the same time.) While the investigative team appointed by the Indian Supreme Court would later find "no prosecutable evidence" regarding Modi's role in the pogrom, Modi's own government has gone on to target and seek to discredit human rights activists who have accused Modi of being involved. Additionally, because of Gujarat Modi was actually denied entrance to the United States between 2005 and 2014 when he rose to the premiership.
In 2014, Modi became India's Prime Minister. Since his rise the nation's Muslim and Christian populations have suffered immensely. Indeed, though the targeting of Muslims has often been more explicit and aggressive, India's Christians have been subjected to enough mistreatment that Voice of the Martyrs, the Jubilee Campaign, and Open Doors have dedicated extensive resources to documenting what is happening in India.
This piece from Open Doors is simultaneously grim and inspirational as an account of the humble faith of our brothers and sisters in India who are suffering under Modi's government.
When a pastor visited his village in India to tell people about Jesus, Hari* was intrigued by the message he heard – but also warned of the dangers it would bring.
He watched as three families from his tribe became Christians through the pastor, only to be driven out of the village. Since traditional religion is so deeply entwined with the tribe’s culture and history, choosing to follow another belief is a seen as a rejection of the community.
The families fled to the pastor’s village, where they were warmly embraced. Together with the message he had earlier heard from the pastor, this had a profound impact on Hari. “I was so amazed at the love these Christians showed to each other,” he says. “I knew this was the God that I wanted to believe and follow. From then on, there was no turning back for me.”
His family were furious – just as he expected. “My parents hated me. My brothers and sisters forced me to leave the house because of my newfound faith.”
Despite this, Hari stood firm in his faith, even deciding to study Christian theology. After completing the course, he dedicated himself to full-time ministry in his village, with many people giving their lives to Jesus.
The story continues:
Threatened by the remarkable growth of Hari’s church, extremists looked for ways to thwart its impact – including false accusations of breaking anti-conversion laws, a common tactic used against Christians in many parts of India. These laws purport to prevent forced religious conversions, but are abused to target and harass Christians and other minority faiths.
“The extremists influenced local police and had me arrested on false charges of forceful conversion, but the police could not find any evidence and had to let me go,” he says. “I continued my ministry and then, one day, I baptised some people. These were people who wanted to be baptised out of their free will – but the police arrested me. Again, they found no evidence and had to release me.”
Worse was to come. “During our Easter service, religious extremists, along with the police, barged into our service. They threatened the believers, telling them they would be arrested and drove them all away from the church.”
Finally:
Hari’s church was closed and he’s since been unable to get it reopened. “We now gather in secret – only in small numbers in houses,” he says. “We take precautions, but I am confident that, even if they kill me for my faith, I want to continue to serve the Lord. Christ has given me His life and, all these years, He has protected me amongst all these threats. I know there is so much work yet to complete for God’s Kingdom.”
Madhav's defenders might object at several points here.
First, they might claim that this is anti-Indian fake news published by leftist organizations in America. I am yet to meet a person who regards either Voice of the Martyrs or Open Doors as being in any way "leftist" or "progressive." The Washington Times, also linked above, is hardly left wing. But they might say that all the same and hope that you believe them.
Second, they might claim that Madhav himself is not involved in these attacks, or in the broader campaign of terror that has targeted many Christians and seen many churches burned across India. Yet clearly the riots and threats are, as Hari's story makes plain, done with the support of government actors. Minimally, police seldom intervene in defense of persecuted Muslims and Christians. But often they also participate in intimidation campaigns or even arrest religious leaders in Islamic or Christian communities. To suggest that these attacks on Christians happen against the will of Modi's ruling party is simply a sort of naivety shading into willful blindness.
Some may try to claim that the fact that Modi's party attacks Christians does not necessarily implicate Madhav himself. But one could only say that if one was entirely ignorant of Madhav's entire career.
Madhav has been engaged in Hindu Nationalist politics since the early 1980s, working in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the now-ruling political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indeed, in this particular case the best way of understanding the organizations that Madhav has spent his life serving would be to see the RSS as a kind of umbrella organization promoting Hindu Nationalism with a political party arm, the BJP, and a religious arm, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) which also has a youth movement, the Bajrang Dal.
Madhav first joined the RSS as a pracharak in 1982 in a coastal state in southeast India. A pracharak plays a particularly important role in the RSS, as one book on the organization explains:
A full-time volunteer in the Sangh is known as a pracharak; the Swayamsevaks who are committed and devoted to the activities of the Sangh, and are capable, trained, and wish to dedicate their full time to the Sangh are known as pracharaks. The life of a pracharak is based on commitment, dedication, and discipline. ... The pracharak system is a critical institution within the Sangh. A pracharak is a full-time volunteer of the Sangh; he stays in the Sangh offices known as Karyalaya in the Sangh terminology.
Currently, there are more than seven thousand pracharaks who work in the Sangh, and in several Sangh parivar organizations; a pracharak remains a bachelor till the time he wants to serve as a pracharak and does not marry. The pracharak forms a communicative network outside the formal system of the Sangh, they are the links between the various levels of the Sangh; they have the commitment, expertise, and time to manage the Sangh activities.
Later the author goes on to describe their qualifications, skills, and lifestyle:
The typical pracharak is recruited in his early 20s. He is very well educated and usually is a college graduate; many a times, even doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers are pracharaks.... The pracharak is fluent in Hindi and English, besides the language of the area in which he works; an ideal pracharak has been associated with the Sangh activities since adolescent age. The lifestyle is very simple and is often connected with the ideals and philosophy of Hindutva. He is a pure vegetarian, his apparel is also traditional... He lives with very simple and bare necessities of life... Though he lives amongst families and in society as a normal worldly being but he is a (monk) for all practical purposes. The pracharak is the soul of the organization.
Thus even in the early 80s Madhav was deeply committed to the cause of Hindu Nationalism, living the life of a kind of politically engaged Hindu monk and dedicating all of his time and resources to the cause of Hindu Nationalism.
He remained in that role until 2000 when he moved to Delhi to work as the chief spokesperson for the RSS, closer to the halls of power in Indian politics. In a 2003 letter he referred to the Hindu Nationalist movement in India as, "a movement for the self-assertion of a civilization. It is a wounded civilization trying to re-invent its roots. It has to be understood properly instead of dismissed with contempt." He then went on in the same letter to defend a 1992 attack that destroyed a prominent mosque and which had played a major role in the BJP's initial rise to power.
In 2004, after the BJP was defeated in a shock election result, Madhav blamed the defeat on the party's lack of ideological commitment, saying that because they ran more on the personality and policies of their aging leader rather than embracing the "emotive" heart of the Hindu Nationalist project.
Later that year when Madhav was invited to speak at the University of Pennsylvania, a number of Penn professors protested in a strongly worded statement condemning the extremist ties Madhav already had established and the methods used by the RSS to grow and advance their movement:
As your colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, and as concerned academics, we write to register our astonishment, and our protest, at your decision to invite Ram Madhav, the official spokesman for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of India to speak on our campus under the aegis of the Center for the Advanced Study of India. As you, and literally millions of people in India who have been taught to fear the murderous militancy of RSS cadres know, this is an organization which was founded with the sole purpose of fabricating a Hindu-rashtra, a Hindu state and nation, out of the multi-religious communities or India. Its history, right to the present moment, is a history of orchestrated violence against non-Hindu communities, and it has, along with its brother organizations in the Sangh Parivar like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, been responsible for the most reprehensible forms of communal violence and political thuggery seen in India. (Just in case you have missed hearing about these activities, we are appending three news reports on very recent attacks on Christian missionaries by cadres of the RSS).
This announcement makes Ram Madhav sound like a young public relations officer for a hitherto quiet organization of socio-cultural “do gooders” rather than describe him accurately as the public face of an organization that has vitiated public and political life in India for over half a century now.
Note that Madhav was already linked with anti-Christian violence dating as far back as 2004. Madhav's ties to these activities, in other words, predated his 2014 deputation to the BJP and Prime Minister Modi.
In 2009 Madhav showed up in another news story indicative of his hostility to Indian Christians. Certain laws in India dating back to the days of governance under the Indian National Congress, the party of founding father Jawaharlal Nehru, provided a kind of preferential policy for both Dalits, the traditionally "untouchable" caste in Hinduism's strict caste system, and also other policies meant to protect religious minorities, such as Christians and Muslims. In 2009, Hindu dalits were speaking out against the religious policies because, in their view, it gave Christian and Muslim dalits an unfair advantage relative to other dalits. Madhav offered his support for their argument, which would deprive Christian dalits of some of their only real legal or cultural protections in India, and warned against the danger of "provoking" Hindus in an election year:
His argument has found support in a familiar quarter. The Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing Hindu organization that is an ally of the Hindu Nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), sees the Muslim and Christian demand as a threat to Hindu rights and “is committed to opposing the demand in every possible way", says Ram Madhav, a spokesperson for the RSS. Madhav says he is confident that no government would risk provoking Hindu anger, especially in an election year.
In 2013, a group from Arktos Media, a European far right publishing house with ties to Richard Spencer and that has advertised in Man's World magazine published by Passage Press, traveled to India to meet with leaders from the RSS and BJP.
Amongst those who greeted them was Ram Madhav.
According to a post on Arktos’s Facebook page, on 26 October 2013, a “delegation” from Arktos, comprising Friberg and the former Swedish politician Patrick Ehn, paid an official visit to the BJP’s Bengaluru headquarters. Ehn had been ousted from the far-right Sweden Democrats party just five months earlier, for his neo-Nazi connections, and was now Arktos’s “director of marketing.”
In Bengaluru, they were greeted by Aravind Limbavali, the BJP’s general secretary for Karnataka, who, according to the Karnataka BJP’s website, has been an RSS worker for 35 years. The Facebook post said that Friberg and Ehn were welcomed with “flowers and gifts,” and that they discussed “possibilities for cooperation between traditionalist and conservative movements in Europe and Asia, as well as potential strategies to counter liberal globalist hegemony, and of course, future book projects.”
Two months after meeting Limbavali, Friberg and Ehn travelled to Delhi and, according to another Facebook post, from 18 December, had “successful meetings” with Ram Madhav, who was then a spokesman for the “grassroots Hindu Nationalist organization RSS,” and Ravi Shankar Prasad, who was then the deputy leader of the BJP. The post discusses how the BJP is “expected by many analysts to take power in the coming 2014 national elections.”
Several months later the BJP took power in the 2014 elections. Modi became Prime Minister, and Madhav began formal work with Modi and the BJP as an organizer and media liaison. By year's end he had arranged a trip for Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to visit India as well as speeches given by Modi in New York City and Sydney, Australia.That November one writer described him as "Modi's ambassador at large."
Madhav's years of organizing and agitating through the activist organization RSS had now equipped him to serve as a kind of evangelist for Modi's government. Shortly after that piece, another writer referred to Madhav as the BJP's "firefighter" and Modi's "go-to man" in handling affairs with the global Indian diaspora. Indeed, he is perhaps best regarded as Modi's best media spokesperson and advocate.
In December of 2015, Madhav gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he commented on a map that had been seen in BJP party offices which depicted a "united" India in which Pakistan and Bangladesh were swallowed by the Indian nation-state. A Times of India journalist wrote about the incident, saying:
On December 7, Ram Madhav, a member of the ruling BJP, recorded an interview with Al Jazeera TV where he was asked a question about the Akhand Bharat map in the RSS headquarters in Nagpur.
The Akhand Bharat issue is a geopolitical time-bomb, as Madhav should have realized. The map shows an ‘undivided’ India, including Pakistan and Bangladesh — and occasionally, depending on the cartographer’s imagination, straying into Afghanistan and Myanmar.
Each is a sovereign state today. Hence Madhav’s statement — that one day all would merge to form an Akhand Bharat, or undivided India, was terribly timed. It did not help that the interview was aired during PM Narendra Modi’s impromptu Lahore visit to meet Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif.
Madhav seemed to suggest that nations like Pakistan actually had no claim to sovereignty in their own right. In this belief, he was entirely true to the imaginary Idea of Akhand India propounded by RSS — an idealized vision of unitary Bharatvarsha — but completely inaccurate as far as historical reality runs.
The picture that emerges, over a close study of Madhav's 40 year political career, is that of a man dedicated to the cause of Hindu Nationalism and who is willing to participate in, and maintain positions of leadership within, movements that routinely use threats of violence and engage in acts of violent in order to intimidate and coerce others.
In this respect, Madhav's nationalism is not noticeably different from the nationalism of a Vladimir Putin (their dreams of a united Russia and united India even overlap) or the western nationalism of far right figures in Europe and America. Or, rather, it is not noticeably different save in one significant way: Madhav's nationalism is Hindu, not Christian, and his movement is quite willing to violently persecute Christians in order to preserve its Hindu culture.
Of course, there is, in Madhav's mind, no real contradiction between appearing with Christian speakers while in the west and persecuting Christians in India. In Madhav's perspective, Westerners are Christians and Christianity is part of their "national" heritage. But, at the same time, it is an unwelcome intruder in India.
Indeed, a key part of securing Hindu Nationalism's place on the global stage involves securing good relations with Christians in America given that India needs a good bilateral relationship with the United States and the BJP's most obvious American allies will be American conservatives, many of whom are Christian. That said, when we turn toward Madhav's home in India, the picture is bleak and only getting worse: In recent years, violence targeting Christians and Muslims has continued to spike. In the summer of 2019, 40 Catholics were attacked while on pilgrimage. Around that same time, an Indian pastor was dragged from a prayer meeting by members of the RSS, who then beat him.
An NBC news report from the fall of 2023 tells the story of one church in the capital city that was attacked by right-wing Hindu mobs:
Abhishek Donald was at church last month, playing the drums as usual, when he and fellow parishioners were attacked by a right-wing Hindu mob.
During the assault, a man wielding an iron rod broke the knuckles on Abhishek’s right hand and struck him on the back at least twice, turning his skin blue. His pinkie remains twisted, rendering him unable to play the drums properly.
That hasn’t stopped Abhishek, 16, from going back to church.
The story continued:
The United Christian Forum, a human rights group based in New Delhi, said in July that since the start of the year there had been at least 400 acts of violence against Christians across 23 states in India, the Indian news outlet The Wire reported, up from 274 in the first half of 2022....
Experts say religious violence in India is driven by a desire to establish a Hindu state, trumping the secularism enshrined in the country’s constitution and instilling fear in those who stand opposed.
“What we are witnessing in India is majoritarianism couched as democracy,” said M. Sudhir Selvaraj, a lecturer at the University of Bradford in Britain who studies anti-Christian violence in India. “There is a sense that people feel emboldened by Modi as the leader. They feel that this is ‘our’ time and ‘our’ place.”
The story concluded by sharing the latest news from the attacked church:
On Sunday, only about a dozen people sat on the carpeted floor at the Prarthana Bhawan Church, which before the attack had sometimes been packed with more than 100 churchgoers. A framed painting of the Last Supper was missing its glass.
“They trashed it,” Bhati said, “but then we tried to fix it up and put it back on the wall.”
Local police, who have been providing the church with guards since the attack, said Tuesday that one man had been arrested in connection with it.
Rock Robinson was not in the church during the attack, but it did not deter him from attending the service on Sunday.
“I’m never, ever scared,” said Robinson, 73, who has been coming to the church for almost a decade.
He expressed determination in the face of the attack, which he said was inevitable given the nationalistic Hindu fervor that has gripped the country.
“Even Jesus’s disciples were put behind bars, but then they had an opportunity to preach, preach, preach,” he said.
The pastor’s 13-year-old son, Amosh, though a bit shaken by the attack, continued playing the drums undeterred. Some of the church’s drums were held together by black tape after the mob punched holes in them.
His father read out verses from the corner of the stage, rather than his usual spot in the center. The center mic had been stolen by the mob.
“Usually 50 people stand amid us,” Bhati told his parishioners.
“Even in a time of anger, we’re still praying,” he said.
Abhishek, the injured teenager, occasionally hit a drum with his left hand.
“They’re scared,” he said of the parishioners who were not there.
But the church is like home for Abhishek, who has been going there with his family for as long as he can remember.
“We live here,” he said. “We have nowhere to go.”
At this point many might protest, noting that even if all that is reported above regarding the persecution of Indian Christians is true and even if all that is reported about Madhav's involvement in the persecution of Christians is true, that doesn't mean Mohler and Wilson are at fault for sharing a stage with him. After all, it was Hazony and not Mohler or Wilson who presumably invited Madhav.
This excuse does not work, however. This is not the equivalent to, say, an elite web programmer who happens to be Christian and who decides to speak at a conference in a secular, professional capacity alongside others who might believe or actually do reprehensible things. As already noted, the bios for both Mohler and Wilson appearing on the NatCon website make it abundantly clear that both men are there in their capacity as Christian leaders in America who are friendly to nationalist movements. Wilson is closely tied to the publishing house that published Stephen Wolfe's The Case for Christian Nationalism, a book which Hazony also endorsed, calling it, "a pioneering work that paves the way for a new genre of American Christian-nationalist political theory."
Meanwhile, Mohler is one of the leading figures in America's largest Protestant denomination, one in which a group of Christian Nationalist actors, whose figurehead is a graduate of Mohler's own seminary, are currently seeking to take control of the denomination. Clearly Mohler and Wilson were not randomly chosen. They were chosen specifically because of their institutional visibility and their influence in the conservative American church as well as their apparent friendliness to Christian Nationalism. In the eyes of Hazony, at least, it makes sense to include both Mohler and Wilson in the conference as Christian Nationalists alongside a Hindu Nationalist such as Madhav.
But there is more we can say here. Both men's bios make mention of their official roles in established Christian institutions. Wilson is a founding leader in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). As it happens, the CREC has several missions projects in India. One can't help wondering how the CREC's missionaries and churches with ties to India feel about Wilson's appearing on stage with Madhav.
Similarly, the SBC's International Missions Board is one of the largest missions organizations in the world. Multiple senior leaders in the IMB were trained at Southern Seminary under Mohler's leadership. They have extensive ties to India and broader works in southern Asia. Remarkably, a 2019 story published on the IMB's own website documents the persecution of missionaries from Mohler's own denomination at the hands of "an angry mob" in India:
The man who was hosting the meeting at his business was confronted in front of the meeting location by an angry mob. The mob stayed in front of the meeting place the entire day, driving away customers and offering sacrifices to insult him and to show their allegiance to one of their thousands of gods. The decision was made to move the meeting to the outskirts of the city.
Why, then, is such a senior official in the SBC, a man who has trained many of the denomination's missions leaders, sharing a stage with one of the key figures responsible for the persecution of the very churches his own students desire to serve and equip? Indeed, I can't help wondering if any of Mohler's students, to say nothing of the Christians who came to faith through their evangelistic work, have been subject to anti-Christian violence encouraged and supported by Madhav's RSS?
The writers of Scripture have a phrase to describe Christians like Pastor Hari, Pastor Bhati, and our brother Rock Robinson. They called them "men of whom the world was not worthy."
Why, then, Hazony is platforming a key leader in the organization and political party responsible for their persecution? And why are their Christian brothers sharing a stage with their persecutor?