Violence in Contemporary Life

Calling for a Critical Theology of Culture and Civil Society

Patrick G
Dept of Christian Studies, University of Madras

A theological response to violence is an inspiring way by which the Christian community can respond to
the experience of violence in contemporary life. By so doing, it can attempt to understand the reality of
violence in relation to its horizon of faith, and be enlightened in its praxis of faith, whose ultimate
meaning lies in contributing to the unfolding of „reigning of God‟, a dynamic reality of life, which is as
much of the present as of the future, wherein substantive peace becomes the very pulsation of life.

Liberation theologians have inspired us to treat theology as a second step, the first being praxis – a
critical commitment for integral liberation. They have also taught us to integrate the socio-analytic
mediation in this second step. Accordingly, my reflection begins with a socio-cultural analysis of
violence, and then moves on to attempting a theological response.

I. Violence in Contemporary Life

Violence in contemporary life has its specific character, which differentiates itself from earlier forms or
frameworks. Living as we are in a post-cold-war era, our public consciousness has moved away from
the threat of a nuclear world war, which has become an underlying but not an impending possibility. It
has been argued that contemporary violence is caused by the way western modernity (super-modernity,
indeed!) works, imposing its hegemony over the globe in the form of market forces (the „invisible
hand‟), including its market-tainted democracy. For example, it has been pointed out that the
destruction of the twin-towers of the World Trade Centre is a reaction of the anti-modernist forces,
which got accumulated due either to the experience of relative deprivation or open resistance to market
fundamentalism. However, it must be noted that, the present-day experience of globalisation is pushing
even this argument to the back-seat. Against the context of the progressive weakening of nation-states -
which are the publicly recognised instruments of modernity, the gradual dismaying of borders (political,
social, cultural, etc), the emergence of multiple regional modernities, and a heavy focus on synchronic
aspects of human life, there emerges new forms of violence today. As Charles Taylor would say,
today‟s violence is a „categorical‟ violence, directed against categories of Others, identified on the bases
of religious, ethnic, social, and other cultural identities. Michael Wieviorka, another leading social
theorist, would call it a „new paradigm of violence‟ wherein identities come into clash. Wherever
identities are vigorously organised, there emerges a sharply contrasted scheme of insider-outsider, and it
serves as the new cultural framework for organising violence. Unlike the previous era, when the
insiders and the outsiders of classical violence such as war were situated in distant places, today they
live in physical proximity, but become enemies on account of difference of identities. The most
traumatic experience is that, as Veena Das observes,1 the „insiders‟ of „local-worlds‟, people who live

1
Veena Das: “The violence in these areas seems to belong to a new moment in history: it certainly cannot be understood
through earlier theories of contractual violence or a classification of just and unjust wars, for its most disturbing feature is
 2

side by side for generations, people who constitute the real life-world with immense social trust (the
core component of social capital2), become the „suspected outsiders‟ and targets of inhuman brutality.
What is that process by which „friends‟ become „foes‟?

1. Implicating Religion in an Era of Cultural Alienation

Today religion is implicated to be one of the major culprits of violence.3 In this post-cold war era, in the
absence of the erstwhile political poles that organised discontent,4 the Huntington thesis of „clash of
civilisations‟, which spoke of enmity between seven civilisational zones, has been customised by the
American empire to implicate the religion of Islam as almost the main culprit.5 Mark Juergensmeyer
observes that religion is prone to violence primarily due to its constitutive features of absolutism,
moralism, and heroic commitment to eternal rewards.6 This manner of implicating religion obtains,
more solicitously, in an emergent context informed by what is called today as the „revival of the
religious‟. Gianni Vattimo speaks of it as „return of the religious‟, a coming back from the
imprisonment imposed on it by generations of metaphysical meta-narratives and the modern
Enlightenment-positivistic stranglehold.7 He speaks about it as a new „positivity‟ whose vitality is wide-
spread and popular, and has the potential to sustain humanity in its day-to-day-ness. While speaking of
a „return / revival‟ may be congruent to a western Euro-American context of secularisation, it is more
appropriate to speak of it as „invigoration‟8 of the religious in the continents of Southern and Eastern
hemispheres. It is so because religion never so eventfully, as in the Euro-American context, was
relegated here to the private sphere or repressed to subconscious levels.

Religious invigoration and implicating religion in violence take place against a broader dynamics of
cultural alienation, visible in the process of „culturalisation‟ of reality today. Corresponding to a
twentieth century „cultural turn‟, the western world, progressively growing out of industrial capitalism,
entered into a phase characterised by the unstoppably growing market economy on the one hand, and, as
Adorno would have it, the „cultural industry‟ on the other. The cultural industry, supported by the
communication system, mediated an experience of reality wherein culture began to occupy a very

that it has occurred between social actors who lived in the same local worlds and knew or thought they knew each other” –
Veena Das et al., “Introduction,” in Violence and subjectivity, ed. Veena Das et al., New Delhi: OUP, 2000, p. 1.
2
For an exploration into social capital, cf. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”, in Handbook of Theory and Research for
the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson, New York: Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 241-58; James S. Coleman, “Social
Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” in Social Capital – A Multifaceted Perspective, ed. Partha Dasgupta and Ismail
Serageldin, Washington , D.C.: The World Bank, 2000; Robert D. Putnam, „Bowling Alone: America‟s Declining Social
Capital‟, Journal of Democracy 6 (1), 1995, pp. 65-78.
3
For an understanding of the multiple ways religion is implicated in today‟s violence, cf. Žižek, Slavoj, Violence – Six
Sideways Reflections, New York: Picador, 2008; Charles Selengut, Sacred Fury – Understanding Religious Violence, Walnut
Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2003; Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, London: Penguin Books, 2006;
Peader Kirby, Vulnerability and Violence – The Impact of Globalization, London: Pluto Press, 2006; Elizabeth Kandel
Englander, Understanding Violence, London: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates Publishers, 2003.
4
Cf. Michel Wieviorka, “The New Paradigm of Violence”, in Globalization, the State, and Violence, ed. Jonathan
Friedman,Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003.
5
Cf. Arundhathi Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers – Field Notes on Democracy, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2009.
6
Cf. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God – The Global Rise of Religious Violence, Berkeley: University of
Cambridge Press, 2000, p. 217.
7
Gianni Vattimo, “The Trace of the Trace”, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Trans. by David Webb et.
al.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
8
Cf. Patrick G, “Religion: Whither its Transformative Potential? – A Subaltern Appraisal from the Contemporary Context of
India”, Transforming Religion – Prospects for a New Society, New Delhi: ISPCK, 2009.
 3

dominant role, even an alienating role at that. It looked as if „there was no salvation outside culture‟. It
was this world which came under Herbert Marcuse‟s attack in his phenomenological critique in the One
Dimensional Man, and more recently in Pierre Bourdieu‟s Acts of Resistance against the Tyranny of the
Market, Noam Chomsky‟s Profit Over People, and so on. Today, the cultural experience of reality
stands characteristically impacted upon by a process of virtualisation of reality, aided by the advanced
ICTs. As a consequence, signs and symbols, the core components of cultural systems, present
themselves to human beings almost as „food and drink‟ in their day-to-day living.

This „culturalisation‟ of reality goes with a deep sense of cultural insecurity. Ulrich Beck speaks about
the emergence of a „risk society‟ in the world of globalization today. In a post-colonial (chronological)
phase, he finds a strong current of migration taking place towards the colonizing countries. It is in a
way a „counter-colonising‟ by the once colonized people. The erstwhile colonizers are put in a
predicament of meeting with the colonized as equals. Colonialism is stood on its head reflexively. This
situation has brought in issues not only related to immigration, but, in an important manner, to cultural
adjustment. Reckoning with different cultural identities becomes a crucial need, and interaction among
them is not very congenial especially when the traditional securities fade in the heat of globalization. In
a post-industrial society, which is deemed to have emerged after „the end of the organized capitalism‟,9
where even the industry-based securities are disappearing, and when this insecurity is exacerbated by the
increasing rise of unemployment, it leads to chronic frustration, amidst which different cultural identities
experience what we call the „cultural insecurity‟.

Simultaneously, it is also an experience of acute perplexity caused by sheer immensity of information on

the one hand, and endless revision, akin to the post-structuralist „endless referral of meaning‟, of stated
accounts of facts. Facts of life dissipate into thin air, and there emerges, as in the words of Zygmunt
Bauman, a „liquid modernity‟,10 which evaporates the concrete systems of life. Economy, for example,
becomes a „knowledge economy‟, centring round knowledge-based industries, which induce an ethereal
and evanescent experience of life. There is then a culturalisation of economy, and on the reverse side,
an economisation of culture, which impacts upon religion too. Economic symbols obtain religious
significance, and vice versa. It is then not an accident that money, an economic symbol, obtains divine
stature today.11

In this context, culture becomes a vital resource for violence. Wieviorka, as mentioned above, speaks
about a „new paradigm of violence‟ wherein the cultural resources have become the fountainhead of
violence. He calls it a new paradigm because it characteristically differs from earlier phases when class
(bourgeois - proletariat), politico-economic (First World-Third Worlds), regional (West-East) and other
such systemic divisions served to organise conflicts. Now, in their increasing weakening, “[T]he most
spectacular element in the renewal of violence today,” as in the words of Wieviorka, “is constituted by
the emergence of references by its protagonists to an ethnic or religious identity. These forms of identity
constitute a cultural resource that may be mobilized violently for political end.

9
Cf. Daniel Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, London: Heinemann, 1973.
10
Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, 2000.
11
“Karl Marx quoted Shakespeare addressing money as “Thou visible God!” For Marx, “the divine power of money” lay in
its ability to reduce all things to an abstract equivalence in its own image and likeness” – William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of
Religious Violence – Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, U.K.: OUP, p. 108.
 4

The upheaval of religious communalism in a country like India, and the manner in which religio-cultural
resources are fed into this flame, do vindicate the observation of Wieviorka. The Hindutva nationalists,
especially its elite section, are in a sort of predicament today. They, due to their education and
specialisation, wish to participate in the global process of market expansion, interchange of intellectual
skills, migration for greater opportunities, etc. However, they are also caught with a fear of being
estranged from their religio-cultural roots and being dominated over by foreign cultures.12 This struggle
is augmented by the development of a sense of victimhood. Hindutva nationalists begin to take recourse
to a propaganda that „their‟ India has always been a victim of dominators and exploiters in the form of
Muslim invaders, Christian colonisers, and so on. They exhibit a sense of being beleaguered by
dominating forces around.13 These experiences of the „fear of being alienated from one‟s roots‟, and
„the sense of being dominated over‟ are duly manufactured and reinforced by the forces of cultural
nationalism.

Against this culturally dominated liquid modernity, there emerges a systemic amnesia of the concrete
realities of life, which, nevertheless, continue to serve as the structural conditions for the existence of
people everywhere.

2. Amnesia of Structural Violence

Notwithstanding its cultural rendering, violence continues to have structural presence in most of the
societies today. Johan Galtung, the leading peace-studies theorist, “defines the dominance system in the
world in terms of the pattern of structural violence, where violence is seen as avoidable deprivation of
basic human needs and an inegalitarian distribution of resources.”14 As Stefan Bucher says,
“[S]tructural violence is a mostly invisible form of violence, embedded in social structures, thus it
appears to be normal and is often hardly noticed.”15 Slavoj Zizek, an important analyst of contemporary
violence, distinguishes between direct / subjective violence and indirect / objective violence. While the
first is the direct physical violence as found in ethnic, religious conflicts, etc., the indirect violence is
that which inheres in structures. In his own words:

At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest,
international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle
ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible "subjective" violence, violence performed by a
dearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such

12
Cf. Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, The Indians – Portrait of a People, Penguin Books India, 2007, p. 143-144. As
Kakar and Kathrina Kakar observe: “The worry about a decay of ancient cultural values and a diffuse feeling of vulnerability
to foreign domination are sufficient for many Hindus to turn to political parties and organizations that promise an alternative
modernity, a modernity in which Hindus can embrace modern global markets, technologies and lifestyles without giving up
their Hindu identity, or their sense of Hinduism being the mother religion, superior to all others” (p. 150).
13
Metha is of the opinion that this is one of the global phenomenon today, and that not merely Hindutva nationalists but also
others in the global scenario undergo this kind of experience. He cites the case of the Christian Right of the US emitting a
sense of being „beleaguered‟ by the liberals. Cf. Pratap Bhanu Metha, “On the Possibility of Religious Pluralism.” in
Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics, ed. Thomas Banchoff, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 86.
14
As cited by Stefan Bucher, “Globalisation and Structural Violence”, Cultures of Violence, ed. Jonathan E. Lynch & Gary
Wheeler, (Papers from the Fifth Global Conference), Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, p. 10.
15
Ibid., p. 9. “Like direct violence, structural violence produces suffering and death, yet this form of violence is mostly
invisible, firmly embedded in social structures and institutions. It is found inside societies as well as between societies, and
we experience them (and, arguably, their violence) as familiar and normal. Because it seems they have always been like that,
these structures tend to appear ordinary and become second nature.” Ibid., p. 10.
 5

outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and
to promote tolerance.16

It is an embedded form of violence sustained by patterns of socio-economic and political relationships

which maintain themselves for longer duration. Poverty is the most gruesome experience of structural
violence. As in the words of Kleinman, this “violence includes the highest rates of disease and death,
unemployment, homelessness, lack of education, powerlessness, a shared fate of misery, and the day-by-
day violence of hunger, thirst, and bodily pain.” 17 Patriarchy, casteism, slavery, racism, class division,
etc are some of the other structural forms of violence which inform our everyday life.

A society dominated by such multiple forms of oppression, which are sustained through embedded
systems or structures, is informed by deep lying conflicts – conflicts in terms of power relations,
dynamics of resource-sharing (exploitative or otherwise), negotiation of identities, and so on. Violence
is one of the means or mechanisms with which such an oppressive society maintains and reproduces
itself. Or to put it in another way, violence is one of the ways of organizing deep lying conflicts in an
oppressive society.

3. Caste-Class Conundrum in the Indian Context

Indian context presents its specific configuration of structural violence, informed by both class and caste
based embedded systems. While India is now home even for the most advanced capitalist forces, the
vast majority of the population still reels under grinding operation of the most retrogressive feudal
system. It is evinced in such realities as very high poverty index, relatively high rate of illiteracy,
landlordism including absentee landlordism, suicide of farmers, bonded labourers, child labour, severe
forms of patriarchy, crude and obscurantist forms of religiosity, and the like. These manifestations of
the feudal system sustain themselves in a mutuality with the caste system, which is a typically Indian
form of feudalism. The workings of caste system have changed their modality in urban areas, but, in the
rural agrarian setting, they continue to manifest themselves in their brutality.

Within this specific caste-class context of life, we find religion-related violence being orchestrated
primarily to hide the face of the cruel caste-system. Dilip Menon‟s essay, „why religious communalism
is about caste?‟ comes as a convincing analysis, which dwells upon the inner violence of the Indian
society. He points to an amnesia imposed on us of the caste dimension of the communal clashes by
inducing a deflection of the real issues that face our country today. This amnesia enables the oppressors
to displace the caste enemy with a religiously concocted enemy – be it a Muslim or a Christian. It
would do well to listen to Menon:

16
Slavoj Zizek, Violence – Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008, p. 1. Zizek: “subjective violence is
experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the "normal," peaceful
state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this "normal" state of things. Objective
violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively
violent” - p. 2. “We're talking here of the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more
subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence” - p. 9.
17
“The term structural violence has been used to designate people who experience violence (and violation) owing to extreme
poverty… The World Health Organization (1995) estimates that 20 percent of the world‟s population lives in extreme
poverty. Authors writing about this population, especially ethnographers, use the phrase “the violence of everyday life” to
indicate the violence such structural deprivation does to people” - Arthur Kleinman, “The Violences of Everyday Life – The
Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social Violence” in Violence and Subjectivity, ed. Veena Das et al., p. 227.
 6

There has been a reluctance to engage with what is arguably an intimate relation between the discourses of
caste … and communalism. That Hinduism – as religion, social system or way of life – is a hierarchical,
inegalitarian structure is largely accepted, but what has gone almost unacknowledged in academic discourse
is both the casual brutality and the organised violence that it practices towards its subordinated sections.
What we need to explore is the inner violence within Hinduism as much as the violence directed outwards
against Muslims … The question needs to be: how has the deployment of violence against an internal Other
(defined in terms of inherent inequality), the dalit, been displaced as one of aggression against an external
Other (defined in terms of inherent difference), the Muslim. Is communalism then a deflection of the central
issue of violence…?”18

The nature and content of this inner violence need to be explored into in order to understand the
insidious features of religious communalism in India. Susan Bayly gives a list of atrocities committed
on the subaltern classes of people in the post-independent India.19 She points out very pertinently that
“[S]ince the early 1970s, the activism of groups who call themselves Dalits have been the other central
element in these confrontations… Such militant „Dalit‟ groups were therefore stigmatized on two counts
at once. They were reviled as „Naxalite‟ insurgents fomenting sedition and criminality, and at the same
time as enemies of caste order (Dharma) to be fought by the righteous „caste Hindu‟ with the weapons
of the community and moral mandate.”20 We find here a simultaneous process of subaltern activism and
the counter strategy of hegemonic forces to stigmatise them both in politically violent as well as
religiously inimical terms. This is a typical strategy the dominant forces keep playing in the hierarchical
society of India. The open communal clashes are only stratagems to sustain „the will to hegemonise‟ a
society, and retain its power over a society.

4. Offering Religion as Surrogate Victim?!?

Even while religion is being implicated in violence, it is also being pointed out by scholars that religion
per se is not the cause of contemporary violence. William T. Cavanaugh, in his recent book, The Myth
of Religious Violence – Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, makes an extensive
argument in this regard. He holds that there is „no transhistorical and transcultural religion‟ which can
be implicated in the origin and maintenance of violence, and that such manner of treating religion is
born out of a western modernist preoccupation with relegating religion to the private sphere.21 If we take

18
Dilip M. Menon, “Why Communalism is about Caste?”, Blindness of Insight – Essays on Caste in Modern India, Chennai:
Navayana, 2006, p. 2.
19
“According to government figures, there were 40,000 anti-Harijan „atrocities‟ between 1966 and 1976, this being the
period of Indira Gandhi‟s so-called „decade of development‟. Another 17,000 such incidents were officially recorded for the
nineteen months of Janatha rule (Mrach 1977 – January 1980). Tamilnadu, Maharastra, Gujarat and the Gangetic north
Indian states have been the worst hit areas. In 1981 a total of 1429 officially designated „crimes against Harijans‟ were
reported in UP, compared with only eight in Bengal and ninety-four in Kerala. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s,
accounts of such attacks remained a prominent feature of home affairs press coverage in many states including Tamilnadu,
UP, Maharastra and Gujarat. Worst of all has been Bihar, where as of January 1995 more people had reportedly died in
„caste wars‟ outbreaks than in the whole of the six-year conflict between Muslim separatists and the Indian security forces in
Kashmir” - Susan Bayly, “Caste Wars‟ and the Mandate of Violence” in Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India –
From the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 345.
20
Ibid., pp. 348-9.
21
Cavanaugh argues that “the attempt to create a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone
to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state” - William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of
Religious Violence, p. 3.
 7

Cavanaugh‟s argument seriously, how do we then account for the implication of religion in violence
today?

I attempt to proffer one possible explanation on the basis of an insight provided by Rene Girard, the
well-known analyst of, what he calls, „sacred violence‟. Girard‟s theory holds that violence emerges in
a society within the context of „mimetic rivalry‟, a fierce rivalry between a „model‟ and an „imitator‟.
Herein, “violence is the process … when two or more partners try to prevent one another from
appropriating the object they all desire through physical or other means.”22 “As an object becomes the
focus of mimetic rivalry between two or more antagonists, other members of the group tend to join in,
mimetically attracted by the presence of mimetic desire.”23 As a resolution of this antagonism, Girard
finds the ritual sacrifice to be a social mechanism wherein „transference of violence‟ takes place, by way
of saving the society from its own mimetic violence. Offering a victim in sacrifice, “serves to protect
the entire community from its own violence…”24

I suggest that the contemporary implication of religion in violence may also be understood with this
Girardian insight. As a sample, when we try to see as to why the Hindutva right is so vehemently
against the Muslims or Christians, this insight enlightens us of the fact that the religion of the Muslim-
Christian Other becomes the sacred victim or object of scapegoat mechanism in the process of
redressing the mimetic rivalry that has got generated because of the relative empowerment of the
subaltern classes of people with the onset of modernisation. The subaltern people‟s „emerging
competition‟ in fields of economics, politics, and social dignity with the erstwhile beneficiaries of these
systems generates a mimetic rivalry. Such a rivalry, as understood within the Girardian concept, looks
for surrogate victims, so as to recover the smooth functioning of its traditional systems. The Hindutva
right, by offering the Christian and Muslim religions as surrogate victims of sacrifice, is endeavouring to
protect the so-called Hindu community from its own internal violence. The so-called „Hindu‟ world
suffers deeply from cleavages and exclusions created by the workings of the caste, and the discontent
generated in the social body of the oppressed seeks to burst out in violent forms. This simmering
violence is a constant threat to the unity of what is put together as a Hindu nation. It is within this
context of the dire necessity of preserving it from its own violence that the Hindutva right finds a
surrogate victim in the religions of Muslims and Christians, and they are sacrificed in the flames of
communal hatred. Similar to this Indian case, it will not be difficult to find in the global arena other
context-specific issues on the altar of which religion gets „sacrificed‟ as a surrogate victim.

II. Theological Response

In a context wherein the characteristically contemporary process of culturalisation of reality, by inducing
a systemic amnesia of the structural causes of violence, serves to generate identity-related „categorical‟
violence, even to the point of scapegoating religion, a theological response, I surmise, must start from a
theological praxis of culture, which would holistically heal the alienating process of culturalisation of
reality, and transform it from being a „culture of estrangement‟ to a „culture of rootedness and
transcendence‟ or „rooted transcendence‟.

22
Rene Girard, The Girard Reader ed. James G. Williams, The Crossword Publishing Company, 1996, p. 7.
23
Ibid., p. 11.
24
Ibid., p. 8.
 8

1. Rooted Transcendence in Jesus

Jesus experienced the transcendent divine, the Abba, from within the Jewish culture, as a „marginal‟
Galilean Jew. Jewish culture provided the historical location for the manifestation of the divine in him.
The way he interacted with the Jewish culture has much to convey to our context of cultural alienation.
As Sebastian Kapppen points out, it was a time when Jewish culture was filled with cult, law and
apocalyptism, an indicator of loss of real freedom. This had brought about fundamentalistic tendency
within the Jewish culture, whose beneficiaries were none but the priestly classes. Apocalyptism, in spite
of serving as utopia for the ordinary people, was indeed a manner of seizing or foreclosing the future in
the name of the divine. As such, the Jewish culture had lost its radical freedom and creativity. Its
implication was that the priestly class, in conjunction with the powers that be, had spread its net of
hegemony over the Jewish world, thereby holding the people under its cultural power, which had
become an embodiment of alienation from the life-realities of the people.

It was in this context, Jesus announces the message of radical freedom, the reigning of God. He
interrogatively takes on the culture of seizure or closure of the divine, and opens a horizon of freedom
wherein the poor, marginalised, and the oppressed could experience the empowering presence of the
divine. Interrogation of the Jewish culture comes to him in the very manner in which he situated his life
within that culture. As Lucien Legrand points out, Jesus identified himself with the “accursed”, the „am
ha‟arets, the “people of the land”, who were a “mixed lot of simply honest souls … of poor people
struggling to make both ends meet…”25 Though struggling, they were people who could express their
dissent in not so insignificant ways. “They were rather inclined to oppose the harshness of absentee
landowners by hook or by crook (Lk 16: 1-8), by laziness (Luke 12:45), or by plain violence (Mark 12:
1-9).” Identification with these people brought about an earthy freedom to Jesus, which he evinced in
his words and deeds. As Legrand says, “[F]rom within the culture he belongs to and in which he was
born, he transcends the cultural … set patterns.”26 This freedom became a prophetic freedom in Jesus
by which he transcended every cultural conditioning, and emerged to be a radical prophet. “Humanly
speaking,” as Legrand notes, Jesus belongs to the race of the creators who open new dimensions of
human existence, of the poets who invent new languages, of the prophets and mystics who enter the
divine sphere and transcend the human perspectives in their commerce with the divine. They are
undoubtedly people of their own times and are an expression of the culture of their land. Yet they go
beyond it and become, in the midst of their own generations, the explorers of new horizons of being. So
was Jesus”27 and his experience of „rooted transcendence‟!

It would be revealing to see how Jesus exhibits this radical openness in his cultural sensitivities.
Aesthetics is a core component of any culture, and it would do well to see how Jesus experienced, as for
example, this inner core of culture. Jewish culture had its own approach to beauty and ugliness, which
was intimately linked to its religious experience. Right from its ancient days when it was constituted in
the post-exodus context, “being without blemish” (Lev. 22: 21-22) was considered as something worthy
to be dedicated to God. A person with any deformity was considered unworthy to go near the tabernacle
of God, and was positively prohibited. Similarly a person with illness like lepresy was also considered a
person with deformity. We see Jesus exhibiting enormous inner freedom in relating to such
personalities, and radically subverting the Jewish rules of purity-pollution. He „touches‟ a leper, touches

25
Lucien Legrand, The Bible on Culture, Bangalore: TPI, 2004, p. 95.
26
Ibid., p. 112.
27
Ibid.
 9

the blind man with clay made out of spittle (Jn. 9:6), dines with „sinners‟ and a short-statured Zacaeus,
and so on. There is a radicality in the way Jesus as a Jew transcended the Jewish cultural aesthetic
conditionings and in such transcending he showed the depth of his experience of the divine. This
experience of Jesus demands of us a theological praxis of culture, which would redeem it from its
alienation.

2. A Critical Theology of Culture (& Religion)

During the first part of the twentieth century, Paul Tillich proposed a theology of culture from within an
existentialist paradigm as situated in an Euro-American context. Tillich treated faith as “the state of
being grasped by an ultimate concern,” and God as “the name for the content of that concern.” And,
religion for him was “ultimately being concerned about that which is or should be our ultimate
concern.”28 He treated religion and culture integrally - religion as “the substance of culture, and culture
(as) is the form of religion.”29 He found the culture of his time as one dominated and alienated by
technology which caused a “loss of the dimension of depth in his (human beings) encounter with
reality.” Consequently, “Reality”, he said, had “lost its inner transcendence or, in another metaphor, its
transparency for the eternal”.30 It is worth recalling here how Augustine distinguished between the
„unchangable good‟, i.e. God, and the „intermediate good‟ (art, culture, etc), by the limitation of which
the will is disabled to transcend beyond the intermediate good.31 Such a situation of inability for
transcendence or transparency for the eternal obtained, according to Tillich, in the context of the
industrial capitalist culture which changed human beings into machines, living life mechanically, losing
their divinely-ordained freedom and creativity. Salvation, for Tillich, implied emancipation from such a
culture which alienated human beings from their ultimate concern.

From the second half of the twentieth century, we have experienced the praxis-oriented motivational
force of liberation theologies. The classical liberation theology, both the South American variety and
the European political theology, brought about a sea change in the field of theological praxis. By
introducing a socio-analytic mediation, it sought to do away with the evil of alienation which tended to
maintain a gap between the world of theology and that of praxis. Among other effects, it impacted upon
our Christian praxis by way of generating substantive forms of faith-based commitments in movements
for structural transformation of reality. However, it must be acknowledged that, as it sought to
incorporate the Marxian tool of analysis, failed to take cognisance of the potentiality of culture. It
treated culture as part of the economic system, and opined that cultures would transform themselves
along with economic systems. Though liberation theology itself was a cultural tool, which sought to
28
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball, New York: OUP, 1959, p. 40.
29
Ibid., p. 42.
30
Ibid., p. 43.
31
Augustine spoke of „eternal good‟ and „intermediary good‟, and opined that though the latter is a good, it is not a good in
which someone can take delight. Accordingly, arts and culture are temporary good, which you can enjoy, but, one‟s soul /
free will could not take delight in them. Perhaps, one can perceive something akin to the observation of Augustine is taking
place today. After the turn to humanism, and the twentieth century turn to subjectivity, what we find today is predominant
focus or preoccupation with the „intermediate good‟, the achievement of which exhausts humanity to maximum. Growing
insecurities and uncertainties of life orient them and tie them down to „intermediate concerns‟ which, in the actual practical
living, becomes almost like „ultimate concerns‟. People have less and less mental, emotional, aesthetic, space for values, and
more and more for intermediate concerns. This preoccupation makes them competitors in the society, positioning each other
as a threat to one‟s opportunities. This general orientation is highly volatile, and can generate simmering discontent or
subterranean strain in the society, which, when other factors come together, can burst into violence under pretexts of social,
cultural, and religious identities. What therefore goes beneath the surface counts for occurrence of violence in the society.
 10

play the critical function of bringing the socio-analytic mediation into theology, it did not pay a reflexive
attention to the actual potentialities of culture. Consequently, it also failed to recognise the potentialities
of religion for social transformation and ignored to integrate the positive insights and dynamics of socio-
religious movements in its praxis. It is this that Sebastian Kappen sought to correct, when he spoke
about situating liberation theology within the counter-cultural and counter-religious traditions of India.

In the subsequent phase, contextual theologies of liberation (black theology, Dalit theology, tribal
theologies, minjung theology, feminist theologies, etc) sought to make the needed correction to the
approach of Latin American liberation theology. They recognised the role of culture, both in causing as
well as remedying the oppressive systems, or put it theologically, both in its aspects of sin and grace.
They treated the oppressive identities, which were constructed with cultural resources, as embodiments
of sin, and spoke of salvation as indispensably constitutive of liberation from these sinful structures.
They invariably identified the suffering of the victims of these oppressive identities with the redemptive
suffering of Jesus, and constructed a hope, based on the experience of resurrection as liberation.
Collective efforts (conscientisation, mobilisation, involvement in forms of protests, networking with
secular forces of liberation, etc) were seen as elements of liberative praxis – the spiritual exercises of
these contextual-liberation theologies.

Context is changing today. The industrial world, or the era of organised capitalism has passed over, and
the Euro-American world now is into a post-industrial society. As far as India is concerned, we, at least
a minuscule section of us, are transiting between the eras of industrial and post-industrial societies,
leaving the vast majority under the stranglehold of feudalism. The major factor in the cultural
experience of this transit, as we saw in the foregoing analysis, is the enormity and ubiquity of cultural
elements, or a „heavy and alienating presencing‟ of culture in the experience of reality. This cultural
presencing obtains in a context when the traditional metaphysical foundations and the modern
objectivistic / positivistic paradigms are, due to their progressive weakening, creating a vacuum in
religious, moral, and aesthetic experiences of life. The post-industrial society, unlike the industrial
society which was still anchored on certain values of common good, goes with radical fluidity of values
and norms. which engender a radical fragmentation of different spheres of life. Going with the absence
of foundations and the advent of fragmentation, cultural experience today lacks depth, rootedness,
wholeness, and transcendence. There is, as Zygmunt Bauman would wish for, „no centre that holds our
life‟ today, and if at all there is one, it needs to reckon with a chronic brokenness. All these changes
mediate an experience of reality, whose characteristic is less substantial and solid, but, more ethereal,
fluid and evaporative. In this context, the cultural mediation of reality is wrought with dangerous forms
of alienation, creating a potent site for generation of violence.

This alienation contributes to at least two major factors that characterise our experience today: One, as
discussed above, a systemic amnesia / myopia on the structures of oppression, and, second, a
fundamentalism of the market, which presents itself in a brute manner. The consequences of these two
factors are that real, hardcore issues that affect our people (poverty, illiteracy, casteism, racism,
patriarchy, etc) do not present themselves as areas of theological concern, and, led by the market, our
religions too begin to reflect a „gospel of market‟ – the prosperity gospel. Acquiescing into the culture
of the market is losing the core of the divine experience religions are to mediate. As for us Christians, a
Legrand observes, “[C]ultural identification would play false to the God of the Bible if it remained deaf
to the cry of the poor, blind to all the modern forms of Pharaoh‟s oppression that continue to weigh on
 11

the downtrodden, whether it be social inequality, economic justice, bonded labour, casteism, sexism,
illiteracy, exploitation of children, destructive exploitation of nature, and so on.”32

The theological challenge today, then, would be to transform the culture so as to be freed from the force
of alienation and be concretely rooted in life-reality. It would imply a process of cultivating a critical
cultural sense which would, on the one hand, provide a sufficiently solid foothold on reality, and, on the
other, the ability to stand clear of the hegemony of the market and other dominating forces. This
theological task, I surmise, is a task which can well be undertaken in a dialectical mutuality with a
philosophy of „critical realism‟, which, as suggested by Margret Archer et al., is situated between the
positivistic paradigm which exudes over-confidence in capturing reality and the post-modern paradigm
which is caught within a chronic hesitation to affirm any ontological dimension in reality.33 This critical
realism, as Archer suggests, goes with an ontological realism which asserts the existence of reality,
independent of our belief, estimation, and epistemic cognition about it. An ontological realism is not
against an epistemic relativism, an experience of knowledge which comes to us “always socially and
historically conditioned‟.34 Being aware of the situatedness of knowledge, a theology of culture based
on „critical realism‟ cures the rootless character of today‟s culture, and anchors it on the epistemic
experience of the marginalised and oppressed people of humanity.

A critical theology of culture draws inspiration from the countercultural biblical attitude towards the
dominant / hegemonic cultures. As Legrand notes, “this trend of counterculture, of challenge toward
alienating aspects of dominating cultures, is a persistent and basic feature of the biblical stand.”35 Again
as he puts it, “[I]t is also the attitude of Jesus, the “marginal Jew”, unfettered by any conventional
opinion, always free to denounce any prevailing routine and latent hypocrisy.”36 This counterculture
embodies a critical freedom, whose source is nothing but the divine “dialectic of belonging and
challenging,”37 “the very dialectic of the God immanent and transcendent.”38 “This critical freedom
represents the fundamental prophetic protest against the falsehood and injustice lurking in the most
brilliant and most solid civilizations. This cultural confrontation is as fundamental as the holiness of
God, whose transcendence shames human meanness.

A critical theology of culture is a subaltern theology which treats culture more as a critical praxis than a
critical resource, a dynamic activity rather than a content; more a process than a substance. It is a praxis,
a dynamic event, that interrogates, contests, negotiates and weakens the hold of hegemonic traditions,
systems, and structures which maintain an oppressive hold on the subaltern people. It is a manner of
unfolding, as proposed by Sathianathan Clarke, the „reigning of God‟, which is a “relational polity of

32
Lucien Legrand, The Bible on Culture, Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, 2004, p. 171.
33
In their own words, “Critical realism is a philosophy of science that stands midway between a positivism that has failed
and a more current postmodernism, which, from a critical realist perspective, is equally flawed” - Margaret S. Archer,
Andrew Collier and Douglas V. Porpora, Transcendence – Critical Realism and God, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 1.
34
Ibid., p. 11.
35
Ibid., p. 170.
36
Ibid., p. 170.
37
Ibid. p. 171.
38
Ibid.
 12

just wholeness.”39 And this dynamic opens up, “new and liberative ways for subalterns to move away
from the politics of domination towards the politics of freedom and liberty.”40

From a subaltern theological approach, religions mediate grace for serving as historical interrogators of
hegemony. Accordingly, those religious forms which perpetuate hegemony, including the market
hegemony, and serve as conduits of violence are „fallen‟ from grace. In an intra-religious context, a
critical theological scholarship must be able to conscientise us of the hegemonic features a religion
obtains in a particular context, and point out the violent tendencies attendant with them. Religion, as
argued by Cavanaugh (mentioned above), is never violent in the realm of its core experience, the
spiritual core. Only when it gets linked to social, cultural, and political hegemony and economic sway,
it turns violent. Perpetrators of exploitation, the hegemonisers, implicate religion in violent acts so as to
maintain their hegemony. They also enlist the support of religion in the maintanence of the everyday
form of violence. They foster a religious mood and motivation, sustained by continual reinforcement of
religious sanction of naïve peace. James Cone, the black theologian‟s observation that, “it is no surprise
that the “best” is always non-violent, posing no threat to the political and social interests of the white
majority” is very pertinent here. The hegemoniesers construct an anatomy of peace, wherein there is no
disturbance to the continuous operation of the hegemonising forces of the society.

We need today a critical theology, built on the philosophy of critical realism, combining both
liberational-contextual and existential theological approaches to culture, as well as correcting the
limitations of these approaches from a subaltern critical standpoint. Liberation theology helps us to
analyse culture in terms of its alienation from economic structures, contextual theologies in terms of
social and ethnic systems, existential theology would help us to probe into the ability of culture to
sustain the depth of being and the openness to transcendence, and a subaltern would motivate us to
critically interrogate hegemonic forms of oppression. As Gregory Baum would say, “[C]ritical theology
is the critical application of the various theories of alienation to the self-understanding in faith of the
Christian Church. This critical method may lead theologians to discover elements of false
consciousness in their perception of reality and thus produce a significant change of mind and heart.”41
Such a critical theology will heal the society of its inner structural violence and mediate a transforming
faith to our Christian community.42 Imbued with this transforming faith, church will function, as the
political theology envisaged, as an “institution of critical freedom...”, and as “the herald of an
eschatological future that always calls into question the status quo, destabilising the present in the name
of a peace, justice, and freedom to come.”43

39
Sathianathan Clarke, “Dalit Theology: An Introductory and Interpretative Theological Exposition”, in Dalit Theology in
the Twenty-first Century – Discordant Voices, Discerning Pathways, ed. Sathianathan Clarke et al., New Delhi: OUP, p. 287.
40
Ibid.
41
Gregory Baum, Religion and Alienation – A Theological Reading of Sociology, New York: Paulist Press, 1975, p. 194.
42
As Baum continues to reflect, “[I]t is the task of critical theology to discern the structural consequences of religious
practice, to evaluate them in the light of the church‟s normative teaching, and to enable the church to restructure its concrete
social presence so that its social consequences approach more closely its profession of faith. For what must be in keeping
with the Christian gospel is not only the church‟s teaching and practice but also and especially the actual, concrete effects of
this teaching and practice on human history. Critical theology enables the church to assume theological responsibility for its
social reality” - Gregory Baum, Religion and Alienation, p. 195.
43
As suggested by Johann Baptist Metz, the church will function as a “permanent critic of any and every social order in the
name of a more just future, in memory of history‟s victims” - Cf. Daniel Bell, Jr. “State and Civil Society”, Blackwell
Companion to Political Theologies, ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 429-
30.
 13

3. Theological Calling for a Critical Civil Society

The critical theology of culture is symbiotically related to a critical theology of civil society. The idea
of civil society has come a long way from the time the classical political economists of Europe, and
Hegel, the philosopher of the Right, theorised on it as the site of freedom for the individual, the
bourgeois individual to be accurate, to pursue his (her?) industrial economic activities without being
interfered by the State. After Marx critiqued Hegel‟s „bourgeois‟ approach to civil society, and pointed
out that it was not a free space, but a site where domination and resistance took place, it was Antonio
Gramsci who took the vision of civil society even from out of the super-structural stranglehold of
Marx‟s theory, and saw it as a liberative social practice, which could even negotiate the economic
structures and transform them. Gramsci spoke of the hegemony of the ruling classes which
manufactured the consent of the ruled ones, and the necessity of the latter to subvert and overthrow the
hegemonic consent of the ruling ones in the civil society practice of negotiation.44 It is in this practice a
critical theology of culture and critical theology of civil society can converge.

Jesus movement, organised around the religious utopia of the Reigning of God, which emerged from
Jesus the mystic and prophet, was the site of the empowering Divine within the civil society of
Palestine. Like the leaven, it sought to radically transform the society from within. It entered into an
emancipatory project of critically negotiating the hegemonic forces of subordination. It sought to trigger
the potentialities of the marginalised people to visualise a „social imaginary‟ of freedom and justice.
The fact that it emerged out of an oppressed condition of life becomes the touchstone of its genuineness
and liberative vitality.

We need to come up with a Christian vision of civil society, which would make the liberative potentials
of religions, especially the Christian vision of Reigning of God, flow into the critical negotiatory
dynamics of the civil society. We need to give birth to a rational civil sphere, which is fuelled by the
motivating and interrogating spiritual power of religious traditions. A coming together of the spiritual
experiences of subaltern religious traditions and the practice of civil society will go a long way in
generating deep structures of equality, freedom and substantive peace.

In the context of constructing this critical civil society, our approach to violence needs to have radical
revisions. Needless to say that taking violence as a punishment or curse from God would be a
theological naivette, and would amount to not believing in the Grace that got mediated through the
person of Jesus Christ. We need to, as beckoned by the documents of Vat II, treat them as „signs of the
time‟ or „invitation‟ of God to commit ourselves for deeper transformations of the society that we live
in. It is a divine call to go beneath the surface of human activities, to tear the masks of cultural
alienation, to rupture the sheaths that hide exploitations, and to analytically and critically empower the
civil society from its very foundations. The violent event in Kandhamal is a case in point. There were
those who made cue and cry, condemning the violence against the minorities (Christians); there were
those who wailed and said, „ah, poor me, they are persecuting…‟ and accepted the suffering as
martyrdom; There were few who made an analysis of the society that had emerged in that context in the
recent decades, a society whose civil sphere had been made violent by rightist forces systematically.
The society stood deeply hegemonised due to these forces. Few of us thought of responding to the
violence by way of committing ourselves for constructing a non-hegemonic civil society in that context.

44
Cf. Neera Chandhoke, State and Civil Society – Explorations in Political Theory, New Delhi: SAGE, 1995.
 14

We need to move on from being „victims‟ to being an active agent of negotiation of violence. I have
come across several Christian theological reflections upon violence, calling us to identify with the
victims and evince solidarity with them. They interpret the suffering of Jesus as a model of solidarity
with the victim, calling it a vicarious suffering – a suffering underwent on behalf of the real victim, the
sinful humanity. Without minimising their theological value, I suggest that we need to move on to
follow a Jesus who was a committed negotiator of violence for the sake of the freedom of the oppressed.
He does not come across as a pacifist plain and simple, neither as a naïve proponent of peace. His life,
death, resurrection – the Jesus event – churned the society from the location of the „little ones‟. The
gospels portray a Jesus, who is a sign of contradiction – a king of peace, who announces the sword [“I
have brought not peace, but sword” (Mt. 10:34), “The child is destined for the falling and the rising of
many… a sign that will be opposed” (Lk. 2:34)]. This contradiction can be resolved only if we look at
the Jesus event from within a location – the location of the little ones, the subalterns. Emancipatory
significance of the cross and the movement is one that motivates us today to be involved in a
transformation which interrogates the hegemony of the dominant from within civil society and cures the
wider society of its inner violence. A critical theology of culture and civil society will converge to give
us an experience of the transforming grace which brings enduring peace to our society.

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