Which violences persist, articulated in ever-new forms, in the aftermath of war? What accounts for these reshuffled patterns of violence? At the end of more than twenty-six years of civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009), majoritarian nationalist discourse celebrated military victory against the ethnic-Tamil LTTE separatists and propounded sovereign defensiveness against the international censure of Sri Lanka’s conduct in the war. Many Sri Lankans expressed hopes that a new era of inter-community solidarities would prevail. However, new contingencies in the immediate post-war period redirected anti-minority ethnic sentiments along renewed lines of religious difference. The contest between Buddhist nationalism and charismatic Christian evangelism is one dimension of interreligious conflict that intensified in late-war and post-war Sri Lanka. Despite the chronic impasses in the rhetoric of these two groups, in everyday encounters Sri Lankans express occasional leniency across lines of difference, or otherwise strive to develop avenues toward interreligious peace.
During the last decade of the war, a contingent of politically active Sri Lankan Buddhists made a series of public accusations that “fundamentalist” Christian proselytizers routinely use “unethical” means to convert vulnerable Sri Lankans. These majoritarian Buddhist protectionist claims must be understood in light of how Third Wave Pentecostalism had burst onto the scene in Sri Lanka decades earlier, coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism and structural adjustment in the 1970s era of independence. By the 1990s, the arrival of new churches, exuberant prayer styles, and new conversions had set off alarm among contingents of nationalistic Buddhists. Despite charismatic Christians’ use of vernacular Sinhala (as well as Tamil and English), Buddhist protectionists perceived the changes in Sri Lanka’s religious landscape as foreign-funded outgrowths of American Christianity.
In the most intense moments of discord shortly after the turn of the millennium, vigilantes intimidated pastors and congregants of new churches with reputational damage and threats of violence. In the main, these episodes involved property destruction. In rare episodes, vigilantes also inflicted bodily violence. In 2004, a subset of Sri Lankan voters elected a party of Buddhist monks to Parliament in support of their platform promise to develop legislation that would criminalize “unethical conversions.” Civil society groups thwarted their legalistic maneuvers. Still, as recently as March 2024 Sri Lanka’s Minister of Religious and Cultural Affairs announced that all unregistered religious centers would be raided by the police. On the tail of the largely ethnic divisions of the civil war, what led to this heightened alarm over religious difference in the post-war era?
The Sri Lankan government’s military defeat of the LTTE separatists (the Tamil Tigers) in 2009 resulted in a staggering number of civilian casualties, with culpability on both sides. Sinhala Buddhist nationalists viewed Western human rights criticisms and born-again Christian proselytization as imbricated in a conjoined effort to “recolonize” Sri Lanka. They reasoned that Christian conversion and Western criticisms bore the soft-power potential to sabotage Sri Lanka’s hard-earned national pride and sovereign self-sufficiency. Majoritarian nationalists perceived international critics and evangelizing Christians as wielding secular humanitarian aid and charity, respectively, that would “induce” disadvantaged Sri Lankans to adopt a “foreign faith” that undermines the nation and its inheritances. The post-war era invigorated millenarian anxieties among Sinhala Buddhist nationalists. Charismatic Christian sermons also routinely convey millenarian aspirations through rhetoric of Christian ascendance, thus adding to majoritarian nationalists’ anxieties. Buddhist and Christian discourse alike evinced a distinctive politico-theological edge.
Charismatic Christian sermons extol God’s love alongside the sacrificial imagery of the Passion. In global charismatic and evangelical Christian discourses, this love transmutes into a call to spread the “Good News.” Charismatic rhetoric also often implores believers to become emboldened as “martyrs” who are capable of facing violence. The danger here is that reactionary violence can have real implications. Scholars of medieval and contemporary Christian martyrdom discourses have argued that herein lies the basis of an evangelical “persecution complex.” The intricate links between Christ’s passional blood and the “blood of martyrs” condense many of the concerns of René Girard’s thinking on violence and the sacred. Since Christ’s passional gift is a “gift that cannot be repaid,” it is meant to be the sacrifice to end all sacrifice. In what amounts to a “jealous” monotheistic demand, there is to be “no more blood on altars to other gods,” because to perform sacrifice (via blood or symbolism) would be to commit the sin of “idolatry”—that is, the act of worshipping “false gods.” Yet, the doctrine insists that Christ’s sacrifice is still a gift and therefore demands reciprocation; as such, even though the gift cannot be repaid, the promise of salvation paradoxically demands reciprocity. This logic fuels ambitious expansion through proselytization and conversion—demands for which evangelical and charismatic interpreters find explicit validation in the Pauline Epistles.
Third Wave Pentecostalism in particular invokes a theology of dominion that promises to christen the landscape by “materializing the Spirit.” This highly portable, global charismatic practice mischaracterizes the gods, demigods, and spirits that hallow established religious landscapes as dangerous, diabolical figures. Charismatic ministers performatively chastise “image worship” (rupa namaskaraya) or “idolatry.” In one Sri Lankan Pentecostal deliverance ministry that I observed on a new moon Sunday in 2010, the pastor punctuated the call to “spiritual warfare” by blowing the shofar, the ram’s horn that is traditionally used in synagogue rituals. Pentecostal ministers in the United States sometimes appropriate the Judaic shofar to enjoin believers to make way for the covenant with God. Deliverance ministers announce that its sacred sound transduces the Holy Spirit, enabling it to pneumatically and haptically christen the landscape, and in turn to root out “demons” that are supposedly “worshipped” by people of other religions. Such diabolizing rhetoric antagonizes non-Christians when they overhear these exuberant pronouncements, which occasionally reverberate beyond the confines of worship services.
In some respects, today’s Pentecostal-charismatic rhetoric resembles missionaries’ negative appraisals of Buddhism in an earlier era. In nineteenth-century Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Protestant missionaries deployed the charge of “idolatry” against the British Crown, to plead for the Christianization of rule in the colony. Upon arrival in Ceylon, British authorities had conferred with Buddhist authorities and agreed to protect Buddhism. However, missionaries accused the Crown of accommodating “idolatry” and other “heathen” practices by “accommodating” Buddhism. Influential Protestant missionaries called for the “disestablishment” of Buddhism in Ceylon and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In 1841, the Wesleyan missionary Robert Spence Hardy penned a polemical tract, The British Government and the Idolatry of Ceylon. Hardy commented upon the providential nature of British “dominion” and launched an invective, claiming that:
The national religion of Ceylon is Buddhism, accompanied by the worship of demons, and the propitiation of malignant infernal spirits. […] In the sacred scriptures all these errors are summed up in one word, Idolatry… [T]here is an unnatural, sinful, and pernicious connexion between the British Government of Ceylon and idolatry.
By 1844, the missionaries’ influence compelled Crown authorities to sever protections for Buddhism in Ceylon.
Some readers may wonder how an “atheist” religion like Buddhism can involve deities, demigods, and spirits in the first place. The Buddha is a figure to emulate in the pursuit of Enlightenment (nibbāna). In Theravāda Buddhism, the pursuit is tremendously challenging, and requires many, many lifetimes to achieve. For this reason, Sinhala Buddhist laypeople have traditionally asked for blessings from gods. Some practitioners also expel karmically stuck spirits who afflict them, conducting rituals to release the spirits toward better future lifetimes and to generate good karma for themselves. Despite these benign practices, Protestant missionaries and early converts in British Ceylon initially condemned deity veneration and ritual dealings with spirits as “devil worship.” That era’s missionary logic had it that the Buddha was “just an idol” that is “empty” of all divinity. The missionaries reasoned that this “empty” space gives rise to Buddhists’ inclinations to worship deities, whom they considered “false gods” or “infernal spirits.” Relatedly, colonial Protestant discourses mischaracterized Sinhala yaktovil rituals as “exorcism,” as David Scott has argued. But for Sinhala Buddhists, yaksa are not evil “demons,” as evangelizing Christians would have it. Yaksa are negative spirits subject to bad karma from their past lives, but they are not irredeemable.
Buddhist nationalism and ambitiously expansionary forms of Christianity chronically meet at an impasse. Across different periods of encounter, Buddhists and Christians sparred with one another for dominance. Buddhist nationalists and charismatic evangelists both strive to protect and propagate their religions by various means, often with the express purpose of rebuilding the nation in light of environmental disasters (e.g., the 2004 tsunami), civil war, and the present-day economic crisis. There is continuity between the wartime and post-war eras inasmuch as competitive and occasionally violent rhetoric subtends such efforts. I want to be clear that inflammatory rhetoric never justifies reactionary violence, nor should either be misused to advance anti-pluralistic agendas. As an ethnographer, I observe that the rhetorical forms of adversarial Buddhist-Christian theopolitics do not always match social realities. As I write in my book, the supersessionist demands of spiritual warfare that are prevalent in Pentecostal dominion theology at times “fall upon ears made deaf by the enchantments of the charism.” This is to say that the charism—or the “gift of God’s grace” which entrances charismatic Christians in direct communication with the deity (signified by glossolalia)—has the potential to overwrite the incendiary discourses espoused through institutionalized practices of evangelization. What is more, through astute textual hermeneutics and activist praxis, Sri Lanka’s ecumenical Christian theologians as well as exceptional Sri Lankan Buddhist thinkers conscientiously object to tensions engendered by ambitious evangelism and majoritarian nationalism. To give one example, the ecumenical Sri Lankan theologian Aloysius Pieris (SJ) finds compelling biblical validation for Christians to understand the sin of “idolatry” not as worship of other gods, but rather as the false worship of wealth and money (“Mammonolatry”). Finally, despite the force of exclusionary religious discourses, Buddhists and Christians at times peaceably exhibit leniency toward one another in everyday life, subtly affirming difference and bolstering a pluralistic ethos. While it is necessary to account for violence in and after war, we must simultaneously look beyond the expressly conflictual dynamics that draw our collective attention. It behooves observers and analysts to also attend to ordinary efforts to sacralize pathways toward pluralism—imperfect and agonistic though they may be.