16th May 2004

from Professor P. Radhakrishnan, India

Religious conversion and American Imperialism

On April 29, 2004, The New York Times published an article “TELEVISION REVIEW; Understanding The President And His God”, By ALESSANDRA STANLEY. The article is on George W. Bush’s faith “by mingling his public pronouncements with interviews with friends; fellow members of the Community Bible Study group in Midland, Tex; evangelical leaders; and Texas journalists who covered him”.

In this context it will not be inappropriate to draw attention to the global Joshua Project. The February 07, 2004 issue of www.tehelka.com carried a report under the title George Bush has a conversion agenda for India. I am attaching it. Initially I did not give much importance to this article. Subsequently, when I was using Google to locate a small social group I hit upon the following website.

http://www.joshuaproject.net/peopcluster.php?rop2=C0213

The website has mapped various ethnic groups of the world, apparently for promoting Christian evangelism. Among other things the matrix form in which the website has presented data includes (a) People group (b) Population (c) # peoples by country  (d) # least-reached [read by Bible] peoples by country and (e) % least-reached [read by Bible] peoples by country, with all kinds of country-language-region permutations and combinations.

Going by this matrix, the conversion agenda as reported by the tehelka.com is not only for India but also for the entire world. In other words, the agenda is for Christianising  the world, presumably as part of the larger imperialist agenda of globalisation.

As a non-believer, in the normal course I would not have bothered about the Joshua project, as I respect all established and institutionalized religions. But the hidden agenda of the project is not only conversion but also and more importantly strengthening American imperialism by strengthening Christianity, not so much as a belief system but as the only  socio-political, cultural, and global imperialist  identity. In my article “Religion under Globalisation” in the Economic and Political Weekly of March 27-April, 2004 (to which the Spectrezine.org gave a link at the end of my review of the book Globalisation Unmasked) I had drawn attention to the increasing apprehension among Christian fundamentalists in US that Christianity has been on the decline (it is still the largest community in the world, accounting for one-third of the global population), and the born-again-Christian George W Bush is probably under the hallucination that  US imperialism is incomplete without “unifying” the Bible.

Best,

P. RADHAKRISHNAN