Buddhist Nationalism and Christian Evangelism: Rearticulations of Enmity and Belonging in Postwar Sri Lanka

Abstract: Based on two years of fieldwork in Sri Lanka, this dissertation systematically examines the mutual skepticism that Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists express towards one another in the context of disputes over religious conversion. Focusing on the period from the mid-1990s until present, this ethnography elucidates the shifting politics of nationalist perception in Sri Lanka, and illustrates how Sinhala Buddhist populists have increasingly come to view conversion to Christianity as generating anti-national and anti-Buddhist subjects within the Sri Lankan citizenry. The author shows how the shift in the politics of identitarian perception has been contingent upon several critical events over the last decade: First, the death of a Buddhist monk, which Sinhala Buddhist populists have widely attributed to a broader Christian conspiracy to destroy Buddhism. Second, following the 2004 tsunami, massive influxes of humanitarian aid—most of which was secular, but some of which was connected to opportunistic efforts to evangelize—unsettled the lines between the interested religious charity and the disinterested secular giving. Third, the closure of 25 years of a brutal war between the Sri Lankan government forces and the ethnic minority insurgent group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has opened up a slew of humanitarian criticism from the international community, which Sinhala Buddhist populist activists surmise to be a product of Western, Christian, neo-colonial influences. Illuminating this renewed Sinhala Buddhist criticism that Christianity is a quintessential anti-national force, the study then moves on to analyze the nodes of Buddhist-Christian conflict, rivalry and conciliation. By building upon concepts of economic theology and political theology, the author demonstrates how religious subjectivities and religious politics are shaped by the material and ideological clash of Buddhist and Christian soteriology. Under the revised demands of ethno-religious nationalism in the post-war context, the ethnographic work also delineates the politically expedient and the theologically orthodox lines along which alliances between Buddhists and certain denominational segments of Christianities have been forged. Thus, the study highlights the internal diversity within the religious traditions and religious politics within Sri Lanka—with focus especially on Pentecostalism, Catholicism, Theravada Buddhism. Finally, the work explores the newness and innovation that is engendered within the field of mutual religious influences. Specifically, it offers an examination of how liturgy and soteriological (salvational) aspirations have shifted under the circumstances of religious rivalry, as well as under the constraints of a state that privileges particular religious forms