Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: February 2, 2015
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780190202101
Description: Every year, there are several hundred attacks on India's Christians. These attacks are carried out by violent anti-minority activists, many of them provoked by what they perceive to be a Christian propensity for aggressive proselytization, or by rumored or real conversions to the faith. Pentecostals are disproportionately targeted.

Drawing on extensive interviews, ethnographic work, and a vast scholarly literature on interreligious violence, Hindu nationalism, and Christianity in India, Chad Bauman examines this phenomenon. While some of the factors in the targeting of Pentecostals are obvious and expected-their relatively greater evangelical assertiveness, for instance-other significant factors are less acknowledged and more surprising: marginalization of Pentecostals by "mainstream" Christians, the social location of Pentecostal Christians, and transnational flows of missionary personnel, theories, and funds. A detailed analysis of Indian Christian history, contemporary Indian politics, Indian social and cultural characteristics, and Pentecostal belief and practice, this volume sheds important light on a troubling fact of contemporary Indian life.
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgements; title: Abbreviations; title: Map; title: Introduction; label: CHAPTER 1
title: Who Are India's Pentecostals?: History, Definitions, Deliberations; label: CHAPTER 2
title: Pentecostalism in the Context of Indian History and Politics; label: CHAPTER 3
title: Where the Spirit (of Violence) Leads; The Disproportionate Targeting of Indian Pentecostals; label: CHAPTER 4
title: Force, Fraud, and Inducements?: Recuperative Conversions and the Growth of Indian Christianity; label: CHAPTER 5
title: Missions and the Pentecostalization of Indian Christianity; title: Conclusion: Conversion Activities, Metaphorical Cockroaches, and the Question of Culpability; title: Works Cited; title: Index