The Charism of the Christian Left - Dissidence as Habit in a Time of Bi-polar Theopolitics - Berghahn Journals
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The Charism of the Christian Left
Dissidence as Habit in a Time of Bi-polar Theopolitics
Neena Mahadev
Abstract
Through ethnography of recent peaceful dissent by Catholic and Protestant activists,
life histories, and a reading of a postcolonial archive of contextually grounded liber-
ation theology, I explore the theopolitics of grace that fuels the habits and habitus of
Sri Lanka’s ecumenical left. Pluralistic and indigenised forms of Christianity emerged
in the era of decolonisation and nationalisation and were emboldened by Vatican II.
Distinguishing ecumenical Christian pluralism from evangelical Christian expan-
sion in the region, this article historicises Cold War religiosity, drawing out ‘bi-polar’
contrasts of politically left and right forms of Christian grace. In doing so, I situate
religious pluralism within the convulsive era of class and ethnic-based insurrec-
tions in Sri Lanka. Analysing the ‘catholicity’, civic nationalism, and post-nationalist
self-conceptions held by Sri Lanka’s Christian left, I argue that the ‘something extra’
of grace can be fruitfully understood as the cultural accretions and theo-political
formations that accrue through localised emplacements of global Christianity.
Keywords: anthropology of Christianity, Asia, Catholicism, Cold War, habitus,
liberation theology, non-violent protest, postcolonialism and decoloniality
‘I feel that I have received a special charism from God to work for the poor’, Sister
Christine said, replying to a question I asked about what inspires her social activism.
A simple white coif and veil, a habit which signifies her covenantal membership
within the Sisters of Charity, framed the gentle glow of a smile that appeared on the
nun’s face. The occasion for my asking—and more importantly for our gathering in
Negombo town that day in January 2018—was an symposium organised by Sister
Christine and other critics of the Sri Lanka’s Port City development, a massive
Chinese-funded land reclamation project that was underway some thirty-five kilo-
metres down the coast in the capital city of Colombo. A few years earlier, the Sri
Lankan government had revealed the bi-national Port City development scheme
to establish a special economic zone to attract foreign-direct investment to the
country. Still under construction then in 2018, and now practically at a standstill
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2022: 84–103
doi:10.3167/cja.2022.400107 © The Author(s)
The Charism of the Christian Left
following the horrific 2019 Easter Sunday bombings and a terribly long 2020 and
2021, the Port City takes the shape of a sandy speculative appendage jutting out
from Colombo city’s coastline into the Laccadive Sea. Built upon promises of Sri
Lanka’s post-war prosperity, some critics of the Port City, and of the wider neo-
liberal project of creating an urban ‘Megapolis’, simply viewed the construction
as an eye-sore upon the liquid blue horizon. Others held more robust concerns,
arguing that although the Sri Lankan government forces might have won the long
war against Tamil nationalist insurgents in 2009, they needed to show commitment
to ‘securing the peace’ with aggrieved communities before forwarding their devel-
opment objectives (Goodhand et al. 2011, Klem 2018, Rajasingham-Senanayake
2009). Still others worried that Sri Lanka would become a relatively passive player
in China’s wider One Belt One Road Initiative to create a ‘string of pearls’ across
the Indian Ocean. For leaders of ‘the People’s Movement’ (Janatha Viyaparaya)—in-
cluding Sister Christine, her spiritual companion and fellow activist Father Sarath,
and the coastal dwellers whom they rallied behind—the Port City protest was a
matter of life and livelihoods for fisherfolk and a commitment to social justice
grounded in faith.
The People’s Movement symposium drew Sri Lankan scientists, sociologists,
community organisers, and activists together at the Cardinal Cooray Centre for
the Sacred Arts and Education in Negombo. The namesake of the littoral town of
Negombo is the thermal spring in Ischia, Italy, indexing the region’s Catholicity.
Through lectures delivered in Sinhala and simulcast translations into Tamil and
English, this gathering of public intellectuals helped to quantify and forewarn
the audience—consisting of roughly two hundred Sri Lankans and a handful of
foreigners—about the environmental hazards, and the damage the construction
would do to Colombo city’s water table. In layman’s terms, they communicated the
science of how the opulent infrastructural development plans would dispossess Sri
Lanka’s coastal-dwelling poor, and especially fisher peoples, consisting mainly of
the Sinhala Karava and Tamil Karaiyar occupational castes. Environmental scien-
tists and activists noted that two consecutive governments neglected to carry out
proper environmental impact assessments. The People’s Movement strived to build
momentum for peaceful resistance against the bi-national plan to move forward
with the construction.
In the bustle that followed the symposium lunch, several community organisers
filed out of the mess hall, and Sister Christine and I ambled outdoors too, to find the
shade of a massive tree in the yard of the Cooray Centre. Sister Christine’s words
and demeanour intrigued me. ‘A charism?’ I asked. She proceeded to tell me how
after she joined the Sisterhood, other nuns of her convent teased her about the
unique way in which she fulfilled her calling: ‘“you are always like this,” they’d say’,
pointedly gesturing with her own arms outstretched and angled upwards towards
the tree in front of us, demonstrating how they mimicked her. She implied that they
sometimes performed the teasing gesture with affection and sometimes with a tone
of rebuke. Puzzled because the gesture resembled that of Pentecostal Christians
who hold their hands outward with palms open to receive the charismatic grace of
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology • 85
Neena Mahadev
the Holy Spirit, I asked, ‘“Like this”? Do you mean, to receive grace?’ Sister Chris-
tine corrected my misperception. Repeating the mimicked posture, she held her
arms outstretched, but this time in a more articulated way reached as if hanging a
picture on a wall. The gesture indexed what her fellow nuns saw as Sister Christine’s
distinctive approach to her sacred work, involving what was practically a ritual
habit of hanging posters in campaigns for social justice.
In what follows, I examine the praxis of working non-violently for social justice
as a sacred habit among members of Sri Lanka’s ecumenical Christian left. This
article builds upon ethnographic research that I carried out between 2009 and 2011
on conversion to Christianity, the rise of Sinhala Buddhist revivalists’ opposition
to ‘unethical’ conversions, and the conciliatory work of a set of leaders committed
to inter-religious dialogue. Intrigued by Sri Lankan Christians’ historical efforts
to develop ‘contextual theology’ that is grounded in the particular realities of Sri
Lanka, I carried out fieldwork again in 2016 and 2018, and remotely in 2020 and
2021, with some leaders of Sri Lanka’s Christian left. This alternative political
theology—one resonant with liberation theology—has been prevalent among a
small subset of Christians in Asia since the 1960s. A ‘contextually grounded’ theo
logical critique of the problem of injustice requires a practical and hermeneutic
approach to culture and history. Even as their writings serve to deprovincialise their
theopolitics, these thinkers take a locally embedded vantage point, thus making
contextual approaches relevant not only for Sri Lanka but for Asia and the world
more generally. Exploring this phenomenon in the context of Sri Lanka, I elucidate
both local iterations of left Christian thought and the way these Christian pluralists
inhabit socially engaged forms of grace.
The praxis of the Christian left is best captured ethnographically, through life
histories and through an exploration of the habits, habitus, and embodiments of
grace, among those in whom it inheres. With this in view, I build upon Pitt-Rivers’
formulation that animates this collection, that grace always accrues ‘something
extra’. The gains here are not necessarily material. Rather, what becomes especially
apparent is the inter-subjective, cohesive, spiritual, and creative forces of the gift.
In examining the generative element in these expressions and conceptualisations of
grace, I highlight the cultural and political accretions that contextually accord with
local milieus. Capturing that ‘something extra’ through ethnography is conducive
to a robust conceptualisation of political theology as praxis. Before attending to
the ways in which grace works upon my Christian interlocutors and how they in
turn take up ‘God’s work’ of social care, activism, and inter-religious dialogue, I
first delineate the political-economic formations that historically inhered within
late-colonial Ceylon and postcolonial Sri Lanka. The ‘Cold’ War in particular had a
profound, if implicit, effect in animating the theopolitical mission of the e cumenical
Christian left. In light of this, I touch upon the place of grace in the lives of some
key figures of this movement in contemporary Sri Lanka.
86 • The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
The Charism of the Christian Left
History, Anthropology, and the Legacies of the ‘Cold’ War
The Cold War left a lasting legacy throughout Asia. For several decades, Sri Lanka’s
Christian left has espoused values of social justice and dissent, in ways that intersect
with the ‘bi-polar’ history of the Cold War. Historians and political scientists have
amply demonstrated how the politicking of that era discursively divided the world
in two. Western and especially US American discourses framed its political and
military interventions as shaping a world safe for democracy and the flourishing of
a free-market, as against ‘evil’ enemies who sought to secure socialism—or worse,
communism. From this vantage point of American empire, the revolutions in the
‘second world’ (industrialised states including the Soviet Union), and the violences
of in ‘third world’ nations undergoing processes of decolonisation, were profoundly
destabilising (Pletsch 1981; Rapkin et al. 1979). In the former colonies within Latin
America, Asia, and Africa, the Cold War coincided with decolonisation, nationali-
sation, and anti-colonial movements. But far from being ‘cold’, this war burned very
hot—especially in these decolonising states (Kwon 2010).
Robert Bellah’s (1967) famous thesis on ‘civil religion’ underscored the religious
intonations found within US American investments in fighting the Cold War.
Following World War II, US American politicians called upon Protestants, Catho-
lics, and Jews to use their spirituality, and cultural and economic capital, to fight
the ‘false philosophy of Communism’ (ibid.). Historians, political scientists, and
anthropologists of religion have since elaborated how American Christianity and
late-imperial European Christianities, were invoked to mobilise moral and military
force to fight ‘communists’ in decolonising nations under the cover of secularity
(Asad 1993; Hurd 2015). In considering how these Manichean bi-polarities played
out in Asia, a growing body of literature illustrates how capitalism, communism,
and the politicised forms of disputation articulated and intersected with long-estab-
lished religious forms (Billaud 2015; Heo and Kormina 2019; Ladwig 2017; Salter
2000). These bi-polarities extend into present-day disputes that animate religious
conservativism and religious newness, in post-war Sri Lanka too.
The formation of a socialistic orientation to Christianity emerged in Ceylon in
a nascent way in the 1950s and gained steam in the 1960s (Fernando 1997; Pieris
1995). Ecumenists and dedicated pluralists constitute a micro-minority within the
Christian minority and grew against the grain of dominant strands of religious
politics in that era. With formal independence in 1948, many mainline churches
were compelled to demonstrate their loyalties to the nation—whereby the nation
was conceived by Sinhala Buddhist revivalists in hegemonically majoritarian terms
(Stirrat 1992).1 In Sri Lanka, like in several late-colonial and postcolonial contexts
in South and Southeast Asia, established ethno-religious communities imagined the
nation along the lines of exclusionary ethno-linguistic and religious heritage prin-
ciples. At an institutional level, many churches established during Ceylon’s colonial
era faced the loss of privileged status with late-colonial processes of nationalisation
(Stirrat 1992). When the country became a republic in 1972, the Constitution en-
joined the state to guarantee Buddhism’s ‘foremost place’ in the country. Seeking to
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology • 87Neena Mahadev
recuperate their heritage in the aftermath of a long colonial era, Sinhala Buddhist
revivalists tended to associate Christianity with the foreign, colonising force. As
a result of these efforts of nationalistic recuperation, how Christianity, and also
Islam (in Sri Lanka, Hinduism too), correlates with foreignness and processes of
enculturation has raised fraught questions for minority belonging in South Asia.
It is within this context that a small subset of Sri Lankan (then Ceylonese)
Catholic theologian-priests, rare nuns like Sister Christine, and a handful of main-
line Protestant pastors transformed Christianity. This subset of Christians crafted
an indigenised and pluralistic religious form, against the backdrop of majoritarian
nationalist discourses which characterised Christianity as alien, and in contrast to
Christian groups that retained or renewed their expansionary ambitions. Pivotal
figures within Sri Lanka’s Christian left shifted emphasis away from maintaining
strict institutional loyalties and instead gave primacy of place to pastoral care and
inter-religious dialogue.
Sri Lanka’s ecumenical movement was emboldened by Vatican II; as one ob-
server put it, that era saw the ‘conversion’ of a subset of Ceylonese Catholic clergy
to ‘the spirituality of Vatican II’ (Fernando 1997). Their theopolitical orientation
to liberation and providence animates a civic form of nationalism, or arguably
even a post-nationalist yet localised variety of social commitment. In their own
self-conception, members of Sri Lanka’s Christian left are at once dedicated to living
the gospel through emulating Christ’s justice-based principles for the poor and
disenfranchised. At the same time, they are consummate pluralists, and their faith
practices represent an indigenisation and an acculturation of Christianity. It is clear
that ‘catholicity’, is a common trait. Whereas ‘catholicity’ could be linked with usage
in the capital ‘C’ sense, connoting the ‘long arm of the Vatican’ that looms large in
its officialdom and claims of universality, in the lower-case it suggests ‘the quality
of being comprehensive in feeling, taste, sympathy, etc.; freedom from sectarian ex-
clusiveness or narrowness’.2 A further definition of the lower-case term, ‘liberality of
sentiments or views,’ avoids connotations of a comprehensive or totalising nature.3
In this usage, ‘catholicity’ signals the inclination to deflect the conservativism of
the Church and also to reject the hierarchies and exclusions of the State and the
neo-liberal economy.
In the theology and self-understanding of the Christian left, divinity works
through all of creation, and thereby converting others to Christianity is anathema
to their orientation to God’s grace (Massaro 2018). Such a pluralist Christian ethos
stems partly but not exclusively from a Jesuit Catholic provenance. Among Chris-
tians, the Jesuits of course are not the sole purveyors of such values, but within
Sri Lanka, the Jesuit ethos is one of the major confessional strands that informs
Christian pluralism.4 For my interlocutors, the papal dispensation of Francis is
taken as validation of the ‘prophetic role’ of the Church. Although inexorably
modern, catholicity nevertheless contrasts with the ‘purifications’ of religious mod-
ernism, as so well delineated in the sociological and anthropological literature on
protestantisation and laicisation of religion, and of rationalisation more generally.5
88 • The Cambridge Journal of AnthropologyThe Charism of the Christian Left
Within the anthropology of Christianity over the last two decades, writing
on grace has tended to focus on Pentecostalism. This is in large part because the
expansionary aspects of charismatic evangelicalism coincides with the diffusive
movement of the charism, understood to move people to convert through the
miraculous and unmediated workings of the Holy Spirit (Meyer 2010, Mahadev
forthcoming). This orientation to an incorporative force of grace has inhered in
Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity (de Abreu 2021), particularly in its Third-
Wave orientation to the Gospel of Prosperity (Coleman 2000). Despite the
‘democratized’ access to grace that stems from Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity
and evangelical expansionism, these religious forms are also typically imbricated
with (US American style) conservativism and persuasive flows of capital. Indeed,
charismatic Christianity is a ‘transposable’ form that widely inflects cosmopoli-
tan aspirations (Csordas 2009). What is more, charismatic and evangelical social
and political forms commonly animate nationalist and right-wing movements,
endeavour to sustain established polities, to expand them, or to project the provi-
dential creation of new domains of Christian sovereignty.
As addressed by McIvor and Edwards in the introduction to this volume, com-
paratively less ethnographic attention has been given to other, non-charismatic
varieties of grace. Nevertheless, modernist Christian soteriology has also histor-
ically articulated with liberationist ideologies such as abolition, anti-colonialism,
and left-wing populism. Liberation theology has had a powerful valence in much
of the Global South, even as ecumenical and left commitments tend to find less
popular resonance compared with evangelical and charismatic Christian forms.
In sum, these distinctive types of Christianity have animated social movements
that are in dialogical tension with one another. This right-left polarity of Christian
theopolitics is pertinent for understanding both the uptake of Christianities, and
their relationship to local and foreign political configurations in Asia.
Given that a pluralist Christian ethos is by definition not an expansionary one,
although these values are dearly held, they are not as widely taught in Sri Lanka as
evangelical Christian forms. Relatively speaking, ecumenical thinkers and activists
are a rarity. Yet, those Sri Lankans committed to ecumenical pluralism envision
that, with dedicated habit, these styles of religiosity can have transformative po-
tential. The habits and habitus of ecumenism, socialistic political activism, and
inter-community peacebuilding are essential ontological qualities understood as
being conferred by a charism. Thus, grace has a theopolitical character. Here, I
invoke the notion of theopolitics elaborated by Carlota McAllister and Valentina
Napolitano (2019), which ‘complements and counters established concepts of politi
cal theology’. In the next section, I consider the thought and praxis of Sri Lankans
who have contributed their intellectual and sacred energies to Asian Theologies of
Liberation.
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology • 89Neena Mahadev
Christianities and the Cold War
To bring the habits of the ecumenical Christian left as a social and theopolitical
phenomenon into relief, I briefly examine its counterpoint, the Christian right,
to consider how it intervenes in the work of the left. Because of the ‘translocality’
of Roman Catholicism and the far-reaching arm of Vatican governmentality,
Vatican policy and interventionism has transformed local forms of Catholicism
(Napolitano and Norget 2009). In varying ways and intensities, rightist inclina-
tions—evinced episodically through the Sri Lankan state, the Vatican authority,
and even far-reaching US Cold War imperatives—have implicitly or explicitly
endeavoured to suppress the values of the Christian left, in material, physical, and
ideological terms.
Protestant evangelicalism bolstered the moral frame of US American Cold
War diplomacy and militarisation, in what historians characterise as a ‘spiritual-
industrial complex’ (Herzog 2011). This ‘complex’ of ideologies and religious
practices found its way to Asia too, through various modalities—not least through
Billy Graham’s ‘crusades’ in cities including Seoul and Singapore in the 1970s.
Christian youth ministering actively sought to quell the inclinations towards
‘communism’ among discontented youth in late-colonial and decolonising Asian
contexts (Paget 2015). In Southeast Asia during the 1950s and 1960s, parachurch
organisations were transformative in consolidating the turn to Christianity among
upwardly mobile youth and were actively tasked with dissuading them from com-
munism. Likewise, evangelical groups on the scene in Sri Lanka from the 1960s on
have proudly sought to bring urban youth and university students ‘into the fullness
of their faith’. In terms of demographics, the pull of this cosmopolitan evangeli-
cal form often materially wins out over the relative austerities of the ecumenical
Christian form.
In addition to Christian revivalism, various operatives in Asia sought to retool
local religions as deterrents against communism. For instance, in Thailand and
Laos, the CIA actively worked to influence Buddhist monks and transform the
political inflections of the Theravadin tradition, with an eye towards enabling it
to stem discontent and stand as a surrogate to supplant revolutionary sentiments
(Ford 2017, Ladwig 2017). What is more, although received historical wisdom has
it that the Cold War involved diplomacy, ‘soft’ power plays, and that it effectively
ended by the early 1990s, anthropologists have emphasised that the ‘Cold’ War
in reality burned very hot (Kwon 2010) and that the consequences of these bi-
polarities extend well beyond the periodisation commonly offered by historians and
political scientists (Heo and Kormina 2019). As I demonstrate, the Cold War and
its legacies inflects South Asia more extensively than is commonly acknowledged
in academic scholarship (see also Rajasingham-Senanayake 2022).
90 • The Cambridge Journal of AnthropologyThe Charism of the Christian Left
A Short History of Christian Bi-polarity in Sri Lanka
With the determinations of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) the Roman
Catholic Church allowed for cultural accommodations, which in theory affirmed
the indigenisation of devotional and theological features of Catholicism in the
postcolonies. However, in spite of the Vatican II mandate, papal authorities sub-
sequently rolled back on the charge of accommodating social, cultural, political,
and theological differences. Sri Lankans became acutely aware of this fact when,
in 1997, Vatican authorities famously excommunicated the Sri Lankan theologi-
an-priest Father Tissa Balasuriya (1924–2013) for authoring a book in English
entitled Mary and Human Liberation (1990). His excommunication took place at
the hands of Church conservatives Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later elevated as
Pope Benedict XVI), and a Sri Lankan Bishop Malcolm Ranjith (later appointed
Cardinal under Benedict XVI’s reign). At the incitement of Bishop Ranjith, the
Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger,
scrutinised Balasuriya’s feminist treatise. The theologian’s writing challenged the
traditionalist Catholic image of Mother Mary’s submissive and virginal character
and instead celebrated Mary for her fierce femininity and righteous motherhood.
Given the liberality of Balasuriya’s thesis and its Marxian and feminist inflection,
conservatives within the modernising Catholic Church castigated him for allegedly
dishonouring the sanctity of Mary. Balasuriya was a champion of engaged work
among the poor, and in 1971 had co-founded the Center for Society and Religion
in Colombo, which to this day retains its anti-capitalist theopolitical commitments.6
Balasuriya was a founding member of the international Ecumenical Association
for Third World Theologians (EATWOT), established 1976, the first meeting of
which was hosted in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania. He was a prolific writer and critic
of social injustice (ranging from foreign debt and structural adjustment to ethnic
violence) and an avid promoter of democratic socialism. Yet, it was ostensibly on
theological grounds that the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
scrutinised Mary and Human Liberation and excommunicated Balasuriya at the
age of seventy-two. After great consternation, Balasuriya’s circumstances demanded
that he show contrition. That same Vatican body required him to sign a Profession
of Faith and he was officially restituted.7
A book published by the Asian Human Rights Commission condemned the
Church’s harassment of Balasuriya, averring that ‘Sri Lanka’s spirituality of soli-
darity’ was under attack (Fernando 1997). The author-activist identified a pattern,
whereby Balasuriya and the cohort of left Catholic activists to which he belonged
were subject to ‘intense dislike’ and ‘endless harassment’ by the official Church
(ibid.). Lauding these members of the Christian left, the author insists that their
perseverance only confirmed the ‘authenticity of the spirituality they represented’
(ibid., 25–26).
Despite Balasuriya’s official restitution, he remained a consummate critic of
Roman Catholic conservatives for attenuating the advances made through the
Second Vatican Council, and specifically for suppressing culturally grounded,
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology • 91Neena Mahadev
socially liberative interpretations of engaged Christian theology. Staying with the
spirit of the Christian left, Balasuriya (2006) questioned how the conservativism
of Pope Benedict XVI might disarticulate with local priorities to accommodate
Asian adaptations of Catholicism. He also raised questions of whether the Roman
Catholic Church under Benedict XVI would foster relationships and show respect
for existing religious traditions. In the view of Catholics and other Christians com-
mitted to human rights activism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the Global South,
Balasuriya’s excommunication in the late 1990s, as well the terms of his reconcil-
iation with the Church, served as a potent reminder of the traditionalist Church’s
capacities to launch an offensive against pluralism (Fernando 1997).
‘Civil Religion,’ Decolonisation, and Bi-polar Christian Theopolitics
Through the capillaric reach of Vatican governmentality, conservative papal
authorities advanced a kind of spiritual warfare against ‘communism’ and the ad-
vancement of social democracy by Christian pluralists in postcolonial Sri Lanka.
As previously discussed, social historians have shown that there has long been a
religious tenor to the US American discourses on fighting communism. Particu-
larly during the Truman (1945–1953) and Eisenhower (1953–1961) presidencies,
opposition to communism was cast as a sacred Judeo-Christian imperative (Herzog
2011; Inboden 2008). Engaging the rhetoric of a nationalist self-conception of
the United States as ‘leader of the free world’, these administrations worked with
government agencies to fight against ‘godless Communism’. Truman, a dedicated
Baptist, directed these efforts. He worked to win over the Vatican authority as well
(Inboden 2008). Arguably it was as a direct result of Truman’s influence that in
1949 the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office of the Roman Catholic
Church under Pope Pius XII issued the Decree Against Communism. The writ
declared that anyone who professes the Communist doctrine is an apostate to be
excommunicated from the Church.8
The excorporative policy of the Roman Catholic Church is especially striking
given that in an earlier era, following World War I (1914–1918), and also later with
Vatican II (1962–1965), the Roman Catholic Church expressed more incorpora-
tive inclinations with respect to socialistic orientations to theology and pastoral
care. Writing in 1923, Carl Schmitt observed in Roman Catholicism and Political
Form that within Europe ‘incomprehensible fear of the Church’ and a generalised
‘anti-Roman’ temper resulted from the Church’s exertions of power. In his apologeti
cal discourse, Schmitt countered by arguing that the success of Roman Catholicism
was attributable to its tendency to incorporate opposite social, political, and even
theological orientations within the purview of its authority. Schmitt remarked that
republicanism and royalism, liberalism and conservativism, socialism and the
demonisation of socialism, are political configurations that were perfectly conso-
nant with Roman Catholic religiosity (ibid.). He suggests that this tendency of the
Church towards a complexity of opposites (complexio oppositorium)—a tolerance
of difference—enabled the Church to thrive and advance.
92 • The Cambridge Journal of AnthropologyThe Charism of the Christian Left
Yet the tolerance of internal diversity that Schmitt captures in his thesis is
often interrupted by the Church’s conservative moves, including the ‘red scare’
and Vatican opposition to leftist formations within the Church. Even as Vatican II
created a new papal dispensation when it was ratified under Pope John XXIII, the
papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI wrestled against the liberalisation and
modernisation of the Church (Napolitano and Norget 2009). In 1985 as Cardinal,
Joseph Ratzinger asserted that ‘the true time of Vatican II has not yet come’.9 As he
gained in authority, he more intensively enacted his conservativism, as seen with
the excommunication of Balasuriya (also Mahadev, forthcoming).
A Prophetic Role
When I first visited Sister Christine and Father Sarath in 2016, I learned of their
commitment to advocating for the poor, their activism in the Free Trade Zones to
champion the rights of garment factory workers, and among farming and fishing
communities around Negombo, as well as their long-standing associations with
other activists, religious leaders, and ecumenical theologians. Two days after the
Port City symposium in 2018, I again visited the pair at Father Sarath’s simple forest
abode and library, several kilometres outside of Negombo. I asked whether they
had any hopes that the construction could be challenged and halted through their
efforts. ‘The construction will go on. And we will go on as a sign of our resistance’,
Father Sarath told me, without any sign of resignation. ‘We will not achieve our end.
China will buy out and win over the people. Our fishermen included. But as a sign
of our opposition, we must continue our protest’. His clear-sighted answer surprised
me. Yet, far from being defeatist, the priest and nun comported themselves with
grace. Father Sarath continued, ‘We must ask ourselves, “What is our prophetic
role?”’ ‘Prophetic role?’ I asked. ‘Where there is an act of injustice, we have to name
it publicly, and condemn it. As with the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament tells
us, we must address the evils of our time. We must stand up to people in power’.
In their prophetic role, as Father Sarath and Sister Christine articulated it, they
sought to ensure that the poor and the natural environment did not become the
sacrificial victims of the capitalist economy. Shepherded by Sister Christine and
Father Sarath, the People’s Movement organised a street-side demonstration at
the Galle Face Green in Colombo. In the mid-day heat of January, the pair stood
alongside fisher people and community organisers, the Laccadive Sea to their backs.
Facing the Galle Road thoroughfare, they held signs and chanted slogans to voice
their opposition to the construction and to inform the public that ‘The habitations
of the fishing peoples are becoming victims sacrificed to the sea’. ‘Dēwara idam
muhudata bili’.
After an hour in the blazing sun, the group retreated to the shade of the trees
along Galle Face Green. The Methodist Bishop Asiri Perera addressed the dem-
onstrators, the local Sinhala press, and bystanders who had gathered. Bishop
Perera beautifully invoked Pope Francis’s Laudato Si. In Sinhala, he orated how
the Catholic Encyclical on the environment was perfectly consonant not only with
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology • 93Neena Mahadev Figures 1–3: One of several Port City protests launched in Colombo by Janatha Viyaparaya, the People’s Movement. Photos by author. Catholic and Protestant Christian values. Laudato Si could also be linked, he ex- plained, to the Dharmic imperative extolled by the Buddha to uphold the sanctity of nature. ‘These values are universally held by Sri Lanka’s religions’. Addressing those gathered, Bishop Perera insisted that the People’s Movement was not ‘against de- velopment’ as those who countered the protests had alleged. But he called upon Sri Lankans to uphold this ethos of protecting Sri Lanka’s poor, and the environment, from destructive large-scale urban developments. To conclude the event, adults and children sang songs and flew homemade kites of recycled plastic. They used black and red markers to decorate the kites with the slogans in Sinhala script such as ‘We don’t want the Port City’ (Port City epaa!). Insurrections of the 1970s–1980s, and a Mis-implicated Ecumenical Christian Left To understand the uptake of Christianity and left activism in Sri Lanka, as well as the constraints to which the ecumenical left are subject, further discussion of the Sri Lankan political context in the era of nationalisation and decolonisation is necessary. During late-colonial and post-Independence nationalisation, Ceylonese 94 • The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
The Charism of the Christian Left
politics became increasingly ethnicised, giving rise to a centre-left majoritarian
populism, typically characterised as Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Strands of
centre-left and centre-right partisanship persisted amid political-economic dis-
contents among identity groups that consolidated along lines of ethno-linguistic,
religious and class differences (Mahadev 2018; Venugopal 2018). By the 1970s, the
country was transitioning from Dominion rule under the Crown to republican
statehood, a time that corresponded with the outgrowth of two major ethnic and
class-based revolts. A decades-long battle between the majoritarian nationalist gov-
ernment forces and the minoritarian nationalist secessionist LTTE (Tamil Tigers)
raged from 1983 to 2009. Prior to that, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP),
a Marxist-Leninist movement almost entirely consisting of Sinhala youth, took
shape in the 1960s (Spencer 1990; Hughes 2013). Discontent seethed among ethnic
Sinhalas from rural areas, and the JVP fomented this discontent over inequities,
the developmentalist paradigm, and the elitism of the state, which was under the
leadership of a party which had, since independence, been known for propelling
liberal economic policies. The JVP reacted against the state with a major insurrec-
tion in 1971.
With the 1971 insurrection, the JVP launched an armed offensive against state
entities, for an intensive period of two months. They attacked police and military,
and terrorised elite civilians, until government forces brutally cracked down on the
movement by arresting, disappearing, publicly torturing, and killing youth who
they believed to be complicit (ibid.; Venugopal 2018). Again in 1987–1989, the JVP
launched a spate of anti-state attacks. With an uptick in intensity the government
again suppressed this second insurrection with an excessive use of military force.10
During the JVP uprisings and the brutal government retaliation, many activ-
ists were mis-implicated in the violence. Centres of ecumenical Christian activity,
often set up as rural ashrams for study and inter-religious dialogue, were believed
to be centres of JVP activity (Amarasuriya, 2021). Harini Amarasuriya observes
that figures of the Christian left evinced an indigenised and dissident form of
Christianity (ibid.). However, although Catholic left clergy were activists, dissi-
dents, and conscientious objectors, they were rarely, if ever, engaged in militancy.11
Amarasuriya (ibid.) provides an ethno-historical account of how a subset of the
Christian left were accused of JVP activity or of harbouring insurgent ‘terrorists’ and
requisite insurgent sympathies, focusing specifically on a centre called Dēvasarana
ashram led by Reverend Yohan Devananda (1928–2016), an Anglican priest.
Because of perceived associations with the JVP, non-militant members of the
Christian left were harassed by government operatives (ibid.). Others were bru-
tally assassinated. In one instance in 1987, an unidentified gunman killed Father
Michael Rodrigo, a Catholic priest belonging to the order of the Oblates of Mary
Immaculate (OMI), a figure who ministered to the poor and was never known
to carry arms (Fernando 1997). He was shot at the altar of his church just as he
had finished carrying out the Eucharistic Mass. Sister Christine and Father Sarath
remember Rodrigo as a revered member of their community. For members of the
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology • 95Neena Mahadev
community who knew Rodrigo, the shock was consonant with a broader pattern
of impingement and episodic violence against innocent Sri Lankans in that time.
Sister Christine remembered the insurrection of 1971 as a time of trouble.
Having witnessed the killing of a child caught in the line of police fire in an indis-
criminating counter-insurgency campaign, she was shaken. Sister Christine had
known the five-year-old girl and her family well. She characterised this event of
April 1971 as her ‘Burning Bush’ moment. It was then that Sister Christine felt
impelled to work for oppressed people in a way that she described as rousing her
covenantal commitment to her God. She spiritually authenticated her faith trajec-
tory through biblical metaphors, recalling Luke 11:17. In her correspondence with
me, she wrote of the incident, ‘She was on her way from “Jerusalem to Jericho” to
buy a loaf of bread fallen into hands of robbers’, invoking the parable of the Good
Samaritan who was called to intervene. In the midst of the events of 1971, Sister
Christine launched a peaceful protest against this surge of police brutality that im-
pacted the rural working poor.
While Sister Christine’s commitments were in favour of social and economic
justice movements, she was clear in her condemnation of the JVP for their violence
as well as their corruption, partisanship, and chauvinistic leanings favouring the
ethnic Sinhala majority. However, amid the overreaching measures of counter-
insurgency, authorities equated peaceable protests to complicity. In addition to the
state’s over-broad inclinations implicating ‘sympathizers’ of left principles during
this burning-hot political volatility of Sri Lanka’s post-Independence era, other
methods of silencing Sri Lankan ecumenical Christian thinkers were meted out
through measures taken by religious authorities.
Sri Lankan Ecumenists and Asian Theologies of Liberation
The justice work engaged by small cohorts of Christian activist clergy and nuns who
exhibit the talent (upathīnma) and calling for such work is fortified by translocal
iterations of liberation theology as well as by way of localised ‘contextual theology’
authored by Sri Lankan ecumenists. My interlocutors occasionally referenced the
works of the Latin American originators of liberation theology, namely Gutiérrez’s
concept of the ‘preferential option for the poor’ derived from the Bible as well as
their adoption of Paolo Freire’s educational methods towards ‘conscientization’.
From the 1960s onwards, hitting a high point in the 1980s and 1990s, Sri Lankan
ecumenists and ‘dialogists’ have authored works that are at once relevant to the Sri
Lankan milieu, in particular, and to Asia and the Global South more broadly. The
late Father Tissa Balasuriya, previously discussed, was one such thinker. Among
many noteworthy figures of the Sri Lankan movement, Father Aloysius Pieris, S.J.,
is perhaps the most famous within Asia. His astute writings exhibit catholicity both
in terms of global Christian theology, Buddhist studies, as well as culturally specific
religious practices of Sri Lanka.
96 • The Cambridge Journal of AnthropologyThe Charism of the Christian Left
Figure 4: A sampling of English-language volumes by Sri Lankan thinkers involved in the
movement for ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue, published from the 1980s to early
2000s. Titles in Sinhala and Tamil are also in circulation. Photo by author.
In an article entitled ‘A Liberation Christology of Religious Pluralism’ (2009), Pieris
delineates the value of ‘cosmic religiosity’ which
reveres this world as sacred, [and can] serve as the common foundation on which all
religions must meet and celebrate religious pluralism as a gift to humanity, appreciat-
ing and encouraging one another’s unrepeatable identities.…In Jesus’ beatitudes, an
Asian hears the echoes of a cosmic spirituality common to all religions…sharing Na-
ture’s abundance…without hoarding and without anxiety (Mt 6:19–34; Lk 12:22–34).
(2009: 6; emphasis in original)
Building upon the work of Jewish and Christian theologians of Europe, the United
States, and Sri Lanka, Pieris expounds a critique of the Old Testament whereby the
God Yahweh vehemently opposes ‘accumulated Capital or undistributed wealth
(Mammon) which creates poverty’ and whereby the Jews’ Covenant with God is
‘Yahweh’s defense pact with the victims of Mammonolatry’ (ibid., emphasis in origi-
nal). Moreover, Pieris suggests that ‘idolatry’ as St. Paul condemned it, was defined
not as worship of other Gods but rather as ‘greed’ as characterised in the Old Tes-
tament scene of the intemperate veneration of the Golden Calf (ibid.). Thus, Pieris
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology • 97Neena Mahadev
suggests, ‘those Asians who are not God-believers in the biblical sense [for example,
Buddhists], are nevertheless anti-idolatrous Mammon-repudiators’ (ibid., 7, my
parenthetical insertion).
Strikingly, Pieris’s alternative exegesis articulates with the contemporary cri-
tique of unbridled secular economic development intensified through urbanisation.
He cites the work of another Sri Lankan theologian, Shirley Lal Wijesinghe, and
Belgian scholar of Pentateuch Jean Louis Ska to explain God’s favouring of the
pastoral sacrifice of Abel, over the agrarian sacrifice of Cain. Pieris interprets this
as God’s preference for nomadic society over a sedentary civilisational one, on the
grounds that the latter would lend to the ‘building of a megapolis (symbolised in
Enoch); whereas Abel, by contrast, represents freedom from compulsions within a
cosmic spirituality that ensures plenty and pleasure’ (ibid., 5). Pieris’s exegesis reso-
nantly anticipates the protests that Sister Christine, Father Sarath, and the People’s
Movement launched against the secular ‘plutocratic’ Port City project, and by ex-
tension, against the political-economic agenda to transform the capital of Colombo
into an Asian ‘Megapolis’.
The Habits and Habitus of Sri Lanka’s Christian Left
In my extended conversations with her, I learned that as a young Ceylonese woman
who hailed from a middle-class background and held the distinction of English
language fluency, Sister Christine went far afield from normative social and career
expectations. From 1967 to 1968, she had trained to become an air hostess. But
instead of opting to pursue a highly sought-after and cosmopolitan career with
Air Ceylon, she encountered nuns working with people with Down’s Syndrome.
Witnessing the nuns’ care, and the inter-subjective extensions that bonded the nuns
to people in need, ‘pierced my heart,’ Sister Christine told me. She joined the Sisters
of Charity in 1969.
Besides sharing her own story, Sister Christine considered pivotal moments
in history to be linked together. She drew a narrative thread between the French
Revolution, the political mobilisations of the 1971 Insurrection (JVP), and the
thirty-year war wherein the militant secessionist LTTE (Tamil Tigers) was pitted
against the majoritarian Sri Lankan state. Expounding upon the linkages she said,
‘We have to interpret, and read the signs of our times according to our faith’. She
referenced the French Revolution because it was then that the congregational for-
bearers of the Sisters of Charity bravely initiated the dangerous work of helping the
needy. Far from advocating violence in alignment with these revolutions, insur-
rections, and guerrilla movements, Sister Christine implied that those historical
pain points lay bare the needs of the people. ‘Having pride in one’s history’—and,
furthermore, having the capacity to interpret the particular conditions in one’s time
and place—is crucial in propelling one’s good works. Sister Christine’s reflection
reveals that the charism is not simply given once and for all time. Engaging God
requires constant work. ‘In every incident, at every moment, [I must ask myself]
‘how will I be creative with the same charism?’’ Otherwise put, for Sister Christine,
98 • The Cambridge Journal of AnthropologyThe Charism of the Christian Left
awareness and vitalistic attunement to locality, event, and the people’s needs of the
day is a necessary condition to work with God’s gifts, and to propel them forth into
the world.
In considering the theopolitical habits of Sri Lanka’s ecumenical Christian left,
it is necessary to consider habitus too. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus relates to the
semiotics of embodied and acquired dispositions, which are sorted as classifications
of social distinction (1977, 1979). In theorising the embodied signs of class, cultural
capital, and charisma, his conception of habitus suggests individuated capability
in a way that allows for play and thus doesn’t serve to overdetermine any course
of action. As Pitt-Rivers (1992) notes, the Bourdieusian term habitus entered the
social science lexicon through moral philosophy and theology. Bourdieu’s secular-
ised usage derives from Augustinian theology, which, as Pitt-Rivers renders it, is
‘an acquired disposition to cooperate with the will of God, and this involves human
will also, upon which the will of God operates’ (429).
The semantic range of the inter-related terms hexis (Latin), habitus, and habit in
medieval virtue ethics can be found within Aristotelian and Augustinian paradigms
of thought. Scholars of medieval moral philosophy are careful to suggest that habitus
as disposition is not to be conflated with ‘instincts’ (Faucher and Roques 2018).
Instincts are present in humans whatever they do and orientate their actions from
birth. Habitus, by contrast, are acquired over the course of human life and thus rep-
resent the fact that the way in which humans live and act progressively determines
what they are and what they will do. As instincts are natural, habitus are called by
some ‘connatural,’ or ‘second nature’ (ibid. 5).
Hence, rather than simply involving in-born capacity, with habitus, as with
Bourdieu’s secularised usage of the term, one becomes driven and practiced in a
way that enhances natural inclinations, and allows the individual to improve upon
those talents. Capabilities become embodied as second nature. Still, habitus is char-
acterised by stability; it is not easily lost since it places an indelible mark on the soul
and persists as ‘second nature’ in the carrier of grace (Bochet 2018).
Conclusion: Inhabiting Grace
For my interlocutors, the sense that they are recipients of a charism from God
suggests that they are not only morally obliged to do this work for the poor but
that the gift of grace calls them to it. It also renders them as adepts at doing so.
Through their aptitudes, they become distinctive in their modest moral comport-
ments. Habit in the conventional Roman Catholic sense of course refers to religious
attire but more generally refers also to an ontological state and a way of being.
As Amarasuriya (2021) shows in her discussion of conscience and conscientious
objectors engaged in the practice of political dissidence, the Sri Lankan Christian
left don simple vestments, ‘beards, sandals, and cloth bags’— sartorial simplicity
that marks a commitment to an indigenised Christianity. The particularities of
outward appearance are reflective of the anti-consumerist stance. In a clerical
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology • 99Neena Mahadev
setting it also distinguishes the Sri Lankan Christian left from the trappings of the
official Church.
For Sister Christine and Father Sarath, even as their charism is given by God,
social concern is acted upon as habit—a sacred work that comes to each of them
like second nature. Their attention to, and interpretation of, historical and contem-
porary conditions fed the creativity required to act upon God’s gifts. Moreover,
Sister Christine told me that her daily, pre-dawn prayers serve as inspiriting fuel
that allows her to abide by her work. Both of them would occasionally reflect
upon the theology of their actions through biblical entry points, and Father Sarath
himself pursued a higher degree as a seminarian. But occasionally, too, they would
sweetly wave away my theologically oriented questions. In this modern postcolonial
context, wherein the livelihoods and habitations of the poor are liable to be sac-
rificed to economic development, these habits arrive supernaturally, taking root
in the person and cultivated through prayer and persistent engagements in social
activism and welfare for the poor.
As McIvor and Edwards emphasise in their introduction, Pitt-Rivers remarked
that there is ‘always something extra’, a gratuitous gesture, beyond the quantitative
measure of balancing the reciprocity of the gifts given. I would argue that for Sri
Lanka’s Christian left, the ‘extra’ associated with divine grace are the cultural accre-
tions and adaptivity of Christianity. Orthodox religious institutions prototypically
condemn phenomenon such as ‘syncretism’, ‘hybridity’, and ‘creolisation’, as if they
represent forged copies of an authentic sacred prototype. But for these adaptors
who embody Christianity deeply, the catholicity and the indigenisation of their
praxis is their way of inhabiting that gracious something extra.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Sister Noel Christine Fernando, Father Sarath
Iddamalgoda, Father Aloysius Pieris, S.J., and the late Father Tissa Balasuriya,
O.M.I. for generously engaging her questions. Fieldwork for the project was gener-
ously sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic
Diversity. Special thanks to Dr. Méadhbh McIvor and Dr. Michael Edwards for
initiating an exciting set of discussions in the course of their Ethnographies of
Grace workshop in December 2020, and for their gracious intellectual interventions
in that event and towards the development of this collection of papers. Additional
thanks to Dr. Hans Steinmüller, Dr. Fenella Cannell, three anonymous reviewers,
and CJA Editor Dr. Andrew Sanchez for an incisive set of comments on earlier
versions of this article.
100 • The Cambridge Journal of AnthropologyThe Charism of the Christian Left
Neena Mahadev is an Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College. Her fieldwork was
supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation
(U.S.), and the Max Planck Institute. Her work appears in Current Anthropology,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Hau Journal, and Religion and Society.
She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Global Buddhism, and the New
Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity book series. Her first book, Of
Karma and Grace: Mediating Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka is under
contract with Columbia University Press. The manuscript was awarded the 2021
Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion.
Email: neena.mahadev@yale-nus.edu.sg; ORCID: 0000-0002-3156-1201
Notes
1. Buddhists constitute around 70 percent of the population (2012 census).
2. Oxford English Dictionary. catholicity. https://oed.com/catholicity
3. Merriam Webster. 2022. Catholicity. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catholicity.
4. Pope Francis’s ‘Jesuit charism’ is reason to celebrate for many Catholics (Massaro 2018). Napoli-
tano (2020) demonstrates however that Francis is a ‘Criollo Pope,’ a politically complex figure of
cultural hybridity, who is received differently in his émigré homeland.
5. With reference to Max Weber (1905).
6. Centre for Society & Religion. 2022. About Us. http://csrsrilanka.org/about-us/.
7. Fernando, R. 2013. ‘Fr. Tissa Balasuriya: A Loving and Gentle Rebel’. National Catholic Reporter.
January 30. http://ncronline.org/news/people/fr-tissa-balasuriya-loving-and-gentle-rebel
8. The persistence of this US American theopolitical discourse was strikingly obvious in the 2020 US
election. Conservatives and right-wing populists expressed alarm of how liberals and the ‘radical
left’ impinge upon their religious freedom. US President-elect Biden noted in his speeches how
the right ‘demonizes’ their opponents.
9. Catholic Culture. 2009. ‘Vatican Liturgical Official Makes New Plea for “Reform of the
Reform”‘. Catholic World News. February 23. http://www.catholicculture.org/news/features/
index.cfm?recnum=60291.
10. The LTTE (Tamil) and the JVP (Sinhala) both became heavily ethnicized in their discourses and
objectives.
11. Although the government censured the JVP as ‘criminal,’ and ‘unBuddhist,’ several Buddhist
monks nevertheless supported the JVP (Abeysekera 2001).
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