How was Chrisitanity able to spread all over the world despite cultural barriers?

From Kirankumar Prabhu based on the “KC and World Religions” lecture series

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
thank you how is it that despite there being different cultural barriers Christianity is spreading all over the world whereas Vedic culture is primarily only in India right now and even in the time of Vedic culture there seems to be cultural diversity all over the world answer in one sense Christianity has either especially in the early days when it went to South America practically destroyed the culture that was there in South America and in fact Pope John Paul II apologized later on for the destruction that happened in Mesoamerica and even in Europe if we see there is not much of the living Roman culture today there was a Roman Empire which at one time was spanning almost all of Europe before that there was a Greek culture so when Christianity came up at that time it was it came to a land where earlier there was Greek and Roman cultures were there so some of those cultural elements were incorporated but we see that the Greek and Roman culture is not surviving today in these countries so one wherever it had the power sometimes Christianity destroyed the original culture in other places Christianity incorporated the cultural elements into its own theology into its own culture for example many of the Christian festivals that are there for example even the whole concept of worshipping Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus that some scholars say was adopted from the idea of the worship of the mother goddess which was there in the Greco-Roman tradition and the whole idea of celebrating the feasts of the various saints that was also not indigenous to Christian culture, that was also adopted by them so Christians have adopted a lot of the local cultural values also into their own system and because of this cultural flexibility which they have shown they have also been able to survive and spread in Africa one of the main reasons why Christianity was able to spread whether it was Africa or whether it was India was because the center of the scientific revolution happened in a place where Christians were ruling so Christianity had the power of technology with them, that was how they were able to mutually succeed also but along with succeeding mutually wherever they had to fight, technology brought respectability to the people who had the technology in Africa as well as in India where the technology was not there, naturally people who had cannons and who had advance ships and printing press and other such technological gadgets and the scientific knowledge they got natural respectability because of that and in fact Rudyard Kipling was a British poet who said that it is actually the white man’s burden to civilize the rest of humanity so it was such an egocentric idea that the white man is the only civilized person and everyone else is uncivilized and it is the white man’s burden he was saying that as if the white man is doing a great good to the whole world by civilizing all of them so this idea came up because the power of science and the glamour which comes from technology was there with European countries and that glamour was used, was appropriated by Christian missionaries in their propaganda activity also so especially if you look at Africa even now much of the native African culture is not there it has neither become Christianized nor it has become Islamized and there are some places where the native African tribes are there and they are being possessive about their culture trying to protect it in India also to some extent the culture was spiritual and Christianity when it came along one of the things that it was it offered technology and it offered material benefits and initially the accusation against Christian conversion was that it would often denationalize Indians because all the Indians would live in India because of the change of religion they would adopt western values, western dress and they would almost be like denationalized Indians who were just physically in India but did not have anything to do with India so this created political complications for the church and then the church decided to change its strategy and now presently at least the Catholic church and several of the other churches also have widely integrated Indian cultural symbols into their religious outreach programs in India so there are Christian churches which are appropriate symbols like or they have also started doing fire sacrifices they have also made Sanskrit and vernacular language prayers, shlokas and totras for Jesus and in this way they adopted the cultural forms so basically by either destroying the culture whenever it is possible by integrating some of the elements of that culture into their own culture or by using the tools of their own culture to present their own philosophy and their gospel Christians have been able to go beyond cultural barriers and have been able to reach to a large number of people and when the Vedic culture was there, Vedic culture also has a broad agreement but within that there are substantial differences there is a broad agreement on the worship of the deity, on the respect of the cow, on the respect of the renounced order, respect of the Vedas but along with that the specific person to be worshipped whether it is Krishna or Shiva whatever, there is diversity within that and beyond that also there is diversity in terms of different varnas have their own subculture so the although Guha in the Ramayana is considered to be a devotee of Lord Ram his culture was substantially different from the culture of Lord Ram himself so similarly there was this cultural diversity in the Vedic times and especially if there is no central coordinating authority or central coordinating principle, then the diversity can lead to complete disunity and disconnection that’s what happened after 5000 years ago after the Kurukshetra war and after the departure of Parikshit the diversity was there within Vedic culture also but when there was no central coordinating governing unifying principle then the diversity leads to disunity that’s how Vedic culture got scattered