When even Americans are concerned about Christian conversions in India, why is ISKCON unconcerned?

This article in the Huffington post outlines the unscrupulous ways in which Christian missionaries are converting Hindus.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-goldberg/missionaries-in-india_b_4470448.html

Why does ISKCON act as if this doesn’t matter?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna question when even Americans are concerned about conversion to Christianity happening in India why is ISKCON unconcerned recently there was an article in Huffington Post by the by an author who has written the book American Veda and he was on a tour of India and he described how Christians are using unscrupulous means to convert Hindus they say they give free treatment only to sick people only if they are ready to convert they prepare they act as if there are dangers they do tricks like for example children are in a school bus in a dangerous place while going through a forest area and they act as if the bus is not starting or bus is broken down and they ask the children to pray to their Hindu God and when nothing works then they say now pray to Jesus and then the bus starts actually the bus has got nothing wrong just the driver is pretending it is not starting and in this way they say that actually your Hindu Gods are false and you should worship Jesus and they do like this many things and because of this many Hindus are disturbed and huge number of especially uneducated underprivileged Hindus are getting converted this is a matter of huge concern yet ISKCON is not doing anything about it why does ISKCON act so transcendental in a very impractical and unrealistic sense by neglecting issues of real concern answer who says ISKCON is unconcerned but the concern itself is to be expressed in a proper way a couple of years ago we had BTG did a full issue on Christianity and Krishna Consciousness and there in we addressed the issue of conversion I wrote a long article which was based on a on a compilation of discussions with various Hindu thinkers about this that was published also as a article on the spiritual scientist website conversion to what intolerance or transcendence so similarly there are devotees who are concerned about it but what is to be done with respect to the concern there are Hindu right wing reactionaries some of them or at least the media labels them like that some people say Christianity itself is bad and Christians are bad and they try to simplistically demonize Christians now I read the article in Huffington Post which you had said and basically the tone there is very reasonable and respectful the author is appealing to other Christians saying that just see there are these there are these overzealous Christian missionaries who are using unscrupulous means do you approve this do you think Jesus would approve this so that is the tone which we should also have we shouldn’t demonize Christians we should be able to recognize that people are under different modes some people are in goodness some in passion some in ignorance so there are Christians also in goodness, passion, ignorance and there are Christians who are in passion and ignorance who will use unscrupulous techniques like this and for them a conversion is just more like business marketing they want to log up the figures and then they get rewards I was invited once to a Christian seminary to give a talk and there I was talking with the students afterwards and I was told that when the conference was there there will be many people and there was Father Nicholas and Father George and Father Paul and so many things I thought who are these people and then I saw and this was in Pune so there was Father Nicholas from Sangamner Father Paul from Nigri Father this from all the local talukas and villages like that talukas basically so then when I saw those people they were all typical Indians and most of them didn’t even know English properly and then I when I was and I gave a talk based on the Bhagavad Gita and then afterwards I was talking with them informally I came to know that they are allured they are told that if you convert you will get this, this, this benefits and not only that if you can convert 50 people we will build a church and we will make you the father and if you can say 50 is a number and number may vary and if you can convert 500 people we will give you a free trip to Europe and America this is what most Indians dream about and these people they had just rejected their traditions and they had got converted like this so this is something which is happening and it is it is both the people who are doing it and the people who are getting attracted by both are basically materially motivated, commercially motivated and this is unfortunate and as the author has rightly pointed out this is this is disgrace to Jesus also or to speak of injury to Hindu culture so now certainly ISKCON is concerned about it but how is that concern to be expressed that concern is not to be expressed by labeling Christianity as bad we have to understand that it is the modes of passion and ignorance which are bad and those can make Christians do wrong things Hindus also do wrong things there are so many Hindus who also are materialistic and they don’t care for they don’t care for religion much in fact many Hindus are paranoid about being labeled as right wing and that’s why often they oppose Hindu culture they say that we cannot have permission for book distribution in companies, we cannot allow lectures in colleges why? because we are secular no but the point is secular doesn’t mean anti-religious secular means it doesn’t support any particular religion but if somebody is sharing wisdom there is no need to stop that anyway the point is that rather than demonizing Christians we have to recognize that it is the modes of passion and ignorance that are at fault and we have to work to counter those modes if we also go into passion and ignorance some people say oh these Christians we should attack and destroy them if we go into passion and ignorance then we are at the same level of consciousness that they are and we will basically create more conflicts so we have to be in goodness and we have to preach vigorously, we have to do outreach more and more widely and more and more effectively this will ensure that the Hindus the broad Hindus community will become more and more active and they will understand their tradition more they will understand the glory of their tradition and will want to protect it so definitely it’s a matter of concern but the concern should not be expressed in a in a philosophically ignorant way by just demonizing Christians it has to be expressed in a philosophically informed way by doing more effective outreach to raise people from the lower modes towards the higher modes now what is important also to recognize is that ultimately religion is in some way like a market place so what we have to do is if one car is producing something and they if there are two cars in the market and one car does more advertising another car doesn’t do advertising then the car which does more advertising will get more sales so like that many Christians have a vigorous preaching spirit now Hindus think that being missionary is not a part of our religion that is fine but that doesn’t mean that we let our culture get destroyed and not being a missionary being a part of our is not being missionary integral part of Hinduism no actually Krishna says if Hinduism is based on Bhagavad Gita Krishna says one who shares my message is very dear to me so that is definitely a part of the Vedic culture the spirit of the Gita to share its message with others but it is not done in an intolerant way where we attack and try to destroy other religions as some some of the Abrahamic religions some people in the Abrahamic religions have done so that is not the spirit of the Bhagavad Gita but still outreach is definitely an important part of the Gita’s message so actually among the many Hindu organizations not many are doing effective outreach ISKCON is doing it vigorously so the way to deal with this convergence is to not demonize Christians but to recognize that lower modes have to be countered and the way to do that is by sharing spiritual wisdom so all of us should feel the responsibility that let me do what I can to share Krishna and the others and protect spiritual culture in general if a person converts from Hinduism to Christianity because that person feels that oh that is the way I will go closer to God and that person actually becomes more spiritually minded by that then we have nothing against that but when people are unscrupulously manipulated to convert that is definitely undesirable that is definitely a matter of concern and we should do vigorous outreach to counter this from its roots onwards thank you