This article is based on excerpts from my contribution to the second KP Sasi Webinar on Religion and Spirituality in the Age of Fascism held on 18 May 2025
I have been engaged with this subject of religion, spirituality and fascism quite seriously since the 1984 violence in Delhi. And after that, I did a lot of work – both on the streets and in terms of discussions – about what it all means. I will try to sum up some of my views, and I know they are amenable to a great deal more discussion. But first and foremost, I think we have not devoted sufficient intellectual rigor to this issue.
We are all agreed that we have human rights, and that we have rights to our conscience and beliefs. There is an assault going on against these rights, and we need to defend our democracy. We are all agreed on that. And there are fascistic features in the political system – not only in our country but in other countries as well. But I think the problem is much deeper than that.
As a historian, I would say that the time periods during which the human mind really flourished in a free manner – and was not oppressed by various kinds of censorship, whether religious or political – were very few and far between.
The moments in history where people actually had full freedom to think, work, and articulate their beliefs have not been many. We have to think about that. Even in periods long before our modern era, when there was religious persecution, people were still struggling for intellectual freedom.
I’ve been studying the history of religion more seriously now. There won’t be time to go into it in detail, but I’ll relate a few points.
To begin with, I think the central issue is that there is a deep-rooted common origin of religion and philosophy. Religion and philosophy share the same root: a sense of wonder, or curiosity. A sense of wonder at where we came from, who we are, where we are going, what time is, what eternity is – whether it is limited or unlimited.
Even today, we find anthropomorphic language used by science journalists who talk about the “ancient universe” and say things like “unlocking the secrets of the universe.” It always makes me smile, because although I’m no expert in science, I do know that if you refer to the “ancient universe,” you are attributing the human quality of being historical to something that is, in fact, ahistorical.
History unfolds within eternity. Eternity is not subject to our concept of history. As a historian, it took me many decades to realize this: everything is not historical. There are some things which are beyond history.
So that’s one issue – that there are serious philosophical questions. And if people talk about spirituality without being religious, they are actually referring in a tangential way to something else: they are referring to the mystery of being.
If I were to sum it up, I would say God is a mystery pretending to be an explanation. So, to begin with, I think we are faced with a mystery. Although philosophy continues the debate and dialogue, theology says: you don’t need to debate and dialogue anymore.
That is the difference. The origin is the same – a sense of wonder and curiosity about where we have come from and where we are going; about time and eternity. But the theological position says: we have the answer. You don’t need to debate this any longer.
There is a wonderful citation by a philosopher whom I respect very much. He says that humanity is constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence associated with mathematics; and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. He goes on to say that philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either kind of charm.
In short, philosophy continues the conversation and dialogue. Theology puts an end to it – if theology were able to continue it, then it would be very interesting. That’s point number one.
The second point relates to the one outstanding philosophical issue through the ages; which can be summed up very simply: should we live according to divine guidance, or should we live according to human guidance?
There is a difference between political philosophy and political theology.
Political theology says we must live according to Gods’ will – divine guidance. Political philosophy says we must devise our means of life and living based on unaided human reason.
Now, this has also been summed up among philosophers as the dispute between Jerusalem and Athens – Athens signifying the Platonic or ancient Greco-Roman tradition, and Jerusalem signifying the Abrahamic tradition.
The Abrahamic tradition implies prophetism and the work of prophets. Moses is supposed to be the first prophet, though there is no firm historical evidence of his existence. There is evidence for Jesus Christ and Prophet Muhammad – we know they existed. Whether we believe in their divine inspiration is a matter of faith, not history.
The prophetic tradition and the philosophical tradition came into some kind of tension. And this tension has remained through the centuries. Should we live according to divine guidance, or human guidance?
Now, if we are to live according to divine guidance, the tensions within the prophetic tradition come into play. How does this happen? Because if you have more than one prophet, you are in the position of having to decide between the true prophet and the false prophet. You have to apply your intellectual faculties and your judgment.
This immediately puts us back in the sphere of philosophy.
Strictly speaking, revelation – what the prophets or sages reveal – is a form of knowledge. In Arabic, it is ilham; in Sanskrit, shruti; in English, revelation. Revelation is a form of knowledge. For instance, faithful Christians believe that all the knowledge you need is written in the Bible. But here is a problem: The first lines in the Bible say, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth… And God said, let there be light: and there was light.” (Genesis Chapter 1).
The first logical question is: Who is saying this? Who is reporting God as having said anything at all? So, there are questions – at a very mundane level – that we can pose from a philosophical standpoint, without necessarily wanting to blaspheme. But the possibility of blasphemy comes into the picture because revelation is a form of knowledge. Therefore, to discuss revelation as being true or false is itself considered blasphemous.
But why is it blasphemy? Because we are subjecting the Word of God and the will of God to human reason. Hence it is blasphemous. But the questioner can reply that God gave us the power to reason. God commanded us to find the truth, and we found that there is no God.
Hence our second problem is the contra-position of reason versus revelation
The third issue is that when we talk about religion and the conflict between different religions, we are missing one major point. We are living, you said, in the age of fascism. Beyond that, I believe we are living in an age of ideology.
In an age of ideology, the question confronting us is not only that of fascism, but about totalitarianism. How is totalitarianism connected to fascism? After all, we also find totalitarianism in the communist world – Stalinism, for example.
As an aside, few people know that Stalin and the Soviet Union voted for the foundation of Israel in 1948; and supplied it with arms.
My point is that the communist world too, is witness to tyranny, the suppression of rights to conscience, free speech, etc. All this happened in the name of leftism and communism – but those of us who are leftists don’t want to discuss it.
So let us consider the problem of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a novel form of tyranny. There have been individual dictators and tyrants before, but totalitarianism is not to be defined as the dictatorship of say, a Stalin or a Hitler alone.
Totalitarianism is the dictatorship of and tyranny of an ideology. Totalitarian doctrines tell us what to eat, wear, whom to love, whom to befriend, how to live, how to walk, how to dress, how to clothe ourselves. They will tell us everything.
In short, the tyranny of an ideology is an overpowering of the human soul itself.
This then, is the difference between any kind of tyranny and the totalitarian tyranny flourishing today in various forms and degrees.
What is happening is that religion has been overtaken by ideology. Ideologies which speak in the name of this or that religion are only apparently religious. Let us think: Is Zionism the same as Judaism? No. Is Hinduism the same as Hindutva? No. Are Christian evangelists and Christian fascists in Trump’s USA the same as any Christian? No.
Christianity produced many liberation theologians and democratic fighters for the rights of the poor and ordinary people. Christianity also produced dictators like Franco and Salazar. Many dictators in Latin America were supported by the Catholic Church. In the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the Catholic Church played a very tyrannical role.
Thus, in every religious tradition, there exists a distinction between those who stand for democracy, liberty, and human rights, and those who do not. Therefore, it’s not a question of religion – but a far deeper issue. Even in Buddhist traditions, we can find examples of fascist and proto-tyrannical tendencies: in Sri Lanka, in Japan during World War II; and Burma today.
If even Buddhism can be appropriated by ideological despots, we have to think about what is producing fascism without reducing it solely to its religious aspect.
There’s something more. That something more is that there has always been a link between the sacred and violence. René Girard, the famous France-American historian and anthropologist, wrote a book called Violence and the Sacred. He examined ancient Greco-Roman religious traditions, sacrificial practices, festivals such as bacchanalia, and more. One of his conclusions (Chapter 5) was that ‘Dionysius is the god of decisive mob action’. Certain religious rituals play a psychological role, of venting our latent violent tendencies. It’s very interesting. We don’t have time to go into it, but we really need a serious discussion about religious traditions and belief systems without getting too excited.
In India, it’s very difficult to have a rational discussion about religion because everybody gets upset. Nobody wants to have a reasoned debate. If I say something critical about a religion, it doesn’t mean I’m against your religion or belittling you. Let me give you a simple example: in Hindi, the word mithya means false, deceitful. You can translate it as chhal-kapat – lies and falsehoods. Mithya means something positively wrong and bad. But in English, ‘myth’ has a dual meaning. It can refer to something fictive, but not necessarily in a bad sense; and it can also refer simply to legends and stories.
The trouble is, when the word myth is used, Hindi-speakers hear it differently. They may respond thus: “Oh, so you’re saying that Muhammad and Jesus were real people, but Indic gods are just myths.” We need to be able to have a discussion about all this without getting overly emotional.
And as I said earlier, religion has been overtaken by ideology. Mahatma Gandhi used to say that communalism is not religion – it is irreligion, the opposite of religion. By which he meant that religion was being overtaken by something else.
Now, often we find people saying we should not mix religion and politics.
But after studying the Western philosophical tradition, I found that through the centuries, the greatest philosophical minds have said you cannot separate them.
Gandhi also used to say he didn’t believe religion should be separate from politics – it should infuse politics at every step. How may we understand this? It’s quite simple: if we substitute the word “religion” with “ethics” and the word “politics” with “power,” all Gandhiji was saying is that power should be exercised with due caution and with regard to ethics and morality.
Whereas in the Western tradition – from Machiavelli and Hobbes to the Jacobins and Lenin and Nietzsche – everybody believed that a political character required a mixture of Caesar and Christ. You have to be cruel. Max Weber even delivered a speech in 1919 entitled Politics as a Vocation, in which he observed that an involvement in politics implied an alliance with ‘the diabolic forces lurking in all violence’.
Religion has been overtaken by ideology. State structures and power structures always require legitimacy. They gain legitimacy through the sacred because violence and the sacred are always together. You can’t ban alcohol in the armed forces. And you can’t ban religious belief either.
This age of ideology is also an age of totalitarianism, which tends to take over the entire soul. It’s not mere tyranny or despotism – it’s more than that. It’s an attempt to control the human soul in its entirety. It’s a pipe dream, of course – because the human mind cannot be suppressed. But there is definitely an ongoing assault on the mind.
If you watch five minutes of certain TV channels, you’ll understand what I mean. There is no conversation. We don’t talk – we shout. We put labels on people, we scream, dismiss, we sneer. But we don’t talk. Talking to one another – conversing, in other words – means holding yourself open to evidence and rationality. But we are not doing that. These are all visible examples of what is happening. So, it’s not simply a matter of fascism.
Spirituality, in my view, is the common ground between philosophy and an open-minded theology – an openness to mystery. When Satya was introducing this discussion, he mentioned scientists and their pursuit of truth. The implication was that truth is something only scientists pursue. I’m not criticizing his statement – I’m pointing out a philosophical problem which is a problem of our entire philosophical climate.
Truth has been reduced to measurement. The pursuit of truth – or reasonable speech – has been separated from the understanding of virtue, beauty, justice, and so on. You must have heard the phrase: “Facts are sacred, opinion is free.” This is another way of saying that facts are what can be measured by science; and everything else – values, ethics and meaning – is purely subjective.
If values and facts are sharply separated, we are left with nothing, no standards of judgment.
Tolstoy made the following statement – which Max Weber repeated in 1917: “Science is useless, because it doesn’t answer the most important questions humans face: What should I do, and how should I live?” Weber said science is useful only to the extent that if you frame the question properly, then maybe science can help you answer it. By themselves, science and mathematics are ethically neutral. You can even be making an atom bomb and say, “I’m only a mathematician. I never did anything wrong. I just tightened the screws. I just made some mathematical calculation.”
Since science and mathematics are ethically neutral, where do we get our ethics?
We have to get it from somewhere. Now, if that somewhere is itself divided and subdivided, then what are we going to end up with? A war of conscience against conscience. I believe that we need to reframe this.
The first step is to recognize that neither science nor religion can actually answer the deepest problems. These mysteries of human life cannot be overcome. Don’t pretend that by sending a Hubble telescope into space and talking about the history of the universe – which doesn’t have any history – you can solve the mystery. There’s a Chinese saying which goes: “Knowledge is like a balloon. The bigger it grows, the larger the area of your ignorance.”
Differently put, the further you look, the more you realize you don’t have a clue.
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Unsolicited thoughts from an elder citizen
The Oceanic Circle: Talk on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s 155th birthday
After the truth-shower 