The Cultural Politics of Neo-Pentecostalism in India

Talk by Pradip Ninan Thomas

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore invites you to a talk by Pradip Ninan Thomas on The Cultural Politics of Neo-Pentecostalism in India. Harvey Cox, the scholar of religions, has described pentecostalism as ‘a religion made to travel’ and as the global face of Christianity today. While there is little hard data available in India on any changes in Christian denominational membership, there is evidence available via the Pew Study on Global Pentecostalism and any amount of soft data that indicates that there has been a massive expansion in new churches in India predominantly linked to the Pentecostalist and neo-Pentecostalist traditions.

This brief lecture is based on a study of Christian fundamentalism and Communications in India that Pradip Ninan Thomas had carried out in 2006. This lecture will explore the cultural politics of neo-Pentecostalism in India including its organizational strategies, ideological struggles, communicative practices and correspondences between the global and the local.

The religious marketplace in India has experienced extraordinary growth over the last two decades. Christianity too has been affected by this growth and Pradip Ninan Thomas argues that the commodification of Christianity is tied into Church planting, the numbers game and contestations with Hindutva in India.

Speaker

Pradip Thomas is Joint Director of the Centre for Communication & Social Change, University of Queensland, Brisbane. His research trajectory primarily comes out of the political economy of communication tradition and he has written/co-edited a number of books and papers on issues related to media ownership, intellectual property, religion and the media and communication and social change. A forthcoming book that will be published by Sage is entitled ‘Political Economy of Communications in India: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. He is currently in India carrying out interviews related to a book project on Communication Rights Movements in India. He has had a long standing research interest in issues related to religion and media, particularly religious fundamentalism and the media.