Thread by @Hiranyareta

"The lesson Jews had learnt in the European Holocaust was that their individual success could easily be used against them if their civilizational identity was defamed." ~ @RajivMessage

"The great American meritocracy has enabled us to succeed as individuals, and many Indians see American Jews as a role model.

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But it took the Jews over half a century of organized lobbying and litigation by organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, to establish their religious identity in public life.
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" Liberalism in America is about egalitarian economic and race policies, and is not a rejection or even a departure from the nation’s majority religion, i.e. Christianity.
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Hindu-Americans need to be educated on the history of American public religion and the “American way” of claiming one’s religious identity across the spectrum of liberals and conservatives.
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In fact, even liberal Americans have always been a very Christian people. Hilary Clinton’s devout Christianity has shaped her liberalism.
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She told New York Times that her Methodist faith has been “a huge part of who I am, and how I have seen the world and what I believe in, and what I have tried to do in my life.”
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She carries a Bible on her campaign travels and confidently quotes from St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley, the father of Methodism.
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Another liberal, Barak Obama, proudly projects his Christianity and delivers many of his key campaign speeches before church congregations.
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It comes as a surprise to many secular Indians that the very liberal President Jimmy Carter describes himself as a Bible evangelist, and asserts that his Christian faith provided the moral compass to guide his presidency.
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The equivalent scenario would be for India’s CPM leaders (the liberal/left equivalent of Obama, Clinton and Carter) to quote Hindu sacred texts and deliver campaign speeches in major Hindu temples.
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While American labor unions have always been very deeply rooted in Christianity, India’s labor unions are encouraged to discard the Hindu identity. Unlike in Europe, American public life has never abandoned its deep rooted Christian foundations.
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America’s separation of state and church affects only formal institutions, and does not imply de-Christianizing the leadership or the national ethos.
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Indian intellectuals have misunderstood America’s Christian psyche because the Indian notion of secularism in India is very different to that of the Amerrican.
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Indian secularism requires distancing from the majority religion, i.e. Hinduism, by one or more of the following ways: by espousing a “generic spirituality” without any specific religious identity,
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by condemning any Hindu identity as a mark of communalism with BJP links, or by explicitly blaming Hinduism for all sorts of human rights problems.
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The equivalent situation would be to blame the Bible for all the US abuses in Guantanamo and in its domestic society, and to de-Christianize America into a sort of generic spirituality.
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While Hinduism, like all other world religions, does have social problems, it also has internally generated reformations, as well as immense resources to deal with the human condition.
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Unraveling this requires understanding Hinduphobia’s nexus in the American academy and seminaries."

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Rajiv Malhotra wrote abv lines almost 15 years ago but they are still very relevant for Hindus.
invadingthesacred.com/article-in-usi…