Athyal:Today, however, the missionary work follows an efficiency mode, where we have strategies and targets. The impression that mission is the programme of a specific department of the church assigned that task, is an understanding that followed this understanding of mission Secularism in India is defined as freedom from discrimination on the basis of religion and also, the promotion of renascent and reform movements in religions, especially those aimed at the liberation of the downtrodden sections of the society. The Neo-Hindu movement of the 19th and 20th centuries was in essence the struggle of Hinduism to build up a religious humanism in active dialogue with the secular and socialist movements in the country.



Several theologians and social scientists feel that one of reasons for the resurgence of communalism and religious fundamentalism is that this dialogue, vibrant during the last century, has become dormant in recent years. Over the years, the renascent elements in religion were overtaken by more aggressive and shrill voices from within. Equally important, the secularist movement, caught up in the web of rigid academic confines and political compulsions, turned dogmatic. The dialogue of the religious and secular, crucial for building up a secular ethos became dormant.In the words of M. M. Thomas, ‘It is my conviction that it is the strengthening of the closed secularism with this total privatisation of religion and the development of what may be called Dogmatic secularism which rejects any relevance of religious values in the public realm, along with the slackening and marginalizing of religious and social reform movements that have created the spiritual vacuum which is now sought to be filled by religious fundamentalism and communalism’ (Religion, State & Communalism: A Post-Ayodhya Reflection, CCA, 1995, p. 14). The hope for a secular India lays not so much in the separation of religion and society but in the positive and healthy interaction of the renascent and liberative elements in both. In Thomas’ own words: ‘If religion is part of the problem in India, religion must also be part of the solution’.