The relation of religion and politics in South Asia is a subject of unusual complexity, with a richness of phenomena which at once intrigues and embarrasses. In the West we are concerned chiefly with the major branches of the Christian church; in South Asia we find a compact geographical region which is the meeting place of three major world religions. The majorities in the three most important South Asian countries, India, Pakistan and Ceylon, profess respectively Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism. From a comparative point of view it is important to note that the three countries share a similar colonial background: all three were part of the British Empire. British policies with respect to religion in undivided India and in Ceylon were not identical, but they did follow the same general lines.

We are slowly being conditioned to believe that with decolonization in the political sphere, the “third world” is getting rid of the Christian religion which had come to Asia and Africa—so the story goes—as an auxiliary force of white imperialism. This is a biased and false picture, born perhaps not so much of wishful thinking as of an erroneous logic of history.“ This logic concludes: if Asians and Africans come once again into their own, they ought to reassert their religious personality too.

My own observations as a traveler in Asia and Africa are inevitably personal and partial. Because I had more ready access to Catholic sources of information, for example, my comparisons and references most frequently involve Catholicism, although many of the generalizations would apply to Protestantism as well. In any case I found that, as always, the reality proved to be far more complex than the general assumptions.

Once again we are practicing brinkmanship in a manner that even the late Secretary of State Dulles would have envied. How we have done so and why the American people in the Atomic Age have permitted their government repeatedly to get itself into perilous situations which could escalate into a general nuclear war cannot really be understood without reference to the background of our thinking since World War II. We must separate fact from fiction, which means that we must re-examine critically and objectively the premises and conclusions from which our actions have sprung.