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Vishal Mangalwadi is an international lecturer, social reformer, and political columnist for The International Indian. He has also written ten books, including The World of Gurus and India, The Grand Experiment. His current project is the ambitious The Book that Shaped a Millennium.

How did you come to the Christian faith?

It was an immoral struggle as a teenager.  I had gone into habit of lying and stealing and felt that this was wrong, but didn't have enough willpower to get out. The gospel that Jesus can save me from my sin came as a very liberating force.

When I was doing my undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Allahabad, India, I began to doubt whether the Bible was God's Word. It was after six months of intense intellectual struggle that I came back to see that Bible was actually God's Word.

What helped you in that struggle?

Well, one critical book was Francis Schaeffer's Escape from Reason. I had completed a course in Western philosophy when I began reading it. I realized … that philosophers knew that they couldn't know truth. So, unless there is someone who knows it and can reveal it to us, we cannot know.

I went back to seeking whether God actually revealed himself to us in the Bible. Reading First and Second Chronicles, I came back to believe that this is actually God's word.

Why First and Second Chronicles?

I was reading from Genesis on so by the time I came to Chronicles I felt, "Why should I be reading this?" I'm an Indian young man, I don't know enough about Indian history. Why should I be reading this Jewish history? I was getting bored reading about kings long dead and gone.

And then, as I was ready to throw it all away, I realized suddenly that this was very strange history. Indian history is always telling me how good and great and wonderful Indian kings are. This Jewish book is telling me that Jewish kings were rotten. I thought, maybe this is written by priests and they love condemning the current politicians. But then it was actually saying that the whole Jewish religious establishment was rotten to a point that God hated and destroyed his own temple.

The theme kept coming: That God had chosen the Jews to bless all the nations of the earth. If I want to understand why my nation is degenerating and how it can be rebuilt, this book is telling me how and why.

What got me really interested in what I'm doing now was a realization that God had promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that through their descendants, he's willing to bless all the nations of the earth.

So has he blessed India? Has he kept his promise? I started looking around. As I started looking around I saw that the whole educational system, technology, and science in my nation had come from this book.

Talk about The Book that Shaped a Millennium, and what the aim and goal of this project is.

In 1994, the Catholic bishops invited a Hindu journalist, who is now a minister in central government, to give a lecture on how a Hindu journalist views Christian missions.  His whole family is a product of missionary schools and colleges. The bishops were hoping that he'd commend missions, which they could then use to do more missions.

But he gave a devastating critique of Christian missions. He painted them as a conspiracy of British colonialism, that the British had come and militarily and politically colonized India, and then missionaries were brought in to colonize the Indian mind. He went on to publish his lecture as a book.  And then I began responding to him with a series of letters that became a book called, Missionary Conspiracy:  Letters to a Post-Modern Hindu.

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October (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46