I. Volcanoes
On Saturday July 6, 2019, I was working a cash register at Häagen-Dazs in West Yellowstone, Montana when some tourists from India approached to order ice cream. The tourists were speaking Telugu, a Dravidian language from southeast India that I had partially picked up while living in Andhra Pradesh for two years as a missionary.
I’d just finished my first year of college. I was working more than sixty hours a week, with a second job waiting tables at the Three Bear Lodge and Restaurant. On weekends, I drove an hour and fifteen minutes back to my hometown in southeast Idaho.
“Bogu nara!” I said as they approached the window.
They weren’t the first Telugu-speaking tourists I’d met that summer, nor would they be the last, but for some reason they were particularly surprised to be greeted in their native language by a Caucasian American on the other side of the world. No one expects a short, blond-haired, blue-eyed graduate student with a mousey nose and large Adam’s apple from middle-of-nowhere Idaho to speak Telugu, a language that is often referred to by both native speakers and foreigners as “the Italian of the East” (a term first coined by Venetian explorer Niccolò de’ Conti who noticed that, like Italian ones, Telugu words tend to end with vowels). As I greeted them, their mouths widened in shock and surprise.
They laughed. We talked. They took videos with their phones. One posted to Facebook.
Unbeknownst to me, sleeping peacefully in the western hemisphere, the video erupted overnight in India. Within sixteen hours, it had 48,000 views. The next day, 150,000. By the time I could post a reply, 600,000. My journal entry reports: “that’s more views than the ESPN highlights of Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic in the Wimbledon final from yesterday.”
Perhaps because I was a declared pre-communications major, I saw that viral video as a window of opportunity. The headlines weren’t helping my ego either. “American guy wins the internet with his flawless Telugu,” wrote India Today. “American youth speaks fluent Telugu, wows all,” read The Times of India. And in The News Minute: “This American garu is slaying it in Telugu and the internet loves him.”
Once you’re in the news, you realize how inaccurate it can be. The earliest articles reported that I worked in a coffee shop in New Zealand or a cafeteria in Britain rather than an ice cream parlor in Montana. So, for the first time in my life, I created a personal YouTube channel and posted a two-minute reply to greet my adoring fans and correct a few facts. But let’s be clear: I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I didn’t have a concrete goal beyond taking advantage of this apparent opportunity and maybe making money somehow. I certainly didn’t know what was going to happen next. All I knew was that I was living my best life. A photo from that summer captures it best: I’m posing at the bar in Three Bear, a slot machine and wall-mounted deer antlers behind me, hundred-dollar bills fanned out on the counter in front of me, and a virgin strawberry daiquiri in my hand.
Meanwhile, the Yellowstone Caldera in Yellowstone National Park—the largest super volcano on the continent—continued to boil. Hot pots bubbled. Geyser basins steamed. Old Faithful exploded every ninety-two minutes on schedule. And beneath the gorgeous pine trees and canyons of the internet, a geothermal chain reaction was about to blow.
*
I grew up on top of a dormant shield volcano known today as Rexburg. Founded by Mormon pioneer Thomas E. Ricks in 1883, the town Rexburg, Idaho (population 29,409) boasts a drive-in theater, access to the Teton mountain range, and a small university that has been named and renamed as the Bannock Stake Academy, Ricks College, and, most recently, Brigham Young University-Idaho. If Rexburg has a biggest perk, it might be its week-long October break from school called “spud harvest.”
About five million years ago, as the North American Tectonic Plate cut southwest to form the eastern Idaho Snake River Valley, an underground pillar of molten rock called the Yellowstone Hotspot seethed beneath what would become my hometown. Rexburg’s last eruptions were about two thousand years ago; the next ones are predicted to occur around the year three thousand. My childhood field trips were to Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, which protects more than 50,000 acres of hardened lava fields and volcanic formations. Roughly the size of Rhode Island, Craters of the Moon encompasses the entire Great Rift volcanic zone and is clearly visible from space, where it looks like an inky black stain spreading across a parchment-colored desert. As a kid, I spent hours wandering those lava flows—cold, windswept badlands of wavy black stone, sparse sagebrush, sloping cinder cones.
Every March, I shoveled three-foot snowdrifts off our high school tennis courts. In June, I carried twenty-foot steel sprinkler pipes through wet, armpit-high barley fields. I drove a tractor before I had a driver’s license. I watched cellars longer than football fields fill from dirt floor to cavernous ceiling with potatoes. My first kiss was at college.
Like the volcano my town was built on, that sheltered innocence was bound to explode.
II. Prisons
Three years before going viral, I knew nothing about India except Gandhi and elephants. I was still a senior in high school when a large white envelope arrived for me from Church Headquarters in Salt Lake City.
“You’ve been assigned to labor in the India, Bengaluru Mission,” it read. That night, my parents drove me thirty minutes down a highway to eat my first Indian food at Tandoori Oven in Idaho Falls.
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, two-year proselytizing missions are strongly encouraged for most young men between eighteen and twenty-five years old. The Church decides where these missionaries serve. I had no idea where I would be spending the next two years of my life until I read my call letter aloud to a living room full of family and high school friends. In a video recording of that moment, I’m standing in front of our fireplace unfolding the letter in eager silence. As soon as I say the word, “India,” the volume explodes with screams, gasps, cheers, applause, and laughter. The camera shakes and chaotically pans the crowd.
I now recognize that Latter-day Saint mission call-opening custom as akin to the college acceptance letter genre. If you viewed that video without audio, you’d think I just got a scholarship to my dream school. When I watch it now, I can still feel my excitement, thrill, and wonder. I can see the skin on my face, white and dry from Accutane, flush red. But with hindsight, I’m also confused, anxious, and mystified all at once. Just as I can see my former self in the video, I can see my own naivete now, in a way that I couldn’t as an eighteen-year-old caught up in a social ritual. Looking back, I probably should have been both more worried and more informed about India’s missionary history.
Between my call letter and my departure, I played tennis, worked at an essential oils warehouse, and read Nothing More Heroic: The Compelling Story of the First Latter-day Saint Missionaries in India (who served from 1852 to 1856) by R. Lanier Britsch (Deseret Book, 1999). Written by a Latter-day Saint to Latter-day Saints for inspirational and devotional purposes, Britsch’s work of popular, first-person narrative adventure history did little to challenge my worldview. Then, a few months before I left for India, we got the news. Two Latter-day Saint missionaries had been arrested in Coimbatore—a city within my assigned mission boundaries.
India’s status as a backsliding democracy is well known. Major news outlets in the United States publish frequently on its rising authoritarianism, censorship, and discriminatory policies, but the centrality of religious freedom to these developments often receives less attention. The state has declared itself secular since gaining its independence from Britain in 1947 and per its 1950 constitution. But from what I experienced as a missionary and read as a PhD student in Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University, its religious realities are much more turbulent. India is home to Hinduism, often considered the world’s oldest religion, and is a veritable fountainhead for many other influential spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. In this context, Muslims and Christians—who belong to majority religions elsewhere around the world—can be particularly marginalized. While once known as the world’s largest democracy, recent evidence suggests that India has since become a violent hotspot for routine and institutionalized religious intolerance.
In 2023, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported India to be a “country of particular concern”—the most severe category—for the fourth year in a row. “The Indian government at the national, state, and local levels,” continues to promote and enforce “religiously discriminatory policies,” the USCIRF report writes, “including laws targeting religious conversion, interfaith relationships, the wearing of hijabs, and cow slaughter, which negatively impact Muslims, Christians, Sikhs,” and other marginalized groups in India’s complex caste system. This assessment has a history of declining religious tolerance behind it. After Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, anti-Sikh massacres killed thousands of Sikhs nationwide. Almost a thousand Muslims were murdered in both the 1992-1993 Bombay Riots and the 2002 Gujarat Riots. In 2008, anti-Christian rampages in Orissa resulted in nearly 400 churches burnt down or destroyed, more than 5,000 ransacked homes, and the displacement of more than 50,000 people—many of whom lived in government relief camps for months where they suffered continued harassment. While the government’s official death count was 39, most estimates are much higher. Dozens were raped, and approximately 2,000 Christians were forcibly converted to Hinduism. After acquiescing to convert-or-die threats, some of these Christians were fed a “purifying” paste of cow dung before bindis were painted on their foreheads.
Beyond these severe instances of violence, mundane religious skirmishes also hit the press frequently, and perpetrators (often government officials) are rarely tried or convicted. For example, in 1992, a mob demolished the Babri Masjid mosque. Investigations afterward found several prominent politicians culpable for inciting the mosque’s destruction. Among those who had delivered incendiary speeches at the political rally immediately preceding the incident were Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani and Minister of Human Resource Development Murli Manohar Joshi—two figures closely associated with Hindu nationalist organizations. Scholars and writers in my field often point to politicians like Advani and Joshi as being among the most problematic perpetrators of democratic backsliding and religious intolerance in India. Through their fiery rhetoric and prejudiced policies, they seem to encourage, normalize, and even incentivize widespread religious hostility.
This was the immediate context for yet another banal instance of Christian hostility, but this time involving two Latter-day Saint missionaries. In early March of 2016, roughly two weeks before I received my mission call to India, Travis Barlow from the United States and Anil Kollipara* from Bangalore parked their bicycles outside a corner market bakery in Coimbatore. They had stopped to get a snack before an appointment with a church member.
“This random person showed up,” Anil said, when I called to ask him about his experience almost a decade later. “A guy named Immanuel approached us and asked to learn more about what we were teaching,” Travis said. “He asked for a pamphlet, which we gave to him.” I only had a vague memory of this Coimbatore conflict, but eventually I was able to track Anil and Travis down through a series of WhatsApp messages, Facebook friends, and mutual connections to ask them about it. We hadn’t talked in more than seven years, but they both remembered me from my YouTube videos.
Their incident happened several months before I ever met them. During my years of service from 2016 to 2018, there were roughly 120 missionaries in the India Bengaluru Mission, divided into zones, districts, and companionships across the southern half of the country and bordered by the New Delhi Mission to the north. I only interacted closely with missionaries who served in the same cities and geographic areas as me. By the time I was a new missionary, Travis and Anil were almost finished. We only overlapped for a few months: Travis and I served in the same zone for a few weeks, and I met Anil at an occasional mission-wide conference. I’m not even sure I put together that they were the ones involved in the incident I’d heard about earlier. It was all very hush hush in the mission at the time, mainly just rumors.
“Soon we were surrounded by at least sixty people,” Anil said. They tried to leave but the mob grabbed their bikes. Someone ripped Anil’s nametag out of his chest pocket. Another held him by the shirt collar. They drilled them with questions, some in English but mostly in Tamil. “Which church do you belong to? What exactly are you doing here? Are you trying to convert people?”
In the one-minute video that Anil and Travis sent me, the crowd’s voices are harsh, bold, and angry. I can hear traffic intermixed with men shouting. One waves a finger inches from Travis’s nose. Another takes close-up photos of their faces. They circle the missionaries, pressing in around them.
They’re trapped.
I ask a friend to translate the video’s dialogue. Someone suggests they search their bags. Another threatens to deport them as early as tomorrow. Travis’s face is drained; he stares forward blankly as if watching a horror movie. Anil, looking young and nervous, tries to stay calm and respond to their accusations. The scene is claustrophobic, blurry, and dark. As I watch it, I can feel my heartbeat accelerate as if someone is adjusting the tempo settings on a metronome to tick faster and faster: beat beat beat beat beat.
Someone called the police, who detained both Anil and Travis at the station for five hours. Travis’s passport was confiscated. A high-ranking official “with a lot of stars on his collar” conducted an aggressive interview.
“He told us that distributing unsolicited pamphlets during an election season was a crime,” Travis said. “We explained that [Immanuel] had asked for the pamphlet.”
Turns out that 2016 was an election year for the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly, and Coimbatore is a favorite turf holdout for the Bharatiya Janata Party—the ruling political party under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP (as it’s known) is a right-wing faction committed to Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist philosophy, with close ideological and organizational ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS (literally translated as “National Volunteer Corps”), a far-right paramilitary establishment. Travis says he believes the mob were BJP members, affiliates, or voters “looking to make a stand against Christian proselyting in the country.” Anil, on the other hand, thinks they were RSS volunteers.
This BJP/RSS distinction, however, is thin at best. Religious mob violence in India often has a political-paramilitary component. For me, what Travis and Anil experienced is in many ways representative. Their account parallels what the French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has closely documented as India’s broader trend toward a kind of quasi-state-sanctioned brutality bent on restricting religious diversity and political dissent. The RSS often acts as a sort of shadow version of the BJP, but the former is rarely held to the same standards of scrutiny or accountability because it’s seen as a grassroots volunteer organization rather than a legitimate political party (like the latter). As a result, government officials can sometimes carry out suspicious or illegal acts under the guise of the RSS and get away with them. But even these phenomena are not entirely unique to India. When I research religion and democracy around the world, I find similar patterns in several authoritarian regimes. They seem to occur whenever leaders seek to suppress genuine pluralism—both religious and otherwise.
In other words, whether the antagonists were members of the BJP, the RSS, or both is beside the point. What Travis and Anil both agree on is that the so-called “Immanuel” character was “definitely not interested” in learning about Jesus Christ.
“He intentionally faked it,” Anil said. “It was more like a planned trap.”
“At one point he said, ‘let me call some friends,’” said Travis. “I struggle to see how they could’ve coordinated between fifty to one hundred people to all show up on such short notice otherwise.”
Eventually, a local church leader was able to come pick them up from the police station. Travis returned a few days later to retrieve his passport. The mission president emergency-transferred all missionaries out of that area, which remained closed to further missionary work until long after I arrived seven months later. Somehow, through emails and blog posts, I learned about this event before I left for India. I wasn’t too worried about the news, though my mother was. Like many teenagers, I felt invincible. I also never experienced anything even close to that sort of incident during my own missionary service in India. But this Coimbatore confrontation can help explain why I was terrified by the next development of my YouTube stardom.
*
Shortly after I posted my reply video, which corrected the errant facts with my actual name, someone found my missionary blog. Images of me in a white shirt, tie, and black nametag exploded over the internet. Much to St. Paul’s chagrin (“I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ”) I frantically adjusted my privacy settings, unpublished several posts, and deleted photos. The comments on my videos, which had previously been a gushing fountain of adulation, were now interspersed with lava-hot rage.
“His mission was to spread [the] gospel of that Abrahamic cult. Obviously he has to learn native language to spread that shit,” commented @harinathvelu84271.* “SAVE HINDUS… STOP CHRISTIAN CONVERSIONS IN INDIA!” @naveenmadiraju66308 wrote. And finally,
I really admired you when the first time I saw you speaking in Telugu. But I realized your real dark face when I got to know that you are a paid agent for those Christian missionaries. This is actually a good trick to convert people. No matter how hard you try it’s not going work. Go back to history countless attempts were made after all the massacres you did to Hindu people still you did not manage to convert us and this should make you realize that Hinduism is something that you cannot destroy. I hate u.
– @MadhavCheruku79231
I was surprised how the burst of anti-Christian sentiment affected me. My neck veins pulsed, and my palms sweat as I read through the comments. Still, this appeared to be a minority view, at least among my 50,000 subscribers. More often, I was getting comments like: “your Telugu is very cute sir,” “you almost sound like a native,” “this is the wholesome content I didn’t know I needed in my life!” and “marry a Telugu girl!” Or even: “whenever I hear Telugu from his videos, I forget all my sorrows!” At least a half a dozen people dubbed me the unofficial Telugu “brand ambassador” to the world. “I really love to hear Telugu from people whose mother tongue isn’t Telugu,”@tejasvemuri58144 wrote.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my channel had quickly become another microcosmic battleground for democratic religious pluralism in India. Christians commented things like: “I remember that you used to visit the Arilova Colony & Dwaraka Nagar areas visiting God’s people. I am residing in Arilova colony and seeing Latter-day Saint believers. May God bless you & use you mightily,” from @arvindkesava41726. To one of the aforementioned anti-Christian comments, another user replied:
Christianity preaches ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness.’ Do you think preaching these things India gets spoiled?!? Does your religious priests preach you to ‘hate’ someone and ‘kick off’ someone ruthlessly without a reason? My God! Are you serious! Though I am not in a support of any religion… I don’t find any reason why do some people hate Christianity and bring it to limelight by themselves. Learn to respect every religion and faith, imbibe the values taught by any religious holy book, instead of hating the worthy! NOTE: *Article no. 25 to 28*: Every citizen of India has a right to practice and promote their religion.
After about a week of this, TV5 News in India offered to interview me on live primetime television. I accepted on the condition that they not ask any questions about religion. They complied and streamed the interview to their six million viewers. By this point, Telugu tourists in Yellowstone were showing up at the Three Bear Restaurant and Häagen-Dazs just to take selfies with me and post them online. One day, I sat down in the West Yellowstone Public Library and spent hours copy-and-pasting a generic reply to every single Facebook direct message I had received. Lakshmi Manchu, a Telugu movie star with 1.8 million followers on Instagram, posted about me: “his Telugu is better than mine.” Before I knew it, I had been offered an all-expenses-paid trip to Dallas for the North American Telugu Association Convention. They wanted me to help welcome Jagan Mohan Reddy, then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, to the stage.
During my sheltered childhood in the shield volcano of Rexburg, I’d had little exposure to politics. I attended a town council meeting as a Boy Scout once. In fact, I’m not sure I was even thinking about “politics” when I got invited to the convention. Like any starry-eyed first-year college student, I was just thinking, cool. Free trip to Dallas? Cool. Big Telugu convention? Cool. Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh? Cool. Sign me up! So they did.
Prior to the convention, they sent me a script that I recited for a promotional video advertising the event. I knew nothing about CM Jagan, nor did I think twice about the potential repercussions of declaring “Jai Jagan!” on YouTube. I’d seen his face plastered over the cities where I served. I’d even happened to be at an airport at the same time as him once, and I remember watching him break free from swarms of fans to catch his flight. I posted the convention’s video, but my lungs caught in my ribs as soon as I saw the first comments. Surprise: Jagan has a controversial backstory. His father was also a former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh who died in a mysterious helicopter crash in 2009. In 2012, Jagan was imprisoned for embezzlement. While in jail, he went on a hunger strike protesting the creation of a separate Telangana state. He was eventually hospitalized for low blood sugar and, seven years later, went on to serve a five-year term as CM from 2019 to 2024. And he’s a Christian.
“Y.S. Jagan is not good and he was in prison 16 months. If something happens in the future, you will also get arrested.”
“Isaac what is your hidden agenda? Are you planning to spread Christianity? Jagan is a robber and highly corrupted person.”
“I am staying in Memphis Tennessee if you came for any vacation I will meet you here. So sweet and proud of you.”
“Isaac Richard the guy who fooled us all with his Telugu skills and later turned out to be a missionary agent meets Jagan in Dallas. Very cleverly planted by Jagan & Co.”
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God I’m your biggest fan.”
“Isaac just ask google who is the most corrupted politician in AP.”
“I don’t know whether it is right or wrong to say this… but I have to say this. I love you.”
“With YS Jagan at the helm of affairs in Andhra Pradesh these missionaries will rapidly try to make AP another Kerala!”
“One missionary meets another missionary!”
“I am disgusted that you are promoting corrupt politicians on your channel. You lost a subscription today :)”
“Even though I am BJP supporter YS Jagan is our CM for 5 years we should respect him.”
Scrolling back through my WhatsApp messages now, I find a thumbnail for a video that is no longer available. The caption in Telugu reads: “Conspiracy things that foreign Christians do in our country to convert people’s faith.” My friend’s message below says, “He wants to shut down our church in Vijayawada and arrest you.”
III. Missions
The academic research on missionaries and democracy is mixed. Several studies have argued that missionaries are good for democracy because they promote religious liberty and mass literacy. Among these is Robert D. Woodberry’s article, “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” published in a 2012 issue of American Political Science Review. “This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world,” it reads. But a follow-up article in the British Journal of Political Science by Elena Nikolova and Jakub Polanski attempted to replicate Woodberry’s analysis with different measures and over a longer timespan; it showed a statistically insignificant relationship between missionaries and democracy and was published with an equally provocative title: “Conversionary Protestants Do Not Cause Democracy” (2020). Empirically, the relationship between missionaries and democracy appears to be at an impasse.
I think, however, that there’s an obvious reason for this discrepancy. The relationship needs to be inverted. It’s not that missionaries are good for democracy per se, but that democracies are the only countries that continue to allow missionaries. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Whether missionaries promote, encourage, or facilitate democracy is a moot point—democracy enables missionaries in the first place by protecting religious freedom and supporting tolerant pluralism. In that sense, the presence of missionaries in a country can be an index of the country’s democratic nature, but not enough to prove causality. Missionaries and democracy are two sides of the same coin. Missionaries can be a litmus test, so to speak, for the strength of a democracy, or an indicator of its shift toward authoritarianism. The fact that India permits missionary visas today should be a cause for hope.
To be sure, the question of historical missionaries and contemporary missionaries already boggles comparison. Early missionaries were veritable engines of colonialism, and the territories they entered were not democracies in their eyes. Think of William Carey, one of the first missionaries to India, who wrote An Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen (1792). But perhaps that’s why the vectors in the two studies (Woodberry versus Nikolava and Polanski) push in different directions once they are differentiated by a longer time span. Receptivity to missionaries several centuries ago probably did make a region more likely to adopt a liberal democratic political structure after it gained independence from its colonizers, but today, countries that resisted or evaded European colonization are less likely to receive missionaries or be democracies. Perhaps the only thing that scholars of missiology agree on is this: missionaries were good for language and literature. Missionaries were among the earliest translators to acquire remote languages, and many texts exist only in missionary records.
When I set out for southeast India as an eighteen-year-old Latter-day Saint missionary in the twenty-first century, which vision was I living? Was I, by preaching Christianity as part of a religious and ethnic minority in Modi’s India, a champion of tolerance, pluralism, and freedom? Or was I just a contemporary incarnation of British imperialism, another white savior blinded by orientalism and socially conditioned to force Western, Judeo-Christian norms onto a vulnerable indigenous population?
I’ve only been home for seven years, but it’s hard to describe the chasm of cognitive dissonance between how I feel about my mission and how higher education has taught me to view it. As a missionary, I saw myself as a force for good. I helped people overcome harmful addictions, reconnect with estranged family members, nurture their commitment to moral values, find a religious community, and discover renewed spiritual meaning in life. Only later, in college, would I acquire vocabulary I didn’t have at the time—terms such as cultural appropriation or whiteness—that would help me better recognize my place in India’s postcolonial history.
I now understand that some people, perhaps including most readers of essays like this one, find missiology to be intolerant and problematic rather than positive and pluralist. That’s a view I completely respect. There are plenty of valid things to critique about missions. I’m certain that I caused some harm as well as good, just like any humanitarian or service effort. But even still, no amount of critical theory seems to change the special place that those two years hold in my heart. I’m still connected to many of the friends I made in India. We call and message each other for life updates. One family that I baptized was absolutely thrilled to tell me that their son had received his own mission call to New Delhi. He’ll be sharing in his home country the same message I shared as a foreigner. What I dream of, then, when I think about what Jürgen Habermas called “the postsecular society,” is a foggy middle path. I’m not willing to fall for the false choice between religion and democracy simply because either feels like more solid footing than walking the tightrope between them.
*
My friends in India often tell me that YouTube views don’t do justice to my popularity; I really went viral in Facebook groups and WhatsApp channels, where my videos were downloaded, circulated, and shared. Dozens of Telugu content creators capitalized on my fame. In the early days of my channel, I submitted privacy complaints and copyright claims so others couldn’t steal and repost my videos. Still, I’ve been meme-ed, parodied, remixed, and more. I still get hundreds of strangers wishing me happy birthday on my Facebook timeline every year. I get emails and messages almost every week asking me to post videos again. At the time of this writing, I have posted twenty-five original filmed and edited videos for a total of more than 40,000 watch hours, 1.4 million views, and 15.5 million impressions. By monetizing my YouTube channel and running ads, I also earned around $400 total over a two-year period. Pay-per-click in India is roughly 0.20 rupees, or less than a penny.
In my recap video from that 2019 trip to the North American Telugu Association convention in Dallas, I shake hands with children and pose for group photos like a natural media personality. Still, there’s something slightly uncomfortable about watching myself being greeted by hundreds of adoring fans after my speech. As a current PhD student taking seminars on rhetoric and communication, I’m more aware than ever that part of my viral appeal was my race, gender, and nationality, which resonated with a hegemony of mass media and commercial products bent on exporting American ideals to other countries. My YouTube channel, named “Telugu Marchipokudadhu” (“Don’t Forget Telugu”), not only exemplified the tensions of religious pluralism and democracy in India, but also embodied the paradoxes of globalism. Somehow, the internet has both made other cultures closer than ever before, while also collapsing and reinscribing them within one larger, increasingly homogenized culture.
These days, most Indians grow up learning and speaking English. Scholars have predicted that more than half of India’s 780 languages will die out within the next fifty years—that’s 400 dead languages. When I promoted pro-Telugu content within a larger system of language assimilation in India, perhaps my embrace of a local dialect hit a special nerve in a country beset by language loss and largely run by Hindu nationalists in a period of cultural retrenchment. Viewers who watched my videos saw a foreigner not only speaking, but appreciating and valuing their mother tongue. To see my videos was to see a message contrary to mainstream propaganda—to see one’s culture celebrated by an American “other.”
My experience wasn’t even really that new. In 2014, a group of four Latter-day Saint return missionaries who served in the Philippines noticed a lack of family-friendly content in the Filipino language Bisaya and posted their first YouTube video. Their channel, The Hey Joe Show, named after the Filipino nickname for Americans, ended up garnering some fifty million views. They wrote a song, “My Morena Girl,” that reached number three on the Filipino national chart. As international heartthrobs, they returned to tour and perform in the Philippines, where young girls chased their van and kissed its windows. But the question remains: does The Hey Joe Show contribute to diversity and intersectionality by filling a void of Bisaya content and connecting white and Filipino audiences, or does it simply reinforce cultural hegemony?
I first encountered the Hey Joe Show in my Communications 101 class the spring semester before I went viral. I later learned that my professor replaced her Hey Joe Show clip with my first Telugu video the following semester. Our textbook was titled Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Media by John V. Pavlik and Shawn McIntosh. Convergence, the word they use to describe our global media landscape, is the same word for the phenomenon that forms volcanos. Convergent boundaries are where two tectonic plates collide. This, I think, is one thing that globalization and the internet have done: placed “the self” and “the other” in a subduction zone. That subduction zone is also where the messy realities of religious freedom and democracy play out.
Personally, I found my mission experience to be neither as vicious nor as glamorous as the YouTube comments on my videos made it sound. At the time, I certainly didn’t see myself as a liberator of Christian minorities or a villain of cultural imperialism. In many ways, it was rather mundane—not that this ordinariness made it any less mired in ethical quandaries. Every day, I got up at 6:30 a.m., studied the scriptures for two or three hours, and then spent the rest of the day knocking on doors; teaching thirty-minute lessons to church members, their interested friends, or relatives; or teaching free English and piano classes. Other hours were spent attending church or other missionary meetings. Every night I went to bed at 10:30 p.m. only to repeat my schedule the next day. I observed strict missionary rules (no television or swimming) and spent a lot of time praying, fasting, and looking forward to my weekly “preparation day” when I could email my family from an internet café for a maximum of one hour.
To talk legally rather than ethically, proselyting in India is certainly not illegal unless it involves bribery or coercion (laws leftover from British rule). I chatted with anyone who seemed eager or at least willing to talk to me, usually learning a bit about their beliefs before asking if I could share a message with them. I didn’t push it if they weren’t interested. Conversion is still the goal of Latter-day Saint missionary work, but the barriers to entry are so high that people rarely get baptized unless they are seriously committed to the church, typically after conducting sustained periods of investigation by attending weekly services and reading church publications. In my experience, few people are willing to give up coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, pornography, pre- or extra-marital sex, and ten percent of their annual income, not to mention Sundays every week, simply in order to join a new religion. Informed consent wasn’t really an issue.
But I also cringe when I think about some of the attitudes I held as a missionary. I wish I would’ve listened more. I wish that eighteen-year-old me, posing to imitate a Buddha statue in a photograph, would’ve thought about how he wanted his own religious tradition to be treated. I wish I would’ve realized sooner that perhaps I needed India much more than India needed me. How else does one learn tolerance, cross-cultural connection, and respectful communication across difference without directly encountering radical others? And isn’t that the essence of democracy?
I’d like to think that my time in India changed me, and not just in the ways my church may have hoped or expected. I’d like to think that, somehow, I was soaking up the ancient wisdom in the air, that spiritual confluence of global religions shimmering on the street—from the Sanskrit Vedas to the rishis. I came back with a yoga-like flexibility from sitting on the floor every day, and I developed at least some of the meditative calm necessary to enjoy the view inching by me while I sat on a bus in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I hope I learned the essence of namaste: to salute the divine in others. To respect, and even embrace, difference.
I’ve shed many naïve beliefs I held as a missionary, but some of my commitments to other principles—like pluralism and religious freedom—have matured and only grown stronger. These days, I’m trying to advance those causes through my PhD studies. Isn’t that the deepest sense of the word mission? Discovering a sense of purpose, ambition, or calling in life? At eighteen, I was called on a mission to India by my church, but ever since then I’ve still been trying to figure out what it might mean to truly answer that call.
Several sources indicate that Telugu is one of the fastest growing languages in the United States. Emory University now has an endowed chair for Telugu Studies. I recently received a grant from Penn State to hire a tutor and continue learning Telugu. At the end of one of my interviews with a potential tutor, she asked if she could take a selfie with me because she recognized me from my videos. I’ve stopped posting videos for several years, though I’m not entirely sure why. I still might post again someday, but what happened to the Hey Joe Show happened to me. I grew up, grew out of my shenanigans, and moved on. I got married, prioritized my new family, got busy, and focused on school. My viral YouTube fame faded into memory.
From my vantage point as a graduate student in the United States, religion clearly appears to be having a moment. The 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey revealed that 92% of U.S. adults believe in either a spirit or soul, a God or higher power, a spiritual reality, or an afterlife. Last year, the New York Times officially launched its “Believing” Project—a landmark subscription column giving voice to the myriad ways that people experience religion and spirituality today. The fall of the Twin Towers represented a watershed in what literary studies scholars like Lori Branch, Mark Knight, and Amy Hungerford have been calling “the postsecular” for a quarter century now. Many other scholars, like Talal Asad in Formations of the Secular and Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, have argued that the secularization thesis—the gradual death of religion and triumph of rational science—hasn’t proven to be true, at least in the West. The United States was founded by pilgrims seeking religious freedom, and the language of Christianity pervades its founding documents. As a nation, it has been grappling with the stubborn persistence of religion ever since.
As a missionary, I found myself smack in the middle of this historical moment even though I was completely unaware of it at the time. I’m also convinced that postsecularity isn’t unique to the U.S. context. What I have come to call “contentious religious democracies” demonstrate the challenges of pluralism in a postsecular age, and they appear in several places around the world. Authoritarian-minded leaders often leverage these national origin myths for populist and rhetorical purposes. Still today, religion and democracy keep colliding with one another in ways that I couldn’t see when I was flying from Idaho to India in the summer of 2016.
The volcano, the prison, and the mission—even these three metaphors are not enough to do justice to the geopolitical complexities introduced by late modernity and the internet. But each metaphor is true. Like a volcano, no one chooses where or what tradition they are born into. The flow of time and history shapes all—erupts, cools, crusts, collides, and carves our world. The prison can represent the impulse to resort to force or violence, rather than speech, when navigating human differences. But I’m convinced that a personal and collective sense of mission against that instinct can help protect democratic ideals like pluralism and religious freedom. A commitment to accepting diverse others, to tolerating the preachy and the intolerant, is one hard doctrine that such political systems demand. And while missionaries may not cause or create democracy, a democracy that denies missionaries fails its own test.
When I want to remind myself of the messy complexities that constitute the everyday, lived realities of globalization, I pull my box of missionary keepsakes from a shelf in my closet. There are two traditional Indian lungis in there, one checkered and one with a floral pattern. I’m always unsure whether wearing them constitutes cultural appropriation, or how many years one must spend in a place to internalize its culture ethically. Next, there’s a mug that two of my friends gave me after they chose to be baptized, screen-printed with images of us together and embossed with words like “memories” and “love you” next to my name. For me, that mug, and the fact that most of my Indian friends never did join the church, represents the way individual human relationships transcend intellectual categories—not missionary or Hindu nationalist, not radical or fundamentalist—but the friendship that results when two people treat each other as equals, whether they have cultural or ideological differences, or not. Then there are my scriptures coated in ink, highlights, and notes, representing my own Christian background and my teenage ethnocentricism (in hindsight, I wish I would’ve spent some of that time reading the Bhagavad Gita, as I’ve done since and been changed by). Finally, a notebook titled “White Handbook Principles” attempts to distill the copious mission rules into ethical generalizations rather than categorical dos or don’ts. Perhaps that’s early evidence of the tensions I faced while trying and failing to live my own moral values perfectly. So much of the complexity that accompanies missiology, religious freedom, and the paradoxes of liberal democratic tolerance—from globalism to nationalism to patriotism to multiculturalism to pluralism—can be found in that single cardboard box: handwritten thank-you notes, an Indian flag, and a veshti woven of white and gold.
* Pseudonyms have been used.