With Anti-Christian Violence in India, Chad M. Bauman, professor of religion at Butler University, effectively completes a trilogy examining modern Christianity in India. His first book, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion, 1868–1947 (2008), explored Protestant missionary activity and Dalit converts in Chhattisgarh, British India. His second text, Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India (2015), focused on violence against Pentecostal Christians, the fastest growing form of contemporary Indian Christianity. In this third offering, the author simultaneously widens and focuses his lens to discern the reasons for and meaning of Indian anti-Christian violence through examination of a particular and emblematic case in the twenty-first century—that which occurred in Kandhamal, Odisha, between 2007 and 2008.

It is always helpful to judge a text by the stated aims of its author. Bauman identifies three: to chart the historical processes by which conflicts came to be understood as religious conflicts between Hindus and Christians; to emphasize, as befits a globalized world, how world historical forces continue to play a vital role in constructing such conflict; and to demonstrate that Hindu-Christian conflict arises due to the framing, mostly by Hindu nationalists, of Hinduism and Christianity as two mutually exclusive ways of life, where Christians are made proxies for the baleful forces of Western secularization, modernization, and globalization. If a text is measured by the fulfillment of its stated aims, then it is successful.

Perhaps the three chief benefits of this text are 1) the nuanced theoretical framework Bauman constructs to understand anti-Christian violence, what he calls a “socio-cosmological” approach explained in detail in chapter 1; 2) the way he employs this framework to interpret and explain anti-Christian violence as it occurred in Kandhamal and elsewhere, the focus of chapters 4 and 5; and 3) the way the author convincingly accounts for anti-Christian violence by never losing sight of interconnections between the local and global. Those with little understanding of the history of Hindu and Christian interactions in South Asia will benefit from chapter 2, “A Prehistory of Hindu-Christian Conflict.”

A word on the “socio-cosmological” analytical framework—as the name suggests, constructivists believe that nearly all social reality and behavior is constructed. Thus, to understand religious conflict, one must examine the interaction of a network of shifting factors by which conflict is presumed, produced, and framed in specific circumstances and places. The benefit of such an approach is that it is commensurate with the complexity of this particular social phenomenon, contrary to instrumentalist or essentialist interpretations that are overly reductive. Of course, one critique, perhaps posed by instrumentalists or essentialists, is that Bauman's analytical apparatus is simply too complicated; simpler explanations are more convincing. Another critique might be that the sheer networked specificity of Bauman's approach limits is applicability elsewhere. Put in the form of a question, one could ask, Is the theoretical socio-cosmological tool built by the author for understanding anti-Christian violence too specific to India to be useful elsewhere? Bauman's conclusion, “A Geography of Anger,” again moves beyond India to other areas of anti-Christian violence (North Africa, the Middle East, Asia) to demonstrate his framework's applicability and the necessity of nonreductive explanations. Reality is complex, after all, and explanations of social phenomena should not be expected to fit on bumper stickers. The author says it even better: “Theories that emerge from this kind of approach will inevitably lack the reassuring parsimony of other explanatory frameworks. But what they lose in simplicity they gain in accuracy” (33). Simply put, Bauman's interpretation of anti-Christian violence is most convincing.

As a social theorist, Bauman is always at his best when adapting other theorists to the subject under his investigation. In this text he proves especially adept at employing and modifying scholars such as Mark Juergensmeyer, Paul Marshall, Mark C. Taylor, and Manuel Vasquez, among others. Although firmly in the “secular study of religion mode” and moving ever more deeply into political science, Bauman takes ideas and ideals (read: theology) seriously. As such, he is a trustworthy guide for those who wish to understand the contours of religious life for Christians in contemporary India. He does this with an interpretive approach whose applicability surpasses the Indian nation-state to account for interreligious violence more generally and anti-Christian violence throughout the world.