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Abstract

This thesis uses livestreamed Fasting Prayer services (2020-21) at the largest Pentecostal church in Bangalore, India as the starting point to understand the experience of Christ being translated into the multiverse of the digital to produce the same experience of Christ in the physical. Herein I focus on Fasting Prayer services as it is these services that visibly work towards the enabling of a relationship with God. This also illuminates the complex network of digital mediation and fasting and prayer that works its interplay into the fabric of training the true Christian, and the ramifications it holds in the mission of “saving” India. Using this examination, this paper is committed to an understanding of Pentecostal worship as a multi-textured practice, building that feeling in a way that off-line worship could not, of the church holding a very realistic potential to Christianize India, leading to the exploration of the implications it holds in the milieu of rising Hindu nationalistic fervor in India. Marked by a spread and reach through the advances in technological dissemination, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, this new wave of Christianity points us towards its response in new forms of Hindu Nationalism like the Karnataka Anti-Conversion Bill 2021 to prevent the perceived dilution of Hindu identity. Contested along the Constitutional right of Freedom of Religion, this 2021 passed Bill in BJP-led Karnataka begs the question of Anti-Conversion being equated to anti-Christian, hinting at the slow but tell-tale signs of a burgeoning anti-Christian rhetoric emerging out of its shadows. The multiplicity of digital accesses highlighted here has both political and theological implications – both the church and the state, it seems are battling for the "soul" of India. One thinks that this soul rests in a primordial claim of Hinduism to the literal soil of India and the other that India belongs to Jesus, the only true sovereign.

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