“Religious Revival or Chalk Fight?” A reflection by Dr. Spencer Dew.

“This is a revival!” festival organizer Caru Das declared from the main stage.  Repeatedly throughout the two days of the Spanish Fork Festival of Colors at the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple, Das took the microphone to frame the experience for visitors, emphasizing the intent of the event to be “transformative,” involving the inculcation of specific values, practices, and theological notions including love and respect for human diversity and the environment, vegetarianism and the chanting of mantras, and a conception of deity phrased at once in intimate, universalist terms (Krishna is a personal god one can relate to, but also explicit “the same God” as featured in the Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible, and Qur’an) and in abstract, monist terms (“We’re eternal sparks of the divine,” he preached, all emanations of “the Supreme Being”).

Yet this festival—so popular with Brigham Young University students that it is called on campus “BYU’s unofficial spring break”—is approached by participants far more  like a rock concert than a religious ritual.  Attendees and local media domesticate the experience of the Festival in their descriptions, and as they borrow some of Das’s ideas, they de-sacralize them.

The Festival of Colors is the most attended of multiple festivals Das uses as part of his evangelism.  His temple also hosts a Festival of Lights to celebrate Divali, India Fest highlighting Indian culture and cuisine, and a Llama Festival showcasing the temple’s collection of llamas—which Das has called both a “secular” event and a “preaching opportunity.”

Das described his understanding of how such preaching worked in an interview.  Visitors, he insisted, once presented with “the info we have” on how to live and how to think about the divine, would need to “accept my concept” unless they could rationally offer a better concept.  Yet rational weighing of religious claims seemed far from the minds of most festival goers.  His role with the Festival was thus like that of Mormons on mission, he suggested.

Das is relentless about getting his message out into the world, through media sources as well as during the event, but he failed to strike many participants of the event as either a missionary or a revival leader.  “We’re just here for the colors,” participants told me, repeatedly.  When Das took the stage, many audience members were unclear as to who he was and what role he played in the event.

Moreover, local media, while eager to run photos of the “colorful” event, also fails to frame it in terms of missionary work or revival.  The local newspaper did list the Festival of Colors in their coverage of spring religious festivals (the Hindu analogue of Easter and Passover), but only with the caveat that for most attendees the event was “more of a rock concert with spiritual influences” than anything explicitly religious.

When the Festival’s religious roots are explored in journalism, Holi is framed in broad terms as a “celebration of the coming of spring” and a generic “reminder of the triumph of good over evil.”  What is traditionally a festival of inversion of hierarchies, an opportunity for social catharsis, was reframed by one BYU undergraduate as “where a bunch of people come together”, and, due to the coating of thrown colors, “everyone is just the same”.  One BYU student journalist argued that the Festival broke “down normal barriers” to social mingling, allowing interaction “with both friends and strangers.”

In coverage not devoted to the religious roots of the Festival, the role for the explicitly religious is fringe, at best.  One article in a student paper quoted a baffled undergrad psychology major:  “I am not quite sure what this is all about” he said, “gesturing to the line of t-shirted zoobies [enthusiastically social Mormons] lined up to bathe a golden statue with a honey and yogurt mixture.”  He then explained his own motivations for attending the Festival:  “The chalk fighting—that is why I am here.”  The ritual activity was left unexplained, and Das’s “revival” got framed not in terms of theology or ethics or practice but, in an inversion worthy of a Holi celebration, as “fighting.”

As I will explore in my book chapter, the image of “fighting” is also an apt one for Das and his quest for the Festival to have effects metaphysical, intellectual, and behavioral in the lives of attendees.  From his tirades against meat-eating to his insistence on the power of chanting to his repeated engagements with (and critiques of) the religious imagery with which he assumes the crowd to be familiar, Das adjusts his rhetoric, paces his presentation, and barrages his listeners with his message.  For Das, this truly is a revival, and the stakes are extremely high.  That his audience seems oblivious to or resistant to such missionizing is Das’s primary challenge and offers a lens for examination of his role in and reception by festival-goers and media alike.