(RNS) — At first glance, the video looks disarmingly ordinary. A silver-haired, middle-age man sits in what appears to be his car, wearing a zip-up velour tracksuit, offering post-church reflections to his phone as he drives home. There is no visible anger, no shouting, no sense of urgency. He speaks with the casual confidence of someone who assumes what he is about to say will be understood — perhaps even affirmed.
Then the turn comes.
“Well, I did a bad thing in church today,” he says. “I refused to receive the Eucharist from an Indian woman. I was supposed to go to her. She was in my aisle, but across the church was the white priest, so I walked across all the pews and received it from him, for fear that I might get fecal matter on my Eucharist, receiving it from an Indian woman.”
He does not want to receive the Eucharist from anyone who is non-white, he says, going on to invoke the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and the need to keep “our churches ours.” And when he reaches the end, he delivers the thesis: If this makes him a “bad Catholic,” fine — he would rather be that than let America “turn into India.”
“I guess I’ll go confess this to my priest, but I’ll continue doing it. That’s the compromise, okay.”
“That’s the compromise,” he says — confession without repentance, acknowledgment without restraint. It is not a moment of shame, but of resolution. He knows this choice violates church teaching, but he has already decided which authority matters more.
It’s an “I choose violence” moment of Christian nationalism: the point where someone stops pretending they are conflicted and announces which god they serve. Not Christ or Church, but disgust, elevated into a worldview.
What matters is not that this happened. What matters is how quickly it became useful.
Within hours, the clip was no longer just racist spectacle. It became a traveling artifact, passed between ideologies eager to extract value from it. White nationalists saw a familiar fantasy confirmed: the clean center, the filthy edge. Christian nationalists saw their own reflection: the church as property, the altar as border control.
Then the moment, perhaps predictable, when another nationalist ideology moved in to repurpose the post for its own ends.
A group calling itself Stop Hindu Hate Advocacy Network reposted the clip to condemn the racism — and used it to deliver a lesson to Indian Christians “who think they are white-adjacent because they are Christians and not Hindus.”
“You’ll always be treated as Indians!” the post warned. “Your religion has zero value to a gora.”
There is a truth buried here: Whiteness is not a sacrament. You do not receive it through conversion or proximity. Racism does not check your theology before deciding what you are.
But Stop Hindu Hate Advocacy Network did not offer this post as solidarity. It was offered as instruction. Not we’re all targets here, but learn the lesson fast: whatever you think Christianity buys you in America, it won’t buy you whiteness — and it certainly won’t buy you safety. Stop imagining coalitions. Come home — on our terms.
Why respond to a man chasing virality or amplify a group eager to weaponize his ugliness? In quieter times, restraint might have been wise. But this moment is no longer quiet. What we are seeing is not an isolated provocation but a pattern asserting itself across ideologies. Refusals at the altar, nationalist bullying masquerading as anti-racism and recycled tropes of contamination are symptoms, not stunts — signals of how racism and religious nationalism are co-testing what they can now say aloud. Silence here misreads the danger.
Because this is not a debate between racism and anti-racism; it is a convergence of supremacist projects borrowing each other’s tools: the body as evidence, proximity as threat, belonging as something that must be guarded against dilution.
They differ only on who gets to claim the center.
This is where the “white adjacency” conversation gets twisted beyond recognition. At its best, the phrase names conditional tolerance — how some nonwhite groups are invited closer to power if they help police others. It is meant as diagnosis, not destiny.
Here, it becomes a scolding theology: You thought Christianity would save you? You thought the cross was an entry pass into whiteness, Western belonging? Foolish.
The bitter irony is that this framing (from both sides) treats Indian Christianity as if it exists only as a negotiation with whiteness — as though Indian Christians were merely auditioning for Europe. Reducing Indian Christians to “wannabe white” is not just insulting, it is historical erasure. Christianity in South Asia has ancient roots, stretching back to the earliest centuries after Christ.
And the more revealing part is what Hindu nationalist scolders are really saying — because it is less about Indian Christians than about their own disappointment. They’ve also flirted with the promise of “adjacency” and discovered it rarely matures into belonging or power.
Far-right Indians in the U.S. have already seen this strategy boomerang. Sometimes it is the public humiliation of Vivek Ramaswamy — proof that perfect ideological loyalty does not guarantee acceptance. Sometimes it’s the abject lackey work of Harmeet Dhillon — now doing Trump’s bidding as the U.S. assistant attorney general for DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. That’s the trade: you surrender principle for proximity, get no belonging in return, and help hollow out both democracy’s guardrails and religion’s moral vocabulary.
Adjacency will not save you. It will not elect you. It will not protect you from becoming the punchline when the room decides it’s time to laugh.
The irony deepens when placed alongside Hindu majoritarian politics in India itself, which has intensified pressure on Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and others through anti-conversion laws, mob violence and cultural suspicion. Persecution is not hypothetical. Yet here, Hindu nationalists flip a racist Catholic’s refusal of Communion into a lesson about misplaced loyalty, as if the danger were coalition rather than majoritarian power.
This is what happens when religious nationalism collides with racial nationalism. They don’t cancel each other out. They compare notes.
What emerges is a familiar figure, refurbished for a new moment: the Dirty Indian. Not a person, but a prototype. Before hierarchy hardens, hate experiments. It asks which story works.
Are they violent? Thieves? Apostates? Or — does this one stick — filthy?
It’s possible to read this as another episode in the long history of using disgust to police belonging — and it is. But what feels newly dangerous is the confidence: the sense that you can move bigotry from the background of religious life to the center of it — doctrine be damned — and call it honesty. The public statement becomes the point. This is the new anti–virtue signal: cruelty framed as courage, humiliation offered as “realism,” and the expectation that the community will reward it the way it once rewarded moral witness — likes instead of absolution, applause instead of accountability.
What disappears is the woman holding the Eucharist. Her hand is either too dirty to mediate God — or useful proof that God will never fully receive you. But the dehumanization, of course, was always the point.
(David Dasharath Kalal is communications director with Hindus for Human Rights. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)