One of the great privileges of hosting Created in the Image of God is that now and then a guest does more than answer questions. He rearranges the furniture in your mind.
That was my experience talking with Vinoth Ramachandra.
I learned a great deal from him in many areas—about Christian witness, about interfaith dialogue, about justice, about lament, about Marxism, and about the challenge of holding conviction without collapsing into caricature. But what stayed with me most began even before we got into the bigger geopolitical themes. It began with his story.
Here was a man from Sri Lanka who had gone to the University of London, specialized in nuclear engineering, and by every conventional measure had a path open before him toward prestige, security, influence, and professional success. He could have remained in the West. He could have pursued an academic or technical career. He could have used his intelligence and training to make the rich world richer and his own life more comfortable.
Instead, he returned home.
And when Sri Lanka’s government later moved toward acquiring a nuclear power station, Vinoth did something even more striking: he publicly argued against it, even though he was, in the words of those questioning him, among the most highly qualified people in the country to benefit from such a project.
That detail mattered to me deeply.
He did not oppose it because he was anti-technology or anti-progress. He opposed it because he had come to see the deeper realities of his society more clearly than the planners had. He argued that a country without transparent government, without a fully free and responsible press, and with unjust distributions of risk and reward was not structurally prepared to bear the dangers of that technology. If there were leakage, corruption, or catastrophe, it would likely be hidden. The poor would bear the risks while the cities reaped the benefits.
In other words, he put the people of the nation ahead of his own interests.
That earned my respect immediately, and not in some abstract moral way. It gave weight to everything else he said. It told me this was not a man theorizing from a distance. This was a man willing to lose advantage in order to tell the truth as he saw it.
And from there, our conversation opened into an even larger education for me—especially about Sri Lankan history and the religious landscape.
For many in the West, Sri Lanka is little more than a name on a map, perhaps vaguely associated with tea, tourism, or civil war. Vinoth gave it texture, depth, and tragedy. He described a nation where Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all live in close proximity; where language, ethnicity, religion, and colonial history are tightly braided together; and where conflict did not emerge simply because people believed different things.
His key insight was sharper than that.
Cultures and religions do not by themselves create conflict. Conflict deepens when a religion or culture begins to claim exclusive ownership of a territory, and when those who do not belong to the dominant identity are treated not as equal citizens, but as tolerated guests.
That is a profound idea. And it felt to me immediately relevant far beyond Sri Lanka.
A religious landscape shaped by history
Vinoth explained that Sri Lanka is majority Buddhist, with substantial Hindu, Muslim, and Christian minorities. The majority Sinhalese Buddhist population speaks one language; the Tamil Hindu minority speaks another. Christians and Muslims are woven into that larger picture in complex ways. Add to that a long colonial history—Portuguese, Dutch, British—and you have the kind of social terrain where identity is never just private.
Religion, in such a setting, is not merely belief. It is history, power, memory, legitimacy, fear, belonging, and land.
Vinoth pointed out that many Sinhalese Buddhists have seen Sri Lanka as a land specially entrusted to Buddhism. From their point of view, this is not simply one religion among others. It is the sacred identity of the nation. That means minorities—Hindus, Muslims, Christians—can be regarded not as full co-owners of the national story, but as people living within someone else’s civilizational home.
That helps explain why Sri Lanka’s post-independence history became so combustible. The question was never only theological. It was also territorial, linguistic, political, and ethnic. Once a majority begins to see itself as the rightful spiritual owner of the land, minorities inevitably begin to feel like second-class citizens. Then demands for autonomy, dignity, recognition, and eventually self-determination intensify. Then backlash intensifies. Then violence becomes thinkable.
That is not unique to Sri Lanka.
But Sri Lanka offers a particularly vivid case study of how dangerous it becomes when religion fuses with territory and state power.
Territorial religion
What Vinoth helped me see more clearly is that there is a difference between a faith being deeply rooted in a culture and a faith becoming territorial.
A territorial religion says, in effect:
- this land is ours in some ultimate sense,
- our faith gives us a superior claim,
- the state should reflect and defend that claim,
- and others may remain here, but only on terms we set.
That is when religion becomes combustible.
As he put it, when a culture or religion claims to be the sole owner of a territory, minorities begin to feel threatened, excluded, and humiliated. They no longer experience themselves as equal participants in a shared political community.
That framing triggered something for me historically and biblically. So many ancient religions were territorial. Gods were local. The god of this hill, this river, this city, this people. Even in the Hebrew scriptures, Israel repeatedly struggled not to reduce the living God to a tribal possession. Vinoth made this point forcefully: the biblical God is not one being among other beings, not a local deity competing for sacred real estate, but the Creator of all.
That distinction matters.
And in Vinoth’s reading, by the time you come to the New Testament, the land itself is no longer the central theological category. The whole earth is holy to God. That was a striking reminder to me, especially in a world where people still instinctively territorialize both politics and faith.
Dialogue without pretending we all mean the same thing
The second thing I learned from Vinoth, and the piece that beautifully complements the first, is his approach to dialogue.
He has spent years engaging in public conversations with atheists, secular academics, Buddhists, Muslims, and others—not to flatten differences, but to clarify them honestly.
He explicitly rejected the soft cliché that all religions are basically saying the same thing in different languages.
No, he said. That is simply not true.
We are not all climbing the same mountain by different slopes. In many cases, we are climbing entirely different mountains. Our understandings of salvation, destiny, God, truth, justice, and human purpose differ profoundly.
And yet that does not mean dialogue is futile.
It means dialogue has to be real.
That was refreshing. Too often, people think the only alternatives are either:
- combat, caricature, and tribal siege mentality, or
- vague relativism where all serious disagreement is politely erased.
Vinoth offered a third way: understand one another more deeply, disagree honestly, and still respect one another because we share a more fundamental dignity.
For him, that dignity is not based on our beliefs being interchangeable. It is based on the conviction that human beings are made in the image of God.
That is a much stronger basis for pluralism than sentimentality.
Sri Lanka and America: same fracture, different fuel
As I listened to Vinoth describe Sri Lanka, I found myself constantly comparing it to America.
Of course, the two are very different.
America has, at least formally and constitutionally, much stronger traditions of religious freedom and religious tolerance. We do not have one legally privileged national religion in the same way. In principle, a Buddhist, Muslim, atheist, Christian, Hindu, or Jew can all belong fully to the American project.
That is a real strength.
And yet we are fracturing too.
The difference is that America’s divisions often do not run first through religion in the same way Sri Lanka’s have. Ours run through ideology, and increasingly through sharpened racial and ethnic identity categories inside what used to be called the melting pot.
In Sri Lanka, religion became territorial.
In America, identity has become ideological—and often racialized or ethnicized—in ways that create similar outcomes: grievance, suspicion, caricature, and the sense that “those people” are not merely mistaken, but existentially threatening.
Both sides in America claim to defend democracy, freedom, justice, and unity. But often what they mean is unity on their own terms. And because our media and digital ecosystems profit from conflict, the loudest and most extreme voices get amplified until they begin to stand in for everyone else.
Vinoth pointed out that in Sri Lanka, communities can develop a persecution complex even when they are numerically dominant. That observation landed hard for me because it applies here too. Groups that hold enormous cultural or numerical power can still narrate themselves as besieged, righteous minorities. Once that happens, dialogue becomes nearly impossible. A nationalist God, a tribal God, an ideological God enters the picture, and every disagreement becomes cosmic.
That is as true in modern America as it is in South Asia—only our gods wear different clothes.
The caricature machine
One thing Vinoth said that I found especially incisive was that his biggest problem with the American church is not first the loud extremists. It is the silent majority.
The ones who know better.
The ones who think more carefully.
The ones who are not captured by either fundamentalist fear or progressive vagueness.
The ones who remain mostly unheard.
That observation matters because caricatures thrive in silence.
When the only public Christian voices are angry, shrill, partisan, apocalyptic, or reactionary, then naturally the watching world assumes that is what Christianity is. The same thing happens in other traditions and ideologies. A loud minority becomes the face of the whole.
And because outrage is profitable, the machine keeps feeding on itself.
I found that comparison between Sri Lanka and America deeply illuminating. In Sri Lanka, territorial religion produced civil conflict and deep ethnic wounds. In America, religious pluralism exists on paper, but we are still being pulled apart by ideologies that function with quasi-religious intensity and by identity categories that keep dissolving the common life.
In both places, human beings are tempted to organize belonging around fear.
What remains when we disagree
And so I come back to the thing I most appreciated in Vinoth’s posture.
He neither erased differences nor absolutized them.
He did not say all religions are one.
He did not say all disagreements are superficial.
He did not say truth does not matter.
But neither did he surrender to the view that disagreement must become dehumanization.
That is the lesson I needed.
We can acknowledge that traditions differ profoundly. We can admit that some of those differences are irreconcilable at the level of doctrine. We can still insist that every person bears a dignity deeper than tribe, race, ethnicity, or ideology.
That is not weakness. It is the beginning of sanity.
And in a world increasingly tempted to turn every disagreement into a battle for territorial control—literal or symbolic—that sanity is no small thing.
Sri Lanka taught Vinoth many of these lessons through blood, pain, fracture, and long civil struggle. Through him, I was reminded that America would be wise to learn them before our own fractures harden further.
We do not preserve a society by pretending everyone means the same thing.
We preserve it by learning how to disagree without denying one another’s humanity.
And for me, that comes back once again to the most basic claim of this whole series:
You are created in the image of God.
So is your enemy.
So is the outsider.
So is the person whose politics, religion, ethnicity, or ideology you do not understand.
That does not solve everything.
But it is where civilization must begin.
Sneak Peek: What’s Coming Up on Created in the Image of God
Next on Created in the Image of God:
- Sunday, July 19 at 7AM US Central time: I interview Jen Pollock Michel—author, speaker, and writing mentor—on desire, time, and the ordinary practices of faith, and how scripture reshapes the way we see our everyday lives.
- Tuesday, July 21 at 8PM Central time: I interview Bryan Adamson, kingdom business coach and entrepreneur, on how faith and business can work together, helping leaders build with purpose instead of striving.
From longing and limitation to entrepreneurship and impact, we’ll keep exploring what it means to live faithfully, thoughtfully, and humanely in a complicated world.
As always:
You are created in the image of God, and God loves His creation.
If you want, I can also make this just a touch tighter—maybe 10–15% shorter—without losing the new Vinoth material.
