On Monday, I watched a play in an auditorium, sponsored by a church in Mumbai.

It was a serious production, staged with earnestness, certainly not with the hope of stirring faith but maybe with the intention of reviving thought. I’m sure it did neither as what I saw was a patchwork of biblical beliefs stitched together with the playwright’s own vague musings—loose threads of half-understood theology, embroidered with poetic dialogue, and sold as divine truth.

It disturbed me intensely—not because it was poorly written, but because it was dangerously shallow.

There is something unsettling about sacred texts diluted to suit creative convenience. The result isn’t art—it’s confusion. The cross wasn’t just a dramatic plot twist. The resurrection not just a metaphor. These are foundations of faith, that need to be the foundation of any message.

As I sat watching the reinterpretation of Scripture unfold, I couldn’t help but think of Jesus with a whip in His hand, chasing merchants and money-changers out of the temple. Not because they were bad businessmen, but because they had turned a place of prayer into a place of profit.

They had taken something sacred and made it transactional.

And I wondered: are we doing the same?

Not just in plays, but across society—where religion has become something to be performed, projected, even politicized.

Every morning, many are awakened by calls to prayer blaring through loudspeakers at five a.m.—not gentle invocations, but thunderclaps over rooftops. Old people, sick people, babies in arms—all startled into wakefulness in the name of devotion. It’s not the prayer that’s the problem. It’s the volume. It’s the noise we’ve wrapped around what was meant to be intimate.

We’ve mistaken public display for private piety.

Then there’s the growing trend of trying to drape our entire nation in one single religious identity—not to seek righteousness, but to rally people against the ‘others.’

Faith turned into a flag.

Scripture turned into a slogan.

And beneath it all, a quiet erosion of the deeper message—love, humility, justice, repentance.

We wear our religion like uniforms. But uniforms without training or belief don’t make soldiers. And religion without depth doesn’t make us holy.

When Jesus entered the temple with a whip, He didn’t aim at outsiders. He aimed at insiders—those who thought they knew God but had lost the plot.

He cleansed His Father’s house not with anger, but with purpose.

Maybe it’s time we look around our temples, our churches, our mosques, our homes—and ask: what needs cleansing?

Maybe we need to revisit our own stage productions—our understanding of faith—and clear away what doesn’t belong.

Because sacred things deserve to be treated as sacred. And those sacred beliefs cannot be twisted in the name of art.

Truth doesn’t need embellishment. It just needs to be told right…!

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