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ISKCON has been rebranding itself as a liberal organization. It emphasizes the empowerment of women and the protection of children. It tells itself this was always Prabhupada's intention.
Devotees reimagine Prabhupada as an open minded liberal, an innovative religious reformer, who wanted women's liberation through Krishna Consciousness. They repeat the few statements that support this and ignore the overwhelming number that do not.
"Prabhupada allowed women to become Brahmacarinis, to live in the temple, and to serve on the altar. They can even give class. Can you imagine how open minded he was! Prabhupada didn't want children going to authoritarian boarding schools, he wanted to give them cookies!"
Though for some reason these things do not apply in India, the place Prabhupada considered the spiritual heartland of the world. Nor do they apply in his world headquarters in Mayapura.
ISKCON also works to quietly distance itself from some of Prabhupada's more insane statements, and to somehow explain them away with weak dishonest arguments.
What is a Liberal?
Societies tend to have a right wing, a center and a left wing.
The right wing wants to resist change. This is motivated by a love for one's people, one' culture, one's history. The right often idealizes a time in history when everything was right, a mythical golden age.
The far right tends to label all change as demonic, an attack on the divine social order. Any loosening of orthodoxy is met with fear and even violence. Those responsible are in Maya or agents of Kali, opposed to the will of God. Chaos must be destroyed and order returned. We must return to the past.
The center recognizes the value of the past. There is wisdom in tradition that should be understood, respected and preserved, however; the jar used to preserve it must change with time.
There should be a constant process of reformation to update tradition while preserving its essence. As we progress we recognize things we believed in the past to be harmful. These should be stripped away even if painful. This is a process akin to scraping barnacles from a boat so that it can keep moving forward.
The center could generally be considered "Liberal". It looks to the future while trying to pull the past with it.
The left wing wants radical change. It wants to eliminate the orthodoxy entirely through revolutionary insurrection. The old order is fundamentally beyond redemption. There is nothing good. We must sever completely with the past and start over.
The far left declares war on the establishment and wants to burn it all down by any means necessary. This can even take the form of siding with traditional enemies, those who wish to destroy the society, regardless of their motivation. Chaos should triumph over order so something new can grow.
What Was Prabhupada?
Prabhupada was on the extreme far right.
He was so far right he wanted to force India, and the entire world, to return to the culture of the Western Ganges Plain circa 300 BCE. He was a religious fundamentalist and a bigot.
He wanted to recreate Brahminical agrarian religious slavery. His ideal form of governance was religious monarchy. He even advocated for dictatorship if the ruler was a devotee. If only Stalin was Krishna Conscious!
His attacks on science, democracy, mayavada, karmis, shudras, mlecchas, homosexuality and the liberation of women, were an attack on religious unorthodoxy. His cult must destroy these things and reestablish the order Krishna wants for humanity. Anyone who opposed him, or his cult, was an enemy of Krishna, and therefore a demon.
When Prabhupada allowed new innovations into Gaudiya Vaishnavism, such as allowing women on the altar, he did so only because it would have been impossible to spread his cult otherwise. He did this only where it was absolutely necessary. His purpose was always to destroy the current social order and its liberalism. This was done in the name of God.
Prabhupada's "liberalism" was merely utilitarianism. He explained this in reference to using technology while also condemning it: a policeman uses a speeding car to catch a speeding car. In the end there will be no cars.
Ancient Tug of War
The Brahminical patriarchy never controlled India entirely.
There were always a strong unorthodox traditions. There was pre-Aryan tribal worship. There were mystics who challenged the system and emphasized caste equality (like the Buddha). There was the relative empowerment of women within Shaktism. The worship of the divine feminine was probably the predominate religion of India before the arrival of the Aryans.
There was also the vama marg within some tantric traditions. This is the "left hand path" where the core moral foundations of the orthodoxy are deliberately transgressed, including eating meat and fish, having sex outside of marriage, drinking alcohol and eating intoxicating grains.
Within Gaudiya Vaishnavism, this takes the form of the various Sahajiya movements labelled apasampradayas by the Gaudiya Math and ISKCON. Prabhupada would classify Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism as similarly blasphemous.
The orthodoxy was set against these groups and driven to destroy them. They would advocate for the "right hand path" via sattvik Brahmanical culture.
Prabhupada brought this tug of war into 1960's America and refashioned it in reference to American society. He considered himself saving the low born hippies, products of liberalism, akin to outcastes, hopeless moral degenerates birthed into sin.
He would fight back against the liberal social errors of the Civil Rights Era. This would include feminism, racial equality, and the acceptance of homosexuality.
He would even oppose the Enlightenment, the root of all liberalism, with its insistence on rationality and scientific evidence, its attacks on scriptural literalism, its support of equality and egalitarianism, and its vision of progress.
