The most Baptist state isn’t Mississippi. It’s Nagaland, India.

India has a striking number of Chris­tian megachurches. Most are in the thriving commercial cities of the south. But there is also massive new structure in the country’s far northeast, at Zünheboto in the remote, poor state of Nagaland. Dedicated in 2017, the nine-story Sümi Baptist Church notionally seats 8,500, but weekly attendance is 10,000. It is claimed as the largest church building in the whole of Asia. It illustrates a dramatic story of conversion of a kind that fulfills the wildest dreams of so many Western evangelical missionaries through the centuries, of spreading the faith to what they called “unreached people groups.”

The Naga people, who straddle the lands that became India and Myanmar, differ greatly in language and culture from familiar Indian patterns. Their languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan family, and they long pursued a tribal warrior culture, earning them the reputation of ferocious headhunters famous for their use of poisoned arrows. During World War II, British forces fighting the Japanese in Burma were delighted to have the Nagas as loyal allies. Kohima, now a major Naga city, was the setting for a legendarily bloody Allied victory. (My father, like many Brits who fought in these campaigns, spoke of the Nagas with something like adoration.) Today, there are several million Nagas, with the largest concentration in Nagaland, with its 2 million residents.

As members of an animist faith, rather than organized Hinduism, the Nagas seemed a promising prospect for 19th-century Protestant missionaries. In the 1870s, the American Baptists Ed­ward W. Clark and Mary Mead Clark began a mission in the region, opening their first church in 1872. The Clarks stressed that although their skins were white, their American identity set them apart from the imperial British authorities—they weren’t spies. The distinction was initially tough to convey but ultimately successful.