Decolonizing Faith

Week 4 of What Do We Do After Deconstructing Fundamentalism

This is week 4 of a new series on what do we do after deconstruction. This won’t be an exhaustive list or a formula for what to do. This is based on my own life and observations of others I’ve walked with. I hope you find this helpful.

The Christianity I Inherited

How much of what we called Christianity was actually Western empire?

That question would have terrified me years ago. I would have heard it as an attack on Jesus, as if questioning Western Christianity meant walking away from Christianity itself. I didn’t yet have the categories to see those as two different things.

Deconstructing fundamentalism taught me to ask better questions about certainty, power, interpretation, and fear. Decolonizing faith asks me to bring those same questions to the version of Christianity I inherited. Not just the doctrines or the sermons. The whole framework.

Whose theology got called neutral, and whose got called emotional or dangerous? Somewhere along the way we all agreed to call one culture’s reading of the Bible “biblical” and treat every other reading as an add-on.

A lot of us weren’t simply handed Christianity. We were handed a Western, white, Americanized version of it and told it was the faith once delivered to the saints. We were taught to confuse Jesus with the nation, holiness with respectability, biblical truth with European interpretation, and discipleship with assimilation into white cultural norms.

Most of the people who handed me this weren’t malicious. They just couldn’t tell the gospel from their own reflection.

The version of Christianity many of us inherited had a geography, a race, a political imagination: assumptions baked in about authority, gender, family, policing, poverty, land, and bodies. All of it got filed under “biblical,” because calling it cultural would have made it easier to question.

That’s why decolonizing faith isn’t a trendy academic exercise. It’s a spiritual practice of telling the truth.

When Empire Learned to Speak Christian

The painful truth is that Christianity was used to bless conquest. The Doctrine of Discovery was a legal and religious framework used to justify Christian colonial conquest, built on the belief that European peoples, culture, and religion were superior to others. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights describes it as a concept that “advanced the idea that European peoples, culture and religion were superior to all others.” (Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Doctrine of Discovery: https://humanrights.ca/story/doctrine-discovery)

This is where some people get defensive. They want to point to schools, hospitals, Bible translation, and the genuine good many missionaries accomplished. Much of that is true. But goodness doesn’t erase domination. A school doesn’t undo land theft, and Bible translation doesn’t make empire holy.

We should be mature enough to hold the whole story without rushing to protect the version that flatters us.

Lamin Sanneh argued that Christianity is unique because it has always been translated into local languages rather than tied to one sacred language. As scholars summarize his work, Christianity makes translation the original medium of its scripture. No culture owns Christianity. It belongs in every language because it belongs to no empire.

Christianity Was Never Western

Christianity was never supposed to be owned by empire. It began among colonized people living under Roman occupation. Jesus was not European. The early church was not American. The Bible did not descend from heaven in English with a flag tucked inside its pages.

The gospel crossed cultures before Europe ever imagined itself Christian. That’s why global Christian traditions matter so much. They don’t simply add diversity to a Western center. They expose the lie that the West was ever the center to begin with.

African theology reminds us that Christianity is not foreign to Africa. It also reminds Western Christians that African believers aren’t guests in someone else’s theological house. They’re one of Christianity’s oldest voices, not a late addition to a European original.

Liberation theology asks a question Western theology often avoided: what does the gospel sound like to people being crushed? James Cone put it directly: “I have to have a theology that speaks to the hurt in my community.” That’s the whole case for liberation theology in one sentence. It refuses to let theology get so abstract that it has nothing to say to people living under real systems of oppression.

Womanist theology presses even deeper. Rev. Dr. Angela N. Parker, a womanist New Testament scholar, argues that the Christian doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility have historically been abused to serve the purposes of a White patriarchy under the guise of biblical authority. She’s lived that argument from the inside, trained in mainstream seminaries to become, in her words, a white male biblical scholar, despite being neither white nor male. That’s not incidental to her scholarship. It’s the argument itself: theology gets called neutral only when it’s speaking in someone else’s voice. Mainly white and male.

Indigenous Christianity asks another question Western churches have often ignored. Randy Woodley writes about what he calls the “harmony way,” a vision of faith bound up with land, community, and creation rather than separated from them. What happens when faith gets disconnected from the ground it’s supposed to be lived on, when mission becomes just another word for erasure?

Contemplative tradition offers something different again. Empire runs on urgency, fear, certainty, and control. Thomas Merton, writing from inside a monastery during some of the loudest years of American empire, kept insisting on silence, presence, and humility instead. Contemplative faith teaches you to pay attention before you try to win.

Each of these traditions challenged assumptions I once believed were simply Christianity. None of them pulled me farther from Jesus. They revealed how small my imagination had become.

Finding Jesus Again

I remember realizing one day that nearly every commentary on my shelf had been written by white, Western men. It wasn’t intentional. It was just what I’d been given. No one had ever said, “This is one perspective among many.” It was presented as Christianity, full stop, and I’d never stopped to ask who wasn’t in the room.

For those of us raised in fundamentalism, sitting with that is hard work. We were trained to guard the borders and treat anything unfamiliar as a threat. If Christianity didn’t look like ours, something had gone wrong, that was the assumption sitting underneath everything.

But what if something went wrong when Christianity only looked like ours? What if the goal isn’t abandoning Jesus, but separating Jesus from the empire that kept borrowing his name?

For me, that’s meant admitting that some of what I called biblical was just familiar. Some of what I called orthodox was simply inherited. Some of what I called sound doctrine was an interpretation protected by power, dressed up in religious clothing but American, white, capitalist, or patriarchal underneath. That realization didn’t make my faith smaller. It made it more honest.

Christianity Was Never Owned by Empire

I don’t need a Christianity that belongs to empire. I need one that can tell the truth about empire: a faith strong enough to repent, and a Jesus who isn’t threatened by African theology, liberation theology, womanist theology, Indigenous Christianity, contemplative wisdom, or the global church. A Jesus who can only survive inside Western categories is too small.

Decolonizing faith asks us to stop treating Western Christianity as the original and everyone else as the adaptation. It asks us to listen before we defend, to notice whose voices were missing from our formation, and to repent of the ways our theology got shaped by conquest and then mislabeled as faithfulness.

Christianity was never owned by empire.

Empire just had better branding.

Jesus is still worth following. But the Jesus worth following isn’t the mascot of Western civilization, the chaplain of nationalism, the defender of whiteness, or the religious face of domination. He’s the one who keeps crossing the borders empire builds.

Maybe decolonizing faith begins there, not with the fear that we’re losing Christianity, but with the possibility that Christianity is bigger, older, stranger, and more beautiful than the version empire handed us.

The work we are left with isn’t trying to find our way back to the Christianity we inherited. It’s finding the Jesus empire tried to bury underneath it.

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