So, as I continue working on my dissertation, I’ve gone back and read some of the papers I wrote in the Master’s program. I found this final paper from my decolonial theologies course and wanted to rework it for this blog post to open questions for discussion. In this paper, I reflected on what colonial Christianity looked like and what a decolonial approach to Christianity would look like.
For some, decolonizing Christianity is like pouring fresh water into the ocean to make it potable. But I want to think out loud here and see if there are possibilities for liberation in a decolonial approach to Christianity, or at least the one I grew up with.
In Guyana, Hinduism and Islam are present in our communities, and while they are a part of our ancestral lineage, Christianity gave us a way to feel a little more civilized than our neighbors. It made us feel less “backward.” It made us feel less oppressed. It made us feel “privileged” even as we lived in poverty. It made us feel like we belonged.
Sadly, though, here is what I have noticed.
We accepted this Christianity, and we became its loudest defenders. Not the missionaries. Not the colonizers. Us. We took the faith as is and guarded it as is. We learned to view sin from the perspective of the people who tell us what is sinful while they get to remain “holy.” Our “sinfulness” was in need of changing, in need of saving. They were never the converts in this story. We were. Why have we not taken the time to question an imposition that tells us we are not worthy unless we convert? Why does God not love us as who we are, in the religious practices we already had? Is this omnipotent God really selective about who gets to worship?
Think about that.
A religion that arrived by force became something people would defend with their whole heart. Why does a violent inheritance get held tighter than a chosen one?
Some may argue that people chose Christianity over other practices because they recognized its liberative power, its blessings, and the way it made them feel whole. In a context like Guyana, I see this differently. Choosing Christianity felt more like choosing to drink the water in front of you because it meant you would survive and it was the best option available at the time. This may anger some readers, but I want us to sit with this history and ask why we found Christianity so liberating compared to the religion of our ancestors. What is so appealing about it? (In that same vein, why did we find speaking English better than the language of our ancestors?)
I do not think this is really about faith. I think it is about who gets to be seen as fully human, and who has to prove it first.
Independence from what, exactly?
The British legal, educational, religious, and ethical frameworks are still there, underneath everything. We are in the Commonwealth. A flag changed. Not much else did. What do we actually get from the Commonwealth? Is the wealth shared equally? Are we treated the same as the countries at its center?
This is the first problem with calling a place free just because it says so.
The early church did not look like this. Before Constantine, before Nicaea, the church was small and mostly concerned with feeding the poor and standing beside the oppressed. Something shifted after 313. The faith that once gathered in houses started gathering empires instead.
A religion built on solidarity with the oppressed ended up, a few centuries later, blessing the taking of someone else’s land.
Notice how that happened. Notice how quietly the shift gets described in most church histories, as growth, as expansion, as the gospel spreading. Rarely as conquest.
Rudyard Kipling wrote “The White Man’s Burden” as part of his pro-annexation propaganda. People still argue about whether he meant it as satire or as instruction. It does not really matter which. He was part of the machinery of British empire-building either way, and this framework, this understanding of colonization as responsibility, became the script for every missionary who came after him, whether or not he ever read the poem.
The reluctant hero, doing the hard work nobody else will do, saving people from themselves. This is what empire-building does.
Social ethicist Miguel De La Torre illustrates this point with the Colonizers’ Manifest Destiny, another violent apparatus in the empire-building wheelhouse, and it continues today. De La Torre shows how the theology did the heavy lifting. Violence, destruction, and dehumanization all became acceptable once God wanted them. The violence stopped being violence.
It became obedience.
Here is what stays with me. The missionary can leave. If the harvest of souls runs dry, if the conditions turn difficult, he packs up and goes home. The people whose land he came to save cannot leave their own home.
Let me share a short story of this in action.
A photo I took of a painting depicting St. Archbishop Óscar Romero and Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande, with some farmers and missionaries, in El Paisnal, El Salvador.
A few years ago, a group of us from my graduate school went to El Salvador to learn about the liberative work happening there, hoping to bring something useful back with us. One of the groups we met with was a set of missionaries doing what they called “good work.” They had left the US to save people from themselves. After living in a remote part of the country for a few years, though, they decided their work there was done and moved closer to the city, where their own children could have better schools and better amenities.
I found that disturbing enough on its own. But the part that stayed with me longest was what they were feeding the Salvadorian children. They were importing soybeans to help feed local families, processing the milk in an unregulated space, and making cookies out of the dry soy husks, loaded with sugar to make them edible (their refrain is “If it is pink they will drink.” Coming from Guyana, we know the risks of drinking the Kool-Aid, so No THANK YOU!). Most of my American colleagues on that trip did not see a problem with any of this. They saw people doing good.
If this is what “doing good” looks like, I reject it. This was ideology, dressed up as charity. But look closer, and it was also a market. Products nobody wanted in the US got repackaged and shipped out as gifts. Soy is not native to El Salvador. Introducing it changes how people eat and how their bodies process food, permanently, long after the missionaries who brought it have moved on.
Have you ever tried bringing food from another country into the US? Try it. Notice how many steps stand in your way. Then ask yourself why it is so easy for us to send the things we no longer want to everyone else.
That asymmetry tells you who the mission was actually for.
Colonization worked hard to sever that thread for the rest of us.
I think about this every time I try to reconstruct pieces of Guyanese history that were never written down, only lived, and then buried. How do you grieve a memory you were never given the chance to have?
Noel Leo Erskine makes this case, working through Moltmann. The oppressed can usually see their need for liberation clearly. The oppressor almost never can, not on his own.
So what would it take for whiteness to actually see itself through Black eyes? Not as a metaphor. As a practice.
Frantz Fanon named something I recognized instantly the first time I read him. The impossibility of building a body schema in a white world. Becoming an image seen only in the third person.
That is double consciousness from the inside. A constant negotiation between who you are and who the world insists you are not.
Christian mission, wherever it landed in the colonized world, produced exactly this split. You were invited toward whiteness. You were never quite allowed to arrive.
That is the cruelest kind of promise, one built never to be kept.
After the British left, Guyana sought economic partners and found the United States and Canada. Trade brought money. It also brought a new wave of American missionaries, carrying a version of Christianity shaped entirely by a context that was never ours.
Can a theology built in one place simply be shipped to another and still make sense there? (I don’t think so)
Gayatri Spivak once asked whether the subaltern can speak. Decades after independence, still caught outside religious and political currents, I keep asking a version of her question about my own country.
Can we?
There is a kind of surveillance that does not need cameras. When a culture has been trained for generations to police its own instincts against a colonial standard, the empire need not remain present. It only needed to train you well enough to leave.
The watcher keeps changing uniforms. The position stays the same. Above us, looking down.
Homi Bhabha writes about a third space, somewhere hybridity can exist without one culture simply swallowing the other. It is not a utopia. It is not safe by default. Power still has to be shared on purpose, or the space collapses right back into the old hierarchy.
What would it actually take for a dominant culture to take up less room? Not rhetorically. Actually.
Christianity in the global majority is growing faster now than in the global minority. More Christians live south of the equator than north of it. That shift should change who gets to define the theological conversation going forward.
Should. Not yet does.
I do not think missionaries are going to stop coming. I do not think the impulse to save someone from their own culture disappears just because we have named it clearly enough to see it.
But I wonder what happens when the people on the receiving end stop accepting the terms of the story they were handed. What Guyanese Christianity looks like when it is finally allowed to be Guyanese first, and not a place trying to fit new wine in old wineskins.
I do not have the full answer. I am not sure anyone does yet.
But I think the question, kept alive and asked out loud instead of buried under liturgy, is where decolonization actually starts.
Please share your thoughts on this issue if you are wrestling with it as well.
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