De-colonizing Christianity.

Most of us have only known a colonized Christianity.

That is, we have only experienced the version of Christianity which has been conquered and coopted by Empire.

For the last 500 years, the version of Empire that has subjugated Christianity has been Modernity: the knot of ideological, economic, political, and social institutions that developed in Europe out of the movements called Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution.  The only Christianity most of us have known is a Christianity thoroughly colonized by Modernity.

Modernity has always been characterized by individualism and materialism (among other things).  Its individualism has privileged selected individuals above others (usually white males), subordinating community.  And its materialism measures success by quantifiable wealth and power, fundamentally denying or devaluing non-material, that is spiritual, concerns.  Thus it talks a loftily about freedom and rights, progress and equality, but in practice Modernity has continued the main agenda of all Empires throughout history, which is to make the rich richer at all costs.  Those costs were almost always paid by poor, indigenous, and working people; now the planet itself has been added to the exploited and degraded.   

Christianity is rooted in an explicitly anti-Empire spirituality of transcendence and community.  The Bible begins with slaves liberated from Empire and resolves in Empire's inability to eliminate the resurrected Messiah.  Therefore, Empire's response to the emergence of Christianity was at first to resist, repress, and persecute it.  Finally, Empire coopted Christianity, turning it into a colonized, domesticated, neutralized, and subservient institutional religion pressed into Empire's service.  

Under this arrangement, the Church has explicitly or implicitly functioned as an arm of Empire.  In return for certain allowances and benefits, the Church has expressed support for Empire in many different ways.  But mainly the Church allows the values, principles, morality, and economics of Empire to pervade its own thinking and practice, subordinating transcendence and community to the ideology of Empire.  

In America, the Church has historically been all-but-required to support and legitimate as normative and necessary six major themes of Empire/Modernity: (1) white supremacy, (2) Capitalism, (3) cis-heterocentric patriarchy, (4) nationalism, (5) militarism, and (6) a political order that pretends to be democracy. 

The central elements of its own identity and tradition, as found in its Scriptures and core doctrines, conflict with these mandates.  Therefore, the colonized Church is required to ignore, downplay, or reframe them.  

Any decolonization of the Church that recovers its actual identity and tradition will begin with: 

(a) renewed attention to the Scriptures as the unique and authoritative witness and attestation to Jesus Christ, who is the revelation of true humanity and true divinity;  

(b) a recovery of liberative spiritual practices by which we emerge into our Essence: Jesus Christ with, among, and within us.  Among these are participation in the Sacraments, as well as art, Psalmody, meditation, prayer, fasting, Scripture study, labyrinth walking, and the Enneagram. 

(c) a categorical rejection, in its own life and in the larger society, of the six themes of Empire.  Replacing them with: 

(1) a multi-racial gathering in which formerly excluded and subordinated people are consciously and intentionally lifted up and empowered; 

(2) a economy based on sharing and abundance, giving what we have and receiving what we need; 

(3) radical inclusion and welcome of all, especially of the feminine, celebrating the full spectrum of gender expressions; 

(4) a sense of global and planetary unity and loyalty; 

(5) an application of the principles of non-violence in every area of life and society; and 

(6) a deep democracy that appreciates all voices, including previous and future human generations, animals, plants, and creation itself, through the application of law and conscious representative government.

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