I first encountered critiques of historic Christian violence in books and talks by Progressive Christians. Christian colonialism was often framed within a larger message about our need to repent for the ways we’ve colonized and marginalized people. This inspired me because I came from an environment where Christians never took responsibility for historic Christian violence.
Then I began studying the history of colonialism from a secular perspective, and I realized something that I had missed for years. All those books I was reading were by white Progressive Christians speaking to other white Progressive Christians, with no sense of narrowness whenever they used the word “we.”
As a Mexican American, my people are some of the people who have been colonized and marginalized through Christian violence. I was hindered from realizing the ways my family and my people were victims of Christian colonialism.
Obviously, there are ways that we all still perpetuate colonial Christianity and white supremacy, simply because those ideologies are so ingrained in all of us that we justify them unintentionally, if not intentionally. It’s important that we all take responsibility for that. But by only engaging with the history of colonialism from the perspective of the descendants of colonizers, I was ignorant of my own people’s experience of violent suppression and cultural erasure. Having a space to collectively repent isn’t enough. I need a space to heal. And I need a space to begin reshaping my faith free from white supremacy.
It’s a common experience for people of color to realize they’ve been seeing themselves through a white lens. It’s difficult to name our own experience when we are constantly indoctrinated with others’ descriptions of our experience and pressured to affirm their descriptions in order to survive.
When we can name our own experience in our own way, we will be empowered to build a new world that intentionally serves all of us everywhere.
I’m inspired and empowered by all those who have reshaped the Christian faith for the sake of the work of liberation. When we can be honest about the violence in the history of Christianity, then we can also understand how profound it is that some people have reclaimed their Christian faith while fighting against the unjust systems that Christianity has been used to justify.
I am not talking about a naive surrender to an oppressive religion. Those who are empowered by their Christian faith to fight against injustice also critically reject Christianity whenever it takes an oppressive form.
Slavery abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was empowered by his Christian faith to escape slavery and commit to the abolition of slavery, while simultaneously rejecting the Christianity that sought to justify his enslavement. In the appendix of his first autobiography in 1845, he wrote:
What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.1
Douglass also saw himself aligned with anyone who rejected “the slaveholding religion of this land,” even if they did not embrace the Christianity of Christ he fought for. In an 1852 speech entitled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” he says, “Welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! In preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!”2
Douglass did not distinguish between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ in order to say that those who follow slaveholder religion are just fake Christians, or to claim that if they were to follow the Christianity of Christ like Douglass, then they would be real Christians. We have a tendency to make that generalization when we talk about Christian violence.
When other people expose Christian violence, we may get defensive and say, “Well those violent people aren’t real Christians,” and then go on to talk about fringe groups of real Christians fighting injustice that most people have never heard of. The fact that these “real Christians” are so marginal exposes the absurdity of claiming that the louder, more powerful, wealthier, and more influential Christians aren’t real Christians.
Douglass wasn’t playing that game. He was making the opposite point, which is why he refers to slaveholding religion as “the religion of this land.” He goes on to clarify: “I mean by the religion of this land, that which is revealed in the words, deeds, and actions of those bodies, north and south, calling themselves Christian churches, and yet in union with slaveholders.”3
The violence revealed in the words, deeds, and actions of the organizations that call themselves Christian churches all over the land is as real as you can imagine. Oppressive versions of Christianity wield the most power and influence, so claiming those Christians aren’t real Christians is a dangerously inappropriate response to people who address Christianity’s history of violence.
Embracing a Christian faith of resistance of injustice requires a resistance of dominant Christian powers and ideologies that justify injustice. I’m inspired by stories of colonized and marginalized people taking the Christian faith to its radical conclusions and being empowered by their faith to fight for collective liberation.
Take, for example, the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Spanish Catholic colonizers gave to Indigenous people the image of a beautiful, pale-skinned Virgin Mary who had, according to legend, appeared to Juan Diego in Mexico City in 1531, and could be prayed to for miracles. It’s likely that the church created this story themselves, and if not, then they still shaped its retelling in order to give Indigenous communities a feminine symbol to replace their goddesses.
But, over time, Mexicans used the symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe to empower their resistance. The Mexican War of Independence from Spain in 1810 began with the Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo crying out, “Death to the Spaniards and long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!” Mexican depictions of the Virgin were also created with darker and darker skin over the centuries. Mexican soldiers fought against the Spanish in 1810 and in the Mexican Revolution in 1910, carrying flags depicting a darker skinned Virgin Mary who looked more like the Mexicans and less like the Spanish who gave them the image centuries earlier.
They did not take an inherently oppressive symbol and transform it to a liberative one. They took a symbol that was used to oppress them, and then through their own engagement with Christian symbolism they discovered its original liberative characteristics that were missed by their oppressors. They were reclaiming the Virgin Mary of the Bible who praised the Lord for bringing down the powerful from their thrones and sending the rich away empty.4
For Mexicans, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a symbol of power that serves as a reminder of the power used against us and the power we have within us to overcome.
Using Christianity to colonize usually backfires eventually because colonized peoples end up discovering that the God they were forced to worship is really on their side. They discover that the God of the Bible is a God who frees enslaved people and condemns those who exploit them. The colonized discover that the Christian story is a story of a God saving people like them from the type of people that forced Christianity on them.
I’m reminded of the story in Matthew 15 of a Canaanite woman who runs to Jesus and shouts, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”
But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.5
Jesus was solely concerned with preaching his message to his fellow Jews. “Dogs” was a common insult Jews gave to gentiles (non-Jews). Jesus reminds this woman that his message is for the children of Israel, like him, and not dogs, like her. Instead of accepting Jesus’s rejection, the woman challenges Jesus to change his mind. She cleverly shoots back, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” Jesus is transformed by this, which shouldn’t shock us because Jesus was human, so of course he was capable of learning and expanding—he was teachable.
This woman challenged Jesus’s mission and stretched it wider for the sake of those whom Jesus hadn’t yet addressed. When the liberation Jesus offered wasn’t made available for her, she had to take it. And Jesus commends the woman’s faith.
In 1971, on the television program Soul!, Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin, two Black poets and Civil Rights activists, had a dialogue about the problems faced by their two generations in fighting for racial equality.6 At one point they discussed their contentious relationship with the church, as Nikki Giovanni said she “digs the church” but “can’t dig the theology.” She then shared a story about realizing how much she was still deeply influenced by the Baptist Church she grew up in. “I went up to an A.M.E. Zion Church and a lady was singing ‘Yes, Jesus Loves Me’ and people started shouting. People were shouting. And it hit me as I was sitting there—my God, as a so-called Black militant I have nothing stronger to offer than Jesus. It blew my mind.”
James Baldwin laughed with Giovanni as she shared this revelation, and then abruptly got serious for a moment, and said, “Baby, what we did with Jesus was not supposed to happen. We took him. We took that cat over and made him ours. He has nothing whatever to do with that white Jesus in Montgomery, Alabama, in that white church. We did something else with him. We made him ours.”
Taking Jesus and reshaping him to empower the work of liberation is an important calling. And this calling has been embodied throughout Christian history, from the Canaanite woman to civil rights activists. This work may seem like a manipulation of an ancient message to the critics, but it is often motivated by the desire to uncover the radical roots of the message that are ignored by the popular teaching of the time.
This process of taking and reshaping ideologies comes naturally to colonized peoples and their descendants because most of the cultural resources we work with were never ours to begin with. And most of the cultural resources that originally belonged to us were suppressed or destroyed by Christian colonizers.
As a Mexican, I share ancestry with both Spanish and Indigenous people, but can never fully belong to either cultural identity because of that historical mixture. My people exist in a liminal space between both cultures, and the disorientation of this liminality is exacerbated by my identity as a Mexican American under the dominating pressure of American culture. Working with a hybrid of philosophical and spiritual ideas is natural to me because hybridity defines my cultural existence in this liminal space in between various cultures.
This hybridity makes some people uncomfortable, but I’m used to it. White Christians often tell me that I can’t be politically leftist while being a Christian, and white leftists often tell me that I can’t be a Christian while being politically leftist. Both of those perspectives perpetuate the European colonial interpretation of Christianity, which says that one must only be the type of Christian that promotes the colonial mission. That interpretation of Christianity was designed to destroy the cultural identity and resources of colonized peoples.
To submit and comply with the demands of white Christians or white leftists who would like me to reject a part of my identity would be to further divide myself in a world that actively divides me and isolates me from the cultural resources I need to survive. I reclaim my dignity and shamelessly embrace my full identity by allowing myself to exist in a state of multiplicity despite the pressure to conform to any singular identity.
In a similar way I also reject the demands of Christians who wish I was more doctrinally aligned with popular Christian orthodoxy, or so-called correct Christian teaching. I have no interest in aligning with the religious convictions of a special branch of European Christians, no matter which special branch of European Christians you think is the right one. I know many Mexican Christians and other Christians of color who value theological orthodoxy more than I do, but the frequent demand that I become more orthodox comes almost exclusively from white Christians.
Reshaping our faith looks like widening our faith beyond the boundaries of so-called correct Christian teaching. Christian denominations and academies do not get to decide the best way to express our faith. Their motivation is preservation. The motivation behind colonized Christians reshaping our faith is liberation.
A major reason Black and Indigenous people could embrace Christianity was because their original spiritual resources had been stolen from them. Indigenous spirituality from pre-colonial Africa and the Americas was demonized and suppressed as part of the mission of settler colonialism. So one of the ways we reshape our faith today is by reintegrating some of those cultural and spiritual resources that were demonized.
It’s been inspiring for me to see Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Christians integrate Indigenous spiritual rituals and teaching into their Christian faith. One of the ways this reintegration is expressed is through rediscovering our spiritual connection with our ancestors. In American and African Indigenous spirituality, the ancestors are still with us, experiencing the world at the same time we are, and guiding us to become whom we are called to be. Christian colonizers claimed our ancestors were in hell. They were wrong. They demonized our ancestors to convince us that we needed to be saved from our culture. Reconnecting with our ancestors means refusing to demonize them and recognizing their ancient wisdom as significant for living out our faith today.
This reintegration also looks like rediscovering the spiritual significance of nature and widening our faith to encounter God within nature. Nature is no longer profane, but sacred, just as our Indigenous ancestors always understood.
This reintegration also looks like reconnecting to the material dimension of worship through sacred objects like candles, prayer cards, photographs, and statues, along with shrines in which to place all our sacred objects. Worship with sacred objects was suppressed by Christian colonizers, who claimed this form of worship was irrational, and now colonized Christians are reintegrating the use of sacred objects into their religious life with a fresh appreciation, recognizing the value that comes from infusing objects with shared spiritual meaning.
Colonized Christians reintegrating the cultural res-ources of Indigenous spirituality is one of the ways we empower ourselves so that we may liberate ourselves from settler colonialism. This reintegration should be a priority in order to develop a liberative Christian faith that empowers us to decolonize.
My friend Bryan started a group within his church strictly for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) to support one another in personal and collective healing. These BIPOC-only groups are essential. Progressive churches preaching against racism and embodying a spirit of repentance is not enough. Providing a space for repentance may be fulfilling for white Christians, but Christians of color need our own space for healing. We also need spaces like this in which to support one another as we reshape our faith on our own terms.
I have rejected the Christianity I grew up with, which is the religion of this land. As a way of discovering my own dignity, I reject the Christianity that has been responsible for so much oppression. However, I am also empowered to discover my own dignity because of my Christian faith. But my faith is not the Christian faith of the colonizers. It’s the Christian faith of colonized and marginalized peoples throughout history who were able to discover that this God is really on our side, empowering us to fight oppression.
There is historic Christian teaching that was developed to justify colonization, and there is historic Christian teaching that was developed by colonized peoples to empower their struggle for freedom. Contemporary Christian teaching is a result of many centuries of both types of Christian teaching melded together. Contemporary Christians have a responsibility to sift through those historic Christian teachings to discover which kind of God they affirm as a Christian today.
I believe in the God of the oppressed, and I reject the God of the oppressors. In order to live out an authentic Christian faith, I have to wrestle with both of these conceptions of God because both of them are claimed by Christians. I am inspired and empowered by various liberative Christian teachings from colonized and marginalized peoples, such as Latin American liberation theology, interpreting the Christian faith from the perspective of the poor and oppressed in Latin America, as well as Black liberation theology, from the perspective of Black people; womanist theology, from the perspective of Black women; mujerista theology, from the perspective of Latina women; queer theology, from the perspective of LGBTQ people; and other liberative theologies that have developed as distinct methods of interpretation over the last century. These various intersectional and liberative Christian expressions are the reason Christianity is still meaningful to me today.
Over the last couple of decades, many white Progressive Christians have become successful authors and influencers, having been propped up as the leaders of a new Christian reformation. However, most of their success is due to their ability to popularize these liberative Christian expressions for white liberal audiences. If we are in the middle of a historic Christian reformation, it is because of the liberative theologies developed by colonized and marginalized Christians over the last century, not because of the white theologians who profit off them.
When I discuss liberation theology in activist spaces, I’ll often hear non-Christians say things like, “I don’t like Christianity, but liberation theology is cool.” Those of us who have actively pursued more liberative expressions of Christianity hear statements like this all the time because these liberative expressions, while inspiring and life-giving, are marginal in the face of “the Christianity of this land.”
Obviously, we would like our perspective to be the norm among Christians, instead of the oppressive forms of Christianity that justify colonization, but first, we must recognize why oppressive forms of Christianity are so popular.
The Christianity of this land is a result of Christianity having been used to justify the mission of settler colonialism. Oppressive Christian teachings did not inspire settler colonialism. Rather, people gradually developed oppressive Christian teachings to interpret settler colonialism as morally justifiable. This Christian ideology evolved into the white supremacist ideologies we are more familiar with today.
The order is really important here. Oppression precedes the ideology that justifies oppression, so Christian teachings that justify oppressive institutions will remain the norm as long as these oppressive institutions exist. Christian teachings that empower our fight for liberation can only have space to become the norm after the abolition of these oppressive institutions.
We can travel all over, sharing alternative Christian teachings and converting people one by one, but it will never be at a rate effective enough to abolish oppressive institutions. It is through the abolition of oppressive institutions that people can have space to begin to truly believe in a God who empowers the oppressed to struggle for freedom.
Before the abolition of slavery in the United States, the majority of American Christians believed God condoned slavery. That didn’t change until after the abolition of slavery. Abolitionist Christians existed, and there were denominational splits over the issue, but the abolition of slavery wasn’t made possible through those abolitionist Christians persuading their fellow Christians to change their minds. Their fellow Christians were only able to gain space to change their minds once slavery was abolished. Before it was abolished, many Christians didn’t have the ability to imagine God beyond a God that ordained the status quo. The same lack of imagination exists today.
This is how most beliefs function. We rationalize and internalize the reality that has been institutionalized in our everyday lives. We naturally want to assume that there must be a good reason that things are the way they are, and that people much smarter than us must have set things up this way. Obviously, individuals can change their minds on their own, but the only way to change minds on a mass scale is to transform the institutions in our everyday lives to give people a new reality to rationalize and internalize. This is how minds change en masse, for better or for worse.
Before a massive transformation, people fight and cling to their old conceptions of God, claiming that those who are trying to transform things are working against God, who carefully set things up the way they are. Then, after the transformation takes place, people praise God for leading the way for this necessary historic change.
So when the enslaved Christian preacher Nat Turner discovered that God is on the side of the oppressed, he knew that this revelation could only be understood by the people of the United States through the abolition of slavery, not through simply teaching people that God desires the abolition of slavery. Nat Turner was known for being an exceptionally gifted communicator, but he used those skills to organize his fellow enslaved people and lead a violent rebellion against their enslavers in 1831.
Nat Turner grew up in what was supposed to be the good, liberal, Christian alternative of a slave plantation. He did not experience particularly harsh treatment or abuse, compared to enslaved people on other plantations. He learned to read and was taught the Bible from an early age. What the slaveholders who maintained these more “civilized” plantations didn’t understand was that there was no possible version of slavery that could ever be tolerable for enslaved people. Nat Turner exposed that.
In A Theological Account of Nat Turner, Karl Lampley describes the significance of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in the historical fight to end slavery:
It signaled the death of slavery in America. Turner’s insurrection meant that slavery and Christianity were fundamentally incompatible. No longer could Christian slave-masters hide behind religious and theological justifications of cruelty and brutality. Turner’s revolt indicated that blacks could not be enslaved indefinitely. The impulse to rebellion and liberation had invaded the consciousness of black slave religion. Turner’s prophetic violence pronounced condemnation and judgment on the institution of slavery. From thereafter, slave rebellion became a reality and concrete fear of white Virginians culminating finally in the Civil War and emancipation.7
To affirm Nat Turner’s Christian faith requires a different conceptualization of the Christian faith than the popular options we have available to us today. The faith of Nat Turner is a stumbling block to the versions of Christianity that exist as a justifying force for oppressive institutions. Affirming Nat Turner as a good Christian who justly followed God short-circuits our typical Christian worldview and creates an opening for an alternative religious expression.
People are getting fed up with religion because people are getting fed up with the status quo. Being fed up with the status quo means being simultaneously fed up with the ideologies and practices that justify the status quo. People are fed up with religion for the same reason they’re fed up with nationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and cis heteronormativity. With the desire to change the current state of things comes the desire to let go of the ideologies that justify the current state of things. For many people, that is all religion seems to be good for.
However, there is another type of religious expression. It begins with affirming the inherent and unconditional dignity shared by all of us, and then it leads to resistance of the systems that categorize humans above other humans. This type of religious expression resists the oppressive systems that devalue us, even if that means resisting a popular version of our religion. This was the religion of Nat Turner. As Lampley notes, “Turner recognized the glaring inconsistency between his personal attributes and worth before God and his actual place in front of white society.”8
This type of religious expression is why Jesus is still so important to me. Jesus was surrounded by fellow teachers whose religion was used to justify the social divisions present in the Roman Empire of the first century. Jesus’s religion empowered him to challenge the social divisions of his day, and so he intentionally blessed those who were the most devalued and dehumanized by society. Religious authorities condemned Jesus for whom he chose to associate with. Jesus condemned those who used their religion to justify their discrimination.
Each of us are many things. We aren’t just oppressed or oppressor. Employer or employee. Rich or poor. Black, or white, or brown. Each of us are so much more than that, and we each deserve the freedom to explore the entirety of our vast and unique identities. We can resist the ways we are reduced to a few identity markers by treating one another with respect, but no matter how we treat one another, there are still unavoidable systemic barriers that perpetuate our division.
The mission of settler colonialism and the Christian teachings that justified it run deep within the structure of the institutions that shape our society, from government, to education, to culture, to health care, to the criminal punishment system. Abolishing the institutions that maintain our inequalities is the only way to open up space for Christian teachings that preach equality to become the norm. Christian history is filled with those who understood this and were empowered by their faith to resist the institutions that used Christianity to oppress them. Those who choose to continue this important work today are joining a long line of Christians who helped shape the path toward our collective liberation.