What is “decolonizing”?
We are about to start a new series of discussions for our next few Thursday night gatherings. We will be thinking about the land we live on. What is our relationship to land? What does the Bible have to teach us about land? Does our theology have anything to say about the climate crisis that threatens all life in this world?
As we grapple with those questions, a theme will arise that may be very familiar to some of us, but may be new to others: decolonization (or “decolonizing”). It’s a pretty big word, both literally and in terms of meaning. I’m not an expert, but I have read a couple of them, and from one beginner to (perhaps) another, I offer a couple thoughts that might help set the stage for our dialogues this month at Harbor.
The basic ideas of decolonizing
If you’ve known me for more than 15 minutes, you know I love the work of theologian Willie James Jennings. There are traces of his theology across the Harbor website. For instance, our statement of vision is based on the dream of everyone belonging to each other, because God’s desire is for us to join to each other and to the divine. This interplay of community and God’s desire is pretty much right out of (my reading of) Jennings’s two masterpieces, his Acts commentary and The Christian Imagination.
Jennings is often referred to as a “postcolonial theologian.” Postcolonial is another $10 word. I am just going to paste here a Wikipedia description of postcolonial theology, then I will summarize for you the most resonant parts of Jennings’s theology when it comes to colonialism and the land.
Postcolonial theologians argue that the dominant Western form of Christianity is actually determined, shaped, and defined by European colonialism, implying and reinforcing notions such as Eurocentrism, colonial exploitation, and the superiority of European values and culture. Therefore, critical examination is needed, and alternative interpretations to colonially-tainted narratives need to be constructed.
This is what Jennings argues in The Christian Imagination. He shows how the Church was a full participant in European colonialism. It not only performed the actions of colonizing right alongside the civic and military powers, it also provided the theology that was used to justify the colonizing!
Two of the massive pillars of colonization that Jennings explores are the invention of race (including the slave trade it enabled) and the commodifying of land. We have read and talked a lot about race and anti-racism at Harbor (and will continue to do so), but it is the other facet of the colonial project that our next series will consider: the colonizers’ theft of land and subsequent turning of that land into a product to be bought and sold.
Prior to Europeans’ arrival on this continent (I write this from the USA), land was something different. Something more. The way Jennings describes it is that the land was “a facilitator of identity.” Indigenous peoples related to the land as a source of meaning, as a way to understand who they were and how they would move through the world. Jennings quotes from Native sources and stories that give shape to the ways they related (and still relate) to land. It was not a commodity to them. It was a teacher, a home, a sacred communal trust… a facilitator of identity.
Colonialism, in order to achieve wealth, power, and dominance for those performing the colonial project, commodified the land.
My understanding of de-colonizing is informed by my understanding of colonizing, as explained above. The evils perpetrated by European colonialism (two chief ones, but not the only ones, being race/racism and land theft/commodification) must be studied, criticized, and rejected—and new ways of being must be imagined and effected.
For the colonial hallmarks—enrichment, oppression, commodification—did not die out from the Church after the 17th of 18th centuries. As Indigenous author Kaitlin Curtice has noted, “we are complicit in colonization on a daily basis, and we have the opportunity to cut it out of our lives for the sake of a better way.”
That is what we will begin to do this month at Harbor. We will ponder our relationship to the land on which we live. In what ways has that relationship been formed by European colonialism? Does our Christian faith, or rather the parts of it not tainted by colonial history, offer resources for us to learn from Indigenous siblings, to learn from the land itself, to learn how to live differently on this planet?
