Decolonizing your faith means removing what was added to Christianity by conquest, racism and sin so that the faith itself can be seen clearly. Deconstructing your faith, in the way most people now use the word, means questioning the foundations themselves, with no promise about what will be left standing. You can tell the whole truth about the church without throwing out Jesus. It takes one honest step: notice the unstated premise that turns “the church failed” into “the faith is false,” and ask whether that premise is true.
That premise usually does its work in silence. Once you say it out loud, it becomes much easier to test.
Are decolonizing and deconstructing really two different things?
Ekemini Uwan, a public theologian and co-host of the Truth’s Table podcast, insists that they are. “I make a distinction actually between decolonization and deconstruction,” she says. She knows people use the words as if they mean the same thing, and she rejects that: “I just don’t see them as the same project.”
The difference shows up in her own definition. Decolonizing, as she describes it, is the work of disentangling the faith “from sinful additives and colonial additives that have been added to the faith.” Those additives, she says, “mar our ability to see the beautiful light of the gospel.” She calls them stumbling blocks.
Look at the word additive. An additive is something put into a substance that was already there before it. You cannot speak of additives unless you believe there is an original that can be told apart from the additions. So decolonizing, on Uwan’s terms, assumes from the start that there is a real gospel underneath, and that it is worth recovering. The project is aimed at what was added to the faith. The faith itself is not the target.
Deconstruction makes no such assumption. Taking a belief apart to see how it was built can be honest and even healthy. The method itself, though, does not say what happens when you reach the bottom. Some people find the foundation holds. Some decide there was no foundation. The word only describes the dismantling.
That gives us a plain way to tell the two apart. Decolonizing asks: what here is not the gospel? Deconstruction asks: is any of this true? Both are real questions. Answering the first does not answer the second.
How does cleaning the faith turn into discarding it?
Many people set out to decolonize their faith and end up concluding that nothing good remains in the Bible or in what Christians hold true about Jesus. The puzzle is not whether racism in the church is real. That much is granted. The puzzle is how a project meant to clean the faith ends up deleting it.
Laid out in steps, the reasoning usually runs something like this:
- The church that taught me Christianity was racist, colonial or abusive.
- That church presented its version as Christianity.
- Therefore Christianity is racist, colonial or abusive, and therefore false.
The first two steps can both be true. The conclusion still does not follow, because a premise is missing. To reach step three you need something like this: the version of the faith I was given is the faith itself, and the conduct of the people who taught it is the measure of whether it is true.
That is the hidden step. It almost never gets said, because once it is said it looks doubtful.
Is the hidden premise true?
Uwan treats it as a lie with a history. When someone leaves “because that was the totality of your experience,” she says, they end up agreeing with the people who hurt them. They grant “the false notion that white Christians have the corner market on Christianity.” Her charge is not that leaving is disloyal. It is that leaving on these grounds accepts the colonizer’s own claim to own the faith.
Consider what the missing premise would require. It would require that the people who used Christianity to dominate were its most faithful interpreters, so that their version settles what the faith is. Nobody grants that rule anywhere else. If a corrupt judge sells verdicts, we do not conclude that justice is a fraud. We conclude that he betrayed it, and we can only say so because justice is a standard he failed to meet.
The complaint against a colonial church works the same way. To call its use of Scripture a distortion, you must believe there is something it distorted. Dr. Christina Edmondson, the other host of Truth’s Table, who comes from psychology and higher education, names one measure of that distortion: the church can “use power to safeguard ourselves instead of to give it away as Jesus models.” The failure is measured against Jesus. You cannot use Jesus as the yardstick that convicts the church and then conclude that the church’s failure has disproved Jesus. The failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are still not the failure of Christ.
What is the strongest objection?
The judge comparison has a limit. Justice is an ideal, and an ideal survives whoever betrays it. Christianity claims more than an ideal. It claims that God acted in history in Jesus and that he changes the people who follow him. A serious skeptic presses exactly here. If the people who carry the name have so often been cruel, perhaps that is evidence the claim of transformation is false. On this view, bad conduct by Christians proves nothing, but it counts as evidence.
This argument deserves a straight answer, because it is not a word game. It is probabilistic, not deductive. It does not show that the faith is false. It suggests the faith may be less likely to be true. So the right question is whether the faith predicted this kind of failure, or whether the failure catches it off guard.
Uwan points to a passage that bears on exactly this. Explaining why people fall away, she draws on Jesus’ parable of the sower, where some seed is received eagerly and then choked. Mark 4:19 describes it: “And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful.” The parable is a story Jesus told about how people receive his message, and it should be read as one. It describes rather than commands. But it shows that Jesus expected his message to be heard by people who would not bear fruit. A faith that predicts unfaithful hearers is not refuted when unfaithful hearers turn up.
Edmondson makes a sharper point about where the church’s credibility comes from in the first place. “Christ alone ensures the credibility and the perseverance of the church,” she says, adding, with a laugh, that if it were otherwise the church would be finished. The Christian claim never rested its truth on Christians behaving well. It rested on what God did in Jesus, and above all on the claim that he rose bodily from the dead.
That shows where the objection loses force. The church’s record is real evidence about the church. It is weak evidence about whether a tomb outside Jerusalem was empty. Those are separate questions, and each needs its own investigation. The first cannot answer the second.
Does telling the truth about the church put faith at risk?
Edmondson takes the defensive instinct seriously and turns it around. “There is enough grace to tell the truth,” she says. Then comes the harder line: “And I think that when we avoid truth, it is an indictment on our belief about grace.”
Her reasoning is about hope. Christians, she argues, have been given the end of the story, a vision of what Christ has secured. That is why they can be honest about the present: “I know that in telling the truth, it’s not gonna shatter what God has promised for us.” If a person’s faith can only survive by refusing to see what is obvious, that faith has quietly placed its trust in the institution instead of in God.
She adds a point about trust. “I don’t trust people who can’t say what’s obvious,” she says. Denial does not protect the church’s witness. It drains it. People who can admit that something is broken earn the standing to speak about what can be made new.
The hidden premise runs in this direction too. The person who leaves assumes that if the church failed, the faith is false. The person who refuses to hear criticism assumes that if the faith is true, the church cannot have failed. Both treat the church and the faith as one thing. Edmondson’s position separates them, and that separation is what lets someone be both honest and faithful.
Why does hurt make the hidden step feel so obvious?
Edmondson offers a term that helps here: trauma hermeneutics. A hermeneutic is simply a way of interpreting. Her point is that real harm can shape how we see ourselves, God and Scripture. She is careful to say this does not make hurt people untrustworthy, because some things really are traumatizing. But if we do not notice it happening, she warns, “then it will be fear that does our theological interpretation.”
Fear, as she describes it, reaches for black-and-white thinking and reads every text as a warning sign. That matters here, because a faith full of paradox is exactly what a fearful reader cannot hold. When things seem to contradict each other, she says, the impulse is to throw the whole thing out. She answers with Isaiah’s picture of God’s greater ways. Isaiah 55:9 says, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” In her words, the fearful reading is “a fear-based interpretation when we’re called to a love-based interpretation of Christianity.”
This explains why the hidden step can feel like plain logic when it is not. Pain merges the people who hurt you, the faith they claimed, and the God they named into one threat. Pulling them apart again is not denial. It is clear thinking under pressure, and it is often work best done with a trained counselor, which is no failure of faith. If what happened to you in a church was abuse, your safety comes first, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233, is one place to start.
What does decolonizing still have to settle?
The distinction does not answer every question. If decolonizing means removing additives, someone has to decide what counts as an additive. That cannot be settled by preference. A person who calls everything they dislike “colonial” has stopped decolonizing and started building a faith in their own image.
So the project needs a standard outside the self, and for Christians that standard is Scripture, read with attention to its history, genre and language. The question for any practice is whether it comes from the text or was attached to it. Uwan’s list of additives reaches past racism to misogyny and sexism: “that’s a form of colonization too.” Some cases will be clear. Others will produce real disagreement among faithful Christians reading the same Bible. That shows the work is careful and ongoing, the opposite of a single cut.
Uwan is also realistic about where people go next. She does not tell wounded believers they must stay in the spaces that harmed them, and she says plainly that time away can be needed. Her plea is narrower, and the argument above shows why: “don’t throw away Jesus. Don’t let them take Jesus away from you.” She points Black Christians toward the Black church, admitting it is not perfect while saying it recognizes their dignity and that racism is off the table there. Edmondson says something similar about the church as a whole: “The church is not done with us, and God is not done with the church.”
None of this asks you to go easy on the church. Its failures tell us a great deal, and they must be named. What they cannot do is decide who Jesus is. To let them, you would have to hand the definition of Christianity to the people who betrayed it. Refuse that, and the real question is still waiting: whether Jesus is who he claimed to be. It has to be answered on its own ground, by looking at him.