You keep hearing the word and you are not sure if it is a threat or a tool. Some people say decolonize and mean they are about to walk away from the whole thing. Others say it and mean they are trying to hold on. So before you pick a side, it helps to know what the word is actually pointing at.
Here is the plain version. Theological colonization is when European or Western readings of Scripture get treated as the universal default, and every other reading gets treated as a deviation. To decolonize your theology is to pull those add-ons apart from the faith itself, go back to what Scripture actually says in its own context, and do that work inside a real community of faith. It is not about doubting the Bible. On a Jude 3 Project panel, theologian Ekemini Uwan, biblical scholar Dr. Marcus Jerkins, and historian Steven Harris drew a hard line between the faith and the way the faith was handed to us. That line is the whole thing.
Is decolonizing your theology the same as doubting the Bible?
No, and this is the first thing to get straight. The panel does not aim at Scripture. It aims at the reception of Scripture, what people did with it and added to it on the way down to you.
Uwan is careful about her target. She says the church was one of the primary vehicles through which colonization happened, and she names a concrete example: stripping people of their ancestral names. But her quarrel is not with the text. It is with what got smuggled in alongside it.
"The church was one of the primary vehicles by which this actually occurred. I am trying to disentangle white supremacy that has seeped in. What is it about the faith, the way the faith was delivered, that is not biblical, that is not reflective of who God made us to be?" (Ekemini Uwan)
Harris, a historian of American religion, raises the stakes. Christianity did not merely ride along beside colonial projects. It legitimized them. It sanctioned them. It was the theological vehicle through which those projects were carried. So the theology that survived was shaped, in part, to fit the purposes of conquest. Pulling your own commitments loose from that is not optional if you want a faith that actually tracks with what Scripture commends.
Dr. Vince Bantu, on a separate Jude 3 conversation, gives the cleanest frame for why this is possible without gutting anything. He separates God's revelation from our response to it.
"All theology is cultural. All worship is cultural. All of what we do as Christians in response to God’s revelation is cultural. God’s revelation is universal. It’s transcendent. The gospel is transcendent. It’s universal. But theology and worship, and what we do as Christians in response to God’s revelation is cultural." (Dr. Vince Bantu)
If the gospel is transcendent but every theology is cultural, then no one owns the default. The Western reading is a cultural reading too. It just got to call itself normal for a few centuries. Naming that is not an attack on the Bible. It is honesty about who has been holding the pen.
What does theological colonization actually look like?
It is not abstract. The panel points to three places you can see it operating right now: a controlling image, a default voice, and an ignored text.
Start with the image. Uwan points to white Jesus as a controlling image, a picture that quietly tells worshipers what their worth is and whether there is room for them in the faith. It shows up in white churches and in Black churches both. She calls it an idol, because it is divorced from history. Jesus was a real person, and the record does not support that face.
Jerkins presses the same point from the text itself.
"Jesus was a brown-skinned man. He was a near-Middle Eastern Jew. We have to really deal with that fact in an age where people are marginalized because of the color of their skin, that Jesus today would have been marginalized because of his appearance." (Dr. Marcus Jerkins)
Then the ignored text. Jerkins did his doctoral research on the Ethiopian official in Acts 8 and found something telling. Both conservative and liberal scholars largely skipped the man's Blackness. One side argued that being Ethiopian did not really make him Black. The other focused on his being a eunuch and gave his Blackness maybe a footnote. Neither stream, Jerkins says, is getting at what the text is doing. The Bible put Black people in the story and made them essential. Both camps missed it the same way, from opposite directions.
That is the tell of a default voice. When the conservative reading and the progressive reading both walk past the same thing, the problem is not one camp. It is the lens they share.
How do you actually decolonize your theology?
The panel does not leave it as a mood. They name four concrete things you have to do.
First, read your Bible cover to cover. Lisa Fields, who hosted the panel, put it bluntly: a lot of people are trying to decolonize a faith they never defined. You cannot pull out what is inconsistent with Scripture until you know what Scripture says. Uwan adds a step before that one. Divorce yourself from internalized white supremacy first, because if you carry it in, your reading is already bent before you open the page.
Second, read Scripture in its original context. Jerkins is direct about it. Your Bible was not written in 1611. It was not written during the Reformation or the antebellum period. It was written across thousands of years by people whose culture runs against the grain of Western thinking. Read it with Western defaults in place and you miss things. You read past Kush. You skip Ethiopia. You flatten Jesus into someone he was not.
Third, do it in community. All three panelists land here, hard. Uwan frames it as spiritual formation and political education together, across generations, under the wisdom of older saints. This is not a thing you figure out alone in your feed.
Fourth, widen the table. Harris urges expanding your conversation partners to include theological work from people of color, women of color, and Global South voices, while keeping the authority of Scripture as the main thing. Bantu makes the same point with a longer memory: the early African church defended the faith in its own tongue.
"We don’t even need to use Greco Latin kind of terminology as we defend our Christian faith, because we have African ancestors who were doing it, but according to their language and according to their culture." (Dr. Vince Bantu)
"Decolonization requires not a new path that is actually the old path in a new dress. It requires a new path of real engagement with a real Scripture and with a real, true God." (Dr. Marcus Jerkins)
Isn't decolonizing just leaving white evangelicalism for white progressive theology?
That is the trap, and the panel calls it out by name. Trading conservative white spaces for progressive white spaces is not decolonization. It is a lateral move.
Uwan does not soften it.
"Same beast, different teeth. It just looks a little bit different. The white supremacy is still there. And to me, that is a form of colonization in my opinion." (Ekemini Uwan)
Harris calls the right move a politics of refusal: refusing to take on the anxieties and constraints of a system of orthodoxy that is built on othering. The point is not to swing from one Eurocentric pole to the other. It is to ask what the Christian witness offers that is better than both broken frames.
Bantu shows why the swing is a category error in the first place. The conservative and progressive grid you think you are choosing between is itself an import.
"The dynamic that we’re seeing in academia between liberal, conservative, evangelical, mainline, whatever you wanna call it – that is really a white European first, and then white American imposition, academic kind of interjection into Christian discourse that is very foreign to the very nature of Christianity and even Christian history." (Dr. Vince Bantu)
So if both poles came from the same place, picking the other one is not freedom. It is just switching seats on the same ship.
Is decolonizing the same as deconstructing the faith?
Related, but not the same, and the difference is the whole point of this piece. Deconstruction often ends in tearing down. Decolonization, the way this panel means it, is surgical, not demolition.
Uwan prefers the word disentangle. She is not trying to burn the faith down. She is trying to separate what is genuinely biblical from what is cultural overlay. The warning she and Jerkins both raise is real, though. People can swing so hard away from racist theology that they end up building a Christianity on their own terms, which is, ironically, a deeply Western move. Decolonizing can curdle into the very thing it meant to escape.
Here is the honest tension the panel does not tie a bow on. The same impulse that frees you can, unchecked, become a new captivity to yourself. The fix is not less Scripture and less community. It is more. You disentangle inside the church, under older saints, with the Book open, so that what you keep is the faith and what you drop is the overlay, not the other way around.
Quick answers
Is Christianity a white man's religion? No. The Scriptures were not written by white people, and the concept of whiteness did not exist when the canon came together. The faith's early foundations include African figures and spread across peoples of color long before it was tied to European culture. It was co-opted by white supremacists, but the faith predates and outlasts white supremacy.
Does decolonizing your theology mean leaving the church? Not according to this panel. Harris points to the Black church tradition, beginning in the hush harbors where enslaved people practiced a faith genuinely their own, as itself a model of decolonized faith. Uwan is skeptical of anyone who claims to be decolonizing while refusing to set foot in a Black church.
Can you decolonize your theology alone? No. Uwan is explicit that this has to happen inside a church community, with spiritual formation and political education together, across generations, with saints who have more years in the faith. Jerkins echoes it: embrace the Black church and do not attempt this in isolation.
What is the difference between colonialism and coloniality? Harris draws the line. Colonialism is the historical event. Coloniality is the enduring structural effect, the way colonized spaces keep running on standards set by the colonizer long after the formal event ends. Theological coloniality is why Western readings of Scripture still function as the default decades after colonialism officially ended.
Is decolonizing the same as deconstructing? Not quite. Decolonizing disentangles the cultural overlay from the gospel and keeps the faith. Deconstruction often dismantles the faith itself. The panel warns that decolonizing done alone, in reaction and on your own terms, can collapse into deconstruction without meaning to.
This piece draws on the Jude 3 Project panel with Ekemini Uwan, Dr. Marcus Jerkins, and Steven Harris, with additional voices from Dr. Vince Bantu's Jude 3 conversations. Listen to the full panel to hear them work it through in their own words.