Deconstructing Whiteness, Empire and Mission: What happens when ‘go, make disciples’ meets ‘Black Lives Matter’
Thursday Sept 21st 2023, 7.30pm, livestreamed on YouTube.
Join us for a roundtable discussion on the themes of the book of the same title, new out from SCM Press. Chaired by Alison Webster, General Secretary of Modern Church, with contributions from:
Anthony G Reddie and Carol Troupe (editors): why the book, and what next?
Followed by personal and political reflections on ‘what does Whiteness mean to and for us – how are we working for liberatory, anti-racist theological practice in our contexts’with:
Al Barrett – Rector of Hodge Hill Church, author of https://modernchurch.org.uk/al-barrett-when-i-finally-realised-i-was-white
Ruth Harley – Curate of Watling Valley Ecumenical Partnership in Milton Keynes, co-author of ‘Being Interrupted: Re-imagining the Church’s Mission from the Outside, In’.
Angela Sheard – Curate at St Martin’s in the Fields, London, and author of https://modernchurch.org.uk/being-a-crossroads
Further details fromgensec@modernchurch.org.uk
Reassessing the Inculcation of an Anti-Racist Ethic for Christian Ministry: From Racism Awareness to Deconstructing Whiteness
1
Regent’s Park College, The University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2LB, UK
2
The Department of Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology, The University of South Africa, Pretoria 0002, South Africa
Religions 2020, 11(10), 497; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11100497
Submission received: 7 August 2020 / Revised: 15 September 2020 / Accepted: 25 September 2020 / Published: 29 September 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Provinces of Moral Theology and Religious Ethics)
Abstract
This paper outlines the means by which candidates training for Christian ministry are encouraged to engage with the deontological positionality of anti-racism as a substantive element of Christian praxis. The first part of the paper provides some brief historical reflections on what was then the conventional approach to teaching an anti-racist ethic for Christian ministry, namely, the practice of “racism awareness”. Following these reflections, the author proceeds to outline the epistemological change that has occurred in his own ethical teaching, moving from the focus on racism awareness to a more critical, postcolonial deconstruction of Whiteness and its concomitant links to Mission Christianity. Mission Christianity, the religion that underpinned the British Empire, is identified as the repository that helped to institutionalise the existence of “white supremacy” and racism within the body politic of colonialism and the rise of notions of “manifest destiny”. In switching the modus operandi for an anti-racist ethic within Christian ministry, this paper seeks to reframe the ways in which the ethical basis for opposing and resisting racism is effected within Christian theology
1. Historical Background
My scholarly development has always existed in a series of dialectics. The primary ones of relevance in this paper are the constructive tensions between scholarship and ministry and Practical theology and Black theology. In terms of the latter, my scholarship has sought to utilise radical, liberative models of transformative education1 as a conduit for undertaking Black theology.2 This thematic and methodological form of scholarly engagement is for the ultimate purpose of the conscientisation and Christian formation of predominantly laypeople for the purposes of radical, anti-racist forms of Christian discipleship. My participative approach to undertaking Black theology is one that seeks to use models of experiential learning, such as exercises and games, role-play and drama, as an interactive means of engaging with adult learners in order that they can be impacted by, learn from, and contribute to the development of new knowledge concerning the theory and practice of Black theology.3 Whilst the bulk of this participative research has been focused on engagement with predominantly Black laypeople, an alternative strand has focused on working with predominantly White people training for ordained ministry.
This form of pedagogical and research engagement once took the form of “racism awareness raising workshops”4 for predominantly White theological education and ministerial training students in various institutions across the country. This work took the form of being a consultant in Black theological studies for the Methodist church5. The term “race” is in inverted commas as in strict terms, it does not exist. The notion of “race” as a set of unproven frameworks for indicating the notion of fixed categories of biological (and hierarchical) differences between differing groups of people is an invention or fiction of the era of modernism6. Racism is the outworking of the concept of “race”, which results in behavioural, procedural, policy, systemic and practical forms of discrimination based on the prejudices and stereotypes that arise from this construct.7
This essay is not seeking to offer a substantive genealogy on the ongoing constructive discourse surrounding the phenomenology of “race”. Rather, it seeks to synthesise aspects of this continuous discourse for the specific purpose of rethinking the current discourse and praxis of ministerial training as pertains to inculcating an anti-racist ethic. In effect, this work is less about the specifics of “race” as a conceptual category and is more concerned with the application of the latest thinking on this phenomena as a theological problem, particularly as it pertains to theological education and ministerial training.
2. Racism Awareness
“Racism awareness training” has become an ingredient within British theological education over the last forty or so years. This form of training in theological education was pioneered by the British Methodist church, arising out of the landmark report A Tree God Planted: Black People in British Methodism,8 in which the term “institutional racism” was first coined within the context of Church life, some fourteen years before the government instituted the Macpherson report that looked into the death of Stephen Lawrence, which gave legitimacy to the concept and the term.9
Racism awareness training was for many years compulsory for all persons training for public authorised ministry within the Methodist church and in many of her ecumenical partner churches. This training sought to conscientise ministerial students to become knowledgeable on the historical manifestation of the conceptual idea of “race” and its dangerous offspring, namely, “racism”. This form of enacted pedagogical practice was undertaken by means of informal workshops over the course of one- or two-day teaching and learning events. These were described as “Racism Awareness Days”, although they were also termed “Racial Justice Training Days” or “Exploring Anti-Oppressive Practice”. The emphasis of this was not simply to assist predominantly White students to become “more aware” of the conceptual frameworks of “race” and racism. Rather, the learning outcomes of these days focused on developing anti-racist models of ministry in order to assist students in combatting and resisting racism in all its forms. The underlying ethical basis of these training days was to challenge White ministerial students to develop action plans for the enactment of praxiological, anti-racist models of Christian ministry that would see such individuals acting as “White allies” in supporting the work of anti-racism in the church and beyond.
My involvement was often that of a guest lecturer, charged with engaging with a group of predominantly White students training for ordained ministry in a variety of theological institutions, from mainly the Methodist, Anglican, Baptist, and URC denominations. These sessions were focused on “theological anthropology”, inviting participants to reflect on the nature of their identity; namely, what are the constituent parts of their human constructions?
In this pedagogical approach to “Black participative theology”, I used a variety of exercises and activities for enabling participants to explore their feelings and emotions in a safe space. The exercises allowed them to adopt imaginary roles and to “park” their sometimes “extreme” feelings within a comparatively safe “rest area” where they could notionally ascribe responsibility for their anger, frustration, or sense of tension to the fictional persona of the character they had adopted in the exercise.
A participative approach to Black theology, linked with transformative Christian education, for the purposes of encouraging adult learners to engage in anti-racial models of Christian discipleship and ministry, is one that uses Martin Luther King Jnrs notion of the “Beloved Community”10 as its central heuristic. The use of exercises and drama represents an invitation for adult learners to reflect within the hospitable and safe space of the workshop. In this context, they can explore and commit themselves to working for and becoming a part of the collective spiritual and psychological journey of the Christian church, towards the “promised land” of racial justice, what, in effect, I would describe as the “reign of God” or “Gods gracious economy”.11
In the various exercises, participants, by means of conversation and interaction, have the opportunity to reflect on their actions within the context of a central activity and to assess their agency and responses to it for their truthfulness to Gods gracious activity in Jesus Christ when juxtaposed with the historical and contemporary experience of racism and oppression.12
The participative element of the work challenges learners to decide how they will inhabit particular spaces and places in order to assess the ways in which they are playing out learnt pathologies that are often informed by the specious binaries of “them” and “us”.13 What would happen if participants were enabled to take on the persona of the “Other” in order to live out their realities and experiences within a participative exercise? To what extent would these experiences change their subjective self and their concomitant consciousness? Ultimately, in what ways would the resultant change in consciousness inform their future praxis as ministers in public, authorised ministry?
The journey towards the beloved community is one in which the process is as important as the destination that is reached. In the context of performative action, one is constantly challenging participants to question their assumptions about what is deemed to be “normative” and that which is termed as “aberrant” or “transgressive”. The modus operandi of this approach to undertaking participative Black theology is for the purpose of offering participants new models of being Christian in a context where White nationalism and racism are on the rise.14
The purpose of this approach to undertaking Black theology lies in the belief that internalised change (spiritual and psychological) can be a conduit for externally verified changes in behaviour and practice. Both of these modes provide the subjective, experiential basis for liberation at an individual, interpersonal, communal, and ultimately systemic level.
This model of liberative, pedagogical work is predicated on a participative teaching and learning process. The natural corollary of this pedagogical approach is a model of liberative theological reflection that is undertaken by means of participative exercises through which new theories and concepts for Christian praxis are enacted.
It is my belief that Christian ministry remains the central context in which ordinary Christians and ministers can seek to use the insights of Black theology in order to become signs of hope and models of change for the liberation of all people who are presently marginalised and oppressed. Whilst building on my past work, these sessions, nevertheless, represent something of a slight departure from my previous scholarship.
The problems with racism awareness training were many, but in brief, I will summarise these ways. First, in its operation as a stand-alone, non-assessed initiative, the work was always envisioned as an atypical form of educational provision separate from the substantive curriculum work of ministerial training and theological education. In the failure to integrate racism awareness into the substantive heart of ministerial training and theological education, the work of anti-racist educators, such as myself, was fatally undermined, as these initiatives were being perceived as barely tolerable encumbrances to the “serious” and “proper” work of ministerial formation.
I remember one memorable occasion when leading a racism awareness training day in a particular Methodist institution during which a ministerial student verbally abused me and other members of the class, kicked over tables, and stormed out of the room in anger and disgust at my teaching. When the student returned, unrepentant and unreflective on their antisocial and wholly inappropriate behaviour, I challenged them by saying, “if you can tell me at what point in your future pastoral ministry your behaviour would ever be acceptable, then I will shut up and never teach these days again.” This ministerial student walked out again and did not return.
I mention this incident because my assumption was that this extreme, inappropriate behaviour might be an impediment to the individual being accepted into the Methodist ministry, but it was not. In fact, my opinion was not sought in terms of the fitness of the person for ministry, because by inference, my running of this atypical, non-assessed, one-off adjunct form of enterprise was simply a tick-box exercise that had no major bearing on the formation of candidates for ministry.15 Showing distain for and behaving badly in the one educational input focused primarily on racism and White supremacy, was not an impediment to their being engaged in authorised, public Methodist ministry. This epistemological lacuna reminds me of the great charge James Cone has levelled against White, Euro-American theological ethics.16 Namely, that Christian theology has developed a penchant for observing in minute details many forms of theological abstraction, but has largely refused to observe the visceral and palpable nature of racism within the body politic of White majority societies and the churches located within them.
The second problem with these days was the failure to ground them in the epistemological heartland of the theological curricula that underpinned the ministerial training and formation of Methodist ministers. By focusing on the concept of “race” and concomitant manifestations of racism, as opposed to the underlying frameworks of the theological construction of White Western Christianity, this approach enabled the reification of the opacity around the continued flourishing of White supremacy. In focusing on abstractions of “race” separated from the centrality of Christian theology as expressed within the curriculum of theological training, this led to the continued diminution in the veracity of racism awareness training and the significance with which it was perceived as an essential component in the ontological development of ministerial students training for ordained ministry.
In critiquing Racism Awareness, I need to acknowledge the limitations of my own practice. The institutional and epistemological frameworks I have described were ones I readily agreed to work within, in that I agreed with the belief such forms of operative pedagogy were entirely reasonable. Working as a Practical Black theologian, I saw this work as an adjunct to my more normative work as a theological educator and not a trainer and facilitator for racism awareness in stand-alone, one-off, day-long activities.
3. Unconscious Bias and Equalities, Diversity, and Inclusion
In the years since this work came to an end, the emphasis has moved on from an analysis of racism to one of “unconscious bias”. Unconscious bias is a social identity theory that seeks to enable individuals to deconstruct their embedded world views and the ways in which these impact on their perceptions and outlooks as they engage with others in the world as historical subjects.17 The shift in culture in how an anti-racist ethic is inculcated within the wider formation for ministry within the Methodist church has coincided with the shift in the corporate policy, moving from anti-racism or “racial justice” to one of equalities, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) and moving from the Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham to the Susanna Wesley Foundation, based within Roehampton University18 in South London. The national policy of unconscious bias has been ensconced within a research project that seeks to rethink models of diversity and inclusion within the Methodist church and how notions of difference are handled within the context of Wesleyan ecclesiology.19
This shift from a Black-theology-inspired ethic for anti-racism to one of unconscious bias has, as I will demonstrate in the final section of this article, serious implications for how we understand the challenges posed by systemic racism that have been revealed by the Coronavirus pandemic and the death of George Floyd, leading to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Does the individualisation and ahistorical, epistemological framing of unconscious bias enable participants to come to terms with and deconstruct the worst excesses of White supremacy and the privileging of Whiteness that has underpinned the concept of “race” and the realities of racism over the past 500 years?
It is important to assert the significant impact of unconscious bias as a form of transformative learning pedagogy that seeks to conscientise participants in a variety of social and institutional settings. My critique of unconscious bias does not extend to the utility and efficacy of this philosophical and pedagogical approach in principle. Although there are queries directed at the effectiveness of “unconscious bias” training20 in terms of diversity and equalities strategies as they pertain to corporate management, my concerns with its utility are located solely in terms of inculcating ethical forms of ministry as it relates to Christian ministry.
My problem with this new model is the lack of any serious analysis of the wider socio-cultural and political construction of Empire and the ways in which the embedded nature of Whiteness has formed a world in which notions of manifest destiny and White exceptionalism have given rise to a toxic reality built on White supremacy.21 African American Black religious scholar Stephen Ray has demonstrated how the construct of Whiteness amongst the White settler colony of the US, building on their European roots, reifies the means by which White Christianity represents the sublimated superstructure that underpinned the ethical basis of modern America.22 The conflation of the cross, White supremacy, and notions of White manifest destiny creates the theological frameworks that enshrine Whiteness as the regulatory norm for what constitutes righteousness and belonging.23
The individualising of the tenets of unconscious bias enables the wider systemic means by which Whiteness constructs a socio-cultural and political platform on which White supremacy is enacted to go unnoticed. African American Womanist ethicist Emilie Townes has written about the cultural construction of evil via the media depictions of Blackness and how the toxic ephemera of the media exacerbates this hegemonic dynamic of White supremacy.24 Townes’ penetrating analysis of the cultural production of Western life reminds us of the embedded ways in which Blackness is fixed in the popular imagination.25 The wider constructs by which Whiteness has enveloped the Christian project are summarily ignored as the church focuses on individual oversights and wrestles with ways in which visible minorities might be integrated into the White socio-cultural framing of normality. In 2020, can it really be the case that a religio-cultural framing for an ethical approach to justice-making should adopt as its modus operandi a focus on integrating minorities as opposed to deconstructing inherited, systemic, White epistemological norms? Conversely, my own developing work draws on the brilliant insights of Willie James Jennings. Jennings explores the construct of “race” within the body politic of Christianity in exemplary fashion using several generative stories of how the world of Europeans collided with that of Africans, and it is in this combustible nexus that the new, toxic order of Christian thinking emerges.26 The creation of this alternative approach to creating an anti-racist ethic for those training for Christian ministry is predicated on a critical rereading of Christian tradition and the concomitant development of White Eurocentric theology.
This developing work I am describing is an acute critique of the racism awareness work I used to undertake and its successor that is framed within the intellectual frameworks adopted by unconscious bias training.
4. Telling an Under-Told Story: The Role of Christianity in Creating Anti-Black Racism
The development of an alternative pedagogy for effecting an anti-racist ethic for Christian ministry commences with a historical deconstruction of the role of White Christianity in the Transatlantic slave trade. I am arguing that there existed (and continues to this day) an underlying framework that enabled many Christian churches to construct an ideology, based upon an incipient, racist theology, that assisted them in supporting Black chattel slavery, which was unhindered by any faith in God.27
To understand the churches’ role in slavery, we need to look back to the early Church Fathers and ideas derived from Greek Antiquity. It is in this much earlier period in the first four centuries of the “Common Era” (CE) that ideas of Black people as the negative “Other” first begin to surface in Christian thinking. The later period of European Expansion around the time of the Crusades and the violent conflict with African (Black) Moors (Muslims) lead to the intensifying of ideas around Christianity=Europe(Christendom)=White versus Non-Christians=Africa(Barbarians)=Black. Black people became the Other.28
The aforementioned is exacerbated by the fact that White Christianity is a violent religion. It is based upon a form of “closed monotheism”—i.e., the “Christian God” is a jealous and competitive God who will not tolerate rivals and the “Other” who worship such God(s),29—which in turn is conflated with White exceptionalism, privilege, and power. Therefore, the conflation of White Christianity and the hermeneutics of power leads to forms of aggressive social-political praxis that are often predicated on violence. This can be seen in a number of Hebrew Bible texts, in which a “competitive” God instructs the people of Israel to commit genocide on others who inhabit the “Promised Land”30 (see the book of Exodus, Chapter 23, Verses 20–33 and the list of peoples overthrown in the book of Joshua, Chapter 12).31
In invoking the term “violent religion” in regard to White Christianity, I am speaking towards the wider Judeo-Christian tradition, which, when allied to notions of White supremacy, becomes the hermeneutical lens for rereading the aforementioned texts in Exodus and Joshua on which “Christian genocide” is enacted. This view is explicated in the work of Robert Warrior, who reflected on the manifest destiny of White settler communities in the US, whose use of the “closed monotheism” of Christianity enabled the justification for the usurping of Native American land.32 Warrior’s claim about the violent impulses of White Christianity that have helped to fuel White supremacy that underpinned European imperialism is amplified in the work of a number of international scholars and activists from the Global South. These scholars and activists have demonstrated the means by which White Christianity has been able to colonise the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to dominate and subjugate others, often people of darker skin, across the world.33
When you combine the questionable attitude to Blackness with the sense of competition with people who are not like you (i.e., Black), you have a potent cocktail for an underlying theology of “them” (Black people or the Other) and “Us”. You know who the “them” are, because they do not look like you. They are not “of God” (not “His people”) and therefore “all bets are off” in terms of how you treat them.
When European traders, particularly in the Elizabethan age, began to engage with Africans on a prolonged basis, mainly through trade, it did not take much imagination to see that the underlying notions of “Otherness” made Black Africans ripe for exploitation.34 The tensions between religion, faith, ethnicity, and nationality are then exploited by means of “specious” Biblical interpretation—the main text that resolved the issue of justifying the enslavement of Africans within a Christian framework came from Genesis 9:18–25—The Curse of Ham. Noah punishes his son Ham by cursing his own grandson Canaan (the son of Ham), condemning him and all his descendants to slavery.35 Since there was a widely perpetuated belief that Africans/dark-skinned peoples were the descendants of Ham, this so-called “curse of Ham” was used as biblical evidence that the enslavement of African people was actually willed and sanctioned by God. There was also a similar but less well-known argument based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel (Gen 4: 8–16), where the “mark of Cain”, punishment for the murder of his brother, is interpreted as representing Black skin. Again, people of African origin are somehow identified as cursed by God for some past wrong. Here, any notions of blame are removed from the slave owners, since it can be said that the condition in which the Africans find themselves as slaves is due to the sins their ancestors have committed in the past, for which God is punishing them. Their Black skin is seen as proof of their sinful condition.36
Proponents of the Atlantic slave trade constructed such wild and fantastical forms of interpretation of the Bible (in support of slavery) because of the presence of pre-existing views of Africans as “Other” and as being “cursed by God”.37
The aforementioned was ameliorated after the Haitian revolution at the end of the 18th century. The charge to “Christianise” enslaved Africans was undertaken on a number of Biblical and theological terms. There was a dichotomy between the body and the soul. This dualism is a particular outworking of Pauline theology. Salvation is achieved solely by faith in Jesus Christ. In the theological construction of Pauline theology, salvation is not dependent on praxis, but on faith in the saving work of Jesus.38
This means that if you are a Christian slave owner, you can have faith in Christ and still own slaves, as God is only interested in your soul, which is preserved through faith in Jesus. Your actions on earth are another matter.39 For the enslaved Africans, faith in this same Jesus guaranteed salvation in heaven but not material freedom here on earth for the same reason as that given for the justification of the actions of slave masters. In the theological construction of slave holding economies, Africans could be saved. Given that this underlying framework of European superiority still held sway, however, even when both Black and White were members of the same religious code (the Body of Christ), it is no surprise that after the abolition of the slave trade and later slavery itself, Europeans continued to oppress Africans. It is interesting to note that the “dash for Africa” in the mid 19th century came soon after slavery was finally abolished in the British Empire.
The existence of racism in Britain today, as we speak, is testament to the continuance of the underlying Eurocentric Judeo-Christian framework that has always caricatured Africans as “less than” and “the Other”, i.e., not one of “us”. So why am I still within the Christian church trying to effect an anti-racist ethic in Christian ministry? I remain a practising Christian because there is another story to be told. One that lies in the heart and mind of such luminaries as Sam Sharpe, a Baptist Deacon who initiated the largest rebellion in Jamaica against slavery, in the Christmas period of 1831. For Sharpe as well as other enslaved Africans, Jesus was the Liberator who came to bring freedom to the captives.40 Texts like Luke 4: 16–19 or Matthew 25: 31–46 from the Gospels became “proof texts” that God as reflected in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was on the side of the oppressed and the suffering and against the perpetrators of the slave trade.
This Black radical tradition in Christianity continues in the present day. Black people have continued to re-interpret the meaning of Christian faith in order to challenge illegitimate White power (and Black power, also, when it should be called to account) and to proclaim freedom for all people, a freedom that speaks against the continued realities of racism and White supremacy.
5. Deconstructing of Mission Christianity
Building on the critical rereading of Church history and Christian tradition, I want to locate the thrust for an anti-racist ethic as one that moves beyond the framing of my previous modalities of this work, as outlined in the first section of this article. This development has moved from a focus on the minutiae of delineating the formulations of “race” and the manifestations of racism in Britain and across the world to one that seeks to explore the internalisation of White supremacy within the phenomenological edifice that is Mission Christianity.41 In using this term, I am speaking of a historical phenomenon in which there existed (and continues to this day) an interpenetrating relationship between European expansionism, notions of White superiority, and the material artefact of the apparatus of Empire. This form of Christianity became the conduit for the expansionist paradigms of Eurocentric models of Christianity in which ethnocentric conceptions of Whiteness gave rise to notions of superiority, manifest destiny, and entitlement.42
Central to the development of Mission Christianity has been the framing of Whiteness as the signifier for notions of righteousness and axiomatic tropes of regulatory patterns of Christian discipleship. James Perkinson demonstrates how Whiteness provides the superstructure on which Enlightenment rationality is predicated, with which Mission Christianity happily colluded as a means of constructing notions of normality versus deviance in the application of the faith across the “New World”.43 Perkinson argues that “Whiteness was born of the European encounter with people, places, and things that fit no clear category on the map of Christian cognition”.44
The aforementioned work, in terms of both the racism awareness training I led or the later development of unconscious bias training I have named, for all its attempts at instituting a liberative pedagogical ethic, is nevertheless predicated on an assumption of the normativity of the Christian faith as an inviolate guarantee for non-racialised discourse and praxis. One cannot ignore the reality that the Bible has been used to justify slavery, colonisation, rape, and homophobic violence.45 It has been used as a weapon against Black people. Ideological biblical scholars such Randall Bailey and Oral Thomas talk about the need to read against the text.46 In fact, Bailey, who I would identify as the doyen of socio-political, ideological readings of the Bible, asserts the importance of an ideological mode of interpretation that is commensurate with one’s own religio-cultural bias.47
Without the robust deconstructive work as I have described, there is a danger that the radical pedagogy underpinning racism awareness training, or the later iteration of an anti-racist ethic that is enshrined in unconscious bias training, effectively becomes a de facto White-controlled discourse much like the more centrist “classical theology” and Biblical studies that have shaped Western Christianity. One of the perennial problems with the racism awareness work I used to undertake lies in its reliance on the normative frameworks of Christian discourse and the failure to name the White, privileged, androcentric inherited norms that have underpinned Christianity since the epoch of colonialism. It has been this unexplored, embedded nature of Whiteness that has enabled Western Christianity to all too easily collude with racism and the subterranean tropes of White supremacy.48
The development of the Equalities framework within the national life of the Methodist church has been distilled within the Equalities, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) toolkit, in which the commitment to justice-orientated ministry is enshrined within the various units and workplans constructed by the connexional (national) committee.49 Within the material developed in the EDI toolkit, one can see clear evidence of a commitment to wrestling with historic, theo-cultural frameworks of Whiteness and the embedded, historic constructs of White supremacy that have defined Christianity as the religion of Empire.50 The toolkit has a section on “race” (module 6), which includes the generative work of Peggy McIntosh51 that addresses White privilege and the normativity of Whiteness as an unmarked form of human subjectivity. Now, to be clear, McIntosh’s pedagogical activism is hugely significant, and the inclusion of this work demonstrates a level of radicality that reveals the substantive ethical intent to address racism and White privilege within the body politic of the church and wider society.
The failure of the EDI strategy adopted by the Methodist church lies in its failure to engage with the radical “theological” deconstruction of Whiteness that is employed by James Perkinson. In his pioneering text, White Theology,52 Perkinson, a White, Euro-American theologian, wrestles with the phenomenology of Whiteness in order to deconstruct the economic positionality of Whiteness and critically challenge the worst forms of theo-anthropological obfuscation that often underpin the existing modalities of anti-racism found in my earlier racial justice work or the more recent EDI framework adopted by the Methodist church. One cannot casually remove Christianity from the contaminating stain of Whiteness as if the problems of White supremacy exist solely beyond the parameters of the Christian faith itself and have not become embedded within the very epistemological framing of the phenomenon of Christianity across its history.
In wrestling with the colonial hinterland of Mission Christianity and the emblematic ways in which Whiteness is embedded within it, this developing approach towards an anti-racist ethic in terms of Christian ministry is one that seeks to help White people connect with their unnamed Whiteness. How does one enable White people to reflect critically on their developing Christian discipleship and ministry in a manner that is informed by their surreptitious and usually unstated Whiteness, which in Christian theology has been as much a hindrance as it has been a help?
In Christian theology, one often witnesses studious attempts to avoid engaging with embodied difference.53 When I was an undergraduate student in Church History at the University of Birmingham many years ago, we spent a great deal of time looking at the writings of great luminaries such Martin Luther, John Calvin, et al. At no point were they ever racialised, i.e., ever described as “White authors” or “White thinkers”. These individuals were simply “authors” or simply “thinkers”. Their ideas were generic and most importantly, they had universal implications for all peoples.
Whiteness operates as an overarching construct, which assumes a central place in all epistemological and cultural forms of production, thereby relegating other positions or perspectives as “Other”. I should, at this juncture, make the point that I am not seeking to traduce all White people, nor am I constructing this discourse on the pejorative understanding that Whiteness is aberrant or wholly without legitimacy. It is also important that I make the point that feminism and gender studies add a particular piquancy to this debate, because they contextualised and complicated the nature of this discourse, as Whiteness has to be contextualised in terms of other overarching vistas such as class, sexuality, patriarchy, and androcentrism.54
As I have indicated in a previous work, this form of generic universalism55 is one that seeks to mask the presumption that the default positionality in how we understand humanity is predicated on Whiteness.56 My critique is of Whiteness as macro epistemological framework for privilege and superiority, sometimes even triumphant supremacy. This first conversation is principally about the development of ideas and discursive practices as opposed to the subjectivities and positionalities of White people per se. I am not arguing that every White person is imbued with either power or privilege, particularly of the economic kind in terms of the latter. However, what I am interested in and trying to assert in this exploratory paper are the ways in which Whiteness operates as a tacit, concealed form of normative framing, what we have come to know as truth, especially that which contains a universal posture to its ideological claims for itself.
In more recent times, a branch of scholarship entitled “Critical White Studies”57 has begun the task of naming and unmasking the privileged construct that is “Whiteness”. The power of this process, if undertaken with due consciousness to exposing the truth, is one that will be an unflinching and unsparing critique of the hypocrisy of White Christianity, particularly that which has emerged from Euro-American evangelicalism.
The notion of the church as a body that is united under the Lordship of Jesus Christ is one of the enduring truths of the Christian faith. This sense of unity that is so boldly proclaimed as central to the self-understanding of the church itself has often proved more illusionary than real. While the Body of Christ has been fractured by arguments over doctrine, denomination, and issues of class, gender, and sexuality, perhaps the most ongoing challenge and indeed the most persistent scourge has been that of racism.
Our present epoch has witnessed the continued idolatrous nature of aspects of White American evangelicalism, for example, that it has always preferred worshipping White supremacy than the Jesus who tells us to love our neighbours, irrespective of ethnicity or culture or “race”, including those who are Black. The recent upsurge in White nationalism in the US in the wake of the Presidency of Donald J Trump and his excoriating rhetoric aimed at those who are deemed the Other is a sad reminder of the singular importance of this paper.
The continued growth of White nationalism across the world is a reminder of the ongoing challenge of resisting White supremacy. In Britain, we have had to deal with our own experience of White supremacy. The Brexit vote clearly demonstrated the barely concealed exceptionalism and sense of entitlement of predominantly White English people.58 The clear xenophobia underpinning the Leave campaign reminded many of us that “True Britishness” equals Whiteness and that those who are deemed the “Other”, be it “migrants” living in the UK or “foreigners” from Europe, are distinctly less deserving in the eyes of many White British people. It can be argued that the romantic push for the nostalgia of the past (when Britain had the biggest empire the world has ever seen) is predicated on the intrinsic value of Britain being superior to others, often seen in terms of groups such as “Britain First” or other groups on the political right who want to “make Britain great again”. To quote the Black British social commentator Gary Younge, “not everyone, or even most of the people who voted Leave were driven by racism. But the Leave campaign imbued racists with a confidence they have not enjoyed for many decades and poured arsenic into the water supply of our national conversation.”59
It is important to note the contested nature of the aforementioned discourse, often focusing on the divergent positionality of Black and Postcolonial scholars when juxtaposed with more centrist ones seeking to offer a more emollient reading of our post-Brexit milieu. The latter, often writing from appreciative perspective of seeking to offer ameliorative hermeneutics for the rise in White British nationalism, will argue that the rise in intolerance to the conspicuous socio-cultural difference of multiculturalism and immigration can be understood more in terms of fear and alienation than in the frameworks afforded by race analysis as adopted by scholars such as myself.60
Clearly, the rise of predominantly White British nationalism has many facets, and I am in no doubt that fear, alienation, and dissatisfaction with the current socio-political milieu that is modern Britain had an important role to play in why so many poorer White people in the former industrial heartlands of the traditional Labour Party voted for Brexit. However, to assert that the resurgence of nationalism has nothing to do with notions of race or White exceptionalism stretches all the normal boundaries of credulity. Let me end this section with a recent conversation I had with my 87-year-old father who lived in Britain from October 1959 until August 199161. He came as a part of the Windrush Generation. He worked in factories in his entire time in the UK. He was an ardent trade unionist, a member of the General and Municipal Workers Union or the GMWU. He was a shop steward for several years and a works convener. When I informed him of the prominent White Anglicans “speaking up for ordinary working-class people” who voted for Brexit,62 my father retorted, “Why is that when people talk about the working class in Britain, they only mean White people? I worked for over 30 years in Britain in a factory and was a member of a trade union. I was working class. But I bet these people are not standing up for me?”
6. An Anti-Racism Ethic in Practice
The existence of racism in Britain today, as we speak, is testament to the continued legacy of Mission Christianity that has always caricatured Africans as “less than” and “the Other”, i.e., not one of “us” in terms of the construct of Whiteness. Slavery is long gone, but anti-Black racism has long outlived the institution that helped to breathe it into life. In our contemporary era, the underlying framework of Blackness, which is still symbolically seen as representing the problematic Other, now finds expression in a White police officer placing his knee on the neck of a Black man; despite the plaintive pleas of “I can’t breathe”, the police officer remains unmoved and maintains his violent posture until this Black man dies. One cannot understand the futility of this death unless you understand that this is no new phenomenon. White power has viewed Black flesh as disposable for the past 500 years.
For those who want to believe that such events as the death of George Floyd could never happen in the UK, let me recall the death of Clinton McCurbin, an African Caribbean man who died of asphyxia at the hands of the police in Wolverhampton on the 20th February 1987, having been arrested for using a stolen credit card.63 Eye witness accounts spoke of seeing McCurbin gasping for breath as White officers pinned him to the floor and crushed the air out of his body. Later that year, despite the cautionary words from my very law-abiding, hyper-religious, and respectable parents to focus on my studies, I nevertheless travelled to Wolverhampton along with thousands of others to protest the death of Clinton McCurbin. That was my very first march. No officers were ever charged with his death. Life in my local church continued without any recourse to the death of a Black man of dubious character. I cannot recall many occasions in which racism within the church and the wider society was ever addressed in the Methodist church I attended at the time.
It is my contention that succeeding generations of Ordained Methodist ministers and “local preachers”64 have been trained to ignore the social reality of racism. Whilst previous iterations of the training process for preachers have stressed the importance of social justice as a key element in the Methodist kerygmatic tradition, I am convinced that little exists in the way of an explicit anti-racist ethic that asserts the necessity of deconstructing the toxicity of White normality, entitlement, and privilege.
This brings me to the curious case of the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol as part of a Black Lives Matter protest on the 8th June this year.65 It can be argued that the pulling down or removal of statues has become a distraction against the wider issues of systemic racism that need to be addressed more than the removal of historic artefacts often ignored by most people in their daily activities. That is correct if the focus is solely on statues in and of themselves. However, let us consider the point of the Black Lives Matter Movement in first place.
The Black Lives Matter movement emerged in order to counter the patently obvious fact that Black lives do not matter.66 This is not just a question of economics or materiality; it is also about seemingly “ephemeral matters” like the impact on our psyche and associated questions of representation and spirituality. It has been interesting observing the concern of many White Christians for the ethical matters of law and order, governance, and property when it comes to the tearing down of the Colston stature in Bristol. Black people, many of whom are the descendants of enslaved peoples, have lived in that city with the sight of a statue built in honour of a slave trader. Polite petitions to move these and other statues were ignored. Long before a so-called mob tore this one down, activists asked for it to be moved to a museum where those who deliberately wanted to see it could while saving those of us who did not the ignominy of having the lives of our oppressed ancestors constantly insulted. White authority ignored our claims, because Black lives and our resultant feelings do not matter. Black lives do not matter in the face of White complacency and disregard. Just as our pleas for justice for Clinton McCurbin went unheeded, because our feelings did not matter either.
Therefore, I find it interesting that following the pulling down of a statue, we had the usual furrowed brow of some White Christians sharing their ethical concern for law and order and the dangers of mob rule.67 One wonders how many of these complainants were supportive of BLM prior to its sudden resurgence since the death of George Floyd? For some respectable White Christians, their ethical concern is focused on property and not Black lives disfigured by racism. Delroy Wesley Hall speaks of Black people living in Britain struggling with a form of existential crucifixion. We are mired in our continued “Holy Saturday” following our social and collective crucifixion, but with no “Easter Sunday” on the horizon.68
Therefore, at this moment in history, I am not going to thank White people for issuing apologies, “taking the knee”, writing statements, and going on marches that do not cost them anything when we are dealing with forms of existential crucifixion that lead to us being more likely to struggle with mental ill health issues such as schizophrenia.69
I am not going to “educate” White people on how to deal with their discomfort and emotions when I and countless Black people are afraid to go out of our houses lest we end up as part of the disproportionate numbers who are stopped, detained, and questioned by our supposedly benign police force for violating the changeable rules on social distancing post-lockdown that see White people congregating with impunity.70
Thinking back to 1987, when I asked my White Christian colleagues and friends to support me in mounting a campaign to mark the callous killing of Clinton McCurbin, I was met with complete indifference. McCurbin’s death did not resonate with them because the death of another anonymous Black man was no big deal. However, every Black person knows that in and of itself, George Floyd’s death is not remarkable. Systemic racism did not start with George Floyd’s death, nor will it end with White people wringing their hands in liberal guilt, telling us how sorry they are for the racism that blights our lives and not theirs. The bitter truth is that Black lives have not mattered for a very long time, and the Church has long been complicit in this.
I have used the iconic toppling of the Colston statue as a microcosm for the wider Black Lives Matter movement and the indifference of some White Christians to our pleas for justice. The frustration of the protestors that led to the toppling and disposal of the statue reminds me of the very human anger and frustration of Jesus in turning out the money changers in the temple (Matt. 21: 12–17, Mark 11: 15–19, Luke 19: 45–48 and John 2: 13–16). It seems like it is alright for a “White Jesus”71 as depicted in Western iconography to be angry and destroy property, but not unruly Black people! An anti-racist ethic in Christian ministry is one that most support Black Lives Matter if White Christians are serious about seeking to be in solidarity with Black people as we wrestle with the continued realities of systemic racism.
7. Conclusions
This article has sought to outline the development in my own scholarship, ministry, and activism, one that has moved from racism awareness to a theological deconstruction of Whiteness and its relationship to Mission Christianity. This work has also challenged the contemporary predilection for the conceptual framing of unconscious bias and equalities and diversity when juxtaposed with the emphasis on racial justice and anti-racism. Deconstructing Whiteness and its relationship to Mission Christianity represents, I believe, a radical and robust means of developing an anti-racist ethic that can inform and radicalise those training for public, authorised ministry.
I have yet to develop a means of converting this work into a pedagogical framework that can be delivered in a training context for those undertaking ministerial formation in the context of theological education within the “Common Awards”72 framework. This work is a tentative heuristic that is incomplete. Additional pedagogical and curriculum work is needed for the effective implementation of this proposal for rethinking how churches undertake the task of ordinands for a life of an anti-racist ethic in their public ministry.
Given the neo-colonial construct of patronage on which many churches continue to operate, where epistemological power resides in the hands of White authority figures who are imbued with the referential power of hierarchy, I am not holding my breath that there will be many takers for this radical theo-ethical approach to anti-racism. Conversely, we are experiencing a seemingly seismic breakthrough in the recognition of systemic racism by hitherto blithely unaware White institutions and their custodians, so we may be witnessing a Kairos moment in the long-awaited breakthrough in repulsing the historic manifestations of racism. As I am not possessed of special powers of prescience, history will be the ultimate judge on whether this is a moment of substantive change or if it simply a momentary blip in the ongoing remorseless march of White supremacy. I will leave the final word to one of the great thinkers on the challenges of converting White people to an ethic of anti-racism, namely, James Baldwin. Baldwin opines: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”73 Are we willing to face the reality of racism?
Can Christian Ethics be Saved? Colonialism, Racial Justice and the Task of Decolonising Christian Theology
Society for the Study of Christian Ethics
Research article
First published online November 15, 2023
Research article
First published online November 15, 2023
Contents
Abstract
Introduction
From Colonised to Decolonising: Theological Education and Christian Ethics in Britain
Decolonised Minds, Anti-Colonial Christian Ethics
Conclusion: Anti-Colonialism as Liberation for All
Abstract
Christian ethical practice has historically fallen short, when we consider the histories of European colonial violence from the sixteenth century and the transatlantic slave trade in Africans. Today, Christian ethics can fail to uphold a standard of resistance to contemporary evils, including racial injustice. To what extent can Christian ethics break with this history and be saved? This article considers the ongoing colonial tendencies of Christian ethics and theological education in Britain, before considering the centrality of decolonisation, primarily ‘of the mind’. In the latter part, it turns to examples of anti-colonial Christian ethics, in the work of Robert Beckford, Anthony Reddie, Anupama Ranawana and Anderson Jeremiah. It ends by giving attention to what decolonisation might mean in religious and theological education, as we seek to create spaces for learning in which all people's bodies, minds and voices are welcomed and honoured.
Introduction
I approach this matter of decolonising Christian ethics as a womanist. This means that my reflections on the question of colonialism, and thus decolonisation, hold together a multiplicity of problems. This includes the construction of race and the various iterations of racial inequity which are the main theme of this article. But the problems of sex, gender and sexuality; class, capitalism and classism; disability and ableism; and of course, ecology and environmental destruction are all implicated.1 I cannot discuss in depth all of these issues in this article of course, but I want to state explicitly that these matters are in my view, interweaved and interconnected. It is also worth saying that there have of course been innumerable forms of colonialism throughout human history which deserve our specific attention, rather than being oversimplified through sweeping generalisations. I will be thinking particularly here about European (and particularly British) ‘Christian’ colonial activity, especially in the Caribbean where in striking fashion, slavery and colonialism have been considered to be consistent with notions of Christian ethical living. The work of decolonising Christian ethics requires we recognise the role Christian theological ethics has played in such history. I have entitled this article ‘Can Christian ethics be saved?’ because the question of decolonising Christian ethics raises urgent and pressing questions which do not in my mind, have a predetermined answer, in a similar way to Willie James Jennings’s question, ‘can white people be saved?’2
The language of decolonisation in relation to academic institutions emerged as Africans in Africa wrestled with the ongoing impact of western, European epistemologies, perspectives and pedagogies on their continent. The ultimate goal of decolonisation was ‘emancipating African institutions from neo-colonial and Eurocentric orientations’.3 Within this framing, decolonisation is fundamentally a matter of African people liberating themselves from ways of thinking and knowing that are foreign to them. It is a task that involves the development of a consciousness of the self, and of one's cultural identity. It depends first of all, upon what is called the ‘decolonisation of the mind’.4 Decolonisation is not the end point, but the means to an end. It is the path taken collectively to freedom, to being oneself, to thinking, speaking, teaching and learning, as one's African self. In the context of Europe or North America, talk of decolonisation has come to mean a range of things. A helpful definition is found within Decolonising the University:
First, it is a way of thinking about the world which takes colonialism, empire and racism as its empirical and discursive objects of study; it re-situates these phenomena as key shaping forces of the contemporary world, in a context where their role has been systematically effaced from view. Second, it purports to offer alternative ways of thinking about the world and alternative forms of political praxis.5Christian theology has a deep and grave connection to European colonialism; indeed, it was one of the core ingredients that made it possible and sustainable from the fifteenth century onward. It provided a narrative to justify the economic exploitation, cultural decimation, social destruction and spiritual violence done to indigenous peoples. Narratives and logics are often more challenging to change than government policies, even though the latter are not often changed easily. In Anderson Jeremiah's words, colonialism is ‘not only physical but ideological and philosophical, providing a worldview to dominate and rule’. It ‘occupies not only physical space but cultural, religious, political, educational, and intellectual spaces’.6
Despite the shift towards independence for many of Britain's ex-colonies, and a move away from having a white elite physically stationed in overseas territories, the spectre of coloniality continues to haunt global communities and the British population and establishment. The nationalistic longing to return to a perceived golden era of a white, Christian Britain is a sign of such a haunting as Anthony Reddie has argued in Theologising Brexit.7 Coupled with this, is the government and population's more recent resistance to welcoming refugees or asylum seekers who are not white or considered potentially Christian. Christian theology is often silent in response to such contemporary issues as Reddie has also highlighted.8 Historically, it is important to recognise that Christian theology was not simply affected by colonialism. Christian theologies of empire were not simply a by-product of the colonial era; they helped to justify, sustain and sacralise it. Christian ethics provided some of the core building blocks that made Christian colonialism acceptable. This theological justification is exemplified most explicitly in the first encyclical to mention colonisation, Dum Diversas, which was published in 1452:
We weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso – to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.9Colonialism was enacted as a Christian ethic with a clearly presented biblical and theological rationale. It was presented as a manner by which Christians were called by God to exist and move in the world against those considered heathens. Christian theology provided a narrative, a logic and a conviction that would underpin centuries of mass exploitation in terms of labour; cultural and psychological trauma; and environmental destruction, all in the name of Jesus Christ and his Gospel. Colonialism as a Christian ethic was rooted in a theology of empire, which dehumanised indigenous peoples from around the world by presuming them to be godless, worthy of exploitation and undeserving of dignity and respect. It had an anthropological emphasis, in that it denied the basic humanity of peoples encountered in Africa, Latin America, Asia and beyond. It was ecclesiological in that it assumed the western church based in Europe to be the only church and the true church. It was soteriological in that it assumed salvation would come through the violent dominance of the European over the global heathen, rather than through the work of Christ and his Spirit. It was an eschatological project that imagined the end of all things would be brought about through the violent victory of the European church over those considered enemies of Christ. The kingdom of God was conflated with the kingdoms of Portugal, Spain, England, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.10
It is important to consider therefore, the historic power of Christian ethics as well as the ongoing influence of Christian theology today. I am not suggesting that Christian theologians or ethicists are the most sought-after voices today, particularly in critical analyses of colonial history. But I do believe that we have something important to contribute, since present-day Christian ethicists function—whether consciously or unconsciously—within a discipline which served the purposes of colonisation. Theological education itself, in which many Christians ethicists and especially theological ethicists are involved, was a colonial project in places like West Africa and the Caribbean. Christian education was an education in whiteness.11 Carlton Turner makes this evident in a lecture entitled ‘Re-thinking African Enslavement’ given at Wells Cathedral in March 2023. In speaking of the Anglican Codrington College in Barbados which was established on a plantation and remains there to this day, he explains:
The death of ex-colonial governor, ex-captain general and commander-in chief, and plantation owner Christopher Codrington in 1710 meant the bequeathing of his Barbadian estates to the ownership of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) with one very odd condition: that it always hold three hundred negroes on the plantation. Codrington's desire was very clear. He wanted a school established for missionary work to the peoples of the colonies … They were to be the vehicles of his vision of a better society. It was a vision of a society, unfortunately, where the place for the Negro was still working the plantation.12The problem of Christian ethics—both the practice and the discipline—is located in the promulgation of ideas such as this, and the lack of critical response from many who have simply overlooked this history. The task of Christian ethics must involve confession. For those of us concerned with the impact of Christian theology on life and lived experience, including in relation to matters deemed public or political, this history cannot be ignored. Christian ethics is implicated in the problems of colonisation, but there is also a huge opportunity to reckon with this history and reframe Christian ethics in a liberating and anti-colonial frame. The potential for this is located in the kinds of Christian ethics that have sought to resist and push against colonial Christian ethics. Liberation theologies, Black and womanist theologies, Asian and postcolonial theologies have all developed a cacophony of voices which speak out against the colonial norms common in some forms of European theology. Christian ethics is already decolonised in such spaces which can often be either overlooked or devalued by those within the field of academic research and education. Within these scholarly corners, Jesus is not white, barely a man (in relation to the standards of popular toxic forms of masculinity) and is clearly aligned with the impoverished and oppressed. This is the Jesus of Black hermeneutics, who Anthony Reddie calls ‘a Black hero’13 and Robert Beckford calls a ‘dread Christ’.14 But this Jesus is often displaced, and replaced instead with a whitened version whose greatest love is empire, and who rules by coercive force. In turn, the disciples of this Jesus follow his example, in all things, being conformed to his image in the interactions with those deemed ‘foreign’ and inferior. And so, to discuss the decolonisation of Christian ethics is to first ask, whose Christian ethics need to be decolonised and what might decolonisation mean in the context of Christian ethics? Who and where might the agents of such a process be? And what opportunities might be opened up through a commitment to anti-colonialism and liberation in the field of Christian ethics? It is to these questions that I will now turn.
From Colonised to Decolonising: Theological Education and Christian Ethics in Britain
A significant part of my work at Durham is summed up to some extent in the term decolonisation. As a lover of history, I am often concerned with understanding how things came to be as they are, before attempting any type of change or, dare I say, transformation. This is why it has been interesting for me to look back to the history of theological education, for example. It is important to me to understand what the ambitions and objectives have been for those who started such enterprises, especially in relation to historically colonised peoples. Christian ethics, as a discipline, forms part of the theological education task through research and teaching, and so much of what I have been considering in terms of decolonising theological education will also apply here. The history of British theological education is bound up in the history of British colonial domination as we have seen in the case of Codrington. Some colleges are discovering the extent to which they have benefited financially from the transatlantic slave trade and colonial enterprise. Carlton Turner explains for example that funding from the transatlantic slave trade enabled the establishment of several colleges in Britain, some of which remain active to this day. St. Aidan's established in 1846, Cuddesdon in 1854, Lichfield in 1857, and Salisbury in 1860 were all sponsored by funds obtained through the selling of African people as slaves.15
Christian theology then, including ethics, must be examined for traces of this colonial history. Forensic examination of financial records is one of the more obvious and somewhat easier tasks within this. But what can be harder to detect are the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ideologies, expectations and perceptions that can impact the research we undertake, and the teaching or sharing of knowledge that we do. Eve Parker has considered what colonial theological education can look like today in her work with the Common Awards network. She writes:
For the most part, Western perspectives dominate the academy, particularly in the context of the UK, and class divisions appear to be ingrained in the dominant structures of theological learning. Those with power in theological education have too often neglected the theological truths from the majority world, have pigeonholed certain theologies as ‘contextual’ and created a hierarchy of knowledge(s), and in doing so have failed to acknowledge that all theology is contextual … Theologies from the bodies of people of colour, the marginalised, the poor, the indecent, and the subaltern are predominantly absent from most theological curricula and reading lists … Eurocentric theology dictates the patterns of learning and contemplations on God as a result of how colonialism's power dynamics have shaped and controlled systems of knowledge and education … In other words, those who have benefited from the privileges of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism own the means of knowledge production, particularly in the West, and thereby determine what does and does not qualify as worthy or necessary knowledge.16This indictment of theological education in the UK raises several important points for us in our consideration of decolonising Christian ethics, and working towards racial justice within the discipline. Primarily, we find again that we neglect certain experiences if we seek to speak about single issues. The problems of class and race are held together in Parker's analysis. In the same way that colonialism was an economic venture, determined by an elite who acted upon the lives of those deemed dispensable, so theological education can maintain elitism by treating some as collateral damage, unworthy or unnecessary in the task of producing knowledge. This raises the question of whether the Christian ethics being produced remains captivated by a certain kind of imagination that decides some are only ever students while others should be consistently positioned as teachers. Who do we imagine to be the theological ethicists of our day and who do we imagine are unworthy of such a title? What is shaping these suppositions?
Secondly, Parker highlights for us the important matter of the way we categorise the various voices we do hear. Even if we do welcome a range of perspectives, it is still possible to place them within an imagined hierarchy of knowledge. To put differently, we might develop a canon (whether in our own minds or on paper) of those essential voices in Christian ethics, and then consider others to be optional additions. What patterns shape who we consider to be core or peripheral in our research and teaching?
When considering the task of decolonising Christian ethics, we are speaking about transforming a particular kind of Christian ethics. The focus is on the forms of Christian ethics which feign neutrality and presume they offer universal truth. The failure to name one's context is a refusal to acknowledge both the location and the limitations of one's work. Black theology provokes all theologians to name the context and agenda which motivates their work, simply by using the word ‘black’ which can agitate so many. The replies come: ‘why do need black theology? Isn’t that racist?’ These questions emerge sometimes with aggression, provoked by the naming of race. It is also a shock to the system, since white theologians often do not name where their theology is located and what its objectives are in regard to race, colonial history, etc. If black and womanist theological ethics is motivated by the concern for black liberation and flourishing, then what is white Christian ethics motivated by? Decolonising theological ethics means recognising white theologians’ work as contextual, as Jason Drexler-Dreis explains:
Decolonial theorists are not interested in doing away with all of Western modernity; rather, they seek to undo the ‘myth of modernity’ in order to transcend its constraints on being and thinking. Enrique Dussel describes the myth of modernity as the European belief that Europe is the most materially and intellectually developed and civilized area of the world, and that it therefore has the task of educating non- or lesser-developed peoples … Constructive decolonial thought entails putting Western intellectual traditions in their proper place and identifying their historical points of origin.17It is this constructive decolonial thought that should be the concern of Christian ethics. This should, I hope, also quell the fear that decolonisation is about the erasure of white voices and western theology. Decolonisation is inevitably a destabilising process, and this cannot be denied. In the words of Frantz Fanon: ‘decolonization is always a violent event’.18 This does not mean bloodshed is inevitable—though this has been the case in the decolonisation of nations which Fanon is discussing—but it does mean upheaval, shifts and even what might feel like chaos is to be expected. It is not comfortable to reorder power in any context. And this is what decolonisation is about at its core. It will cost something of everyone who has benefited from the existing norms, and this is why it is resisted and rejected. It might also be watered down to ‘inclusion’ or ‘diversity’. However, the objective of decolonisation is not to improve representation within an existing system or structures, but to challenge the very basis on which those systems and structures have been built. Decolonisation recognises that the very foundation of a system, an organisation, a philosophy or a practice, must be critiqued for its implicit assumptions regarding the superiority of the white and European. This is for the sake of all people now and in the future, since colonial violence distorts the coloniser as well as the colonised. In the process of decolonisation, we must always be mindful of the potential for colonialism to simply be replaced by neo-colonialism. Neo-colonialism is a simple evolution of colonial violence that may appear more subtle; it ‘assumes power by reactivating entrenched structures of discrimination and prejudice, such as race and caste, legitimized by Christianity’.19
Christian ethics must be prepared for such violent reordering, if what is wanted is decolonisation and not a nicer, less intrusive alternative. The target of decolonisation within Christian ethics is the kind of work that presumes Europe and America to be the centre of the church, and of relevant thought and enquiry regarding God and the Christian faith. It addresses the assumption that Christian ethics can be researched and taught, without proportionate leadership from those who represent the largest Christian contingents globally. It challenges the kind of Christian ethics that longs for a ‘golden era’ in which western voices and perspectives were considered the most important. Decolonial theology (including ethics):
[m]akes an epistemic shift in its understanding of the historical encounter with a divine reality by starting from viewpoints grounded in intellectual traditions shaped by the experience of the violent imposition of Western modernity. Second, situated within these intellectual traditions, decolonial theology contests modern/colonial ways of defining reality, the human person, and cosmic relations in light of communities’ historical encounter with divinity and proposes options for thinking, acting, and relating otherwise.20Decolonisation in Christian ethics depends upon us recognising the widest epistemological range, as we consider the questions and queries which might be addressed in the field. It requires us to resist the perception that the practical or embodied has less status than the purely theoretical. It invites us to consider the kinds of knowledge that are experiential, embodied and mystical as valid and important. It should also invite us to imagine the public and community contributions the field might make, in light of the urgent demands facing humanity as a whole, and certain groups in particular. There are some who might suggest that decolonisation should lead to Christian ethics withdrawing from public dialogue in order to break with its colonial tendencies. However, I would suggest that anticolonial voices in the field have something essential to contribute.
Decolonised Minds, Anti-Colonial Christian Ethics
The process of decolonisation is a form of reordering power that depends upon the liberating of minds. It depends upon individuals being liberated in their thinking, often through the insight and education of those who belong to their wider community. To put it in theological terms, it is reminiscent of having the veil removed (2 Cor. 3:13-15); having one's eyes or ears opened (Mark 7:35, John 9); or being awakened (Eph. 5:13-14). It is for this reason that decolonisation of the mind is held up as having such importance for those who belong to historically colonised peoples. Chammah J. Kaunda explains:
Decoloniality is meant to get into the core of the African psyche in order to dismantle power relations and conceptions of knowledge that foment the reproduction of self-negation or negated subjectivity. It is concerned with disturbing the solidified inferiority complexes, duality perception of reality and the ‘geo-political’ hierarchies that came into being or found new and more powerful forms of expression in the modern/colonial world.21It is clear from this description that decolonisation is a task of epic proportions. Its impact must be traced through the thoughts and instincts of historically colonised people as well as in the structures and systems that exist in a given social, political, economic and cultural space. Kaunda begins with the mind of the African—as his example of those descended from colonised peoples—in his designation of where decolonisation must begin. Decolonisation is not a process that begins with the best intentions of even the most progressive white people, or other allies. It has to begin as a movement of liberation that has its locus in the minds of those who are coming to terms with a history of oppression, and the necessary actions to free their present and future selves. The mind of the colonised is conditioned by colonialism, to hate itself, to despise what is deemed African, Asian or indigenous and to view what is European as superior. This was the ultimate goal of colonialism: to possess the mind in order to own the body more determinedly.
In describing decolonisation of the mind in more concrete terms, Kaunda describes it as a process by which the African person recaptures a forgotten sense of self and the world. It requires an exploration of what has been hidden, buried, suffocated within the self. He explains decolonising the mind as:
[s]eeking to reclaim the essential unity between self and other, self and the entire cosmos, consciousness and unconsciousness, spirituality and materiality, organic and inorganic, science and religion, sacred and profane. It is a recovery of an integrated approach to reality. It is a mode of theological education that is grounded in the quest to recover a self-consciousness that upholds a radical theology of oneness (singular) of life driven from the common source.22Here Kaunda describes the epistemological shift, and indeed a philosophical shift required for the decolonising of African minds. The ‘self-negation’ (in the words of Carlton Turner),23 which the colonised mind imbibes, must be addressed, for Kaunda, through theological education which returns to the ‘materio-spirituality’ which represents the African way of viewing the world.24 Africans, through colonialism, have been steeped in a dualistic philosophical framework which opposes the sacred and secular, the body and the spirit and the material and spiritual more broadly. This way of viewing reality is a misnomer for Africans. Instead, decolonisation means returning to a ‘materio-spirituality’ which ‘integrates all cosmic relationships of God and humanity, the living and the dead, self and collective, humanity and non-human creation, humility, metaphysical and psychic powers, healing and wholeness’.25 This unified view of the world does not seek knowledge for its own sake, but is driven by the desire for a more just future. This just future is understood as holistic, encompassing all elements of human experience and recognising them as interconnected.
This description of the decolonised mind and decolonised theological education raises several important points for us in relation to Christian ethics. Primarily, it speaks to the impact of colonial theology not only on white people—who can be centred even in decolonisation conversations—but on people of global heritage. The task of decolonising the mind is about freeing the minds of historically colonised people and their descendants who have been taught to see themselves as inferior. It has resonances of Paulo Freire's focus on ‘conscientisation’: the critical consciousness which allows people to notice and understand what has caused their oppression.26 To say that this work of decolonising the mind must come before any other task is to recognise that attempts to diversify reading lists or increase diversity in recruitment will fail, if there has been no success in ‘get[ting] into the core of the African psyche in order to dismantle power relations and conceptions of knowledge that foment the reproduction of self-negation’.27 If, as Carter G. Woodson has asserted, there has been not a lack of education but a specific ‘mis-education’ of ‘the negro’28 as well as other historically colonised peoples, then theological education must equate to a re-education. If theology is going to be of any benefit to humanity as a whole and those of global majority heritage in particular, it must take on this task. This re-education involves a reclaiming of the global story of Christianity, in terms of history, as well as in the development of the broad range of Christian theologies and spiritualities. But it also must include challenging the hegemony of white European perspectives which undermine a holistic understanding of life and being, and restrict the spiritual and theological to the religious life. Christian ethics is one area of theology which more easily transcends the binaries between belief and practice, the sacred and the secular. The question remains: in what ways can Christian ethics contribute to such a task?
The problems of Britain's colonial Christian heritage and its theological roots have been highlighted by several important voices in the UK. They are examples of decolonised minds, which must lead us as we work towards decolonisation in Christian ethics. Robert Beckford, Anthony Reddie, Anderson Jeremiah and Anupama Ranawana have all brought to our attention the avenues Christian ethics might take as a discipline to recognise and address its contribution to colonial dynamics historically and in the present. In the next section, I examine ideas which each of them contributes as examples of decolonised and anti-colonial Christian ethics. They represent, respectively, commitment to developing Black faith and spirituality in ways that are geared towards liberation; a willingness to engage with contemporary public and political issues through a theological lens; a commitment to critiquing the Church and theology's colonial tendencies; and a determination to challenge humanity's destructive relationship with the earth.
Robert Beckford is the first to examine the ongoing impact of colonialism on African Caribbean Pentecostals whose faith was inherited in part from colonial missionary activity. In Documentary as Exorcism: Resisting the Bewitchment of Colonial Christianity, Beckford argues compellingly that due to the colonised history of places like Jamaica, Black Pentecostals in Britain remain captivated by colonial theologies which prevent them from integrating their faith with their lived experience and struggle as Black people. In his postcolonial interpretation of exorcism, which centres the story of the demoniac in Mark 5:1-10, he explains what decolonising might mean for the Pentecostal understandings of the demonic, and especially what it means to ‘cast out’:
To cast out is to remove an occupying or harassing malevolent spiritual force from the physical body and also social world. It is in opposition to bewitchment in so much as it directly confronts and overcomes the spiritual malevolence diagnosed in witchcraft. In conclusion, exorcism in the Bible, while by no means static in meaning, appears in the Gospel of Mark with political implications. The exorcisms of Jesus are political acts demonstrating the expulsion of the occupying colonial force out of the mind and body of Israel. This interpretation not only facilitates a religious critique of empire but also allows me to view exorcism as a socio-political reality, whereby to exorcize is to engage in struggle against witchcraft, that is, structural evil.29Within Pentecostal contexts, this reading will not be commonly heard. Due in part to the centring of literal readings of the scriptures as well as an unequivocal belief in demonic spiritual powers, this passage would traditionally be interpreted as a straightforward story of a person being freed from demonic control by Jesus. Any social or political reading would not be prioritised, and this, for Beckford, is the sign of a ‘bewitched’ Christian faith. Bewitchment is, for Beckford, ‘the colonial oppression and social ineffectiveness of many Pentecostal churches’.30 Decolonised ethics for Beckford in this case is seen in the capacity to transcend the binary between the spiritual or religious and the public and political. Decolonised ethics engages with the social realities of inequity, hierarchies and exclusions, rather than retreating to an individualised focus on personal piety. It awakens Black people, as historically colonised peoples, to their own power to examine, critique and define.
Anthony Reddie's analysis of Brexit offers a public theology that puts Britain's colonial tendencies front and centre. In his examination of the motivating factors that led to Britain's departure from the EU, he does not allow the church, Christians or Christian theology, or we as theologians to escape from accountability. Far from being a simply political manoeuvre, Reddie argues that this decision was rooted for many people in a particular theological imagination:
What underpinned the Brexit phenomenon was an unresolved set of religious and theological ideas that have helped to shape the national identity. Essential to the ‘development’ of the populist trust of British (more specifically English) nationalism is a conflation of religion and economic and political expansion abroad, namely the link between Christianity and empire.31Reddie goes on in multiple places to note the lack of engagement with such theological ideas by white scholars, though there have been some exceptions of course. If decolonisation requires confession, then this is clearly an area for deep examination. Reddie along with Carol Troupe have recently compiled an edited book called Deconstructing Whiteness, Empire and Mission in which some are starting this work. It includes some helpful voices in this regard such as Eve Parker, Al Barrett, Cathy Ross, Mike Higton and others.32 To deconstruct whiteness is, in my view, to ask how in the course of constructing race, white Europeans imbibed ideas and committed to particular violent practices which continue in ever-evolving forms today. Not all white people conform to such historic ways of being of course, but it is inviting critical exploration of how colonialism has distorted white humanity, especially in terms of their relationship to global peoples. Theologically it asks, what kinds of idolatry are European cultures prone to, because of historic lust for power over global populations? Of what must supposedly ‘white’, ‘Christian’ nations repent? And what role might theologians play in bringing such repentance about?
Anderson Jeremiah, one of the foremost postcolonial theologians in the UK, offers us yet more reflection, this time bringing the conversation to bear on the context of colonialism in India. It is important to note that British colonialism has looked different in the various places it has been experienced. While we can simplify the history of British colonialism down into particular moments or events, there are many variations in approach, and in outcomes. Jeremiah makes this very clear in his own critique of British colonialism in India. While recognising the explicit role of Christian theology in helping to legitimate European exploitation and enslavement, he also condemns Christian mission for its complicity in upholding and exacerbating existing forms of inequity. In India's case, this was seen, for Jeremiah, in particular relation to the caste system which continues to have an impact even today:
Within Christianity in South Asia, the roots of ongoing caste conflict between various caste communities are well documented. Hostility between Syrian Orthodox, non-Syrian, upper caste and lower caste, and Dalit Christian communities continue to plague the church in India. Often caste identity is a subtext for denominational differences and a major factor in the church polity. Sadly, the caste-based worldview that mirrors a racialized worldview of difference and revulsion to one another shapes much of Christian experience. Interestingly, roots of these differences could be traced back to early missionary encounters that in many ways legitimized caste practice within Christianity.33Here we find a similar point to Beckford's, in that decolonial theology for Anderson also relates to South Asian churches being liberated from social orders which oppose the message of the Christian faith in which all people are brought into one family of God. Here also, Christian theologies have been proven inadequate for equipping Christians to resist conforming to the colonial ‘patterns of the world’ (Rom. 12:2). Rather, Christian theologies, promoted by missionaries, sustain the unjust status quo. In response, Jeremiah argues that ‘through post-colonial enquiry, we must be able to challenge and deconstruct neo-colonial tendencies that tend to reactivate entrenched structures of theological prejudice and decolonise Christian mission’.34 The notion of reactivation is important; it reminds us that historic patterns and structures can often remain dormant in the communal body of the church. Though, to continue the analogy, the body may seem healthy, and this may cause us to deny the ongoing risk of illness, like a virus, it may well have adapted in order to survive, or may simply be awaiting an appropriate stimulus to re-emerge.
Anupama Ranawana, a Sri Lankan postcolonial feminist and eco-theologian in the UK, writes of the importance of Asian theologies in resisting the capitalist motivations of the colonial project which continue to lead to the plunder of the earth. She explains that ‘the deep-rooted sinfulness of capitalism and plunder is underscored in the political theology that we find in Asia, particularly Asian theology that allies itself to Third World liberational thinking’.35 It is this thinking that is not only non-white but also located beyond the ‘global north’, that also needs to be centred in anti-colonial Christian ethics. Theologies from global populations that are bearing the brunt of environmental destruction brought about by the overdeveloped world are also responding to colonial dynamics that bring race, class and environmental concerns together, as Ranawana explains in A Liberation for the Earth: Climate, Race and Cross:
The modern, capitalist world economy is one in which colonizers and colonized were systematically bound into relationships of extraction, colonization and dispossession. It is also important to note here that this is not simply a tale of European colonization, but also of the collusion of elite and upper-class/caste persons in the colonies with the colonizer to deem certain lands and certain communities as lesser and disposable.36For Ranawana, the problem of colonialism for Christian ethics lies also in the disordered relationship humanity has with the earth, as the result of capitalism. The industrial revolution which is celebrated as a turning point in the history of British economic development was funded by the enslavement of Africans as a source of free labour, and the exploitation of global lands and peoples. The extraction of natural resources was and has since been essential to the development of global capitalism, as has the pollution of the seas, and the destruction of the natural environment. Postcolonial theologies which recognise these links also have an important place in decolonising Christian ethics. Theologies from the ‘global south’ which centre the earth must also be heard in the violent re-ordering of exploitative colonial patterns.
In each of these cases, we find ample opportunities for Christian ethics to fulfil the demands of the decolonisation task. Firstly, by being honest about the problems of colonialism which undermine Christian faith, life and practice. And secondly, by taking the ongoing impact of such tendencies seriously. Following the example of such voices, and intentionally developing the next generation of these traditions, must be a priority.
Conclusion: Anti-Colonialism as Liberation for All
I hope it is clear that the argument for decolonising Christian ethics is not simply a case of pandering to what some people have labelled (often pejoratively) ‘political correctness’ or ‘identity politics’. It is a call to reassess the motivating factors which shape the discipline, and the power we have given to some at the expense of others. It is an opportunity to shape our communal life, which must always be examined and questioned lest we fall into a complacency that prevents genuine community. We must be intentional, since the default will always lead us to privileging the same groups over the same ‘others’. The fruits of such a determination have the potential to be enriching for all people, since all suffer under a colonial dynamic of research, inquiry and teaching about God and our lives in the life of God. In a recent resource produced by the American Academy of Religion on Equity-Focused Pedagogies in the Religious Studies Classroom, educators shared stories of what the process of decolonising their classrooms has meant. We do not all have classrooms in a literal sense, but the learning can be true whether we lecture, preach, run community projects, engage with public issues or suchlike. Three themes emerged for me that I would like to leave with you as an encouragement: academic excellence, joy and belonging.
Miguel De La Torre, a renowned Latino theological ethicist, writes to counteract the notion that decolonising knowledge amounts to lowering the bar to allow in more diverse perspectives. This can be what is presumed when we speak about embracing a wider range of voices. The logic being that the door is equally accessible for everyone, and so if there is a lack of scholars from a particular group, this simply reflects their personal or communal failings. Decolonising is therefore resisted in order to maintain ‘excellence’. Instead, De La Torre explains:
To build a pedagogical methodology solely on Eurocentric religious, theological, or philosophical thought is to produce an epistemology on shifting sand. Worse, when the focus in the classroom is exclusively on Eurocentric thought, students’ ability to grasp reality is undermined. Bringing the perspectives of communities of color into the classroom is not some empty exercise in political correctness, nor is it an inconvenient attempt at tokenism. It is a methodology that halts the regurgitation of death-dealing Eurocentric theoretical paradigms detrimental to the world's marginalized. It is a praxis concerned with understanding the world, and just as important, transforming the world.37The same could be said not only about pedagogical methodology but about the discipline of Christian ethics as a whole whether or not it is taught in a classroom. To build a discipline like Christian ethics ‘solely on Eurocentric religious, theological, or philosophical thought is to produce an epistemology on shifting sand’. Such Christian ethical work undermines the capacity for learning, reinforces ‘death-dealing Eurocentric theoretical paradigms’, lacks curiosity and prevents transformation.
The second factor is that of joy which again may not always feel familiar in the field of academic research, teaching and learning. Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds writes about Black joy in his classrooms, which is brought about when learning ‘provides space for the variety of learners and engagement of ideas to be validated within the classroom’.38 Traditional classrooms, he argues, are committed ‘to the reproduction of normative texts and ideas and a focus on point-based assessments’ which ‘have erased joy and experimentation from the university classroom’. ‘Joy-filled classrooms’, on the other hand, ‘begin with identifying historical moments, texts, and questions that are central to our students’ and develop ‘curricula, opportunities for engagement, and creative outcomes in response to those’.39 In this reflection we find more signs of the possibilities that are opened up through a decolonising approach to teaching and learning. The question is raised for Christian ethics within or beyond the classroom—to what extent it enables experimentation and the asking of new questions? In research, in teaching, in learning, is there room for joy, as we move beyond normative expectations in terms of the people we count as ethicists and the topics we imagine belong here?
And finally, the importance of dialogue and belonging which is examined by Kevin Minister who explains the importance of dialogue for reorienting colonial dynamics. If colonial Christian ethics assumes certain bodies hold all knowledge, while others are simply empty vessels to be filled, then ethics in an anti-colonial mode must break away from this through practices such as dialogue:
Dialogue practices break down the sense of the teacher as the source and arbiter of knowledge and the students as disembodied, objective learners through questions that require students to connect their own experiences to course content. Furthermore, students begin to perceive each other as partners in learning as they reflect on how their and their classmates’ different experiences inform their perspectives on the course content.40Of course, as researchers and educators, we have knowledge that we hope to share, and this is what has qualified us for our roles. But it is also true that the reader or the student have their own forms of knowledge. They have stories to tell, truths to communicate and perspectives that bring challenge and contribution to the learning space and to our research. The teacher, the writer, the researcher, the academic might also be taught as we welcome in the various voices which have gifts to offer the wider community as we learn together. In the welcoming, we pay particular attention to those voices that are often considered unimportant, and we notice when they are not there: the voice of the migrant, the refugee, the person living in poverty, the student who is neurodiverse, or comes from a global majority background. We remember the women, the person with a stutter, the one who is treated with suspicion because of their sexuality or gender. Anti-colonial Christian ethics refuses to define people as ‘good’ or ‘evil’, or ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘ignorant’. It resists the temptation to decide the questions that are worthy of consideration, it attends to power, and the voices heard and not heard, to the bodies present and absent even as the discussion and debates take place. In this way, the classroom or learning space might become a place for education not only in intellectual knowledge but in how to be in the world, as those seeking to embody the ethical demands of the Christian faith.
Abstract
Introduction
From Colonised to Decolonising: Theological Education and Christian Ethics in Britain
Decolonised Minds, Anti-Colonial Christian Ethics
Conclusion: Anti-Colonialism as Liberation for All
Abstract
Christian ethical practice has historically fallen short, when we consider the histories of European colonial violence from the sixteenth century and the transatlantic slave trade in Africans. Today, Christian ethics can fail to uphold a standard of resistance to contemporary evils, including racial injustice. To what extent can Christian ethics break with this history and be saved? This article considers the ongoing colonial tendencies of Christian ethics and theological education in Britain, before considering the centrality of decolonisation, primarily ‘of the mind’. In the latter part, it turns to examples of anti-colonial Christian ethics, in the work of Robert Beckford, Anthony Reddie, Anupama Ranawana and Anderson Jeremiah. It ends by giving attention to what decolonisation might mean in religious and theological education, as we seek to create spaces for learning in which all people's bodies, minds and voices are welcomed and honoured.
Introduction
I approach this matter of decolonising Christian ethics as a womanist. This means that my reflections on the question of colonialism, and thus decolonisation, hold together a multiplicity of problems. This includes the construction of race and the various iterations of racial inequity which are the main theme of this article. But the problems of sex, gender and sexuality; class, capitalism and classism; disability and ableism; and of course, ecology and environmental destruction are all implicated.1 I cannot discuss in depth all of these issues in this article of course, but I want to state explicitly that these matters are in my view, interweaved and interconnected. It is also worth saying that there have of course been innumerable forms of colonialism throughout human history which deserve our specific attention, rather than being oversimplified through sweeping generalisations. I will be thinking particularly here about European (and particularly British) ‘Christian’ colonial activity, especially in the Caribbean where in striking fashion, slavery and colonialism have been considered to be consistent with notions of Christian ethical living. The work of decolonising Christian ethics requires we recognise the role Christian theological ethics has played in such history. I have entitled this article ‘Can Christian ethics be saved?’ because the question of decolonising Christian ethics raises urgent and pressing questions which do not in my mind, have a predetermined answer, in a similar way to Willie James Jennings’s question, ‘can white people be saved?’2
The language of decolonisation in relation to academic institutions emerged as Africans in Africa wrestled with the ongoing impact of western, European epistemologies, perspectives and pedagogies on their continent. The ultimate goal of decolonisation was ‘emancipating African institutions from neo-colonial and Eurocentric orientations’.3 Within this framing, decolonisation is fundamentally a matter of African people liberating themselves from ways of thinking and knowing that are foreign to them. It is a task that involves the development of a consciousness of the self, and of one's cultural identity. It depends first of all, upon what is called the ‘decolonisation of the mind’.4 Decolonisation is not the end point, but the means to an end. It is the path taken collectively to freedom, to being oneself, to thinking, speaking, teaching and learning, as one's African self. In the context of Europe or North America, talk of decolonisation has come to mean a range of things. A helpful definition is found within Decolonising the University:
First, it is a way of thinking about the world which takes colonialism, empire and racism as its empirical and discursive objects of study; it re-situates these phenomena as key shaping forces of the contemporary world, in a context where their role has been systematically effaced from view. Second, it purports to offer alternative ways of thinking about the world and alternative forms of political praxis.5Christian theology has a deep and grave connection to European colonialism; indeed, it was one of the core ingredients that made it possible and sustainable from the fifteenth century onward. It provided a narrative to justify the economic exploitation, cultural decimation, social destruction and spiritual violence done to indigenous peoples. Narratives and logics are often more challenging to change than government policies, even though the latter are not often changed easily. In Anderson Jeremiah's words, colonialism is ‘not only physical but ideological and philosophical, providing a worldview to dominate and rule’. It ‘occupies not only physical space but cultural, religious, political, educational, and intellectual spaces’.6
Despite the shift towards independence for many of Britain's ex-colonies, and a move away from having a white elite physically stationed in overseas territories, the spectre of coloniality continues to haunt global communities and the British population and establishment. The nationalistic longing to return to a perceived golden era of a white, Christian Britain is a sign of such a haunting as Anthony Reddie has argued in Theologising Brexit.7 Coupled with this, is the government and population's more recent resistance to welcoming refugees or asylum seekers who are not white or considered potentially Christian. Christian theology is often silent in response to such contemporary issues as Reddie has also highlighted.8 Historically, it is important to recognise that Christian theology was not simply affected by colonialism. Christian theologies of empire were not simply a by-product of the colonial era; they helped to justify, sustain and sacralise it. Christian ethics provided some of the core building blocks that made Christian colonialism acceptable. This theological justification is exemplified most explicitly in the first encyclical to mention colonisation, Dum Diversas, which was published in 1452:
We weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso – to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.9Colonialism was enacted as a Christian ethic with a clearly presented biblical and theological rationale. It was presented as a manner by which Christians were called by God to exist and move in the world against those considered heathens. Christian theology provided a narrative, a logic and a conviction that would underpin centuries of mass exploitation in terms of labour; cultural and psychological trauma; and environmental destruction, all in the name of Jesus Christ and his Gospel. Colonialism as a Christian ethic was rooted in a theology of empire, which dehumanised indigenous peoples from around the world by presuming them to be godless, worthy of exploitation and undeserving of dignity and respect. It had an anthropological emphasis, in that it denied the basic humanity of peoples encountered in Africa, Latin America, Asia and beyond. It was ecclesiological in that it assumed the western church based in Europe to be the only church and the true church. It was soteriological in that it assumed salvation would come through the violent dominance of the European over the global heathen, rather than through the work of Christ and his Spirit. It was an eschatological project that imagined the end of all things would be brought about through the violent victory of the European church over those considered enemies of Christ. The kingdom of God was conflated with the kingdoms of Portugal, Spain, England, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.10
It is important to consider therefore, the historic power of Christian ethics as well as the ongoing influence of Christian theology today. I am not suggesting that Christian theologians or ethicists are the most sought-after voices today, particularly in critical analyses of colonial history. But I do believe that we have something important to contribute, since present-day Christian ethicists function—whether consciously or unconsciously—within a discipline which served the purposes of colonisation. Theological education itself, in which many Christians ethicists and especially theological ethicists are involved, was a colonial project in places like West Africa and the Caribbean. Christian education was an education in whiteness.11 Carlton Turner makes this evident in a lecture entitled ‘Re-thinking African Enslavement’ given at Wells Cathedral in March 2023. In speaking of the Anglican Codrington College in Barbados which was established on a plantation and remains there to this day, he explains:
The death of ex-colonial governor, ex-captain general and commander-in chief, and plantation owner Christopher Codrington in 1710 meant the bequeathing of his Barbadian estates to the ownership of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) with one very odd condition: that it always hold three hundred negroes on the plantation. Codrington's desire was very clear. He wanted a school established for missionary work to the peoples of the colonies … They were to be the vehicles of his vision of a better society. It was a vision of a society, unfortunately, where the place for the Negro was still working the plantation.12The problem of Christian ethics—both the practice and the discipline—is located in the promulgation of ideas such as this, and the lack of critical response from many who have simply overlooked this history. The task of Christian ethics must involve confession. For those of us concerned with the impact of Christian theology on life and lived experience, including in relation to matters deemed public or political, this history cannot be ignored. Christian ethics is implicated in the problems of colonisation, but there is also a huge opportunity to reckon with this history and reframe Christian ethics in a liberating and anti-colonial frame. The potential for this is located in the kinds of Christian ethics that have sought to resist and push against colonial Christian ethics. Liberation theologies, Black and womanist theologies, Asian and postcolonial theologies have all developed a cacophony of voices which speak out against the colonial norms common in some forms of European theology. Christian ethics is already decolonised in such spaces which can often be either overlooked or devalued by those within the field of academic research and education. Within these scholarly corners, Jesus is not white, barely a man (in relation to the standards of popular toxic forms of masculinity) and is clearly aligned with the impoverished and oppressed. This is the Jesus of Black hermeneutics, who Anthony Reddie calls ‘a Black hero’13 and Robert Beckford calls a ‘dread Christ’.14 But this Jesus is often displaced, and replaced instead with a whitened version whose greatest love is empire, and who rules by coercive force. In turn, the disciples of this Jesus follow his example, in all things, being conformed to his image in the interactions with those deemed ‘foreign’ and inferior. And so, to discuss the decolonisation of Christian ethics is to first ask, whose Christian ethics need to be decolonised and what might decolonisation mean in the context of Christian ethics? Who and where might the agents of such a process be? And what opportunities might be opened up through a commitment to anti-colonialism and liberation in the field of Christian ethics? It is to these questions that I will now turn.
From Colonised to Decolonising: Theological Education and Christian Ethics in Britain
A significant part of my work at Durham is summed up to some extent in the term decolonisation. As a lover of history, I am often concerned with understanding how things came to be as they are, before attempting any type of change or, dare I say, transformation. This is why it has been interesting for me to look back to the history of theological education, for example. It is important to me to understand what the ambitions and objectives have been for those who started such enterprises, especially in relation to historically colonised peoples. Christian ethics, as a discipline, forms part of the theological education task through research and teaching, and so much of what I have been considering in terms of decolonising theological education will also apply here. The history of British theological education is bound up in the history of British colonial domination as we have seen in the case of Codrington. Some colleges are discovering the extent to which they have benefited financially from the transatlantic slave trade and colonial enterprise. Carlton Turner explains for example that funding from the transatlantic slave trade enabled the establishment of several colleges in Britain, some of which remain active to this day. St. Aidan's established in 1846, Cuddesdon in 1854, Lichfield in 1857, and Salisbury in 1860 were all sponsored by funds obtained through the selling of African people as slaves.15
Christian theology then, including ethics, must be examined for traces of this colonial history. Forensic examination of financial records is one of the more obvious and somewhat easier tasks within this. But what can be harder to detect are the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ideologies, expectations and perceptions that can impact the research we undertake, and the teaching or sharing of knowledge that we do. Eve Parker has considered what colonial theological education can look like today in her work with the Common Awards network. She writes:
For the most part, Western perspectives dominate the academy, particularly in the context of the UK, and class divisions appear to be ingrained in the dominant structures of theological learning. Those with power in theological education have too often neglected the theological truths from the majority world, have pigeonholed certain theologies as ‘contextual’ and created a hierarchy of knowledge(s), and in doing so have failed to acknowledge that all theology is contextual … Theologies from the bodies of people of colour, the marginalised, the poor, the indecent, and the subaltern are predominantly absent from most theological curricula and reading lists … Eurocentric theology dictates the patterns of learning and contemplations on God as a result of how colonialism's power dynamics have shaped and controlled systems of knowledge and education … In other words, those who have benefited from the privileges of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism own the means of knowledge production, particularly in the West, and thereby determine what does and does not qualify as worthy or necessary knowledge.16This indictment of theological education in the UK raises several important points for us in our consideration of decolonising Christian ethics, and working towards racial justice within the discipline. Primarily, we find again that we neglect certain experiences if we seek to speak about single issues. The problems of class and race are held together in Parker's analysis. In the same way that colonialism was an economic venture, determined by an elite who acted upon the lives of those deemed dispensable, so theological education can maintain elitism by treating some as collateral damage, unworthy or unnecessary in the task of producing knowledge. This raises the question of whether the Christian ethics being produced remains captivated by a certain kind of imagination that decides some are only ever students while others should be consistently positioned as teachers. Who do we imagine to be the theological ethicists of our day and who do we imagine are unworthy of such a title? What is shaping these suppositions?
Secondly, Parker highlights for us the important matter of the way we categorise the various voices we do hear. Even if we do welcome a range of perspectives, it is still possible to place them within an imagined hierarchy of knowledge. To put differently, we might develop a canon (whether in our own minds or on paper) of those essential voices in Christian ethics, and then consider others to be optional additions. What patterns shape who we consider to be core or peripheral in our research and teaching?
When considering the task of decolonising Christian ethics, we are speaking about transforming a particular kind of Christian ethics. The focus is on the forms of Christian ethics which feign neutrality and presume they offer universal truth. The failure to name one's context is a refusal to acknowledge both the location and the limitations of one's work. Black theology provokes all theologians to name the context and agenda which motivates their work, simply by using the word ‘black’ which can agitate so many. The replies come: ‘why do need black theology? Isn’t that racist?’ These questions emerge sometimes with aggression, provoked by the naming of race. It is also a shock to the system, since white theologians often do not name where their theology is located and what its objectives are in regard to race, colonial history, etc. If black and womanist theological ethics is motivated by the concern for black liberation and flourishing, then what is white Christian ethics motivated by? Decolonising theological ethics means recognising white theologians’ work as contextual, as Jason Drexler-Dreis explains:
Decolonial theorists are not interested in doing away with all of Western modernity; rather, they seek to undo the ‘myth of modernity’ in order to transcend its constraints on being and thinking. Enrique Dussel describes the myth of modernity as the European belief that Europe is the most materially and intellectually developed and civilized area of the world, and that it therefore has the task of educating non- or lesser-developed peoples … Constructive decolonial thought entails putting Western intellectual traditions in their proper place and identifying their historical points of origin.17It is this constructive decolonial thought that should be the concern of Christian ethics. This should, I hope, also quell the fear that decolonisation is about the erasure of white voices and western theology. Decolonisation is inevitably a destabilising process, and this cannot be denied. In the words of Frantz Fanon: ‘decolonization is always a violent event’.18 This does not mean bloodshed is inevitable—though this has been the case in the decolonisation of nations which Fanon is discussing—but it does mean upheaval, shifts and even what might feel like chaos is to be expected. It is not comfortable to reorder power in any context. And this is what decolonisation is about at its core. It will cost something of everyone who has benefited from the existing norms, and this is why it is resisted and rejected. It might also be watered down to ‘inclusion’ or ‘diversity’. However, the objective of decolonisation is not to improve representation within an existing system or structures, but to challenge the very basis on which those systems and structures have been built. Decolonisation recognises that the very foundation of a system, an organisation, a philosophy or a practice, must be critiqued for its implicit assumptions regarding the superiority of the white and European. This is for the sake of all people now and in the future, since colonial violence distorts the coloniser as well as the colonised. In the process of decolonisation, we must always be mindful of the potential for colonialism to simply be replaced by neo-colonialism. Neo-colonialism is a simple evolution of colonial violence that may appear more subtle; it ‘assumes power by reactivating entrenched structures of discrimination and prejudice, such as race and caste, legitimized by Christianity’.19
Christian ethics must be prepared for such violent reordering, if what is wanted is decolonisation and not a nicer, less intrusive alternative. The target of decolonisation within Christian ethics is the kind of work that presumes Europe and America to be the centre of the church, and of relevant thought and enquiry regarding God and the Christian faith. It addresses the assumption that Christian ethics can be researched and taught, without proportionate leadership from those who represent the largest Christian contingents globally. It challenges the kind of Christian ethics that longs for a ‘golden era’ in which western voices and perspectives were considered the most important. Decolonial theology (including ethics):
[m]akes an epistemic shift in its understanding of the historical encounter with a divine reality by starting from viewpoints grounded in intellectual traditions shaped by the experience of the violent imposition of Western modernity. Second, situated within these intellectual traditions, decolonial theology contests modern/colonial ways of defining reality, the human person, and cosmic relations in light of communities’ historical encounter with divinity and proposes options for thinking, acting, and relating otherwise.20Decolonisation in Christian ethics depends upon us recognising the widest epistemological range, as we consider the questions and queries which might be addressed in the field. It requires us to resist the perception that the practical or embodied has less status than the purely theoretical. It invites us to consider the kinds of knowledge that are experiential, embodied and mystical as valid and important. It should also invite us to imagine the public and community contributions the field might make, in light of the urgent demands facing humanity as a whole, and certain groups in particular. There are some who might suggest that decolonisation should lead to Christian ethics withdrawing from public dialogue in order to break with its colonial tendencies. However, I would suggest that anticolonial voices in the field have something essential to contribute.
Decolonised Minds, Anti-Colonial Christian Ethics
The process of decolonisation is a form of reordering power that depends upon the liberating of minds. It depends upon individuals being liberated in their thinking, often through the insight and education of those who belong to their wider community. To put it in theological terms, it is reminiscent of having the veil removed (2 Cor. 3:13-15); having one's eyes or ears opened (Mark 7:35, John 9); or being awakened (Eph. 5:13-14). It is for this reason that decolonisation of the mind is held up as having such importance for those who belong to historically colonised peoples. Chammah J. Kaunda explains:
Decoloniality is meant to get into the core of the African psyche in order to dismantle power relations and conceptions of knowledge that foment the reproduction of self-negation or negated subjectivity. It is concerned with disturbing the solidified inferiority complexes, duality perception of reality and the ‘geo-political’ hierarchies that came into being or found new and more powerful forms of expression in the modern/colonial world.21It is clear from this description that decolonisation is a task of epic proportions. Its impact must be traced through the thoughts and instincts of historically colonised people as well as in the structures and systems that exist in a given social, political, economic and cultural space. Kaunda begins with the mind of the African—as his example of those descended from colonised peoples—in his designation of where decolonisation must begin. Decolonisation is not a process that begins with the best intentions of even the most progressive white people, or other allies. It has to begin as a movement of liberation that has its locus in the minds of those who are coming to terms with a history of oppression, and the necessary actions to free their present and future selves. The mind of the colonised is conditioned by colonialism, to hate itself, to despise what is deemed African, Asian or indigenous and to view what is European as superior. This was the ultimate goal of colonialism: to possess the mind in order to own the body more determinedly.
In describing decolonisation of the mind in more concrete terms, Kaunda describes it as a process by which the African person recaptures a forgotten sense of self and the world. It requires an exploration of what has been hidden, buried, suffocated within the self. He explains decolonising the mind as:
[s]eeking to reclaim the essential unity between self and other, self and the entire cosmos, consciousness and unconsciousness, spirituality and materiality, organic and inorganic, science and religion, sacred and profane. It is a recovery of an integrated approach to reality. It is a mode of theological education that is grounded in the quest to recover a self-consciousness that upholds a radical theology of oneness (singular) of life driven from the common source.22Here Kaunda describes the epistemological shift, and indeed a philosophical shift required for the decolonising of African minds. The ‘self-negation’ (in the words of Carlton Turner),23 which the colonised mind imbibes, must be addressed, for Kaunda, through theological education which returns to the ‘materio-spirituality’ which represents the African way of viewing the world.24 Africans, through colonialism, have been steeped in a dualistic philosophical framework which opposes the sacred and secular, the body and the spirit and the material and spiritual more broadly. This way of viewing reality is a misnomer for Africans. Instead, decolonisation means returning to a ‘materio-spirituality’ which ‘integrates all cosmic relationships of God and humanity, the living and the dead, self and collective, humanity and non-human creation, humility, metaphysical and psychic powers, healing and wholeness’.25 This unified view of the world does not seek knowledge for its own sake, but is driven by the desire for a more just future. This just future is understood as holistic, encompassing all elements of human experience and recognising them as interconnected.
This description of the decolonised mind and decolonised theological education raises several important points for us in relation to Christian ethics. Primarily, it speaks to the impact of colonial theology not only on white people—who can be centred even in decolonisation conversations—but on people of global heritage. The task of decolonising the mind is about freeing the minds of historically colonised people and their descendants who have been taught to see themselves as inferior. It has resonances of Paulo Freire's focus on ‘conscientisation’: the critical consciousness which allows people to notice and understand what has caused their oppression.26 To say that this work of decolonising the mind must come before any other task is to recognise that attempts to diversify reading lists or increase diversity in recruitment will fail, if there has been no success in ‘get[ting] into the core of the African psyche in order to dismantle power relations and conceptions of knowledge that foment the reproduction of self-negation’.27 If, as Carter G. Woodson has asserted, there has been not a lack of education but a specific ‘mis-education’ of ‘the negro’28 as well as other historically colonised peoples, then theological education must equate to a re-education. If theology is going to be of any benefit to humanity as a whole and those of global majority heritage in particular, it must take on this task. This re-education involves a reclaiming of the global story of Christianity, in terms of history, as well as in the development of the broad range of Christian theologies and spiritualities. But it also must include challenging the hegemony of white European perspectives which undermine a holistic understanding of life and being, and restrict the spiritual and theological to the religious life. Christian ethics is one area of theology which more easily transcends the binaries between belief and practice, the sacred and the secular. The question remains: in what ways can Christian ethics contribute to such a task?
The problems of Britain's colonial Christian heritage and its theological roots have been highlighted by several important voices in the UK. They are examples of decolonised minds, which must lead us as we work towards decolonisation in Christian ethics. Robert Beckford, Anthony Reddie, Anderson Jeremiah and Anupama Ranawana have all brought to our attention the avenues Christian ethics might take as a discipline to recognise and address its contribution to colonial dynamics historically and in the present. In the next section, I examine ideas which each of them contributes as examples of decolonised and anti-colonial Christian ethics. They represent, respectively, commitment to developing Black faith and spirituality in ways that are geared towards liberation; a willingness to engage with contemporary public and political issues through a theological lens; a commitment to critiquing the Church and theology's colonial tendencies; and a determination to challenge humanity's destructive relationship with the earth.
Robert Beckford is the first to examine the ongoing impact of colonialism on African Caribbean Pentecostals whose faith was inherited in part from colonial missionary activity. In Documentary as Exorcism: Resisting the Bewitchment of Colonial Christianity, Beckford argues compellingly that due to the colonised history of places like Jamaica, Black Pentecostals in Britain remain captivated by colonial theologies which prevent them from integrating their faith with their lived experience and struggle as Black people. In his postcolonial interpretation of exorcism, which centres the story of the demoniac in Mark 5:1-10, he explains what decolonising might mean for the Pentecostal understandings of the demonic, and especially what it means to ‘cast out’:
To cast out is to remove an occupying or harassing malevolent spiritual force from the physical body and also social world. It is in opposition to bewitchment in so much as it directly confronts and overcomes the spiritual malevolence diagnosed in witchcraft. In conclusion, exorcism in the Bible, while by no means static in meaning, appears in the Gospel of Mark with political implications. The exorcisms of Jesus are political acts demonstrating the expulsion of the occupying colonial force out of the mind and body of Israel. This interpretation not only facilitates a religious critique of empire but also allows me to view exorcism as a socio-political reality, whereby to exorcize is to engage in struggle against witchcraft, that is, structural evil.29Within Pentecostal contexts, this reading will not be commonly heard. Due in part to the centring of literal readings of the scriptures as well as an unequivocal belief in demonic spiritual powers, this passage would traditionally be interpreted as a straightforward story of a person being freed from demonic control by Jesus. Any social or political reading would not be prioritised, and this, for Beckford, is the sign of a ‘bewitched’ Christian faith. Bewitchment is, for Beckford, ‘the colonial oppression and social ineffectiveness of many Pentecostal churches’.30 Decolonised ethics for Beckford in this case is seen in the capacity to transcend the binary between the spiritual or religious and the public and political. Decolonised ethics engages with the social realities of inequity, hierarchies and exclusions, rather than retreating to an individualised focus on personal piety. It awakens Black people, as historically colonised peoples, to their own power to examine, critique and define.
Anthony Reddie's analysis of Brexit offers a public theology that puts Britain's colonial tendencies front and centre. In his examination of the motivating factors that led to Britain's departure from the EU, he does not allow the church, Christians or Christian theology, or we as theologians to escape from accountability. Far from being a simply political manoeuvre, Reddie argues that this decision was rooted for many people in a particular theological imagination:
What underpinned the Brexit phenomenon was an unresolved set of religious and theological ideas that have helped to shape the national identity. Essential to the ‘development’ of the populist trust of British (more specifically English) nationalism is a conflation of religion and economic and political expansion abroad, namely the link between Christianity and empire.31Reddie goes on in multiple places to note the lack of engagement with such theological ideas by white scholars, though there have been some exceptions of course. If decolonisation requires confession, then this is clearly an area for deep examination. Reddie along with Carol Troupe have recently compiled an edited book called Deconstructing Whiteness, Empire and Mission in which some are starting this work. It includes some helpful voices in this regard such as Eve Parker, Al Barrett, Cathy Ross, Mike Higton and others.32 To deconstruct whiteness is, in my view, to ask how in the course of constructing race, white Europeans imbibed ideas and committed to particular violent practices which continue in ever-evolving forms today. Not all white people conform to such historic ways of being of course, but it is inviting critical exploration of how colonialism has distorted white humanity, especially in terms of their relationship to global peoples. Theologically it asks, what kinds of idolatry are European cultures prone to, because of historic lust for power over global populations? Of what must supposedly ‘white’, ‘Christian’ nations repent? And what role might theologians play in bringing such repentance about?
Anderson Jeremiah, one of the foremost postcolonial theologians in the UK, offers us yet more reflection, this time bringing the conversation to bear on the context of colonialism in India. It is important to note that British colonialism has looked different in the various places it has been experienced. While we can simplify the history of British colonialism down into particular moments or events, there are many variations in approach, and in outcomes. Jeremiah makes this very clear in his own critique of British colonialism in India. While recognising the explicit role of Christian theology in helping to legitimate European exploitation and enslavement, he also condemns Christian mission for its complicity in upholding and exacerbating existing forms of inequity. In India's case, this was seen, for Jeremiah, in particular relation to the caste system which continues to have an impact even today:
Within Christianity in South Asia, the roots of ongoing caste conflict between various caste communities are well documented. Hostility between Syrian Orthodox, non-Syrian, upper caste and lower caste, and Dalit Christian communities continue to plague the church in India. Often caste identity is a subtext for denominational differences and a major factor in the church polity. Sadly, the caste-based worldview that mirrors a racialized worldview of difference and revulsion to one another shapes much of Christian experience. Interestingly, roots of these differences could be traced back to early missionary encounters that in many ways legitimized caste practice within Christianity.33Here we find a similar point to Beckford's, in that decolonial theology for Anderson also relates to South Asian churches being liberated from social orders which oppose the message of the Christian faith in which all people are brought into one family of God. Here also, Christian theologies have been proven inadequate for equipping Christians to resist conforming to the colonial ‘patterns of the world’ (Rom. 12:2). Rather, Christian theologies, promoted by missionaries, sustain the unjust status quo. In response, Jeremiah argues that ‘through post-colonial enquiry, we must be able to challenge and deconstruct neo-colonial tendencies that tend to reactivate entrenched structures of theological prejudice and decolonise Christian mission’.34 The notion of reactivation is important; it reminds us that historic patterns and structures can often remain dormant in the communal body of the church. Though, to continue the analogy, the body may seem healthy, and this may cause us to deny the ongoing risk of illness, like a virus, it may well have adapted in order to survive, or may simply be awaiting an appropriate stimulus to re-emerge.
Anupama Ranawana, a Sri Lankan postcolonial feminist and eco-theologian in the UK, writes of the importance of Asian theologies in resisting the capitalist motivations of the colonial project which continue to lead to the plunder of the earth. She explains that ‘the deep-rooted sinfulness of capitalism and plunder is underscored in the political theology that we find in Asia, particularly Asian theology that allies itself to Third World liberational thinking’.35 It is this thinking that is not only non-white but also located beyond the ‘global north’, that also needs to be centred in anti-colonial Christian ethics. Theologies from global populations that are bearing the brunt of environmental destruction brought about by the overdeveloped world are also responding to colonial dynamics that bring race, class and environmental concerns together, as Ranawana explains in A Liberation for the Earth: Climate, Race and Cross:
The modern, capitalist world economy is one in which colonizers and colonized were systematically bound into relationships of extraction, colonization and dispossession. It is also important to note here that this is not simply a tale of European colonization, but also of the collusion of elite and upper-class/caste persons in the colonies with the colonizer to deem certain lands and certain communities as lesser and disposable.36For Ranawana, the problem of colonialism for Christian ethics lies also in the disordered relationship humanity has with the earth, as the result of capitalism. The industrial revolution which is celebrated as a turning point in the history of British economic development was funded by the enslavement of Africans as a source of free labour, and the exploitation of global lands and peoples. The extraction of natural resources was and has since been essential to the development of global capitalism, as has the pollution of the seas, and the destruction of the natural environment. Postcolonial theologies which recognise these links also have an important place in decolonising Christian ethics. Theologies from the ‘global south’ which centre the earth must also be heard in the violent re-ordering of exploitative colonial patterns.
In each of these cases, we find ample opportunities for Christian ethics to fulfil the demands of the decolonisation task. Firstly, by being honest about the problems of colonialism which undermine Christian faith, life and practice. And secondly, by taking the ongoing impact of such tendencies seriously. Following the example of such voices, and intentionally developing the next generation of these traditions, must be a priority.
Conclusion: Anti-Colonialism as Liberation for All
I hope it is clear that the argument for decolonising Christian ethics is not simply a case of pandering to what some people have labelled (often pejoratively) ‘political correctness’ or ‘identity politics’. It is a call to reassess the motivating factors which shape the discipline, and the power we have given to some at the expense of others. It is an opportunity to shape our communal life, which must always be examined and questioned lest we fall into a complacency that prevents genuine community. We must be intentional, since the default will always lead us to privileging the same groups over the same ‘others’. The fruits of such a determination have the potential to be enriching for all people, since all suffer under a colonial dynamic of research, inquiry and teaching about God and our lives in the life of God. In a recent resource produced by the American Academy of Religion on Equity-Focused Pedagogies in the Religious Studies Classroom, educators shared stories of what the process of decolonising their classrooms has meant. We do not all have classrooms in a literal sense, but the learning can be true whether we lecture, preach, run community projects, engage with public issues or suchlike. Three themes emerged for me that I would like to leave with you as an encouragement: academic excellence, joy and belonging.
Miguel De La Torre, a renowned Latino theological ethicist, writes to counteract the notion that decolonising knowledge amounts to lowering the bar to allow in more diverse perspectives. This can be what is presumed when we speak about embracing a wider range of voices. The logic being that the door is equally accessible for everyone, and so if there is a lack of scholars from a particular group, this simply reflects their personal or communal failings. Decolonising is therefore resisted in order to maintain ‘excellence’. Instead, De La Torre explains:
To build a pedagogical methodology solely on Eurocentric religious, theological, or philosophical thought is to produce an epistemology on shifting sand. Worse, when the focus in the classroom is exclusively on Eurocentric thought, students’ ability to grasp reality is undermined. Bringing the perspectives of communities of color into the classroom is not some empty exercise in political correctness, nor is it an inconvenient attempt at tokenism. It is a methodology that halts the regurgitation of death-dealing Eurocentric theoretical paradigms detrimental to the world's marginalized. It is a praxis concerned with understanding the world, and just as important, transforming the world.37The same could be said not only about pedagogical methodology but about the discipline of Christian ethics as a whole whether or not it is taught in a classroom. To build a discipline like Christian ethics ‘solely on Eurocentric religious, theological, or philosophical thought is to produce an epistemology on shifting sand’. Such Christian ethical work undermines the capacity for learning, reinforces ‘death-dealing Eurocentric theoretical paradigms’, lacks curiosity and prevents transformation.
The second factor is that of joy which again may not always feel familiar in the field of academic research, teaching and learning. Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds writes about Black joy in his classrooms, which is brought about when learning ‘provides space for the variety of learners and engagement of ideas to be validated within the classroom’.38 Traditional classrooms, he argues, are committed ‘to the reproduction of normative texts and ideas and a focus on point-based assessments’ which ‘have erased joy and experimentation from the university classroom’. ‘Joy-filled classrooms’, on the other hand, ‘begin with identifying historical moments, texts, and questions that are central to our students’ and develop ‘curricula, opportunities for engagement, and creative outcomes in response to those’.39 In this reflection we find more signs of the possibilities that are opened up through a decolonising approach to teaching and learning. The question is raised for Christian ethics within or beyond the classroom—to what extent it enables experimentation and the asking of new questions? In research, in teaching, in learning, is there room for joy, as we move beyond normative expectations in terms of the people we count as ethicists and the topics we imagine belong here?
And finally, the importance of dialogue and belonging which is examined by Kevin Minister who explains the importance of dialogue for reorienting colonial dynamics. If colonial Christian ethics assumes certain bodies hold all knowledge, while others are simply empty vessels to be filled, then ethics in an anti-colonial mode must break away from this through practices such as dialogue:
Dialogue practices break down the sense of the teacher as the source and arbiter of knowledge and the students as disembodied, objective learners through questions that require students to connect their own experiences to course content. Furthermore, students begin to perceive each other as partners in learning as they reflect on how their and their classmates’ different experiences inform their perspectives on the course content.40Of course, as researchers and educators, we have knowledge that we hope to share, and this is what has qualified us for our roles. But it is also true that the reader or the student have their own forms of knowledge. They have stories to tell, truths to communicate and perspectives that bring challenge and contribution to the learning space and to our research. The teacher, the writer, the researcher, the academic might also be taught as we welcome in the various voices which have gifts to offer the wider community as we learn together. In the welcoming, we pay particular attention to those voices that are often considered unimportant, and we notice when they are not there: the voice of the migrant, the refugee, the person living in poverty, the student who is neurodiverse, or comes from a global majority background. We remember the women, the person with a stutter, the one who is treated with suspicion because of their sexuality or gender. Anti-colonial Christian ethics refuses to define people as ‘good’ or ‘evil’, or ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘ignorant’. It resists the temptation to decide the questions that are worthy of consideration, it attends to power, and the voices heard and not heard, to the bodies present and absent even as the discussion and debates take place. In this way, the classroom or learning space might become a place for education not only in intellectual knowledge but in how to be in the world, as those seeking to embody the ethical demands of the Christian faith.
