Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives

By Raimundo Barreto and Roberto Sirvent

What does it mean to theorize Christianity in light of the decolonial turn? This volume invites distinguished Latinx and Latin American scholars to a conversation that engages the rich theoretical contributions of the decolonial turn, while relocating Indigenous, Afro-Latin American, Latinx, and other often marginalized practices and hermeneutical perspectives to the center-stage of religious discourse in the Americas. Keeping in mind that all religions—Christianity included—are cultured, and avoiding the abstract references to Christianity common to the modern Eurocentric hegemonic project, the contributors favor embodied religious practices that emerge in concrete contexts and communities. Featuring essays from scholars such as Sylvia Marcos, Enrique Dussel, and Luis Rivera-Pagán, this volume represents a major step to bring Christian theology into the conversation with decolonial theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Nov 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030241667

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2019

R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.)Decolonial ChristianitiesNew Approaches to Religion and Powerhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_1

1. Introduction

Raimundo Barreto¹   and Roberto Sirvent²  

(1)

Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA

(2)

Hope International University, Fullerton, CA, USA

Raimundo Barreto (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Roberto Sirvent

Email: [e-mail]

In her essay, The Bible and 500 years of Conquest, Mexican-born biblical scholar Elsa Tamez invites Christians to move beyond trying to construct liberating hermeneutics and instead focus on a critical analysis of our own Christian-biblical discourse.¹ Commenting on the limits of Western rationality to respond to the religious practices of Indigenous, African Brazilian, and African Caribbean communities, Tamez asks what it would mean to follow Kuna theologian Aiwan Wagua’s observation that to think things from outside indigenous thought is quite problematic. Without naming it, and still using a terminology that did not fully acknowledge the plurality of Latin American Christianities, Tamez’s observation can be taken as a challenge for Latin American Christians to undergo a more radical cultural and epistemological turn, critically reviving their self-understanding in the region. The Christian Church might have shown itself to be sensitive to the poor, Tamez writes, but not to the other.² Speaking at the time Indigenous peoples in Latin America were commemorating the 500 years of resistance to the European invasion of their land and world, Tamez takes the Christian Church—its practices, its theology, and its hermeneutics—to task for its complicity in the destruction of life, denouncing that many deaths have been caused, maybe more than the actual liberation of persons and peoples. Thus the significance of taking a further step in the critical analysis of Christian biblical-theological discourse in Latin America. As Tamez notes, it is no longer possible to substitute the work of the Indigenous or blacks who are the subjects of such experiences. Instead, the task of Christian theologizing in the region is to help the non-Indigenous people to open up their mentality to receive with joy and equality those different practices of faith.³ Ultimately, Tamez admits, elaborating a biblical hermeneutics that includes other-non-Christian practices…is a task that we will learn from Indigenous exegetes themselves.⁴

Tamez’s call for Christianity to confront its centuries-long complicity in colonialism, conquest, and domination at a time when Latin American Christianity was wrestling with the 500th anniversary of its first and tragic encounter with the peoples of Abya Yala was an early call for theologians to start thinking of decolonial Christianities even before the establishment of the intellectual movement we now know as the decolonial turn.⁵ This is to say nothing of the many Indigenous Christian communities across the globe, including Latin American, that have not only been theorizing decoloniality before and apart from recent scholarship but practicing it as well.⁶ Indeed, decolonial epistemologies and praxis preceded any academic theorizing of the decolonial turn. Moreover, they continue to take shape in Christian and other communities among people who may have never even heard of the term decolonial. So, we might ask, what benefit is there in initiating a direct conversation between lived Christianities and the important scholarship being produced by decolonial thinkers? In other words, what can be gained from making explicit (i.e. theoretical connections between decolonial thought and Christian theology) what is already implicit (i.e. decolonial praxis found in many Latinx, Latin American, and Indigenous communities)?

Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives addresses these and other important questions inviting a select group of Latinx and Latin American scholars to a multidirectional conversation, which engages the rich theoretical contributions of the decolonial turn, while relocating Indigenous, Afro-Latin American, Latinx, and other often marginalized practices and hermeneutical perspectives to the center-stage, thus decentering colonial Christianity and theology. While the decolonial turn aims to critique and debunk the West’s paradigm of discovery and newness,⁷ it also proposes new possibilities of knowing and constructing the world which go beyond Western rationality. Decoloniality is at the same time critical and constructive. Whereas it denounces hegemonic forms of knowing, it proposes forms of knowing otherwise. It moves from ‘learning to unlearn’ to the utopian constructive proposition that another world is possible.⁸ In other words, decolonial theory is an option for epistemic disobedience , the delinking from the hegemonic Western foundations of knowledge.⁹ As Mignolo clarifies, though, such delinking does not mean abandoning or ignoring what has been institutionalized all over the planet. Instead, he says, it is meant

to shift the geo- and body-politics of knowledge from its foundation in Western imperial history of the past five centuries, to the geo-and body-politics of people, languages, religions, political and economic conceptions, subjectivities, etc., that have been racialized (that is, denied their plain humanity).¹⁰

In short, going beyond the mere criticism of Eurocentric epistemologies, the decolonial turn proposes an interculturality, which while reassessing, without denying, the hegemonic epistemology of Western reason upon other peoples and cultures, moves towards an intercultural dialogue in which the excluded also participate.¹¹

With its focus on coloniality¹² rather than merely on colonialism , decolonial theory addresses the various configurations of power—the gradual propagation of capitalism, racism, the modern/gender system, and the naturalization of the death ethics of war¹³—that outlived the imperial conquest. In the steps of decolonial thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Chela Sandoval, Maria Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter Mignolo, Gloria Anzaldúa , Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Enrique Dussel,¹⁴ this edited volume hopes to contribute to the unfinished project of decoloniality not only through the critique of three of colonialism’s violent legacies: (1) the coloniality of power, (2) the coloniality of knowledge, and (3) the coloniality of being—including the coloniality of faith, and Christian complicity with colonialism and its violent legacies; but also through the proposition of Latin American and Latinx decolonial options in the context of emerging Christianities, which engage in epistemic disobedience and delinking from the colonial matrix, promoting a vision of life and society that requires decolonial subjects, decolonial knowledges, and decolonial institutions.¹⁵

Throughout this volume’s dialogue between decolonial thought and Christian theology and praxis, our contributors address significant questions around the topics of epistemology, modernity, and the production of knowledge. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes,

The Decolonial Turn is about making visible the invisible and about analyzing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the ‘invisible’ people themselves. Indeed, one must recognize their intellectual production as thinking – not only as culture or ideology.¹⁶

Decolonial thought exposes how the academy, the archives, and various apparatuses of state power seek to determine not just what is heard or listened to but what is considered theory to begin with. As Maldonado-Torres explains above, these very mechanisms do not just determine what is theory but who can and cannot produce it. The decolonial turn therefore examines how those in the underside of modernity create spaces that serve as sites for producing theory, knowledge, philosophy and, we add, theology. Central to this examination of how certain ideas are made invisible by the colonial matrix of power is its intersection with the racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies generated and strengthened by Western modernity. In doing so, decolonial theorists challenge dominant ideologies about reason, agency, and what it means to be human.

We situate this volume alongside other important works, hoping to both complement and go beyond the conversations initiated by their contributors. Among them, we highlight three. The first, Mark G. Brett and Jione Havea’s Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies: Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific, examines how colonial domination damaged native systems of expression in the lives of Indigenous Australians and Pacific Islanders, outlining creative postcolonial practices that help readers imagine how the church and academy can shape more constructive intercultural politics and theologies for the future.¹⁷ Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies addresses the important question of the central role played by religious and theological language in the colonial process, making critical analysis of religion crucial to decolonizing efforts. Rooted in the Asian-Pacific context, and in conversation with postcolonial rather than decolonial theorists, this volume does not address the Latin American colonial experience. However, regardless of obvious differences of context and approach, we see some equivalence between its contributions and the ones in the present volume, particularly as for the explicit concern for creating innovative spaces for (respectively) postcolonial and decolonial conversations in the academic study of religion and theology. Both books elevate previously overlooked expressions of Christianity and theological voices, offering important contributions to the often-neglected discussion about the relationship between religion (and Christianity, more expressly), postcolonial/decolonial theories, and Indigenous experiences and perspectives in academic discourse. Furthermore, both works advance creative and innovative interdisciplinary conversations, which while fully acknowledging the impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples, validate strategies of resistance to ongoing colonial harms, […] also seek to offer constructive thinking, which might move the conversations toward the ideal[s] of [healing and] reconciliation.¹⁸

Another important book we are indebted to is Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy. Engaging in a more direct conversation with decolonial rather than postcolonial thought, in the context of the Americas, it features essays situated, in the editors words, at the intersection of two axes: liberation epistemology and decolonizing epistemology.¹⁹ Critical of the epistemic hegemony that results in the dominant group’s epistemic privilege, the volume’s editors observe that

Little or no effort has been made to facilitate and encourage the elaboration of knowledge that does not use the dominant episteme, that is, the dominant system of understanding and the ideas that emerge from the experience of the dominant group. The center continues to hold; it continues to exclude Latina/o epistemology and hermeneutics and therefore, it continues to oppress.²⁰

This work represents the first major step in the Latin American/Latinx context to bring Christian theology into a more explicit conversation with decolonial theory. Taking that task a little further, the third edited volume motivating our project, Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America , provides groundbreaking scholarship on how many Indigenous societies resisted this epistemic and hermeneutic violence by repeatedly turning around Christian terms, practices, and traditions during the process of textual translation in colonial Latin America.²¹ This collection of essays is a major contribution to accessing Indigenous agency and the relocation of the loci of meaning and enunciation in the Latin American experiment with Christianity. The significance of this work’s attention to Indigenous peoples’ interaction with and appropriation and transformation of Christian ideas and practices demonstrates the depth and breadth of the multidirectional impact that took place in the encounter between modern missionary Christianity and the diverse Latin American Indigenous cultures and traditions.

Decolonial Christianities stands on the shoulders of these and other previous works,²² offering an important contribution to the field of decolonial thought by drawing on a broader range of ecumenical and theological voices from the underside of modernity, while engaging various fields of study, and representing multifaceted loci of enunciation from which words continue to be turned around today in the context of the Latin American and Latinx experiences with Christianity.

While Latin American decolonial theorizing can be grouped among other expressions of postcolonial discourse, its geocultural location and the specificity of the Latin American colonial history make its contributions distinct. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres shows, whereas postcolonial thought emerged as a critical discourse engaging postmodern theories, decolonial thinkers, in their efforts to overcome modernity/coloniality, are keener to alternative genealogies emerging in the Southern hemisphere, particularly among Indigenous and Black peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean. In that sense, decolonial writers tend to be particularly attentive to Indigenous and African-derived religious traditions. Their suspicion of Christianity and Christian theology cannot be generalized and does not mirror the kind of secularism seen in projects dominantly informed by Eurocentric frameworks. Most decolonial thinkers are not afraid of engaging religion.²³ Their work is keenly critical, though, of a certain kind of Christianity, namely, colonial Christianity. Thus decolonial thought contributes, for instance, to dismantle dominant Christian narratives that glorify missionary colonialism,²⁴ exposing the role this kind of Christian discourse and imaginary have played in the formation of coloniality, as legitimizers of colonial violence in the name of evangelization.²⁵

Whereas one cannot speak of an existing antagonism in the relation between decolonial thought and Christian theologizing, one aspires for the promises of further and more systemic explorations of such conversations, which are still far from occupying a more significant place as a meaningful analytical tool and conversational partner in theological seminaries and churches where Christian theology is dominantly produced. In fact, one of us has called for a more intentional initiative on the part of scholars in the field of world Christianity to engage insights from Latin American decolonial theory, arguing that such engagement may contribute to a decolonizing countermovement, making room for decolonial forms of Christianity to come to the forefront.²⁶ This volume contributes to expand this conversation by engaging multiple existing resources present in Indigenous, African-derived, mujerista, queer, and other forms of Latinx and Latin American Christian praxis and theologies, thus offering several examples of Latin American and Latinx Christianities that rise as participants in a broader network of people’s movements and processes critiquing and resisting coloniality and empire. As such, it prioritizes the experiences of those who, existing in the underside of modernity, hold particular faith and theological commitments, which have informed grassroots Christian movements. Such experiences are still often downplayed or simply dismissed in certain academic circles—something that in itself denounces a still prevalent Eurocentric bias in both ecclesiastical institutions and important sectors of the academy. Our primary aim, then, is to critically evaluate both the ways in which Christianity is complicit in empire and coloniality and also the instances in which it provides unique and important resources for resisting, un-thinking, un-disciplining, and re-imagining alternative ways of being in the world.

While it might be helpful to frame Decolonial Christianities in terms of advancing an ongoing exploration of the points of connection and difference between Latinx and Latin American theologies and decolonial theories, we consider the scope of this volume to go beyond theological discourse. By this we mean that our contributors devote just as much attention exploring the links between the decolonial turn and historical, ethical, and hermeneutical issues in Latin American Christian discourses. This is another reason for highlighting the significance of the book Colonial Contexts, which also explores the context and reality in which postcolonial theologies are produced. Moreover, the broader regional conversation that the book proposed in the Asia-Pacific offers a model for us to foment a more comprehensive understanding of the decolonial turn and its implication for theology, Christian praxis, and Latinx/Latin American Christian scholarship, prioritizing existing alternative genealogies (Indigenous, Black, women, among others). While deeply indebted to Decolonizing Epistemologies, we expand the conversation by including alternative voices from a variety of contexts, from Argentina to Puerto Rico, to Canada, representing different Christian traditions and perspectives. Finally, this edited volume pays special attention to ethnic/racial discourses key to the epistemological rupture proposed by decolonial theorists.

Acknowledging that sometimes artificial geographical borders—particularly between those living in the belly of the Empire, and those living outside its claimed territory—become a symbol of further separation, and that often the conversations among Latin American scholars writing predominantly in Spanish and Portuguese and that of those writing in the Anglophonic academy fail to engage one another more consistently, this book aims to bring Latinx and Latin American perspectives into a common project by transgressing several borders which artificially but historically have divided us, as well as silenced and oppressed many. Indeed, the distance created by—and the relatively small collaboration between—those working on the Northern side of the Mexican/US border and those working on the Southern side of it is quite problematic. In contrast to this tendency, adopting a decolonial border thinking perspective,²⁷ this work attempts to bridge that gap by encouraging a critically constructive conversation which highlights a variety of decolonial Christian experiences in the continent. It is worth noting that the volume title refers to Christianities instead of Christianity. Considering that Christianity is always cultured, and in contrast to the hegemonic trends of the modern/colonial Eurocentric project, we avoid abstract references to Christianity, favoring embodied religious practices, which emerge in concrete contexts and communities. By naming decolonial Christian practices, the volume contributes to also name colonial ones, making room for the condemnation of colonial Christian theologies and practices while avoiding the generalized rejection of Christianity.

In other words, this project addresses the question about how Christianity can still be possible—and meaningful—after colonialism and empire. How can Latinxs and Latin Americans still be Christians in light of coloniality and empire? Although traditional divisions of historical periods in Latin American history would identify the colonial era as ending at a certain moment, colonialism’s legacy persists, taking new forms. As many of our contributors point out, while political and economic relations must not be ignored, they cannot be disentangled from other forms of domination, involving language, culture, religion, and the production of knowledge. Christian institutions and theology have undeniably been part of that mix. In spite of that, considering that the large majority of Christians in the continent are poor and marginalized, finding themselves often at the receiving end of systemic oppression, many have encountered in their faith resources and tools for the transformation of their lives, communities, and living conditions, turning Christian stories, teachings, and symbols into inspiration and tools in their struggle for liberation, and re-signifying them in the light of Indigenous, African-derived, and popular histories and legacies.

Eleven contributors were asked to respond to three Focal Essays. The first one, Enrique Dussel’s Epistemological Decolonization of Theology, the opening chapter in this book, discusses the theoretical rupture originated with the epistemological turn in the realm of the sciences produced by Latin American and Latinx theories of decolonization, and its impact on theology. Dussel, one of the first Latin American scholars to pay attention to what would later be named coloniality, expands on the tradition of liberation theology in his effort to identify modernity’s structural sin. He discusses two inversions of the early messianic Christianity that emerged with the Jesus movement—the first one starting in the fourth century, and the second one at the end of the fifteenth century—which shaped the colonial Christianity that is at the root of the modern/colonial paradigm that has created the Eurocentric world system along with the subsequent destructive disparities of our time. In response to that, he proposes an inversion of these inversions as a way for decolonizing theology. Christendom resulted from the transformation of both the Greco-Roman culture and the early Christian culture. The apex of Dussel’s first inversion happened with the crowning of the emperor of the newly formed Holy Roman Germanic empire by the Pope, a scene that would seem absurd to the early messianic Christians. The second inversion takes place with the expansion of Christendom from a regional system to a world system, central to an incipient global geopolitics, having lasting implications to Latin America and other regions dubbed peripheral by the self-proclaimed center of a new world system. According to Dussel, this inversion marks a radical change in geopolitics that would relocate Europe (particularly Latino Europe) from its peripheral status to the center of global commerce and politics. If the first inversion was from Messianic Christianity to Christendom, the second one turned that Christendom into an imperial Christendom, now set to dominate oppressed colonies in the name of gospel of the Crucified one.

The Epistemological decolonization of Christianity requires the relocation of theological thinking moving its epicenter from imperial Christendom to the oppressed colonial subjectivity. While the insights of world Christianity scholars such as Lamin Sanneh²⁸ focus simply on the translatability of the Gospel, Dussel contrasts the creative transformation of Messianic Christianity in the first centuries incorporating elements of Greco-Roman cultures and creating a new culture to the contempt for the Indigenous cultures of the oppressed colonial subjects, forced to turn their back on their culture in the name of the universalization of Christendom. Dussel’s insights put the cultural transformations identified by world Christianity scholars, particularly in the formerly colonized world, in perspective, as he places the subjectivity and revitalization of Indigenous culture at the center of such transformations, as well as of emerging demands to rethink the utopia of modernity which has led to the oppression of the peoples of the colonial South.

Moreover, Dussel’s critique of modernity, like that of other Latin American decolonial thinkers, is external. In contrast to internal or Eurocentric critiques, it denounces its racist elements that permeate the subjectivity of Eurocentric thinkers and the claimed objectivity of their theories, relocating the loci of enunciation to the self-conscious postcolonial subject. Epistemic decolonization is important not only because it unmasks the racism hidden in the universalistic claims made by Eurocentric epistemologies, along with the distortion it causes, but also because it brings to the fore other knowledges and ways of knowing hitherto made invisible. Dussel identifies the Latino-Germanic Christendom as the spine of Eurocentrism. Therefore, the decolonization of Christian theology is central for the task of decolonization.

By opening this book with his chapter, the editors acknowledge the centrality of Enrique Dussel’s work in the roots of decolonial thinking. Through his prolific work, Dussel paved the way for the rise of Latin American decolonial theory. But more needs to be said about him. On top of being a philosopher—the founder of a Latin American philosophical school called liberation philosophy—and a renowned historian—a pioneer of a Latin American historiography that paved the way for non-Eurocentric narratives of the birth and development of a Latin American Christianity—Dussel’s work has undeniably had a major impact on the formation of Latin American liberation theology. Dussel was one of the key founders of CEHILA (Comisión para el Estudio de la Historia de las Iglesias en América Latina y el Caribe) in 1973 and an active member of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT), an organization that can be credited with enabling much of the theological exchange and cross-fertilization among Asian, African, and Latin American theologies in the past 40 years.²⁹ His work has been influential in the formation of theologians in Latin America and beyond for more than four decades. Yet, his contribution, particularly to the theoretical development associated with decolonial thinking, had not yet addressed specifically the significance of decolonizing Christianity and Christian theology. With this chapter, Dussel comes full circle as one of the most influential Latin American intellectuals of the last quarter of the twentieth century; someone who not only opened the doors for new ways of knowing and thinking, but who continues to point the way forward.

The second heading chapter, written by Princeton Emeritus Professor of History and Ecumenics Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, offers a historical-theological perspective on the background of the decolonial quest, speaking from the perspective of the Caribbean—Puerto Rican, more specifically—experience. In the case of the Caribbean—as it also happened elsewhere in Latin America—Christendom was at the center of the colonial discourse, since the conquest was pitched from its inception as being beneficial to the Christian cause. He highlights that on top of political subjugation and material appropriation, ideological justification is key for imperial dominion. In his words, colonial discourse mystifies imperial dominion, thus highlighting the importance of epistemic decolonization. Such demand helps us understand the centrality of theological discourses and biblical interpretation in the production of colonial hegemony. Consequently, Rivera-Pagán’s appeal to a rereading of the Christian Scripture from the perspective of those who were made subaltern in order to produce a liberating discourse that defies colonial hegemony becomes so important.

In the particular case of Puerto Rico, Rivera-Pagán’s own locus of enunciation, there is a double consciousness that stems from the dual colonial experience, first in the hands of Spain, and since 1898, in the hands of the United States—what has given Puerto Rico the epithet of a postcolonial colony. Coloniality in the Puerto Rican case, then, cannot be disassociated from the experiences of migration, diaspora, and exile, which Rivera-Pagán describes so vividly, reminding his readers that more than half of the Puerto Rican population live in the United States, and the Puerto Ricans’ awkward situation of being US citizens, although of a different category, which make them subaltern subjects. From that distinctive place of enunciation, Rivera-Pagán finds in the experience of migration and diaspora a commonality that marks most colonial peoples all over the world, highlighting the importance of these concepts to postcolonial studies in general, since diaspora not only entails dislocation and displacement but also a painful and complex process of forging new strategies to articulate cultural differences and identifications. On top of seeing in the diaspora a critical location for the production of postcolonial defiance, Rivera-Pagán brings attention to the diasporic ecumenicity, which impacts most urban centers in the world today. In other words, in the counter invasion of what he calls colonized barbarians, people who have heretofore been silenced are now reshaping and reconfiguring their own narratives, which in light of the proximity of other colonized and colonial narratives hybridize the language of the colonizers, producing new crossroads and dialectical encounters. This is the ecumenical dimension of migration and diaspora. Rivera-Pagán, among other things, enriches the conversation by bringing theological and diasporic voices to bear on postcolonial and cultural studies, where they have still been largely neglected.

The third text the contributors to this volume are asked to engage with is Sylvia Marcos’ Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Belief, originally published in 2009, in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Marcos’ contribution comes from another important perspective in decolonial studies, that of Indigenous women, with special attention to their spirituality. Marcos, an anthropologist who has studied feminist Indigenous movements particularly in Central America and Mexico, brings to the fore the agency of Indigenous women and their work producing an Indigenous spirituality which is in itself a decolonial turn. Such agency is double-edged, since, as she ably demonstrates in her chapter, they want both to preserve and transform their Indigenous culture. In this sense, she can speak of a modern Indigenous culture. At the heart of such a process is spirituality, which they consider the main axis of culture.

Despite the significance of these three head chapters, the core of the book is composed of 11 chapters by younger scholars from different parts of Latin America and the Latinx diaspora in the United States and Canada who critically and creatively engage the three head chapters, offering important contributions for the development of decolonial Christian approaches, which are inter- and transdisciplinary, blurring the strictness of disciplinary academic discourse, while interweaving different fields and disciplines, thus contributing to fresh insights in Christian theology and history, tuned to the praxis and faith of marginalized and often silenced peoples.

To help the reader navigate these responses, 10 of the 11 chapters that follow are divided into three sections. Part II of the book, called Indigenous Dreams, Indigenous Resistance, is made up of the four responses that engage the three focus essays in light of the experience of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Part III, Decolonial Politics and Theological Possibilities, gathers the next four responses, which present critiques, inversions, and subversions of coloniality and hegemonic theological knowledge, re-imagining theology as thinking otherwise. Part IV, Decolonial Ecclesiologies, is formed by two chapters that continue this exercise of theological re-imagination, now with a focus on re-imagining the church and its liturgies.

In her chapter, Mapping the Autochthonous Indigenous Church: Toward a Decolonial History of Christianity in las Américas, Jennifer Scheper Hughes reads Indigenous maps in the sixteenth century (Mexico) to identify and draw out the counter narratives that they yield regarding histories of Christianity—narratives that contradict the idea of spiritual conquest and place Indigenous communities and Indigenous agencies at the center of Latin American Christian origin. It is not possible to disengage, to sever, or uncouple the history of Latin American Christianity from the global imperial project, or from colonial violence, she warns, But neither can we juxtapose Christianity and indigeneity. Arguing that Christianity’s survival in Latin America can only be partly understood as the product of colonialism and imperialism, Jennifer Scheper Hughes shows that its proliferation was due to various Indigenous communities deciding that Christianity not only would survive, but should survive. In as much as Christianity was imposed upon the continent by force and coercion, she concludes, the adopted religion was also compelled to yield to indigenous preferences and ideas about the sacred.

Verónica A. Gutiérrez similarly challenges the dominant Eurocentric narrative about passive or fatalistic native peoples in her chapter, Indigenous Christianities: Faith, Resilience, and Resistance Among the Nahuas in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. By focusing on the Nahuas in sixteenth-century central Mexico, Gutiérrez shows that, far from being mere passive recipients of a colonizing religion, native peoples played a critical role in developing Indigenous forms of Christian faith and practice. She reminds readers that since the 1970s scholars have theorized about reciprocal models of evangelizations, namely, in the context of Gutiérrez’s study, a Nahuatilization of Christianity, rather than the static imposition of a foreign belief system. Thus, whether by pursuing various artistic ventures, planning extravagant celebrations, or embracing alternative methods of church leadership and theological pedagogy, native peoples displayed incredible resilience and resistance to the colonial enterprise. Christianity in Latin America was not a static imposition of Mediterranean Catholicism, Gutiérrez shows, but rather a collaborative enterprise resulting in a variety of indigenous Christianities.

In "Iglesia Autóctona : An Indigenous Response to Colonial Christianity," Michel Andraos examines how Indigenous communities in San Cristóbal de Las Casas engage in social, political, and ecclesial resistance to churches that reproduce coloniality in their ecclesial structures and theologies. The story of the iglesia autóctona , Andraos writes, is ultimately the story of the struggle of the Indigenous people in the church to transform the colonial ecclesial structures that have often justified and actively contributed to their dispossession, cultural genocide, and subjugation. Claiming that churches remain ignorant of the deep implications of their historical and continued role in the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples, Andraos insists on the importance of studying—and joining—movements such as those of the iglesias autóctonas. Not only do they represent today a deep hope and force for decolonization and transformation of our ecclesial communities, structures, and theologies, Andraos concludes, but they also open up decolonial spaces within the Church that help us imagine alternatives to the violent structures that have so often served as the main instrument[s] and force[s] of their colonization, and where coloniality is still pervasive today.

Néstor Medina, in his chapter, Indigenous Decolonial Movements in Abya Yala and Aztlán, Turtle Island: A Comparison, draws on reports from various reconciliation commissions and historical memory projects to show how the Mayan communities in Guatemala and the First Nations, Métis and Inuit, in Canada embody what Medina calls decolonial epistemological impetuses. In doing so, Medina invites readers to locate the decolonizing aspects already present in Latina/o theology. For Latina/o theologians, the goal has not been the creation of a grand-theoretical frame, he writes, but the careful articulation of the particular ways in which our communities live their faith in God. Ultimately, Medina asks what it would be like for Latina/o theology to direct its efforts toward embracing, enhancing, and developing more of these already existing decolonizing methodologies.

In his chapter, Decolonizing the Cosmo-Polis: Cosmopolitanism as a Re-humanizing Project, An Yountae takes a critical look at modern cosmopolitanism and the role played by imperial Christianity and neocolonialism in constructing a universal (and problematic) conception of the human. But although cosmopolitanism finds itself deeply entangled with liberal notions of property, progress, and freedom, An urges readers not to dismiss cosmopolitanism altogether. Rather, by following Frantz Fanon, we can begin to imagine cosmopolitanism in a decolonial way, as a rehumanizing project against the European ideal of universal humanity which is sustained only at the expense of dehumanization of others. According to An, then, the process of rethinking cosmopolitanism involves recognizing how Christianity has violently colluded with imperial and neocolonial agendas. Yet at its best, An adds, Christianity offers plenty of inspiration to decolonial movements, particularly in the form of eschatological visions—visions pointing not just to the end of empire but to the end of the colonial order as well.

Matilde Moros draws on the work of Marcella Althaus-Reid and Peter Wade to examine the decolonial roots—and possibilities—of Indecent Theology. In her chapter, "Inversion and Diasporas: Decolonizing Racialized Sexuality