Decolonizing
Your Faith

There is a version of Christianity I grew up in that I now recognize was not entirely Christianity.

It was Christianity wrapped in something else. Something older, something colonial, something that smelled of Victorian England more than first-century Palestine.

It took me years to separate the two.

I am still separating them.

"The gospel came to Africa in the hands of people who also came
to take things. We received the message and the messenger.
We must now learn to tell them apart."

What Came With the Gospel

The missionaries brought the Bible. They also brought the corset.

Not metaphorically — I mean they brought a theology that required African bodies to be covered, African rhythms to be stilled, African emotional expression to be contained. They brought a version of Christianity that had already absorbed centuries of European class structure, emotional restraint, and theological hierarchy.

And we received it.

We received it because the Spirit of God was genuinely in the gospel — the part about a God who loved us enough to come himself, to die in our place, to defeat death, to offer new life. That part was true.

But that wasn't all we received.

We also received the idea that our indigenous wisdom was automatically demonic. That drums in worship were suspect. That emotional expressiveness in prayer was undignified. That silence meant reverence and volume meant carnal excess. That the model Christian was a quiet, contained, English-adjacent worshipper.

We received a faith that required us to evacuate our culture to enter the Kingdom.

The Scripture They Used — and What It Actually Says

The theological justification for cultural suppression often came from verses about the old self, about leaving the past behind, about all things becoming new.

But look at Pentecost.

Acts 2:5-11 — the crowd heard the disciples speaking in their own languages. Not translated. Not standardized. Each person heard the gospel in their own tongue.

The Holy Spirit does not evacuate culture. He fills it.

He enters the specific, the particular, the located. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a God of named persons — not abstractions. He is not more comfortable in a building that looks like Canterbury Cathedral than in one that sounds like a village in Yorubaland.

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." — Galatians 3:28

This verse is not about cultural uniformity. It is about equal standing before God. It means none of these categories disqualify you. It does not mean all of these categories disappear.

What the African Church Got Right

Before we critique, let's name what African Christianity preserved — often better than the tradition that brought it.

Community as the primary unit of faith. Western evangelicalism has increasingly become individualistic — a private, personal relationship with a privatized God. African Christianity kept the communal instinct: ubuntu, "I am because we are." The idea that you cannot be healed alone, that witness requires a body of people, that praise is something you do together — this is closer to the New Testament than the solo devotional quiet time.

Embodied worship. The African Christian who dances during worship is not being carnal. David danced before the Lord with all his might (2 Samuel 6:14). The Psalms are full of instructions to shout, clap, leap, play instruments. The suppression of physical expression in worship was never biblical — it was cultural.

The directness of prayer. African prayer is often immediate, specific, loud, and believing. "God, you know where I am right now" — there is no hedging, no apologetic distance. This is closer to the persistence of the widow before the judge (Luke 18:1-8) than to the careful, measured intercession of a liturgical tradition that forgot it was speaking to someone who actually listens.

What We Must Return

But honesty requires naming what the African church also absorbed that needs to be given back.

The shame around emotional need.

The equation of suffering with faithfulness.

The silence around mental health, around grief, around the wounds that colonialism and its descendants left in the body.

As I've written about in why smart Christians struggle to feel their feelings, the theological framework for emotional suppression was not African in origin — it was imported. And it merged seamlessly with African cultural norms around resilience and endurance to create a faith tradition that has no language for interior wounds.

We must also return the theology that equated obedience to the church with obedience to God. The colonial church was, in many places, a tool of political control. The pastors were often answerable to the colonial government. Deference to authority was not just spiritual — it was structural. And that structure got baptized as holiness.

"The African church absorbed both the gospel and the oppressor's theology.
Our work now is to know which is which."

Decolonizing Is Not Discarding

I want to be careful here.

Decolonizing your faith does not mean abandoning Scripture. It does not mean embracing syncretism — merging Christianity with traditional religion in a way that loses the specificity of the gospel.

It means something more careful.

It means asking, for every practice and belief: Where did this come from? Is this from Scripture, read in its own context? Or is this from a cultural tradition that got attached to Scripture?

It means recovering African Christian history before colonialism — because there is one. Ethiopia had Christianity before England. North Africa gave the church Augustine, Athanasius, Tertullian, Origen. The Egyptian Coptic Church has been worshipping without interruption since the first century.

African Christianity did not begin with a missionary. We were in Acts 2. We were at Pentecost.

What Reclaiming Looks Like

For me, decolonizing my faith has meant several slow, ongoing movements:

• Reading Scripture through eyes that aren't automatically Western — asking what these texts meant to people in the ancient Near East, which often has more cultural resonance with Africa than with Europe.
• Recovering the communal understanding of healing and faith. You are not meant to work through your wounds alone. Confession to a trusted community is biblical, African, and healing.
• Allowing African philosophical frameworks like ubuntu to illuminate theological truths rather than treating them as threats. "I am because we are" is not pagan — it's a description of the Trinity in the language of relationship.
• Refusing the false choice between being African and being Christian. The incarnation means God entered the specific — a Jewish man, in first-century Palestine, in a particular family. He takes the specific seriously. He does not require cultural evacuation.

And perhaps most personally: allowing myself to bring all of what I am — including the parts that my tradition taught me to be suspicious of — into the presence of the God who made me.

The grief. The anger. The complexity. The things I cannot yet reconcile.

A God who is not threatened by my full self is more trustworthy than a God who only accepts the sanitized version.

"Christ does not require you to become Western to follow him.
He asks only that you follow him — all of you, as you are,
into the wholeness he intends."