A street preacher in Nigeria with musical accompaniment. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Ebenezer Obadare’s Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria vigorously pushes the boundary of the political-theological predicament—the problem of how to figure out and configure the relationship between ecclesia and imperium, or the secular and the sacred—that troubles most societies grappling with the resurgence of the religious and its complicated relationship with the political. The new book, the second installment in a promised trilogy that started with the Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (2018), opens up large theoretical vistas in the relationship between Pentecostalism, secularity, and postsecularism in postcolonial Nigeria. It presses Pentecostal studies into deeper reflection on the role God is supposed to play in world-making, and how that could shape the political future of the postcolonial Nigerian state.
Apart from its deep exploration of the political-theological predicament (which I will explore in this piece), Obadare plunges into the highly sensitive realm of the erotic and eroticism in the relationship between the Pentecostal pastor and gender dynamics. The relationship between religion and gender has remained an ever-contentious one, especially given the patriarchal orientation of pastoral power that defines Pentecostalism. However, projecting the pastor as “a masculine object of erotic fascination able to generate sexual frisson in his female congregants” (xix) not only opens up a dimension of the Pentecostalism-gender discourse that goes beyond the usual masculinist and sexual readings of Pentecostal pastors, it will also outline a discourse that will reel in African feminists and womanists.
Obadare’s book presses Pentecostal studies into deeper reflection on the role God is supposed to play in world-making, and how that could shape the political future of the postcolonial Nigerian state.
Specifically, Pastor Power, Clerical State makes a bold statement that interjects in the powerful contributions to Pentecostal studies, especially by the duo of Ruth Marshall and Nimi Wariboko. Yet Obadare differs from these two in his ability to take the political-theological predicament of the Nigerian state seriously; he combines personal observation, ethnography, and incisive analysis of the political significance, charismatic power, and social relevance of the Pentecostal pastor within Nigeria’s postcolonial milieu. Between them, Marshall and Wariboko expounded on specific issues and how they impinge on Pentecostal political dynamics. Wariboko’s Nigerian Pentecostalism (2014) takes seriously the ideas of epistemology, spirituality, and community as means of political engagement within the Nigerian state. Pentecostal spirituality, for him, is founded on the conviction that spiritual information can be mined to aid the search for meaning by the Pentecostal believers. And it is that epistemological quest that conditions the relationship between the Pentecostals and the Nigerian state. In Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (2009), Marshall also articulates Pentecostalism as a project of rebirth that positions itself in oppositional engagement with the corrupt Nigerian state against which a new mode of government must emerge.
My own research into African Pentecostal political philosophy attempts to excavate the specific African inflection of the politico-theological predicament, especially within the context of postcoloniality. In my reading of Marshall and Wariboko, and in reaction to their arguments, I make the case for what I call the “theology of complicity” that implicates both the Pentecostal ecclesiastical order and the political class in the socioeconomic conditions and predicaments of the postcolonial Nigerian state. I argue specifically that “African Pentecostalism can only be understood as a practice mediated by its leadership and by pastoral power. The leadership’s mediation of political exchanges requires a theology of complicity and duplicity, deriving from the state–society relationship, which determines the Pentecostals’ mode of reacting to political events and dynamics” (224). And this, I further contend, is a justifiable reason for why the vision of a Pentecostal political order—arising from Pentecostalism’s this-worldly political program that seeks to displace the corrupt postcolonial state—is unrealizable. At best, Pentecostalism is possible as politeia; only a certain way of reacting in the political space (237).
Pastoral Power, Clerical State deepens this argument, especially in reading the Pentecostal pastor as a “political entrepreneur”—“someone who reinforces his authority within the religious domain by projecting the same within the political domain—and vice versa” (61). However, it is more bullish in its articulation of the relationship between religion and the state in Nigeria. But while my arguments, as well as Marshall’s, Wariboko’s, and those of many other scholars already participate in Pentecostalism’s inflection of the politico-theological predicament of the Nigerian state, Obadare’s Pastoral Power, Clerical State bluntly overrides my hesitation in conceiving the possibility of a Pentecostal political order. He makes a distinct and provocative contribution to the unraveling of the politico-theological predicament by dubbing Nigeria a “clerical state”—specifically, a Pentecostal republic.
This, all by itself, raises red flags and queries around Nigeria’s hazy secularity. It is hazy because the Nigerian Constitution does not clearly position the Nigerian state as a secular one in ways that distinctly make the secularity discourse, and Pentecostalism’s interjection, clear-cut. And yet, Obadare overrides that haziness by declaring the Nigerian state a clerical one: that argument pushes the Pentecostal-politics conversation in Nigeria along a path that provokes deeper reflections around the depth of Pentecostalism’s influence in shaping postcolonial Nigerian society. In this regard, Obadare forces on Pentecostal studies the question of whether Nigeria is a postsecular state, or Pentecostalism is instigating an awareness of the urgency of secularism. More precisely: can Nigeria be postsecular before it is secular, given Pentecostalism’s attempt at enforcing a postcolonial City of God?
Obadare makes a distinct and provocative contribution to the unraveling of the politico-theological predicament by dubbing Nigeria a ‘clerical state’—specifically, a Pentecostal republic.
The argument for positioning Nigeria as a clerical state is quite brilliant in its simplicity: Pentecostal pastors have stepped into the breach created by the abdication of social responsibility to the Nigerian state by her intellectual class. In his words: “The contemporary Pentecostal pastor is the ultimate beneficiary of the epistemic chasm created by the ideological bereavement of the Nigerian intelligentsia, paralleling the way in which religious forces (Pentecostalism in the Nigerian case) have profited from the collapse of what Mary Kaldor refers to as ‘emancipatory ideologies’” (46).
The argument has two related dimensions—the intelligentsia’s loss of prestige and authority, and the Pentecostal pastor’s emergence as a spiritual and political entrepreneur, with an erotic masculinity to boot! The words that Obadare uses in pushing this position—“surrender,” “delegitimizing,” “transfer of prestige and authority,” “evacuation,” etc.—are too charged and presumptive and thus overlook the continued presence and relevance of the intelligentsia on the Nigerian sociopolitical and cultural scenes. One gets the sense that Obadare overstates not only his arguments about the influence of the Pentecostal pastors but also the vitiation of the intellectual class. He writes, for instance, that given the ascendancy of the pastors, the professor desires to become a pastor “to overcome his comparative social anonymity” (xvii)! The pastoral profession has become so glamorous and fundamental that it has become the number one choice for the unemployed. These are very difficult claims to justify. This is essentially because pastoral power is facing a massive challenge facilitated by a value reorientation, mostly fueled by the celebrity- and crime-induced belief that one can make worldly progress by just being smart (in a negative sense) and artistically creative, rather than being spiritual or hard working. It is thus difficult to see how such an increasingly abnormative context reinscribes pastoral power. Abnormativity pushes the logic of amorality consistently in the negative and immoral direction. If this is correct, then it turns on its head the argument that “it is when this desire for a ‘Me’ does not find an outlet in pastoring that we see the desperation to be ‘worth something’ spill over into an assortment of pyramidal ventures: ‘419,’ ‘Yahoo Yahoo,’ ‘MMM,’ and other get-rich-quick schemes” (53). Nigerians dabble in dubious endeavors for so many reasons. I wonder how the failure to become a pastor leads straight to crime! In essence, the devitalization of the Nigerian intelligentsia does not translate into its decapitation.
The issue gets yet more complicated. This is because Obadare’s “impatient anti-clericalism” (5, emphasis added) situates pastoral authority within the “popular economy” in a way that smoothes over its cogent relevance. For him, the waning of the intelligentsia and the weakening of the public space accentuates the “generalized metaphysical bafflement that is the foundation of clerical authority” (47–48). To read Pentecostalism solely in terms of a metaphysical bafflement misses its significance as a cogent re-enchantment of the world; a reading critical to postsecularism. With Pentecostalism, the sacred, to quote Jean Comaroff, “defies the telos of disenchantment” beloved not only by modernization theorists but also all anticlerical scholars (61). Postsecularism reintroduces God back into the process of world-making as a fundamental critique of the modernist project, and this is even more fundamental within the context of the postcolonial societies and their myriad predicaments. Essentially, the existential meaninglessness that lies at the core of postcolonial subjectivity cannot be answered by the modernist project, in the same way, according to Jurgen Habermas, that the internal solidarity of liberal societies cannot be sustained solely on postmetaphysical and nonreligious foundations. Obadare’s impatient anticlericalism prevents a nuanced understanding of how the secular and the sacred implicate each other in the Nigerian postcolony. The postsecular is a critical challenge to secularism’s self-understanding arising from its internal contradictions. The secularist understanding of the world and of religion fails significantly to mediate between the perfectibility and pervertibility of religion; Obadare focuses solely on the latter in a state that is barely secular.
By so doing, his impatient anticlericalism impudently overlooks the possibility of what Nimi Wariboko calls the Pentecostal principle as a framework of new and enchanting beginnings that enable the rethinking of the human future. Pentecostalism represents, for Wariboko, “the capacity of social existence to begin something new” (viii). This understanding of Pentecostalism—as a playful theological framework—opens an alternate interpretation that Obadare’s instrumentalized or zero-sum analysis in Pastoral Power, Clerical State precludes. As a postsecular source of new beginnings, Pentecostalism presents significant potential within the context of reconstructing Nigerian society as (post)secular; a critical attempt to rethink Nigeria with God at the core of postcolonial world-making. What does it imply to rethink he Nigerian society within the rubric of a postsecularity that takes God and the perfectibility of Pentecostalism seriously? Pastoral Power, Clerical State dismisses such a possibility too soon.
Obadare’s impatient anticlericalism prevents a nuanced understanding of how the secular and the sacred implicate each other in the Nigerian postcolony.
The simple lesson here for research in Pentecostalism and Pentecostal studies is not to take Pentecostalism as an undifferentiated monolith, nor to take the heterogeneity of pastoral power for granted. There are so many dimensions to Pentecostalism and even the spiritual influence of the Pentecostal pastor, that defy a one-off negative summation. Pentecostal spirituality can help orient a (post)secular if the perfectibility of religion is factored into the reconstruction of the postcolonial society. But then, the pastors must be properly situated within the Nigerian political and socioeconomic context. Within what we can designate as the space of influence in Nigeria, I doubt that even the pastors achieve the same level of significance that celebrities and criminals now command. Burna Boy, the Afro-pop celebrity, has as much capacity to generate sociocultural and political influence as Pastor Enoch Adeboye. I would populate that space with celebrities, pastors, and the intelligentsia, without inflating the ascendancy of the pastors.
A candid shot of Pastor Jerry Eze during a live service. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Nigeria’s acclaimed novelist Chinua Achebe once asserted that the trouble with Nigeria was leadership and nothing more. Over the years, his definitive thesis on the Nigerian condition has been recalled multiple times to understand the challenges that impede social progress. Achebe focused on the political class and perhaps did not fully envisage how the crisis of leadership he described forty years ago would severely indict the intelligentsia he himself represented. The modern Nigerian state he diagnosed has since gone through several phases and wrestled with leadership failure at every point. Having thus been serially let down, its beleaguered citizens have learned to look everywhere else for meaningful administration that will guarantee moral renewal and eventual social transformations. Their wild search for leadership that will combine moral legitimacy with both intelligence and managerial perspicacity would settle on the unlikely figure of the contemporary Pentecostal pastor.
This clergy figure, as sociologist Ebenezer Obadare describes in his latest book Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality, is probably the most dynamic in contemporary Nigeria. Typically male, he is a combination of a rock star, social (media) influencer, political analyst and lobbyist, artiste, motivational speaker, sex therapist, counselor, entrepreneur, social critic, and of course, clergyman. This composite functionality allows him to perform the roles that society traditionally ascribes to its thought leaders. At first glance, the clergymen-as-intellectual type does not appear to be a historically unique phenomenon. Western history is replete with examples of clergymen who advanced social and political transformations through the power of ideas (think Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement). The Pentecostal clergy cannot be said to fulfill similar progressive roles as King or other previous clergy leaders but is still no less influential. The social significance of the Pentecostal pastor lies in his ability to astutely translate the mythical components of religion into idioms and practices that not only divine the condition of the Nigerian person but also suggest redress and reforms.
The Pentecostal pastor is closest to what contemporary Nigeria has in place of an intellectual—that quintessential man of learning who generates the idea that transforms society. Yet, that usurpation fails to translate into human flourishing within the clerical state. Written in the delightful prose Obadare is well-known for, Pastoral Power, Clerical State masterfully dissects the historical and political shuffles that have enabled the pastor to slide into the position previously occupied by the intellectual. In Obadare’s chronicle of the fall from grace of the Nigerian intellectual class, he perceptively locates the moments where their stars began to dim in the socio-political firmament. He does not blame any party but describes how the military government that ruled Nigeria at several junctures slyly coopted the intelligentsia and corrupted them with money and power. Having exposed these elites as self-serving and even opportunistic, the military state proceeded to discard them. Their use and abuse culminated in the ongoing crisis of the academy in today’s Nigeria; neither the intellectuals nor the ivory towers they metonymize have recovered.
The social significance of the Pentecostal pastor lies in his ability to astutely translate the mythical components of religion into idioms and practices that not only divine the condition of the Nigerian person but also suggest redress and reforms.
Pentecostal pastors did not cheaply step into the vacuum created by the diminished intelligentsia. Some of them, especially the most influential, had university training, professional degrees, and even obtained the highest academic degree. Thus, their concurrent identities as pastors and thought leaders, “Men of God” and “Men of Letters,” confers them with charismatic and “rational” authority. This means that when the intellectuals within and surrounding the university system became impotent, the pastors could not only logically supplant them, but they also added an air of religious mystique to their positions. Attaining such status was not merely given; it was also contrived to accrue through various means: pastors’ claims to a divine calling and endorsement by transcendental authority, their drawing on an immanent source of power, manipulative uses of prophecies and prayer, theatrical skills and spectacular displays, and the right dosages of sexual appeal. All of these allowed them to dominate the socio-political sphere.
This clerical authority, Obadare also shows, exists as an alternative that threatens to override the political sphere and its actors. While its existence sparks some tension with the state, both sides also work in tandem. Much of what results between the church and the state is a calibrated balance of mutual benefits. The pastor grants the politician spiritual enablement and moral legitimacy by generating ideas that pacify a restless society. The politician reciprocatively boosts the pastor by using the instruments of political power to give his spiritual power the necessary political efficacy. Despite all the influence Obadare ascribes to Pentecostal clergy, pastors do not—because they cannot—claim commensurability with political agents at the highest echelons of power. They rely—perhaps overly—on the political instruments extended in their direction by the secular authority for them to execute formidable spiritual power. This contingency means that their power lies more in the realm of influence. It is the close relationship with those who wield the actual instruments of political power that enables them to manifest their claims to spiritual power. This puts the pastors in competition with other social and political actors similarly struggling for a more potent power that outpaces the fragility of their existing ones.
Since the book is thus an account of one of the many in the series of constant reshuffle and power “takeovers” in Nigeria, one also sees the fragility of the clerical authority of the Pentecostal pastor. The near miraculous rise of the clergymen’s fortunes also precipitates their eventual fall. Obadare’s study is situated within broader studies that have noted an ongoing global crisis of authority and diminishment of the expert. While his focus in the book is mainly on the diminishment of those who embody rational and scientific knowledge, how long before the global phenomenon of “common” people standing up to expert authority reaches the pastoral figure who claims spiritual expertise? In these cycles of boom and bust of political fortunes in Nigeria, what would the fall of clerical power look like and what else would come after it?
Obadare’s portrayal of clerical power as so immense, and merely short-circuited on a few occasions by women who allege various sexual infractions against the pastors, runs against other realities of late modernity. Neoliberalism and its enticing promises of rewards through digital capitalism have further democratized both charisma and religious authority. With the various devices of media communication at their behest, otherwise ordinary folks now feign charisma using the same tactics as these powerful pastors too once did in order to challenge their authority. Social (media) influencers and entrepreneurs of opinions who either have genuine concerns about these pastors’ conduct or are mere clout seekers routinely stimulate public conversations against the pastoral class. Largely unable to control these public discourses, the average Nigerian pastor remains haunted by the newfound and heady power wielded by the disaffected and disenfranchised mob that uses social media as its pulpit, and whose “speaking truth to power” chips away at their legitimacy. A notable example is the case of Ifedayo Olarinde, the radio host who started a campaign against tithes in churches on social media and rattled the Pentecostal establishment.
Pastoral Power, Clerical State is the second in a series of works where Obadare has tracked Nigeria’s political and social culture. The earlier book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria, similarly gave shape to the Pentecostal specter that haunts the country’s 4th republic. His analysis was so insightful that Pentecostal Republic became the oracle that sociologists, political scientists, and media analysts consult to understand the intricate ways religion unsettles Nigerian politics. Obadare’s insightful analysis outlines how new rulerships emerge in Africa’s yet unstable democracies while highlighting the nature of politics, power, legitimacy, and the evolution of democracy. Pentecostal pastors’ amassment of influence (which sometimes transcends national boundaries) has also allowed them to overtake traditional civic space actors. The ensuing crisis Obadare describes also sheds some light on other factors in the polity—the bitter disappointments of democratic governance for people who fought for civil rule, their further search for power and transformative knowledge, and how Pentecostalism came to fulfill the yearning for moral renewal in the aftermath of an autocratic order.
Abimbola A. Adelakun, Assistant Professor in the Department of African/African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, researches spirituality and performance in Africa. She obtained a PhD from the department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, along with a doctoral portfolio and Master’s degree from African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic articles have been published with The Drama Review and Journal of World Christianity. She is the author of Performing Power in Nigeria: Politics, Identity, and Pentecostalism(Cambridge, 2021) and Powerful Devices: The Politics and Praxis of Spiritual Warfare(Rutgers, 2022). She writes a weekly column for PUNCH Newspapers, Nigeria’s most widely-read newspaper.
In Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria, Ebenezer Obadare asks a seemingly simple question: “How is it that in contemporary Nigeria (and indeed in many other African countries where Pentecostal Christianity exercises an outsize influence) the pastor has come to occupy such a central place in the social imaginary, to such an extent that medical and other forms of professional judgment must defer to him?” (3). What this ostensibly straightforward question opens up, however, is a complex socio-historical phenomenon that reveals much about the changing nature of authority and power in post-colonial Nigeria and in other similar contexts where Pentecostalism is on the rise.
In the early days of post-independence Nigeria, Obadare contends, authority was more often wielded by intellectuals, whom Obadare refers to as the “Man of Letters” (as opposed to the Pentecostal “Man of God”). The gendering of the intellectual and pastor in this case is intentional, as in the Nigerian context the shift from one form of authority in social and political space to another is merely a shifting of patriarchal power to a different realm. Obadare’s contention is that the shift in authority is explained by the vacuum opened up by the failures of the state (and the intellectuals who supported it) to manage economic turmoil and everyday government functionality. This failure, due in no small part to problems inherited from colonial rule, has made space into which the Pentecostal pastor, with his charismatic authority, has been able to enter. This pastor does not “run” the state, as Obadare makes clear, but in his social, political, and erotic power he is able to wield authority and influence the people and by extension the government.
Obadare is also unabashed in his criticism of this model of authority. While he understands the historical and political conditions that have given rise to it, he worries about the undemocratic ends to which such power can be put. Pentecostal pastors practice a “rule by prodigy” wherein they claim to have special access to truths from the divine concerning social, political, and economic matters. Such rule by prodigy short circuits the need for democratic debate and reform and opens up the path to authoritarianism.
The contributors to this symposium take up both the normative and descriptive claims that make up Obadare’s text. Abimola A. Adelakun asks to what degree the pastor’s authority is now under threat from the forces of the digital age. Pundits, social media influences, and others have begun to question the authority of the Pentecostal pastor, thus raising the question of whether the “Man of God” might go the same way of the “Man of Letters” in the recent past that Obadare documents. Adeshina Afolayan also wonders if Obadare has overstated the influence of the Pentecostal pastor. In conversation with other scholars of Pentecostalism in Africa like Ruth Marshall and Nimi Wariboko, she argues that Obadare’s anti-clericalism leads him to this overstatement and also leads him to ignore the potential positive impact that Pentecostalism might have on Nigerian society. By ignoring such potentialities, Afolayan argues that Obadare’s book betrays a secular bias that underestimates the potential constructive aspects of religion.
Where Adelakun and Afolayan worry that the pastor’s influence has been overstated, Adriaan Van Klinken conversely worries that the continued relevance of the intelligentsia has been understated in Obadare’s portrait. Drawing on literary critiques of the pastor in Nigerian culture, Van Klinken contends that there are deep roots in African literature for critiquing the role of Christianity in politics and society. While not contending that literary figures are likely to overtake the pastor anytime soon in terms of popularity, Van Klinken reminds us that they continue to act as a “thorn in the side” of the pastor and wider movement that he represents. Karen Lauterbach also wonders to what degree we find remnants of the intellectual still present in African societies today. But rather than see the “Man of Letters” as a form distinct from the “Man of God,” she sees them as partaking in similar literary techniques and drawing on similar traditions, albeit towards different ends. For her, this raises wider questions about how spiritual and earthly authorities interact with seemingly secular liberal democratic structures.
What Obadare’s book and the contributors to this symposium encourage us to reflect on is how authority is maintained, challenged, and revoked in the modern world, and especially in postcolonial settings.
Finally, Devaka Premawardhana poses two concerns for Obadare: first, he asks if the fall from prominence of the “Man of Letters” can be causally linked to the rise of the Pentecostal pastor, and second, he wonders if Obadare places too much of the blame on Pentecostal pastors for the socio-political issues facing Nigerians today. Still, Premawardhana finds in Obadare’s work a potential spark that might ignite resistance among those who find the dogmatism linked to the “Man of God” to be problematic. In his response to all the contributors, Obadare takes up the theme of anti-anti-intellectualism as the normative impulse behind the book.
What Obadare’s book and the contributors to this symposium encourage us to reflect on is how authority is maintained, challenged, and revoked in the modern world, and especially in postcolonial settings. This has been a key question of the authority, community, and identity (ACI) research group of Contending Modernities, of which Obadare is a member, and of which this book is a product. This requires that we attend to those who wield both political and spiritual power and that we continue to challenge the idea that such forms of authority have been separated in the era of the liberal nation-state. Indeed, as Obadare demonstrates, regardless of whether we believe the pastor’s claim that his prophetic power is divinely bestowed, the effects of this claim on the socio-political realm will be real, and we ignore them at our own peril.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
This Carmelite sisterhood facility was built around the discovery of an old tablet bearing the traditional ‘Pater Noster’ (‘Our Father’) prayer, in the vicinity of a tomb of a woman ascribed to various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy women. Here is a display of translations of the prayer in Latin, Arabic, and Armenian forms. Via Wikimedia Commons.
I would like to start by thanking all the contributors for their important essays, valuable insights, and scholarly feedback. In this response, I will focus on three areas: claiming agency, exploring colonial tools, and understanding transnational communities, that were picked up bymyfourcolleagues.
Claiming agency
This book is part of several edited volumes of mine which focus on the Christians of the Middle East. All of these volumes tackle numerous aspects of the history, life, and witness of the Christians in our region. Over half of the contributors to them are Middle Eastern scholars of religion, theology, history, and sociology. The main goal of these publications is to raise awareness of the situation of the Christians in the Middle East to a North American and European audience and to provide a platform for Indigenous Christians to tell their stories in their own words. For too long, North American and European scholars have been telling the story of the Christians of the Middle East. Many of them have produced genuine and valuable research that is important. Others, however, have instrumentalized Middle Eastern Christians for their own political ends or conservative religious agendas.
Over the course of the last two centuries, several tools have been developed by European and American scholars that have allowed them to use Middle Eastern Christians to further their colonial interests. One of these is the tool of sectarianianism, which looks at the Middle Eastern region as a conglomerate of religious sects. A topical, historical example of this is the British conceptualization of Jerusalem as a city of four sectarian quarters: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Armenian. This conceptualization took place even though each quarter was housing Palestinians with diverse faiths. The French similarly divided Syrian territory along sectarian lines between Sunni, Alawite, and Druze.
Another tool that was developed in the aftermath of World War I was the concept of minorities in the region. The influence of Christians and other prominent communities was minimized, giving colonial powers an excuse to interfere in the internal policies of the newly “independent” Middle Eastern states.
The latest tool is known as FoRB, “Freedom of Religion or Belief,” a mandate and special focus of the UN. There is genuine concern among many Christians in the Middle East that FoRB will be weaponized as a platform for populism, religious nationalism and colonial interventions, resulting in more violent religious conflicts. Many evangelical organizations are using FoRB as a tool to pressure Muslim countries to allow for Christian missions under Muslims. The more Christian martyrs there are, the better it is for their fundraising efforts in conservative circles. Although FoRB is an important and legitimate right, the narrative ignores many of the region’s other hard-fought victories for human rights. It is imperative to see freedom from within a holistic perspective. It is also crucial to recognize that there have been long struggles for freedom in the Middle East, which include confronting colonialism, occupation, socio-economic marginalization, authoritarianism, and patriarchy.
Understanding Transnational Communities
For the last hundred years, the Middle East has been suffering under European colonialism, Israeli settler colonialism, regional conflicts, militarization, and exploitation. Such difficulties have resulted in civil wars, underdevelopment, and displacement in the region. In this context, many Middle Eastern Christians—especially Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi—have chosen to emigrate, establishing diasporic and transnational communities. Drawing on identity politics rhetoric (Assyrian, Egyptian, Phoenicians versus Arab Muslim), some of those diasporic Christian communities of Iraqi, Egyptian, and Lebanese origin have utilized the discourse of religious persecution in defense of their religious siblings at home. Though their advocacy for their native communities is understandable, it has often proved to be counterproductive as it borrows a sectarian framework. This narrative widens the gap between the Muslims and Christians in the region and subtly calls for foreign political intervention.
There is genuine concern among many Christians in the Middle East that “Freedom of Religious Belief” will be weaponized as a platform for populism, religious nationalism, and colonial interventions, resulting in more violent religious conflicts.
The only hope for Christians in the Middle East is genuine engagement with their communities to build a society that places less emphasis on religion and more emphasis on creating civic space; making diversity an intrinsic value in the region; and reimagining interfaith relations and de-emphasizing identity politics. The region is in dire need for justice, peace, and stability. Without such a political framework, all segments of the Middle Eastern societies, including the Christians, will continue to suffer, migrate, and lose heart. Yet, in all these contexts, the Christians of the Middle East have proved over and over again to be resilient. They “are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair… struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4: 8-9).
Founder and President of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem. Dr. Raheb is a co-founder of Bright Stars of Bethlehem, a not-for-profit 501c3 in the USA. The most widely published Palestinian theologian to date, Dr. Raheb is the author and editor of 40 books including: The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire(Baylor, 2021) The Cross in Contexts: Suffering and Redemption in Palestine (w/Suzanne Watts Henderson, Orbis, 2017); Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes; I am a Palestinian Christian(Orbis, 2014); Bethlehem Besieged (Broadleaf, 2004) . His books and numerous articles have been translated so far into eleven languages. Rev. Raheb served as the senior pastor of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem from June 1987 to May 2017 and as the President of the Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land from 2011–2016. Dr. Raheb was elected in 2018 to the Palestinian National Council and to the Palestinian Central Council. A social entrepreneur, Rev. Raheb has founded several NGO‟s including the Christian Academic Forum for Citizenship in the Arab World (CAFCAW). He is a founding and board member of the National Library of Palestine and a founding member and author of Kairos Palestine.
Walking up to the large crucifix over alQosh, Iraq. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of Christian persecution have exerted a gravitational pull on western writings on Middle Eastern Christianity. Whether in the vulgar idiom of the commonplace ahistorical narratives of the persecution of a beleaguered Christian minority at the hands of an undifferentiated Muslim majority, or in more subtle renditions, western narrations of Middle Eastern Christianity often invoke persecution as a quasi-defining category. Departing from this implied orthodoxy, Mitri Raheb’s The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire promises and delivers “an alternative interpretation of the history of Middle Eastern Christianity” (3).
Central to Raheb’s erudite study is his demonstration that this persecution discourse is “a Western construct that says more about the West than about the Christians of the Middle East” (143). As the author explains, “Intra-European national rivalries and competition in religious mission… planted the seeds for sectarian identities that were not previously known in such a form or intensity” (31). The ensuing “culture of sectarianism” precipitated the disintegration of the very social fabric of the Middle East and in turn, served as the hotbed for the successive catastrophic events that beset Middle Eastern Christians—which the author discusses in detail throughout the book. As Raheb concludes,
Over and over again, Middle Eastern Christians were sacrificed at the altar of Western national interests. This was the case with Britain and the Assyrians in Iraq; with Germany in the Armenian Genocide; with Britain in Palestine; and with the United States in Iraq and Syria. In most cases, the West was part of the problem for Middle Eastern Christianity and not part of the solution (150).
Not only does the persecution discourse lack the tools necessary to scrutinize the roots of the problem—the very subject it sets out to elucidate—but it also doggedly effaces western complicity in the Middle Eastern Christian predicament.
Raheb, however, does more than offer a careful anatomy of the sectarian ails of Middle Eastern society and their origins. It is said, in theological parlance, that naming the sin is a theological achievement—one, as Stanley Hauerwas indicates, that is “made possible by being part of a people who are pledged to love one another even if it requires telling one another the truth.” By reorienting our vision from facile, ill-founded, and misleading Muslim-Christian “battling to the end” narratives, the author invites his audience to name the sin necessary to metanoia, the fundamental transformation necessary for intra- and inter-communal reconciliation. At its heart, The Politics of Persecution is a book about hope—the hope for reconciling the brokenness of the Middle Eastern bodies torn apart by the violent culture of sectarianism, which as Raheb demonstrates, is planted and cultivated by imperial interests, and cloaked by the persecution discourse.
In his highly acclaimed Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi conjures up the unspeakable horrors of war-torn Iraq in the figure of Frankenstein’s monster, who is “made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes” (152). Set on a relentless quest to avenge the deaths and mutilations of his former body parts’ owners, the monster personifies the desperate cry for justice amid ineffable injustice. Saadawi’s macabre and brutal surreal presentation of the broken bodies sewn together to produce this avenging monstrous mishmash is an apt manifestation of a dismembered body politic that was plagued with senseless violence. Refusing to succumb to the foredoomed fate of this Baghdadi monster, Raheb’s alternative prophetic interruption is a call for repentance and reconciliation.
In many ways, Raheb’s discernible offering of hope evokes that of Emmanuel Katongole in his Mirror to the Church, in which the author reflects on the theological implications of the Rwandan genocide:
I want to suggest that the crisis of Western Christianity is reflected back to the church in the broken bodies of Rwanda. Western Christians cannot look into this mirror without coming face-to-face with betrayal, idolatry, and death. Indeed, I want to say the only hope for our world after Rwanda’s genocide is a new kind of Christian identity for the global body of Christ. (13)
Throughout the different chapters of his study, Raheb similarly suggests that the crisis of Western and Eastern Christianity is reflected back to the church in the broken bodies of Middle Eastern Christians. Like Mirror to the Church, The Politics of Persecution supplants the stories that perpetuate brokenness and ultimately genocide with healing ones. Interrogating and destabilizing the persecution discourse is an indispensable step in this process.
Two young Assyrians sit next to the fence of a huge statue of the Holy Virgin Mary. They fled with their families from Islamic State-held Mosul to Koysinjaq, Iraqi Kurdistan. Via Flikr User Christiaan Triebert.
Raheb’s reconciliatory and hopeful vision permeates even the darkest episodes in the book. Indeed, the different chapters lead the reader on a journey that explores different historic events through the eyes of a motley crew of Middle Eastern Christian actors, from Asʿad Shidyaq, one of the first Arabic-speaking converts to Protestantism and the first Arab Protestant martyr (25-27), to agents of Arab and ecclesiastical revival such as Yacoub Sarrouf, Jurji Zeidan (50), Negib Azoury (66), and Bishop George Khodr (80)—all the way to the contemporary Christian Academic Forum for Citizenship in the Arab World (Chapter 12). The author’s presentation of Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883), the towering Arab Christian intellectual, and the first Middle Eastern Christian voice encountered in the study, is a powerful case in point. Hailing from present-day Lebanon, Bustani was an ardent proponent of the Arab Renaissance (al-Nahda) and played a key role in translating the Bible into Arabic (the very translation that many Arabic-speaking Christians still use to this day). In response to the massacre of Christians on Mount Lebanon, Bustani founded al-Madrasa al-Wataniya (the National School) “where in an ecumenical spirit, Christians, Druze, and Muslims could study together”—an experiment that, as Raheb notes, “must be understood as a critique of the many missionary schools that Bustani came to know and sometimes teach in” (45). Bustani’s experiment thus serves “as an antidote to confessional fanaticism, and thus to sectarianism” (44): the very sectarianism that fueled the massacre. Interwoven throughout the study, the different testimonies of these diverse Arab Christian figures converge on their unremitting attempt to achieve peaceful and harmonious living with their compatriots, regardless of their communal belonging.
The stark contradiction can hardly be missed: whereas colonial interests and narratives continue to fuel sectarianism and to perpetuate the discourse of Christian persecution, the stories of Middle Eastern Christian resistance and resilience offer powerful counternarratives of healing and reconciliation. By centering Middle Eastern Christian voices throughout the study, Raheb potently deploys a decolonial reframing and re-envisioning of interfaith relations in the region. Narrated through their eyes, the story of Middle Eastern Christians is not so much one of persecution but of “struggle, resistance, social involvement, and resilience” (156).
Not only does The Politics of Persecution present a much-needed decolonial interruption, but it also affirms the necessity of repentance and reconciliation in ensuring a peaceful and just future: it is an offering of hope grounded in the lived experience of Middle Eastern Christians. After all, as Raheb establishes throughout his investigation, the story of Middle Eastern Christians is the story of the Middle East.
Mourad Takawi (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. He has published works on Qurʾānic interpretation, early Christian Arabic literature, Coptic Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century, and Christian-Muslim relations. Currently, he is co-editing the second volume of Medieval Encounters: Arabic-Speaking Christians and Islam. His current book project is titled The Qurʾān as a Classic: The Interreligious Context of Qurʾān Interpretation.
Image by Giovani Racca, taken in Seville, Spain, 2015. Flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Religious studies scholars have traced the history of their field (for instance, see Randall Styers’s chapter “Religious Studies, Past and Present”) from early modernity when the concept of “religion” first emerged as a transcultural category. Into the modern period, the discipline further developed as majority-Christian European and American scholars explored “comparative religion/theology” and “the history of religions” at divinity schools and centers for social science research. In the mid-twentieth century, religious studies scholars undertook concerted efforts to distinguish the field as a discipline separate from Christian theology. Scholars of the field’s history have accounted for this shift by pointing to such factors as the 1960s U.S. Supreme Court school prayer decisions that seemed to permit “teaching about religion” but not “teaching religion” in public institutions (see Sam Gill’s chapter “Territory”), Cold War-era funding sources such as National Defense Fellowships that incentivized religious studies scholars to redefine their discipline as a humanistic endeavor separate from the training of religious ministers, and various Civil Rights and antiwar movements that sparked a challenge to Eurocentrism and Christian normatively in the study of religion (see Mark C. Taylor’s introduction to the linked volume).
During the twenty-first century, the question of the proper relationship between religious studies and Christian theology has remained a topic of intense debate. Differing perspectives have developed around how to respond to this issue. These include the argument that religious studies scholars should work as critics who theorize about theologians and religious discourses without making normative or theological claims themselves. Another view proposes that religious studies scholars should operate as “critical caretakers” who interrogate the relation of religion to power while also constructively engaging marginalized groups and their alternative ways of conceptualizing their traditions. Still another suggests that the field of religious studies might embrace methodological pluralism (see Paul Dafydd Jones’s chapter “‘A Cheerful Unease’: Theology and Religious Studies”) and create space for scholars to account for and discuss their normative—which may include Christian theological—commitments.
Insights from decolonial theory have raised provocative questions about the basic assumptions of religious studies, as well as the field’s relationship to theology. For instance, what counts as a “religion” and what does the “secular” mean? Who or what determines these definitions? Should all “religions” be thought of as possessing a “theology” or is this term Christian-specific? What (or whose) forms of intellectual production are typically categorized as “theological”—and, accordingly, “subjective”—and which methods of studying religion are considered “neutral” or “objective”? Given Christianity’s historical entanglement with colonialism, how ought decolonially minded religious studies scholars respond in the present to the field’s Christian origins? How might decolonial thought reshape the ways that the boundaries between religious studies and theology, as disciplines, are imagined?
This educational module assembles resources from the Contending Modernities blog that are useful for addressing these questions, raising new ones, and envisioning decolonial approaches to religious studies and theology. The selections below are organized under three overlapping themes: (1) critical explorations of the categories of “religion” and “theology,” (2) perspectives on how scholars might contend with the continuing legacies of colonial Christian theology, and (3) constructive proposals for enacting a decolonial turn. Together, these resources present a plurality of approaches for addressing the field’s Christian-normative and colonial roots, collaborating with ethnic studies and broader decolonial projects, engaging theological/intellectual labor found within religious traditions including and beyond Christianity, and rethinking the role of normative (particularly liberation and decolonization-oriented) claims in academic scholarship. By encouraging a critical assessment of the trajectories of religious studies and theology, these resources challenge scholars to consider the applicability of such concerns within their own work while inviting their participation in the reimagining of the disciplines. Following the module are questions for discussion that teachers and students will find helpful for reflecting on the challenges and possibilities that arise when investigating the relationship between religious studies and theology.
Theme 1: Complicating the Categories of “Religion” and “Theology”
The posts gathered under this theme present three ways of contending with the historical connections between religious studies and Christian theology, particularly concerning the terminology of “religion,” “theology,” and “objectivity.” Together, these posts provoke a reconsideration of the theology/religious studies divide by challenging simplistic narratives that paint theology as “subjective” and religious studies as “objective.” They address the historical intertwinement of the disciplines and contend with the ways that western Christian conceptual categories have shaped the field of religious studies. Rather than assert that religious studies must ensure its more complete objectivity through the rejection of theological influences, the posts under this theme suggest that scholars from both disciplines might critically engage theological resources while acknowledging the limits of theology as a category for approaching non-Christian religious/intellectual traditions.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres provides a critical account of the entanglement between the category of “religion” and the formation of modernity/coloniality, writing that religion “emerged as an indispensable term for making sense of the difference between the colonizers and the colonized.” He explains that as the category evolved, “religion” was used first to dehumanize those perceived as not having a religion or culture, and later to mark as inferior those whose religions or cultures were imagined as “primitive” or “irrational.” The dominance of Christian normativity and western notions of secularity shaped both what counted as “religion” (and, accompanying such categorization, which “religions” were valued over others) and what counted as properly “secular” or compatible with modern secularism. This history of the category of “religion” came to inform the forms of scholarship that eventually resulted in the field of religious studies. To contend with this colonial history, Maldonado-Torres argues that religious studies should engage with ethnic studies and other decolonial efforts inside and outside the academy.
Considered with respect to the relationship between religious studies and theology, Maldonado-Torres’s analyses and proposals invite critical questions about the “secular” and “religious” categorizations that have been taken as distinguishing the disciplines from one another and defining the scope of their inquiries. Rather than assert its compatibility with modern secularism in comparison to theology, religious studies might—by drawing from its own resources for destabilizing “religious” and “secular” terminology—contend with the ways that Christian-theological and European-colonial concerns have shaped its development and continue to shape the organization of secular, modern/colonial worlds. Since processes of religious category-formation have been imbricated in processes of racialization and colonization, it is crucial for religious studies and theology scholars to consider the relevance of decolonial analysis for their work and to recognize the unique perspective that scholarship on “religion” and “secularization” can offer to decolonial thought.
Calvary Cemetery, Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Joshua Lupo’s account of the history of religious studies in this post highlights the role of Christian theology at the field’s origins, as well as more recent efforts by religious studies scholars to distance themselves from Christian theological assumptions and to maintain a sense of scholarly detachment in relation to their topics of study. Lupo focuses on the phenomenological methods emphasizing “subjective experience” and “meaning” that were prominent during the formation of religious studies—particularly as employed by European Christian theologians studying “world religions”—and the critiques of such methods as merely advancing Christian theological worldviews. He writes that in the present, many efforts to separate religious studies scholarship from theology have involved the suspicion of phenomenological methods and the idealization of a stance of scholarly detachment and objectivity. This stance, however, is an always-unachievable position, and prevents religious studies from acknowledging its past and imagining new paths for critical work. Lupo proposes a critical reappropriation of the insights of phenomenology as a means of challenging this idealized stance, and of “contribut[ing] to philosophical accounts that prioritize the agency of the marginalized who challenge racism, coloniality, and misogyny in our politics and culture.”
Lupo’s discussion in this post is useful for considering the goals and limitations of a strict religious studies/Christian theology separation, and for exploring possibilities within the theological residues of religious studies that this separation causes scholars to overlook. This post suggests that, rather than avoid “theological” or “subjective” resources, religious studies scholars might explore the history of their field and acknowledge the impossibility of maintaining a purely “secular” and “objective” position. Lupo’s argument for the recovery of certain phenomenological insights opens new pathways for the critical engagement of Christian theological sources, alongside sources from non-Christian religious/intellectual traditions and from anti-racist, decolonial, and feminist thought.
Natalie Avalos critiques the racist and colonial dynamics that continue to persist within religious studies. She draws attention to the ways that Native American and Indigenous religious traditions have historically been dismissed as failed epistemologies or excluded from recognition as “true” religions. She also writes that the field of religious studies has tended to separate itself from the discipline of theology and from the normative goals of liberation theology, which “as a praxis is directed at both religious and material liberation.” Avalos situates her own work as resonant with yet distinct from liberation theology, drawing primarily from Native American and Indigenous studies and rooted in decolonial frameworks. She critiques the category of “theology” as inadequate for discussing non-Christian traditions, and she positions her own scholarship as intentionally resisting categorization as such. Despite these efforts, she writes that her work has been critiqued as “too theological” for the field of religious studies—a designation rooted in the field’s historical prioritization of etic forms of analysis (which employ theoretical apparatus external to the community whose religious phenomena are being analyzed) over emic ones (which prioritize the terminology and conceptual understandings of a particular community) and tendency to distance itself from normative claims. Avalos critiques the ways that the Protestant secular has influenced both what counts as “religious” and what counts as “objective” religious studies scholarship, and she proposes critical ethnic studies and decolonial approaches as resources for challenging colonial/Christian theological logics.
Like Maldonado-Torres’s post, Avalos’s post critiques the colonial entanglement of religious category formation, and like Lupo’s post, this essay pushes back against the idealization of “objectivity” within religious studies. By focusing specifically on Native American and Indigenous religious traditions and epistemologies, Avalos advances a dual critique. First, she challenges the uncritical application of Christian-influenced conceptual categories such as “theology” to non-Christian traditions, while simultaneously acknowledging the usefulness of “religion” as a (constructed and imperfect) category in her argument that Indigenous epistemologies should be taken seriously by the field of religious studies. Next, Avalos critiques assumptions of a “secular/religious” binary and the devaluing or delegitimization of scholarship that has been categorized as “theological” and therefore “subjective.” Avalos’s post invites both a rethinking of the boundaries between religious studies and theology, and critical reflection on the implications of labelling of non-Christian epistemological traditions as “religious” or “theological.”
Theme 2: Challenging Colonial Christian Theology
Assembled under this theme are three posts that offer contrasting proposals for scholars aiming to challenge colonial Christian theology. Together, they highlight the importance of centering analyses of race and empire, contending with the entanglement of Christian theology with Eurocentrism and colonial legacies, and challenging Christian normativity within religious studies. Atalia Omer’s post offers a necessary reminder that Christian theology is not monolithic and that valuable decolonial resources can be located within marginal traditions of Christian thought and practice. Considered alongside Nicholas Anderson’s and Santiago Slabodsky’s posts, however, it is evident that even scholarship on anti-oppressive forms of Christianity must take care to avoid replicating the dynamics of Christian hegemony.
Nicholas Anderson describes comparative religious ethics as a subfield committed to the provincializing of Christian and/or European philosophical concepts and moral vocabularies, asserting that this provincializing—while valuable—does not in and of itself constitute a decolonial turn. Anderson argues that comparative religious ethicists must learn from decolonial theorists by intentionally analyzing the influence of imperial and racial formations on people’s ethical lives. This involves contending with the colonial histories of the very categories of “ethics,” “religion,” “personhood,” and “reason” that have grounded the discipline’s practice, and the adoption of a willingness to interrogate and even abandon core assumptions of the subfield. He concludes by gesturing towards constructive proposals for a truly decolonial turn in comparative religious ethics, suggesting that new modes of ethical inquiry produced through a greater attention to race and empire would likely draw from “sources and/or practices that many comparativists have not heretofore considered “religious” or “ethical.””
By avoiding a conflation between the decolonization of comparative religious ethics and the decentering of Christian thought within the subfield—even as he views the latter as essential for decolonial projects—Anderson’s post invites a deeper exploration of the steps that religious studies scholars might take to advance decolonial work. His discussion also raises questions about possibilities for the field of theology to similarly center analyses of empire and race, and to decenter European philosophical concepts and moral vocabularies—as well as questions about the extent to which the field of theology is capable of contributing to efforts to challenge Christian normativity.
Screen shot from The Battle of Algiers. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Santiago Slabodsky discusses the 1550–1551 Valladolid debate in which European Christian theologian-philosophers—who could imagine “no possibility of existence outside a totalizing Christian framework”—were tasked with determining the “nature” of Indigenous peoples. He traces how the legacies of pivotal colonial moments such as this debate fueled Christian evolutionist genocides and extended into the creation of academic disciplines for the study of religion, including the area of philosophy of religion, which has continued to betray tendencies towards Christian normativity. As a result, the contestation of Christian hegemony and the provincializing of Christian thought—including “its secular reiterations”—appears for Slabodsky as the first step towards decolonizing the philosophy of religion. He proposes that rather than uphold colonially sanctioned forms of dissent (that is, forms of radical philosophy that are rooted in—and accepted as legitimate by—the side of the colonizer) or continue to sustain the dominance of Christian frameworks, scholars of philosophy of religion should “think from, and with, critical thought emerging from barbaric (rejected, negated, or invisibilized) cosmovisions.”
Like Maldonado-Torres and Avalos, Slabodsky discusses the ways that dominant Christian frameworks have shaped the development and application of ontological and epistemological concepts within religious studies. Slabodsky warns against the maintenance of Christian normativity as it appears even in resistant forms of scholarship in/on religion, and he argues that the tendency “to follow the critique that the secular is not a neutral space in order to intervene in public debates with normative Christian resources instead of delinking from them” evidences a failure to sufficiently confront totalizing Christian frameworks. He also cautions against overly optimistic interpretations of the role of Bartolomé de las Casas in the Valladolid debate, reframing the debate as a moment in which colonialism was reinforced rather than interrupted. His post ultimately calls for the acknowledgment of colonial difference through engagement with cosmovisions that have been the target of epistemological genocide. Although Slabodsky writes that some forms of Christianity can offer useful resources for decolonial projects, his post raises critical questions about the place of Christian thought within broader efforts to decolonize religious studies and theology.
This post is a part of a book symposium on Cecelia Lynch’s Wrestling with God: Ethical Precarity in Christianity and International Relations (2020), which provides a sweeping genealogical exploration of the role of Christian traditions in shaping the modern field of international relations and reveals plural forms of ethical reasoning within Christian thought. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) Atalia Omer, in response to Lynch’s work, discusses the relationship between western Christianity and secular modernity and echoes Lynch’s critiques of European/Christian colonialism. Omer praises the book for bringing nuance to such critiques by emphasizing the internal diversity of Christian thought and advancing an intersectional approach to religion and politics. She elaborates on the book’s value for challenging overly simplistic or reductionistic accounts of Christianity’s entanglement with colonialism.
In contrast to Slabodsky’s critiques, Omer’s post emphasizes that Christianity should not be imagined as a “foil for decolonial epistemologies”; rather, scholars committed to decolonization ought to think of “religion,” “race,” and “gender” together and attend to “the epistemologies of those on the Christian margins.” Omer’s work suggests that decolonial scholarship in religious studies should recognize Christianity as a heterogeneous body of thought that has offered communities anti-oppressive resources. While Slabodsky’s and Anderson’s posts reveal that religious studies” Christian-centric colonial past and present reliance on Christian normativity is still in need of critique, Omer’s post highlights the importance of considering marginal Christian epistemologies and engaging decolonial Christian-theological resources.
Theme 3: Towards Decolonial Sources, Epistemologies, and Practices
The blog posts in this section provide decolonial approaches to intellectual production by drawing on religious and theological traditions. The first theme of this educational module focused on complicating the theology/religious studies divide and notions of “objectivity,” and the second challenged Eurocentrism and colonial Christian hegemony. This final theme offers constructive decolonial proposals for scholarly approaches, interlocutors, and questions that might be explored in response to the critiques advanced within the first two themes. Together, the posts under this theme propose ways that non-Christian and non-European sources might be engaged seriously and on their own terms through a decolonial lens, with implications for research, teaching, and scholarly conversations in religious studies and theology.
In this post, Irene Oh offers constructive proposals for decolonizing the subfield of comparative religious ethics. Although she discusses the ways that scholars have already begun to decenter Christianity and dismantle notions of Christian supremacy, she identifies a need for a decolonial questioning of the terms and assumptions at the core of the discipline. Oh briefly refers to the history of the category of “religion” as a European Christian invention that has served colonial ends, and she mentions critiques of the “commonly accepted definition of ethics as other-regarding.” She argues that one step towards decolonizing comparative religious ethics would be to avoid inaccurately imposing terminology or forcing “the moral relevance of issues” transculturally. At the same time, she suggests that dialogue among communities may result in a shared understanding of issues and ideas that resonate across different contexts. Ultimately, she asserts that a decolonial turn within comparative religious ethics would involve recognizing non-Christian and non-European peoples as intellectual and moral agents rather than as objects of study, and uplifting the ways these agents “represent ideas on their own terms, rather than mediated through the theories and categories of colonialism.”
If applied to the relationship between religious modes of intellectual production and the field of religious studies, Oh’s post invites reflection on the different ways that Christian theologies and non-Christian moral and epistemological traditions might be approached by scholars in various religious studies subfields. Lupo’s and Avalos’s posts have critiqued the idealization of scholarly “objectivity,” and Avalos has argued for Indigenous epistemologies and normative decolonial claims to be taken seriously within religious studies. Similarly, Oh’s post insists upon the recognition of moral and intellectual claims made by non-Christian and non-European interlocutors; however, the post’s emphasis on dialogue and intellectual humility also raises questions about how a scholar might navigate their own normative commitments when engaging in transcultural conversations.
The decolonial approach that Abdulkader Tayob offers in this post counters the Eurocentrism of the humanities. Tayob critiques the ways that the field of religious studies seems to contest the intrusion of theological assumptions and methodologies more than it challenges its own colonial assumptions and entanglements, and he argues that religious studies must dismantle its “colonial library” as one step towards decolonization. To do so, he proposes that the distinction between the scholarship of the colonizers and the scholarship of the colonized be acknowledged, and that the latter receive the attention that it has previously been denied. In particular, Tayob argues that critical thought from within Islam and other religious traditions—types of intellectual labor that have not always been treated as legitimate within the academy—must be taken seriously as forms of scholarship, and that practices of “critique” should not be imagined as limited to the modern secular modes that are presently dominant. Noting that the critical reflections of scholars such as Talal Asad have ironically been taken up in service of western-centric scholarship on religion (and have thus been used to accentuate—rather than displace—the “colonial library,” Tayob also argues that the types of inquiry pursued by religious studies scholars should increasingly prioritize the social and political contexts of the colonized, rather than the contexts inhabited by western scholars.
The decolonial approach offered by Tayob emphasizes self-criticism, dialogue among secular and religious critical voices, and the de-exceptionalizing of the western academic tradition. Tayob’s proposals may open space for religious studies scholars to approach religious/theological modes of intellectual production on their own terms, and to respect non-western and non-Christian religious critical voices as interlocutors. Additionally, Tayob’s emphasis on resisting “colonial libraries” invites scholars to engage decolonial sources in their research and teaching. This emphasis raises questions about the ways that religious studies scholars might balance the critical reappropriation of “canonical” resources– as Lupo’s post proposes—with the necessity of assembling an alternative “library.”
Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes that decolonial theory is not a mere extension of mainstream postcolonial studies, but a transdisciplinary and ongoing mode of thought, practice, and being that has historically involved an openness to religious thought, attention to the role of spirituality for decolonial projects, and commitment to critiquing the coloniality of modern western secularism. He asserts that narratives framing the engagement between decoloniality and religion as a “new” development are inaccurate and serve only to reinforce the coloniality of the secular academy. Next, Maldonado-Torres turns to the life and thought of Frantz Fanon to counter the ways that Fanon has often been framed as opposed to religion. Drawing out five lessons from Fanon, Maldonado-Torres explores the relevance of Fanon’s work for envisioning relations among religious studies, religious thought and practice, and ongoing processes of decolonization.
By both highlighting aspects of Fanon’s work that reveal signs of openness to religion and theology, and imagining an expansion of Fanon’s thought in ways that Fanon himself had not considered (for instance, by mentioning practitioners of African diaspora spiritualities who have drawn from Fanon’s work), Maldonado-Torres’s post exemplifies one method through which scholars of religious studies and theology might incorporate insights from decolonial thought, and in turn, enrich decolonial projects with resources from their own fields. This post shows that figures from decolonial thought—including figures that are traditionally imagined in opposition to religion and theology—might act as unexpected interlocutors and inspire a reshaping of the canons and considerations of the disciplines.
Conclusion and Discussion Questions
The blog posts assembled for this educational module have addressed the history of religious studies and categories such as “religion” and “theology,” discussed the role of efforts to decenter Christian and/or European thought for broader decolonial projects, and offered constructive proposals for decolonizing scholarly approaches to sources, terminology, methodology, lines of inquiry, and chosen interlocutors. The questions below trace some of the overarching themes among the authors, draw out some standing debates and considerations, and provide a means of continuing conversations on this topic.
Contending with Christianity
Atalia Omer challenges overly simplistic and reductionistic accounts of Christianity’s relationship to colonialism and argues for the importance of taking an intersectional approach that attends to marginal Christian epistemologies. Santiago Slabodsky, while noting that some forms of Christianity can provide decolonial resources, critiques the dominance of Christian normativity “in discourses of dominance, rebellion, and re-existence.” In what ways might religious studies scholarship that centers marginal Christian epistemologies (for instance, “popular Christianities,” liberation theology, and anti-colonial Christian movements) and decolonial Christian resources contend with the field’s Christian-centric colonial past and avoid reinforcing Christian normativity? How might scholarship in the field of Christian theology address these concerns?
The Colonial Past
Joshua Lupo’s post offers proposals for religious studies scholars to contend with—and critically reappropriate—methods and figures from the field’s past. Abdulkader Tayob’s post emphasizes the need for religious studies scholars to dismantle the “colonial library” at the heart of the field. In different ways, both of these authors trouble the boundaries that have been constructed between strictly“secular” religious studies scholarship and the theological/intellectual labor found within religious traditions. In what ways might their proposals complement or conflict with each other? How might decolonial approaches to religious studies both critically reappropriate resources from the field’s formative colonial past, and assemble a new decolonial “library”? How might these efforts reshape the ways religious studies scholars relate to religious/theological intellectual production?
Negotiating Religious Values
Natalie Avalos and Joshua Lupo—from different angles—critique the scholarly idealization of a stance of detachment and objectivity. Such critiques might be valuably directed towards the troubling of “neutrality” and towards the opening of religious studies to the types of liberation-oriented, decolonizing projects that Avalos uplifts. On the other hand, Irene Oh and Abdulkader Tayob both discuss dialogue as a component of a decolonial turn. The forms of dialogue that these authors propose involve approaching (particularly non-Christian and non-European) religious practitioners as intellectual/moral agents: potential interlocutors rather than mere data or objects of study. Such an approach appears to involve some bracketing or provincializing of one’s own ethical/moral vocabularies and intellectual traditions. How might decolonial projects within theology and religious studies balance normative (liberation and decolonization-oriented) claims with the intellectual humility that dialogue involves? Or, in what ways might different types of decolonial projects negotiate these values differently?
Beyond the Field
Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Natalie Avalos both argue that religious studies should welcome insights from critical ethnic studies and broader decolonial projects from within and outside of academia. Relatedly, Nicholas Anderson writes that a decolonial turn within comparative religious ethics would entail transformative analyses of race and empire and a willingness to engage with sources beyond ones that are typically considered “religious.” Maldonado-Torres’s posts suggest that ethnic studies and decolonial projects might “gain much from the analyses and insights of decolonial Religious Studies, decolonial philosophy of religion, and decolonial forms of religious thought and theology.” What perspectives, contributions, and creative reworkings do—or might—religious studies, theology, and religious thought uniquely offer to decolonial discussions and projects?
Bibliography and Further Reading
Asad, Talal. “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category.” In Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, 27-54. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Chidester, David. Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Gill, Sam. “Territory.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor, 298-314. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Jones, Paul Dafydd. “‘A Cheerful Unease’: Theology and Religious Studies.” In Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation, edited by Elizabeth Shanks Alexander and Beth A. Berkowitz, 69-81. London: Routledge, 2017.
Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
McCutcheon, Russell T. Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.
———. “‘Just Follow the Money’: The Cold War, the Humanistic Study of Religion, and the Fallacy of Insufficient Cynicism.” Culture and Religion 5, no. 1 (2004): 41-69. doi:10.1080/0143830042000200355.
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Victoria Basug Slabinski is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia, with a graduate certificate in American studies. Her work draws Christian theology into conversation with decolonial thought and explores constructive Filipino American theologies, focusing especially on questions of memory, ancestrality, narrative, and aesthetics. Her research interests include decolonial and postcolonial thought, Christian liberation theologies and eschatology, gender and sexuality studies, and constructive readings of literature and the arts.
Statue of St. Charbel Makhlouf situated in the Iraqui suburb of Ankawa just outside Erbil.
I have had the privilege of knowing Mitri Raheb for a long time—since the days when our careers were young. I remember my first attempt to bring college students to Bethlehem and provide them with an honest engagement with the local church. Raheb was the pastor of a Lutheran church in Bethlehem and I had a crew of about 30 eager college students. His students met mine on a rooftop somewhere in town and I watched the magic of what inter-cultural connection looks like. The students later told me it was one the best things they ever participated in. Thanks to that moment and Raheb’s modeling, I’ve had this same experience with hundreds of students since then.
In this short post, I can hardly do justice to this excellent book or provide a substantial response to the many arguments it contains within. I will therefore primarily focus on a few significant points, as well as one point of criticism. My chief interest is in how Raheb has sustained a conversation with the west—in particular with the western church—something few other Palestinians have done successfully. The book helpfully surveys the way that western powers have pursued their interests in the Middle East for the last 200 years, focusing on how such foreign involvement has affected the Arabic-speaking church from Iraq to Egypt. It is full of surprises and is indeed, as Philip Jenkins describes in his blurb, a trove of information and analysis.
One example of this is Raheb’s account of the diplomatic connections developed between the Ottomans and the Germans and how these connections led to their alliance in WWI. Another example is how the Ottoman millet system both benefited from and later fractured the religious communities present during the Ottoman Empire. Still another is his description of the ways that western powers—and here I think mainly of France and England—resisted the inclusion of Arab leadership into the church structures that had been put in place. As a feature of this colonial project, western church leaders had educated and empowered the Arab laity but neglected to include the Arab clergy who were significant leaders in every community. Though they were eventually incorporated, the Greek Orthodox church still struggles with this inclusion and is barely indigenized.
The book helpfully surveys the way that western powers have pursued their interests in the Middle East for the last 200 years, focusing on how such foreign involvement has affected the Arabic-speaking church from Iraq to Egypt.
Another example of western church failings appears in the story of Iqrit. I was familiar with the horrible story of the village of Iqrit but not in the detail provided in Raheb’s book. I found myself once again infuriated and made a silent vow to bring 30 more students to that ruin and its church to show them material evidence of a crime scene. I’ll be back in January with 30 more students where they will meet with some of the grandchildren of Iqrit in Nazareth.
It was a sentence on page 72 that haunted me: “No wonder that many Middle Eastern Christians do not trust western sympathy for ‘persecuted Christians.’” From Balfour to the 21st century Western Christian, calls to protect the church ring hollow when one looks at the implementation of foreign policies in many European states. Today, this hollow ring is heard most loudly from the U.S. and its involvement in the region. While evangelical politicians call for the security of Arab Christians, their policies betray them.
The displacement of Arab Christians is such a sobering story that I, too, would be suspicious of any overtures from the west. The statistics for the depopulation of the Christian Middle East are sobering. In the 19th century, Christians made up 20% of the region’s population; today, only 3%. In Palestine, if this emigration had not occurred, there would be 600,000 Palestinian Christians in the Middle East. Imagine that.
Three themes resonated with me in the book that I will focus on in the rest of this post. And there is a fourth where Raheb lets us off too easily.
First, western involvement in the region instigated the three most destructive events for the region’s churches. Each time, western governments used the claim that they were “protecting minorities” as a pretext for their colonial expansion. There was the German-Turkish collusion in the Armenian massacre, then the British betrayal of the Assyrian communities in Iraq, and lastly the American invasion of Syria and Iraq in 2003. Each of these events devastated Christian communities. Raheb summarizes on page 150, “I am not aware of a single case in which western empires played a constructive role in creating a political framework in the Middle East where Christians and others could thrive.” I agree. We should rethink the explanation that the west has been a force for good in the Middle East. We are skilled at finding and defending oil reserves, but less good at finding and defending the region’s minorities. There is a level of irony and hypocrisy here that must be named: Western powers and in particular, the U.S., have been instrumental in breaking up the most ancient Christian community in the Middle Eastern world.
Second, Raheb describes the western disparagement of Islam as a tool used to understand the region; to decide who are its victims and who its valiant defenders of order. From this perspective, Arab Christians are the victims of Islamic extremism and Israel is usually claimed to be a welcome enclave of sanity. I wish I could count how many times I have heard this in the church. The problem is that this invites us to take on a colonial worldview: the Muslim is backward, barbaric, and intolerant. This worldview, as Raheb shows, has more to do with western perceptions than concrete facts. It helps us feel “civilized” and as the transporters of light to a very dark world. This is why reading Raheb is important. For those who continue to carry stereotypes like this today, hearing an Arab Christian voice of this caliber will certainly change that perspective.
Western powers and in particular, the U.S., have been instrumental in breaking up the most ancient Christian community in the Middle Eastern world.
If the length and scope of the book had allowed, I think we would have benefited from hearing how Islam itself is undergoing its own confusing period of self-definition. 9/11 is now a symbol, an unfair symbol to be sure, of how many perceive Islam. There have been instances from Madrid, to Paris, to London not to mention Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria where extreme groups have not helped western perceptions. I do not pretend to know how Islamic leaders are coping with this and would like to learn more. But I know that for my Muslim friends, it is an embarrassment and a dilemma. Maybe a crisis.
When I guest-lectured in a seminar at a university in Amman a few years ago, to my surprise I met a small group of Muslim firebrands launching threatening criticism of me and the west. Though myself and some of the other faculty present were unsure how to respond, the Muslim women in the room engaged in this verbal battle and silenced all of these militant young men with eloquence and intelligence. I wondered if I was witnessing something important. Were the Muslim women less enamored of this sort of reactive intimidation? Were they the courageous voices that can speak into this situation? I think there is a secret hidden in this story. Perhaps an analogy can be found in modern Iran where women lead the way against the Islamic clerics in their country.
Lastly, evangelicals in the west are driven by an agenda of Christian persecution and suffering in the Middle East. For some mysterious reason, I get a newsletter mailed to me from the organization Voice of the Martyrs. It is a case-study that exposes the reader to dreadful images of loss before asking for money. I see it now as evidence of a persecution-industry within my own evangelical tribe. This view is widespread and never questioned. But as former Vice President Pence has written (and know he is an evangelical Zionist, see page 146), these stories of persecution gain traction in Washington and can be used to justify intervention in any part of the world, particularly the Middle East.
If there was room for improvement, I would argue that Raheb is far too generous with the American Evangelical church and how it has woven Zionism into a political ideology that is a mash-up of eschatology and colonialism. He pins this down well in the late 19th century and gives the British and French their due. Here, however, I am thinking of people I know: evangelical leaders that churches are following whose theological views produce intolerance, violence, and inspire a foreign policy of militancy toward the region. Those in the US need a prophetic rebuking no less than that which appears in the book with regard to the Europeans. But perhaps this is for another book.
After 35 years teaching in liberal arts colleges, Gary Burge joined Calvin Seminary in 2017 as Professor of New Testament and eventually as academic dean. He specializes in the gospels and the ancient cultural context that shaped them. He is a frequent visitor to the Middle East, having served in eight of its countries, and has led students through the Holy Land over 25 times. He studied at The Univ. of California (BA), The American University of Beirut, Fuller Seminary (MDiv) and Aberdeen Univ., Scotland (PhD). He has authored many books and articles both on the New Testament and the conflicts in Israel/Palestine. His two books on theology and Zionism, Whose Land? Whose Promise?(2013) and Jesus and the Land (2010) are used widely by scholars and students.
Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels, Belgium. June 7, 2020. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity is a thoughtful and important reflection on dignity. Taking the Black Lives Matter movement as a starting point, Lloyd writes a philosophical manifesto that does not restrict itself only to theoretical analysis but equally offers ideas for how to re-center the struggle for a renewed Black dignity. Dignity doesn’t restrict itself to what he describes as the opposition to “ontic” manifestations (oppression, exploitation, and harm), but should extend to a continuous opposition and struggle against relationships of domination, which is defined by the capacity to impose one’s will over another human being. Dignity, therefore, is the refusal of that relationship of domination, the refusal of subjugation.
As someone who has been studying, researching, and thinking about race and racialization in continental Europe, and especially from the vantage point of what scholars have come to describe as the Muslim question, I take Lloyd’s reflections on dignity, especially as he constructs it in opposition to respectability, as a basis to reflect on how mechanisms of racialization operate in very distinct forms. While the legacy of the transatlantic slave-trade figures as the background in Lloyd’s reflection, race works differently—but no less insistently—in Western Europe, a continent which still fails to grapple with colonialism and its afterlives. Starting from two cases, which touch upon the question of Blackness and Islamophobia, I want to address how the question of dignity can be rethought in a context where one’s alterity is simply erased.
Respectability and Survivability
In May 2023, the sixth edition of the Afropolitan festival was held at the prestigious Centre of fine Arts (Bozar) in Brussels. This festival started in 2015 as an annual homage to the Belgian and European Afrodiasporic community in all its complexity. Artists, community organizers, and filmmakers gather to discuss questions and issues that are at the heart of the African diaspora. This year’s festival was dedicated to the theme “Legacies from the Black Cosmos.” For three days, dozens of artists gathered to showcase and discuss the imaginative possibilities of Black communities, taking their inspiration from the American artistic movement of Afrofuturism. As with the previous editions, the central purpose of the festival was to allow for African artists to “tell their stories and (re)present themselves.” The festival is well-attended and receives timid, yet overall positive media coverage.
While the legacy of the transatlantic slave-trade figures as the background in Lloyd’s reflection, race works differently—but no less insistently—in Western Europe, a continent which still fails to grapple with colonialism and its afterlives.
About 40 miles to the north of Brussels, in Belgium’s second largest town, Antwerp, which is known for its harbor and diamonds, another festival took place a few weeks earlier: the Medina Expo. The festival started out as the “Muslim Expo” in 2014. It was held in the commercial exposition halls of the city. Its central aim was to create a space of encounter between Muslims and non-Muslims and to allow for Muslims to showcase their talents and competencies in all their diversity. Since 2014, dozens of entrepreneurs and community organizations have gathered in a large public hall, while workshops and public talks are given by influential speakers. In 2017, the organization decided to change its name from the Muslim Expo to the Medina Expo to attract a wider non-Muslim audience. It also hoped to entice more entrepreneurs who often operate in “the city” (Medina in Arabic). This, interestingly, also occurred right after the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016. The festival is largely self-funded and organized using private funding. Since 2015, every edition of the Medina Expo has also been consistently met with demonstrations by the far-right party Vlaams Belang who vehemently oppose its organization. They warn that it marks the steady Islamization of society and threatens the possibility of “Islamic terror.” In 2017, the mayor of Antwerp, Bart De Wever, ordered a security clearance on one of the keynote speakers from the Netherlands and public speakers are regularly subjected to public scrutiny.
The two cases sketched above can be read as illustrations of love: Afrodiasporic and Muslim love. Men, women, and community organizers gathering to celebrate each other and re-center the narrative around their own accomplishments. Yet these two initiatives don’t seem to attract the same kinds of responses from the public, as the reactions to the Medina Expo illustrate. Muslim-centered public initiatives are routinely seen as polemical. Both their body politics (the headscarf being the most infamous), as well as their public initiatives are often met with suspicion. Muslims are accused of promoting unacceptable forms of secessionism, or simply banned from engaging in advocacy work as the dissolution of the French human rights organization fighting Islamophobia, the The Collective Against Islamophobia (CCIF), illustrated. A quick, and misleading, reading could lead one to conclude that anti-Blackness (or Afrophobia, the preferred term in Europe) and Islamophobia don’t work in the same ways in a country like Belgium, and that organizing as Muslim makes one subject to a higher degree of harassment and subjugation. Yet holding such a claim would not only be factually inaccurate (as the moral panic around wokeness and decolonization has aptly shown in the recent years, and which also includes an anxiety around Black collective bodies), but it also risks indulging in an “oppression Olympics” that is neither analytically fruitful, nor politically helpful. Rather, the distinct sociological treatment of these different cases should be seen as an invitation to adopt a relational view of domination, i.e., to understand how domination can take different forms and work through distinct mechanisms.
In Lloyd’s book, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the primordial encounter between the White master and the Black slave serve as paradigmatic and phenomenological starting points for conceptualizing domination and reflecting on dignity. In a context like the US—where slavery and Blackness have historically, legally, financially, and institutionally been co-constitutive in shaping the body politics— one can understand how and why Black dignity comes to represent “the paradigm of dignity” (14). Dignity is in Lloyd’s work also sharply contrasted with respectability, which he considers a temptation that those involved in the struggle against domination should resist. Respectability maintains an asymmetrical relationship with Whiteness as it strives for a multicultural politics of recognition which depoliticizes the struggle against domination.
In the continental European context, however, the dialectical relationship between “Blackness” and “Whiteness” doesn’t operate as an explicit formative element, nor does colonialism, for they are simply erased from the body politics. The Dutch anthropologist Gloria Wekker describes this as White Innocence, which she understands to be the ostensible disavowal of a series of interdependent ties (produced through colonialism, migration, etc.) in the political imaginary of the Netherlands. In the European context, this is manifested in the repeated erasure of the historical role of Islam in the formation of Europe and the erasure of colonialism from the archives of the industrial revolution. This colonial aphasia maintains itself today through the vehement denial of this postcolonial presence, which today is embodied in the presence of migrants from the former colonies. This colonial aphasia is managed through the exoticization and commodification of these migrants and/or their criminalization. The multicultural “other” is either celebrated as a commodity of diversity or chastised as a threat. I see the two cases described above as two sides of the same coin.
Ancestral Uprising AR art installation at Spadina Museum, by Afrofuturist Quentin VerCetty. Photo Credit: Flickr User City of Toronto. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
A relational view of domination also shows how striving for “respectability” is not always only a matter of recognition but also of survival. Islamophobia is often defined through discipline rather than domination. At stake is not so much the erasure of Muslims’ will (as is the case with the Slave), but rather their continuous redisciplining into acceptable lifeforms, which means—in the European context—lifeforms which are seen to be compatible with liberalism, secularism, and Whiteness. As has been noted by several scholars, Muslim subjectivities have, for distinct historical and theological reasons, been treated as important challengers of liberal modernity. Their redeemability (or secularization) has often been treated as a conditio sine qua none of their acceptability. This redisciplining is manifested in the case above through the renaming of the Muslim Expo as the Medina Expo, as well as through the heightened emphasis on a neoliberal logic of entrepreneurship and self-governance (all participants are presented as entrepreneurs).
One could read this as an instance of trying to gain “respectability.” Yet respectability includes not only wearing the right “clothes,” but also an existential component. It is also a matter of (social) survivability. For if, and when, Muslims fail to properly comply to liberal and secular demands of Whiteness, they risk a form of social death that may translate into isolation, marginalization, expulsion, deportation and in some cases—and depending on the geographical zone—physical death.
Dignity and/as Solidarity
In Lloyd’s account, dignity appears primarily as an articulation of resistance and opposition to domination. The struggle for dignity is both an individual and collective enterprise which is also affectively charged (rage, love, and spirituality feature prominently in the book). Yet in a context where postcolonial domination is expressed through erasure rather than only domination, the question of solidarity and mutual entanglement imposes itself as a pressing question—one which isn’t addressed in very explicit terms in Lloyd’s text. Solidarity is necessary to make one’s presence visible and to oppose postcolonial racial systems of domination. Blackness, I want to suggest, has historically played an important role in making that possible—in a way that exceeds subjects who are phenotypically defined as Black. Rather, the tradition of political Blackness has produced a set of discursive repertoires that make certain struggles legible, certain oppressions visible, and certain fights possible. Blackness has historically produced a vital and universal repertoire of speakability in the struggle against domination which goes beyond the case of the US. I want to illustrate this point by returning to the BLM movement as it spread outside the U.S. and show how it allowed for an unprecedented political conversation on police violence.
Muslim subjectivities have, for distinct historical and theological reasons, been treated as important challengers of liberal modernity. Their redeemability (or secularization) has often been treated as a conditio sine qua none of their acceptability.
#BlackLivesMatterBrussels, June 2020. Around 10,000 people gather in the streets of Brussels around the monumental Palace of Justice to support the worldwide protest for Black dignity. From the public tribune, Black community organizers and representatives call on the public to face the afterlives of colonialism and tackle the realities of police brutality and violence. One of the banners reads “COLERE NOIRE, COMMUNE REVOLTE” (Black anger, common revolt), thereby signaling a definite rupture with the invisibilization as it is hegemonically imposed through Europe’s postcolonial racial order.
A few weeks before the demonstration, on April 10th 2020, a young man named Adil Charrot of North-African origin was killed in a confrontation with the police. The police denied any guilt in his death and spoke of a tragic accident, while a small coalition composed of family members and friends challenged this version. The story of Adil would have passed unnoticed were it not for the death of George Floyd a few weeks later, on May 25th, 2020. The BLM movement that ensued launched a worldwide conversation on police violence. Suddenly, Adil’s fate was not only discussed in small activist blogs, but in articles that were published in the national press. But he was not the only one: in those weeks, the larger public learned about several other victims who died after a confrontation with the police, not to speak of all those who have perished in their quest for a better future when trying to cross the borders of Europe. The demography of these victims is much more messy: Moroccan, Algerian, Afghan, Syrian, Nigerian, Guinean, Congolese, Slovak.
Preceding the organization of the Black Lives Matter demonstration there was a slight indecision among the organizers on how to deal with this “messy” reality of the victims of police violence. BLM was understood to be a movement addressing Black suffering, and some organizers felt that this focus should remain central. Yet after much negotiation and discussion an agreement was met that family members of Mehdi, one of the North-African victims of police violence, would be allowed to speak in the tribune. The hesitations among some of the organizers stood in sharp contrast with the crowd, who didn’t wait for the organizer’s approval: the banners that were carried honored the most well-known victims of police violence, endorsing this “messy” reality and including victims with “Arab” sounding names. They all understood that they too were “Black” and that they were killed because their lives were considered redundant.
Against institutionalized attempts to erase the memory of #Semira #Lamine, #Mehdi or #Adil, BLM thus served as an incredible opportunity to honor and restore the dignity of the victims of the racialized system of exclusion. Such victims are too often forgotten and erased from the public conversation. By challenging a simplistic take on “Blackness,” a larger alliance was built that defied attempts to co-opt Sub-Saharans (Afro-descendants) into a fetishized politics of representation and place them in competition with other racialized communities (“Arabs” or “Muslims”—implying that Muslims aren’t Black). Racial dominance was addressed in its “ontological” appearance, as Lloyd suggests, by collectively challenging its necropolitics, or politics of death. Just as hip-hop has been able to offer a language and rhythm to the world that has travelled well beyond the Bronx and into the French banlieues or Gaza, the political vocabularies and tactics generated through the African American struggle has had a universal reach that has inspired and shaped struggles all over the world. While the struggle against domination might be a never-ending aim, as Lloyd rightly states, the quest for Black dignity acts as one of the universal compasses in this process.
Nakba, 1948 Palestine, in the Jaramana Refugee Camp, Damascus, Syria. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Mitri Raheb’s The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empires tells several profound stories of loss. One of those is the loss of the interwovenness of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities in the MENA (Middle East and North African) region before western Christian colonial forces violently devoured the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. Raheb’s account doesn’t romanticize the Ottoman period of diversity, which existed within a millet system, but instead shows how its demise brought into being an exclusionary and sectarian political logic.
My remarks put Raheb’s critical account of “the politics of persecution” into conversation with the film ‘Til Kingdom Come (directed by Maya Zinshtein) to illuminate the continuous Palestinian Nakba (or catastrophe) of 1948, which also names the ongoing reality of Palestinian displacement. The Politics of Persecution captures the violence of European missionary and colonial administrations and contextualizes the manipulation and weaponization of Christian persecution for imperial agendas and designs, often under the guise of the protection of “religious freedom.” First, he tells the stories of massacres of Christians that didn’t enrage the colonial or neocolonial forces. If such massacres enraged them, this indignation was connected to expediency, utility, and geopolitical and ideological interests. His point is not that a commitment to religious freedom is ideological as a matter of course but rather that a concern with the plight of communities rendered “religious” has been used as a weapon and is manufactured around hegemonic objectives. When one takes away the utility of the weaponization of religious freedom and concern with religious persecutions, the ethical concerns vanish too. Raheb explicitly points to how and why concern with “religious persecutions” was invented as an integral dimension of imperial designs. In addition, he traces how confining groups along religious labels was deployed to forge the sectarianism that characterizes some areas in the MENA region, such as Lebanon. Relying on the notion of sectarianism as an explanatory framework for the analysis of conflict in the MENA region thus reconstitutes a colonial interpretive frame. Within such a frame, the protection and selective empowerment of various Christian denominations, such as the Maronites in Lebanon, was linked to imperial designs and vice versa. This selectivity persists to this day and is often generative of false analyses of how religion relates to the dynamics of violence (and, in the inverse, peace) in the MENA region.
Religious Freedom and the Secular in the Postcolonial Moment
Raheb’s analysis pushes against rhetorical and explanatory frameworks that render the “plight of persecuted Christians” as the outcome of a sectarianism that has supposedly been in place since the beginning of time. Instead, he traces how sectarianism itself was a product of European colonial and missionary intrusions into the region. Here Raheb’s storyline connects with the late Saba Mahmood’s analysis of the discourse of minority rights in Egypt. In Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (2015), Mahmood challenges secularist accounts of religion and violence. She argues that, rather than a panacea, secularism (as a part of a modernist epistemological colonial project) is the source of political violence that presents and cloaks itself as “religious.” The liberal secular as a discursive tradition is embedded within a parochial European Christian history and political projects, which is undergirded by orientalism. While Raheb does not engage with the critique of the modern/secular, his embodied and historical account conveys the violence that Mahmood’s theoretical intervention demystifies. This is especially the case when he zooms in on episodes of catastrophic violence, such as the Massacre on Mount Lebanon in 1860, a conflict that involved primarily Christians and Druze. Here, Raheb captures the tragic outcome of the colonial discourse of division and reification when he writes, “Geography could no longer tolerate more than one demography: either Christian or Druze” (37).
The liberal secular as a discursive tradition is embedded within a parochial European Christian history and political projects, which is undergirded by orientalism.
Further, as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues, the “promotion of religious freedoms” via governmental and intergovernmental organizations that monitor “religious persecutions” constitutes an international relations strategy intent on reconfiguring hegemonies in the presumed postcolonial moment. Raheb contextualizes this insight within a deep history of Christian intrusions into the delicate tapestry of the Ottoman MENA region via missions, colonial infrastructures, schools, and curricula. In a layered manner, Raheb reveals the epistemic and political violence—along with the mapping and controlling—that the deployment of “religion” as a boundary for identity and as a basis for human and cultural rights allows. As the critical study of religion, especially in its decolonial turn, has demonstrated, “religion” as a mode of an anthropological and comparative classification was born together with empire and the doctrine of discovery (e.g., Nelson Maldonado Torres). As such, religion has been co-constitutive with “race,” or with the logic of racialization, in the development of colonial empires. The story of Jewish Zionism is a part of this story. It is a project of settler colonialism in Palestine that is interwoven with western Christian colonial and imperial designs and has colluded with missionary expansionist moves into the region. The disregard for Palestinian lives (Christian, Muslim, or secular) has exemplified the manipulative nature of the discourses about religious freedoms and persecuted Christians. These discourses, further, are intricately related to Christian and Jewish theologies of restoration, end time, and redemption (e.g., Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin).
American Evangelicals, Israeli Settlers, and the Palestinian Christian
One of the critical points Raheb articulates is that naming violence as a “religious persecution” is misleading and glosses over the process of sectarianization born out of western Christian intrusion into lands previously under the Ottoman sphere of influence. Nowhere is this claim more evident than in the ignoring (and in the denying the validity of) the plight of Christian Palestinians amongst European and US empires.
As I read the Politics of Persecution, I was reminded of the film ‘Till Kingdom Come. The film portrays the consolidation of the political power of White Christian evangelicals in the US during the Trump era and the convergence of this group with the increasingly mainstream settler lobby in Israel. It focuses specifically on the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. The film explores the apocalyptic theological worldview concerning Christian end-time prophecy that animates US Evangelical Christians’ commitment to Israeli settler colonialism. “The Jews” are a mere fetish, an instrument in this antisemitic drama, which proposes the necessity of a Jewish nation being established in Israel for the second coming of Christ to occur. At the same time, Jewish Zionist actors are happy to instrumentalize this toxic “love” to further entrench Jewish Zionist supremacist control over Palestine. The film also depicts a toxic intersection of the prosperity gospel and end-time theology, distorting the pivotal verse from Genesis 12:3 (“whoever blesses Israel will be blessed, and whoever curses it will be cursed”). In the Genesis verse, Abram is the subject of the cursing/blessing, but as the verse has circulated amongst this group in the US it has been decontextualized and treated reductively to refer to the nation of Israel or “the Jews.” The viewer glimpses how members of a church in a poor Appalachian community collect their small change to give to the Fellowship, believing their act of “blessing” Israel will bless them as a church and a community. Driving through a dilapidated community, seeing where people are living, and even commenting that some of the homes look abandoned, the Israeli Jewish leader of the Fellowship, Yael Epstein, is keen to deploy Genesis 12:3 to rationalize her fundraising efforts. This results eventually (in the course of the film) in a 5-million-dollar donation to “friends of the IDF” using the funds she has raised in Appalachia, amongst other places. She announces the check at a fancy gala in Hollywood. Yael manages to bracket the antisemitic theology of the pastor in the church. As he hands her the check, he comments on the wealthy Jews of Hollywood and how one day “soon” they will see their error.
Zinstein, the film director, is brilliant in not lecturing or telling but simply showing us the absurdities of the Christian evangelical and Jewish settlers’ alliances with one another and an array of political opportunists. In doing so, Zinstein shows us the how religion operates violently within American empire.
I now want to highlight a sequence in the film that recurred to me as I read Raheb’s book. In one scene, Zinstein arranges for a meeting of the evangelical pastor from rural Kentucky (aka Pastor Boyd) and Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac from The Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Perhaps there was some sort of naiveté and hopefulness invested in this arranged meeting. Zinstein might have thought that a conversation between Pastor Boyd from Kentucky and Rev. Dr. Isaac, a Palestinian Christian, would somehow make Pastor Boyd see the suffering of Christian Palestinians and the plight of the Palestinians broadly. This would then puncture the myopia that comes with interpreting the world through an end-time prophecy. However, despite Rev. Dr. Isaac’s efforts to explain the concrete realities of dispossession and violence experienced by Palestinians, Christians, and otherwise, Pastor Boyd emerges from this meeting, declaring to the camera that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian!” This unbelievable sequence, where Boyd’s Christianity and all-consuming “love” of Israel and the Jews prevents him from seeing and hearing the story of another Christian person, connects with Raheb’s story in the book. In this instance, the phrase “Christian persecution” rings hollow. For Pastor Boyd, a Palestinian cannot exist because doing so would violate his ahistorical rendering of the world, one in which the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea can only be the land of Israel, and only inhabited by “the Jews.” This is why Pastor Boyd goes on to disturbingly claim that Rev. Dr. Isaac’s theology is antisemitic. For Pastor Boyd, the identity of who is able to count as a Christian goes unnamed, though the racial and imperial logic that undergirds this identity lies barely beneath the surface. Raheb examines the long history of this manipulative politics as a tool for advancing—under the pretense of protecting various Christian communities— specific imperial power agendas. In the case of Pastor Boyd, we see him blinded by his belief in the prophecy. This belief—and its embeddedness in an imperial and colonial framework—blinds him to the concrete suffering of his fellow Christians (and more basically, his fellow humans).
For Pastor Boyd, a Palestinian cannot exist because doing so would violate his ahistorical rendering of the world, one in which the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea can only be the land of Israel, and only inhabited by “the Jews.”
By moving from rural Kentucky and Pastor Boyd’s little church to the wider political context in which it operates, the film also shows us how this apocalyptic end-time evangelical theology has devastating ramifications for Palestinians. For example, the film depicts the mobilization of Christian evangelicals to withdraw US support of UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees) and to relocate the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Both these policy outcomes were eventually implemented. The story of pastor Boyd shows the importance of thinking intersectionally, in this case, about Whiteness, Christianity, and poverty, for understanding how, when, and in service of whom Christian persecution in the MENA region is raised as an issue of concern.
Indeed, the fact that Dr. Rev. Isaac is a Christian is the least relevant factor contributing to his persecution. Palestinian Christians are under attack, but they are targeted not because of their Christianity, but rather because of their Palestinian identity. Even if Pastor Boyd recognized Isaac as a fellow Christian facing an existential threat, the framing of the threat in terms of Christian persecution would still distort the analysis of settler colonialism, Jewish Zionist supremacist policies, and occupation. The deployment of religion and its extraction from a complex historical and political analysis obscures the explanatory frame that is needed to understand the persecution of someone like Rev. Dr. Isaac. By the same token, without scrutinizing the role of American empire in addition to the Christian restorationist theology and race, class, and gender within the US, we cannot fully understand Pastor Boyd’s lack of empathy. At the moment, “saving” Christians from “persecutions” in the MENA region is refracted through an Islamophobic and orientalist lens consistent with the “global war on terror.” The complicity and co-imbrication of Christian and Jewish Zionisms, amplified by orientalist tropes, totally obscure the reasons for the persecution of Christian Palestinians.
A Concluding Question for Further Discussion
I conclude with a question to open rather than close the discussion. Decolonial thinkers have spoken recently on the need for double critique, namely focusing externally on a critique of empire while also interrogating the traditions themselves through an epistemology from the margins (feminist religious hermeneutics, for example). How should such conversations unfold within the geographies of Christians in the MENA region and perhaps specifically in Palestine?
During the twentieth century and now into the twenty first, White Christian evangelicals have claimed that their standing in the US socio-political landscape is under attack. Even though they have enjoyed political and religious dominance in the US, they believe that they are now the persecuted, and that their persecutors—Blacks, Latina/os, LGBTQI+ persons, and other minorities—are plotting their demise. The perception of Christian persecution is not a new one, as Mitri Raheb demonstrates in his most recent book, The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire, nor is it monolithic. In this monograph Raheb traces the particular histories of Christians in the MENA (Middle East and North African) region who have long served as pawns in the political machinations of empires, including those of White evangelicals in the US. The latter, while more than willing to claim the mantle of persecution for themselves, are far less likely to extend such claims to Palestinian Christians. Who is able to claim the mantle of being persecuted in the Middle East, as Raheb shows, more often has had to do with what suits the interests of European and US powers, rather than the realities of those who live in the region. In the current moment, we find expressions of sympathy (or lack thereof of) for the plight of Middle Eastern Christians still enmeshed in the operations of empire.
What Raheb’s book in particular adds to our understanding of this phenomenon is a deep historical engagement that locates the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in a longer arc of colonial history and the history of empires. Raheb begins his story with the Ottoman Empirem where he gives an account of the treatment of Christians within the millet system. He is not nostalgic for the pre-colonial European Ottoman system, which surely did treat Christians as second-class subjects. But his history is also one that is decolonial, and as such refuses to see in the Ottoman system an imperfect precursor to the liberal nation state system, under which Middle Eastern Christians would arguably fare much worse than under the Ottoman system. In subsequent chapters, Raheb explores the role of European missionary activities in the region and their often symbiotic work with imperial and colonial forces, the effect of the Nakba on Palestinian Christians, and the more recent decisions of US administrations to fly the banner of religious freedom in the Middle East only when it suits their purposes. And it is this latter point that resurfaces again and again in this text. Who is able to claim that they are being persecuted or lacking in freedom, and thus able to reap the benefits of others recognizing that claim, is unevenly distributed and marks not the suffering of those living under oppressive rule, but those with vested interests in marking some as persecuted and others as not, thereby bypassing the need to interrogate political forms of violence defining all Palestinian lives regardless of religion. The latter move, often enough as Raheb shows, acts as a pre-text to further intervention in regions not under colonial political control.
What Raheb’s book in particular adds to our understanding of this phenomenon is a deep historical engagement that locates the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in a longer arc of colonial history and the history of empires.
The contributors to this symposium explore this theme in a variety of ways. Candace Lukasik, for example, takes Raheb’s geopolitical framing of persecution into reflections about her own work with diasporic Coptic Christian communities in the US. What Lukasik finds in doing so is that as communities move from one context to another, their identities as a persecuted minority transform. In this case, Coptics reframe their persecution in Egypt through the US framework of Christian persecution in ways that lift up their Christian identity and downgrade their MENA identity in keeping with US geopolitical framings. Omer likewise takes Raheb’s argument and thinks with it in new contexts. In particular she puts Raheb’s book into conversation with the recent documentary film directed by Maya Zinshtein, Til’ Kingdom Come, which examines the role of Christian Zionists in the US supporting groups who help fund the Israeli military and settlement and annexation projects. This support has been welcomed by some in Israel despite the overt antisemitism expressed by Christian Zionists in the US. Indeed, so-called philo-semitism is antisemitism. The deep irony and tragedy of this story comes in the way that Christian evangelicals fail to see Palestinian Christians as co-religionists and as bearers of human rights and dignity, despite their shared faith. In the film, this is most starkly revealed when a pastor from Kentucky claims, following a conversation with a Lutheran Pastor in Bethlehem, that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Here, recognition fails because of the Christian Zionist lens that constructs “real” Christians as White evangelicals and Christians living under occupation in Israel/Palestine as non-existent. The persecuted Christian again here is tied up with the politics of empire and nation.
In his contribution, Gary Burge also brings in further reflections on the complicity of the west in forms of violence throughout the MENA region. Burge first focuses on the western political violence that has damaged Christian communities in the region before turning to the role of Islamophobia in shaping who are considered victims of religious persecution. He finally turns to a criticism of Raheb, not for his harsh words for Evangelicals in the US, but for his lack of them. Burge worries that Raheb lets American Evangelicals off the hook and calls for an even more strongly prophetic voice to counter their message.
If Omer, Lukasik, and Burge extend Raheb’s critical account of Christian Zionism and Evangelical complicity in the suffering of Christians in the MENA region, Mourad Takawi highlights the moments of hope that surface in Raheb’s text. Takawi finds in even the most horrendous episodes of violence recounted in Raheb’s text moments that illuminate alternative futures for those suffering under the weight of oppression. He delves more deeply into the example of Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883) to illustrate this. Raheb pens a response to these contributors which takes up the central themes analyzed in each of these essays.
This mixture of trenchant critique that is attentive to multiple layers of identity formation—including, but not limited to, religious, ethnic, national, and racial identities—and constructive imagining of ways of forming community beyond those identities is necessary as we confront populist forms of authoritarianism. The latter mobilizes the rhetoric of persecution to further marginalize the most vulnerable in societies around the world. In this symposium the author and contributors alike draw us to the urgency of this analysis and help us chart ways forward beyond our current frameworks.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
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During the twentieth century and now into the twenty first, White Christian evangelicals have claimed that their standing in the US socio-political landscape is