Book forums are generative when they move beyond the text under scrutiny to a broader conversation around foundational questions the book generates for differently situated readers. Therefore, I am indebted to my generous and thoughtful readers who engaged with my book to illuminate critical queries in the study and praxis of religion in conversation with their research trajectories. In what follows, I first telegraph what Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding is about. I then engage the productive reflections of my readers and use them as an opportunity to dive deeper into some motifs and questions animating the book. The book wrestles with what exceeds the gaze of (secular) decolonial theory. It does so in light of what the evidence from my fieldwork, interviews, and focus groups revealed about religious peacemaking on the ground. In his engagement with my work, Robert Orsi powerfully identifies this wrestling as amounting to an unrealized potential “for an epistemology of religion in the ruins of the modern.” Drawing on a layered account of the “abundant pluralism of contemporary global religions among people in movement on the planet,” Orsi pinpoints how my intersubjective research methodology enacts a decolonial move that nevertheless stops short of displacing the secular as the foundation of critique. In this piece, I move from Orsi’s discussion of the catastrophic ruins of modernity broadly speaking, to the particular ruins of Gaza in 2025. I ask what it means to discuss religion and the practice of peacebuilding in a time of live-streamed genocide enabled by a particular narration of religion and politics.
“Bad” vs. “Good” Religion?
When the box with my author’s advanced copies of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding arrived in July 2023, I was preoccupied with what I had seen on a visit to Palestine in late June 2023 (months before October 7th). During that trip, I witnessed the charred aftermath of pogroms in Palestinian villages in the northern West Bank. Jewish Israeli settlers had conducted the pogroms in collusion with the Israeli military. Of course, in the months and now well over a year since the Hamas-led attack of October 7th, 2023 this Jewish supremacist violence—which intends the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank (along with Gaza, or under the guise of Gaza) has accelerated with impunity. Amid a continuous genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, it has been difficult to re-engage with a book that focuses on the cases of the Philippines and Kenya in order to highlight the operative frame of the religion and peacebuilding business. I have struggled with it not only because the book examines two cases that are remote from the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, but also because much of the industry of religion and peacebuilding was developed in Palestine/Israel. This industry has often de-emphasized the material realities of occupation, apartheid, settler colonialism, and eventually genocide.
In June 2023, I walked through the paths of Turmus Ayya and saw burnt homes and cars, shattered windows, and sites of utter destruction. All of this violence unfolded under a framework of a Jewish “landlords” theology on Shabbat (a day usually designated for settlers’ ever-increasing and, post-October 7th, greatly augmented expressions of what they deem as sacralized violence). This site of destruction demands a lucid analysis of religion not as a simple causality of violence. Such arguments treat “bad religion”—i.e., the political kind that “causes” violence—as distinct from “good religion”—i.e., the apolitical kind that is “peaceful”—and in doing so normalize and authorize secular authority as that which parses what counts as good or bad religion. At times, secular violence is even treated as “good violence” in opposition to religious violence. Ultimately, the recognition of the “secular” as filled with a curated political theology is what led me to critique the praxis of religion and peacebuilding for its thin, reductive, depoliticizing, and ahistorical deployment of “good religion” as the common denominator (undergirding what I call the “harmony business”) to counter political violence and conflict. Such an argument assumes falsely that the “religious” stands over and against the other presumably more material and real issues. Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding traces the operative logic of the “harmony business.”
Depoliticized Plurality
Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding is based on empirical research of inter and intra-religious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, often underwritten by donor countries, organizations, and intergovernmental initiatives intent on “harnessing” religious actors for peaceful outcomes to political conflicts. This outcome, of course, is not necessarily the same as the redressing of historical injustices and conditions of structural violence. The book identifies two paradoxical findings: first, religious peacebuilding practices are both empowering and depoliticizing, and second, more doing of religion—“putting religion to work to promote various [measurable] objectives, such as reducing the rate of child marriages in Kenya” (3)—does not necessarily denote a deeper knowing about religion, or what Diane L. Moore understands as critical religious literacy. The book traces the neo-liberalization and securitization of religious virtuosity within the landscape of the so-called global war on terror. It interrogates how interreligious peace governance uses the language of empowerment and peace to promote inter-communal harmony but, in effect, depoliticizes communities through “double closures”—that is, the “mutual indexing of religion and culture to the threshold of communal belonging and vice versa [where] one’s religious or cultural identity provides a communal boundary marker” (124). Accordingly, communal belonging is defined by religious belonging and vice versa; “being Muslim” or “being Christian” is a communal marker, and thus, finding oneself labeled as one or the other contains one’s narrative within a predetermined script.
Ultimately, the recognition of the ‘secular’ as filled with a curated political theology is what led me to critique the praxis of religion and peacebuilding for its thin, reductive, depoliticizing, and ahistorical deployment of ‘good religion’ . . . to counter political violence and conflict.
This scripting disenfranchises and confines individuals’ agency and political imagination of what peace entails. It is a segregationist approach to managing a pluralistic society, that in turn prohibits broad-based conceptions of political-economic solidarity. The more there is a programmatic investment in religion as a mechanism for managing building peace and governing postcolonial “divided societies,” as they are called by those in the industry, the more the capacity of each communal actor to disrupt their ascribed religious and communal scripts diminishes. On the one hand, the book’s decolonial and intersectional prisms expose the entrenched and ongoing colonial dynamics operative in religion and the practices of peacebuilding and development in the global South. On the other hand, the many stories of transformation and survival that emerged from my fieldwork speak back to decolonial scholarship and theory, exposing their limited traction and, often, their irrelevance to people’s struggles for survival. At this juncture, I turn to the questions the book raises for my gracious interlocutors. I focus, in particular, on those questions that point to concerns that lay outside the purview of the book.
“Manualizing” the Decolonial Turn or Revolutionary Action?
Emma Tomalin, a prominent leader at the intersection of the academic study of religion and religion and development praxis, retrieves her extensive experience to highlight the multidirectional utilitarianism of the religion business. Specifically, I refer to her account of the Hidden Peacebuilders Network’s Muslim participant’s refusal to divulge the “intangibles” of his religiosity while eagerly embracing the other dimensions of the program’s focus on “strengthening the role of local faith actors in peacebuilding and reconciliation.” Tomalin wants to think through the concept of “decolonial openings” in strategic and operationalizable terms. I am unsure of how decolonial interruptions can become “manualized.” Broadly, in the book and through my ethnographic work, I wrestle not only with the question of what religion can do, for example, to enhance reconciliation practices in local communities (which itself is implicated in a neoliberal discourse of responsibilization) but also with whether there are openings for epistemic and theological or hermeneutical disobedience within its limited framework.
Therefore, to reiterate the book’s paradoxical finding, the more religion is integrated into peace and development policymaking, the less politically emancipatory it becomes. I persistently worry about hermeneutical closures while recognizing their agentic potentiality nonetheless. In his piece, Jean-Pierre Reed asks about the revolutionary potentialities of the praxis of religion and peace, if it does not entail decolonial justice. The empirical evidence I foreground in the book makes more complex, as noted, revolutionary conceptions of agency, religious or otherwise. Still, the life stories I collected illuminate how “unwoke” religiosity (heteronormative, patriarchal) can also express people’s agency and transform their lived realities. However, I call such a form of agency “Sisyphean,” which I further connect to a notion of “pious resiliency,” a concept deeply challenging for decolonial political horizons. By “Sisyphean” I refer to people in the margins’ “persistence against hopelessness and investing daily survival tasks with religious piety” (83). Programmatic peace/development practices themselves become sites of spiritual and vocational formation. Sisyphean persistence nourishes religious commitments by spiritualizing peacebuilding practices that are incorporated into neoliberal peace governance. Hence, a contrast between “woke” religiosity and the realities of “unwoke” but transformative practice is one of the points that emerged from the book’s empirical work. A purist critique of (neo)colonial dynamics often obscures people’s agency in rewriting conflict narratives of hate into inter-communal peace scripts. This rewriting also constitutes a spiritual reclaiming of a religious and communal sense of “authenticity.”
Pious Survival
My point about hermeneutical closures urgently connects with K. Christine Pae’s grappling with the transformative and disruptive prospects of hermeneutical and theological disobedience that she writes about from a South Korean context and as a feminist religious ethicist. Pae foregrounds a genealogy of feminist scholarship to disrupt the binarization of knowing and doing. I argue that more doing of religion entails the diminishment of knowledge about religion. By diminishment, I mean the foreclosure of hermeneutical horizons from the margins (queer, feminist, and others) as a result of the utilitarian logic of “capacitating” of so-called religious actors to do helpful things—Helpful for whom?, one might ask.
The more religion is integrated into peace and development policymaking, the less politically emancipatory it becomes.
Pae’s contribution, based on her work with women victims of a prostitution network connected with the American military stationed in South Korea, discloses the reluctance of her interlocutors to divulge religious knowledge when involved in various faith-related healing activities marked by power differentials. Pae foregrounds the experience of the women affiliated with the Sunlit Center to examine syncretism and the role of Minjung theology in understanding hermeneutic disobedience. Yet, my emphasis on doing rather than knowing religion signals the flattening of virtuosity as a utilitarian rather than a normative and disruptive intervention in peace/development (making it something other than pacification). “Survivalist piety” therefore links survival with piety and the reforming of subjectivities to be more conducive to (useful for) keeping the peace. The concept of “survival piety” exposes the spiritualization of survival and peace practices as well as how they unfold within a neoliberal frame that depoliticizes religion/culture. It does so through a reductive analysis of the causes of conflict (and poverty) and singles out the “religious” as the key to unlocking “local” buy-in. The latter is a neoliberal concept that denotes the “business” aspect of the religion and peacebuilding industry and its devolutionary logic. Under such a logic “partnership” is sought by peacebuilding professionals with religious and civil society actors and sectors.
The theoretical dimensions of my book challenge the limits of the language of “partnership” central to the post-secular turn to “religious actors.” I argue that this concept invisibilizes those on the margins by overlooking historical injustices and their long-term impacts. In a distinct manner, a social justice and solidarity lens prioritizes the margins and, as Pae notes, enacts multiple forms of “theological disobedience.” The very deployment of “religion” to define communal and individual narratives or scripts reflects a colonial taxonomic and segregationist logic. Hence, when Reed writes that my discussion of a hermeneutics of disobedience and resistance does not point to “practical” outlooks concerning intersectional politics and does not redress “the ‘doing [religion]’ dilemma” that I illuminate throughout the book, he is, in effect, reaffirming that doing religion and peacebuilding that is not disruptive of scripted forms of depoliticizing religion counters transformative politics. My critical approach to religion and peacebuilding praxis seeks to illuminate the disruption of enclosed communal boundaries that deploy religious affiliation to delineate boundaries of belonging and solidarity. I show that so much of the religion and peacebuilding industry—with its technocrats, research centers, intergovernmental bodies, and multiple projects that intersect with development, so-called counterterrorism, and peacebuilding praxis—fails to be disruptive of hegemonic systems of domination because it operates within a realist frame that deploys a utilitarian instrumentalizing logic.
My critical approach to religion and peacebuilding praxis seeks to illuminate the disruption of enclosed communal boundaries that deploy religious affiliation to delineate boundaries of belonging and solidarity
Hence, I develop the concept of the “prophetic lite” to denote the delimitation of religious agency to being useful but not disruptive or disobedient to dominant scripts. Pae comes to the question of agency from postcolonial feminist theology and transnational feminist interventions. These interventions center the practice of coalitional work from the margins in order to move power and radically transform both theologies and political economy. The feminist and intersectional decolonial framework, however, is in tension with the neoliberal utilitarian framework of religion and peacebuilding. This is the case even if the peacebuilding frame uses words like feminism or gender mainstreaming. Such words at the time of this writing are being excised from US-related initiatives (themselves under a massive dismantling, denoting a shift in the philosophy of “soft power” that underpinned investments in “religious actors”). Underpinning Trumpist assaults on “soft power” is a White supremacist, masculinist, extractive (neo)colonial reactionary vision of “world peace.” Counter to this vision, I articulate a decolonial critique of the peace business, including its utilitarian domestication of marginalized sectors and their subsequent depoliticization, which prevent a transformative justice-oriented formation of solidarities disruptive of persistent epistemic, structural, and direct forms of violence.
Nonrevolutionary Decolonial Openings
Finally, I return to Orsi’s reflection on the unrealized potential of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding to build on my “critique of the thin secular pluralism of interreligious peacebuilding” and to make theoretical space for “abundant pluralism of presences” from the “ruins of the modern.” Such ruins, for Orsi, are found in “an ad hoc plurality of real presences from different worlds” that converge through “[t]he landscapes of contemporary migrations—border crossings, refugee camps, NGO-sponsored peacebuilding centers, and so on.” Orsi highlights that such convergences in modernity’s ruins “present an opportunity for cross-religious engagements apart from the imperatives of states and the harmony business.” Orsi then asks whether I smuggle in secular epistemology by focusing on the ethical which focuses on horizontal inter-subjectivity and inter-communality to the exclusion of the causal force and conviviality of the vertical (gods and other nonhuman agents and beings). Indeed, he pushes my account of the sacred and how and where it enacts decolonial openings.
I trace intersubjective love in sites of horizontal friendship across divides (and scripts) formed on “the underside of modernity,” often produced as an upshot of various neoliberal development/peacebuilding programs that nonetheless exceed the aims of both neoliberal rationality and decolonial theory. I suggest that they enact decolonial openings through nonrevolutionary love. Orsi vividly describes how “people in movement,” in their realities of dislocation, see one another in fullness. He gives the example of how Santa Rosalia populates the religio-social imagination of Sicilian Catholics and Tamil Hindus in Palermo, albeit differently. For Orsi, the syncretic (which Pae also examines) allows Tamils and Catholics in Palermo to “get glimpses of themselves in the other and of the other in themselves.” In distinction, he writes powerfully, “[s]ecular moderns are seemingly doomed to forever be encountering the religion that they themselves created. But Santa Rosalia shows that the gods may be practitioners of decolonial love too; they come with their own intentions and purposes.” On this basis, he urges me to unsettle the authoritative location of the modern/secular as the foundational ground of critique. This is a powerful challenge that I want to think through via the example of the US-backed Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza. To think about religion in and from the ruins of Gaza, it is necessary for one to think ethically, especially when she is confronted by the ethical claims Palestinians make on her. Is such ethics necessarily “secular? Is it possible to decolonize secularity and extract it from its nest in racialized modern and colonial formations?
In the Ruins of Gaza
Rather than “religious,” the underlying cause and driver of violence in Palestine/Israel is secular settler colonialism born in and enabled by Euro-American imperial patrons. As is the case in the postcolonial contexts I describe in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, positing the causality of violence in Palestine/Israel in terms of presumably competing religious claims contradicts centuries of interwoven communal life in the region. Such arguments are definitionally anti-historical. The critical work of Ussama Makdisi on the “ecumenical frame” in the region that existed before western Christian colonization and encroachment offers one example of how communal life was interwoven. Another comes from Iraqi-Israeli Jew turned Oxford historian Avi Shlaim’s recent memoir, Three Worlds, which tells the story of his family in Iraq. Yes, they were Jewish, but mostly they thought of themselves as Baghdadi, much like the other non-Jewish inhabitants of the city. Likewise, Ella Habiba Shohat relinks Jews to Arab and Muslim geographies of belonging and in doing so advocates for a “revolutionary nostalgia,” which is a form of what she calls “diasporic reading” that refuses the boxes and scripts into which the Zionist (Christian and Jewish) formations have relocated and enclosed her. Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding disrupts precisely the overwhelming force of colonial scripted foreclosures or what might be called a segregationist discourse of war and peace.
Is it possible to decolonize secularity and extract it from its nest in racialized modern and colonial formations?
Therefore, the case of Palestine/Israel is entirely consistent with the critique of modern/colonial secular epistemologies Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding traces. Incidentally, Palestine/Israel has been a site for the “religion and peacebuilding industry” in ways that enact multiple erasures and depoliticizations and illuminate the secularist extraction of religion for (settler)colonial agendas. Particular narratives about Jewish history and destiny that are themselves products of the modern/Christian colonization of Jewish consciousness have permeated across secular and religious registers of Jewish modern nationalist and statist projects. What exactly makes Israel “Jewish” beyond the fact of Jewish bodies or biology is a critical problem that has taught me continually to interrogate the religious hermeneutics underwriting secular ideologies (see also Yaacov Yadgar’s To Be A Jewish State). This connects to a throughline in my scholarship, namely “critical caretaking” as a peacebuilding praxis. Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding explores how the religion and peace industry works against critical caretaking. “Critical caretaking” uses the tools of critique to denaturalize the stability, and claims to authenticity, of public narratives and modes of memory modulations. In addition, it advocates for a relational and intersectional hermeneutical depth that is capable of rescripting public narratives and disrupting claims to ontological and epistemological authenticity.
One of the most grotesque manipulations of interfaith discourse is the so-called Abraham Accords orchestrated by the first Trump Administration, which, according to many analysts, catalyzed the occurrence of the Hamas attack of October 7th, 2023. On this analysis, the attack was an attempt to reject the “regional normalization,” which intentionally bypassed the Palestinians. The accords were designed to make them go away and/or be absorbed into other Arab contexts (reflecting, of course, the orientalism and Islamophobia shot through the peacebuilding frame). The cynical naming of the normalization accords—which were economic and military sets of agreements (among the U.S., the normalizing countries, and Israel) building on antecedent cooperation, especially in terms of Israel’s export of surveillance technologies—as “Abrahamic,” captures the depoliticizing, ahistorical, and reductive utilization of religion. Instead of talking about land theft and territory, the story is spun as being about “terrorism,” marked explicitly as “Muslim” (in other words, “bad religion”). Instead of talking about the material reality of one hundred years of settler colonialism as experienced by Palestinians, we talk about a rift between Muslims and Jews (the “Abrahamic” children supposedly). Even more strikingly, the framing is put in “civilizational” terms that assimilate Jews into the violent construct of the “Judeo-Christian”; instead of examining how a biblical grammar underpins even the most anti-religious articulations of Jewish nationalism and entitlement to a land that already had people in it, there is talk about needing to reconnect “Jews” and “Muslims” as generic categories into a peaceful discourse of co-existence. Instead of interrogating how the reliance on a biblical grammar of return, holy land, and the ingathering of exiles is, in fact, a Christian European discourse embedded in racialized accounts of Jews and anti-Muslim/orientalist frames, the religion and peacebuilding industry—under the postsecular cover of claiming to take religion seriously—ends up covering up and reenacting colonial violence while reinforcing secular epistemologies. Trumpism’s assault on “soft power” at the onset of Trump’s second presidency removed a liberal inclusivist façade deployed ultimately to maintain peace without radical accountability for addressing the roots of global and international injustice.
Overemphasis on unreconstructed foreclosed and segregated accounts of religion, hence, become a form of a reductive explanatory frame, which is especially weaponized in the case of Palestine/Israel. Such accounts may present themselves as “authentic” representations of religious claims. Still, such a framing is precisely a product of European modernity’s deployment of “religion” in the service of imperial designs. Connecting to Orsi’s discussion of the ruins of the modern, the ruins of the US-backed Israeli genocide against Palestinians also represent modernity’s violence. Since such violence deploys “Judaism” and “Jewish history” in spinning itself as “self-defense,” and since such justification mobilizes antecedent orientalist and Islamophobic dehumanizing discursive formations, redressing the legacies of such violence requires that we think on the level of the ethical and historical accountability, and such thinking requires excavating “revolutionary nostalgias” and counter-archives, digging in the debris of (Judeo)-Christian modernity for historical Islamo-Jewish secularity before the Euro-modern construction of religion in the service of colonialism. Thinking and analyzing religion and peace requires, therefore, a robust ethical account of secular/modern epistemic, ontotheological, and (settler) colonial violence.
