Decolonizing Churches as Emancipation and Exorcism

Abstract

As urgently needed as decolonial theory, theology, psychology, and ecclesiology are in the churches that have had their lives and history constrained (or indeed their ecclesial formations given birth) by colonial power and knowledge relations, they are just as urgently needed in the churches that continue to benefit from those relations. The churches of the global North, and particularly those that have been the allies and moral architects of colonial extraction and assimilation projects, the churches whose histories bear out a flow of knowledge and authority from center to periphery and a flow of economic and cultural production from periphery to center, are thereby diminished and distorted in ways that require painstaking decolonial analysis and constructive reorientation to rectify.