Decolonizing Religion
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Decolonizing Religion
Decolonizing religion is the process of identifying and dismantling the colonial assumptions, institutions, classifications, and power relationships that continue to influence religious traditions and the academic study of religion. It examines how colonial governments, missionaries, universities, churches, and legal systems defined what counted as religion, whose knowledge was considered authoritative, and which spiritual traditions were dismissed as superstition, folklore, or primitive belief.
The project extends beyond adding previously excluded authors to reading lists. It calls for structural changes in scholarship, theological education, religious institutions, biblical interpretation, peacebuilding, and relations with Indigenous communities. Decolonial approaches emphasize land, sovereignty, race, gender, class, language, historical memory, and the authority of communities whose religious lives were transformed or suppressed by colonialism.
Colonialism and the Study of Religion
The modern academic study of religion developed alongside European colonial expansion. Scholars, missionaries, and administrators classified the traditions of colonized peoples through categories derived largely from European Christianity. Diverse systems of ritual, law, ancestry, philosophy, healing, and communal responsibility were often compressed into supposedly universal concepts such as religion, belief, scripture, priesthood, and worship.
These classifications were not politically neutral. Colonial institutions used religious categories to determine which communities received legal recognition, which practices were tolerated, and which peoples were viewed as civilized or governable. Academic disciplines frequently presented European secularism and Christianity as universal standards while treating other traditions as cultural objects to be observed and explained.
Decolonial religious studies challenges this hierarchy by asking who creates scholarly categories, who benefits from them, and whose knowledge is excluded. It encourages scholars to examine their own institutional position, relationships with studied communities, citation practices, curricula, funding structures, and claims to intellectual authority.
A decolonized study of religion does not merely reverse the direction of observation or replace one universal theory with another. It seeks more reciprocal forms of research in which communities are recognized as producers of knowledge rather than objects of study. Indigenous sovereignty, local languages, community accountability, embodied experience, and historical context become central to the research process.
Decolonial Theology and Church Reform
Christian theology was deeply involved in colonial expansion. Biblical interpretation, missionary teaching, racial ideology, and doctrines of providence were sometimes used to justify conquest, forced assimilation, slavery, land seizure, and cultural domination. Churches frequently presented European theological traditions as universally Christian while treating African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American religious knowledge as inferior or incompatible with Christianity.
Decolonial theology examines these histories and asks how Christian belief and practice can be reconstructed outside colonial frameworks. It draws from liberation theology, Black theology, African theology, Indigenous theology, womanist theology, feminist theology, queer theology, and other traditions developed by communities affected by conquest and racial domination.
This work involves more than condemning abuses committed in the past. Colonial patterns may continue through church leadership structures, missionary relationships, financial dependence, theological publishing, educational accreditation, liturgical language, and assumptions about legitimate ministry. Decolonial church reform therefore requires institutional accountability as well as theological reflection.
In African contexts, theologians have challenged the racialized whiteness of Western theology and emphasized African languages, proverbs, histories, communal practices, and Indigenous knowledge systems. In Latin America and the Caribbean, theologians have connected colonial history with poverty, race, migration, political repression, and struggles for cultural autonomy. In settler-colonial societies, churches are increasingly called to address their involvement in land dispossession, residential schooling, resource extraction, and the suppression of Indigenous spiritual traditions.
The aim is not to reject every European theological contribution. Rather, decolonial theology questions the presumption that European traditions possess universal authority while other traditions are merely contextual. All theology emerges from particular histories, cultures, institutions, and relationships of power.
Theological Education and Curriculum Reform
Theological schools and religious education programs are important sites of decolonial reform. Many inherited curricula continue to privilege European theologians, Western philosophical categories, colonial languages, and models of ministry developed for missionary institutions.
Decolonizing theological education requires examining what is taught, who teaches it, which languages are used, how students are evaluated, and what communities theological institutions serve. Adding a small number of African, Asian, Indigenous, Latin American, womanist, or queer authors is insufficient when the basic structure of the curriculum remains unchanged.
African theologians have called for the meaningful integration of Indigenous knowledge systems into theological education. Such knowledge should not be included merely as cultural decoration. It can provide substantive resources for understanding community, healing, ethics, ecology, spirituality, leadership, and human relationships.
Contextual theological education also seeks to bridge the divide between universities, churches, and communities. Scholarship is connected with ministry, public life, local struggles, and the lived experiences of religious communities. Community-engaged education challenges the idea that academic institutions are the sole producers of legitimate theological knowledge.
Decolonial religious education encourages students to compare traditions without assuming that Christianity or Western secularism provides the neutral standard. Anti-racist and comparative approaches can help students recognize unequal power relationships while engaging traditions with greater humility and intellectual reciprocity.
Biblical Interpretation, Mission, and Liturgy
Biblical interpretation has often reflected the interests of empires, missionaries, colonial governments, and dominant social groups. Decolonial biblical interpretation examines how scripture has been used to legitimize conquest and how colonized peoples have interpreted the same texts as sources of resistance, dignity, and liberation.
Postcolonial and decolonial readings pay close attention to empire, displacement, land, cultural identity, class, race, gender, and the experiences of marginalized communities. African biblical scholars have developed interpretive strategies grounded in African history, proverbs, communal reading, and struggles against apartheid and economic inequality.
Mission studies are similarly being reconsidered. Christian missions contributed to literacy, education, translation, health care, and the formation of new religious communities. At the same time, missions could undermine Indigenous authority, suppress local traditions, impose European cultural norms, and support colonial administration.
Decolonizing mission requires a shift away from paternalistic models in which Western institutions provide knowledge and leadership to supposedly deficient communities. Locally led churches, reciprocal partnerships, historical accountability, and respect for community knowledge become essential.
Liturgy is another area of reform. Religious language can reproduce divisions between civilized and primitive, Christian and heathen, or savior and victim. Decolonial liturgical practice seeks language, music, ritual, and community relationships that do not silence or objectify others.
African Religions and Black Theology
Colonial governments and missionaries frequently classified African religious traditions as primitive, irrational, or demonic. These judgments helped legitimize missionary intervention and the replacement of African institutions with European religious and educational structures.
Decolonial scholarship treats African religions as complex intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and social traditions. It challenges colonial taxonomies that separate religion from politics, ecology, healing, ancestry, and community life in ways that may not reflect African understandings.
Black theology of liberation confronts the religious foundations of racism, apartheid, and white supremacy. Thinkers influenced by figures such as Steve Biko and James Cone have connected spiritual liberation with political struggle, psychological freedom, and resistance to racial domination.
African decolonial theology also examines class inequality, urban segregation, development policy, environmental justice, gender, and the continuing economic consequences of colonialism. It views African communities not as passive recipients of religious or developmental assistance but as sources of knowledge, agency, and transformative practice.
Popular culture can also become a site of theology. Music, storytelling, protest, memory, and community organizing may express theological insights that formal academic institutions overlook. These sources reveal how ordinary people interpret unfinished colonial and apartheid histories.
Indigenous Spiritualities and Settler Colonialism
For many Indigenous peoples, religion cannot be separated from land, language, kinship, governance, ecological responsibility, and relationships with ancestors. Colonial systems often divided these interconnected traditions into categories such as religion, culture, mythology, and property.
Settler colonialism differs from forms of colonial rule focused primarily on administration or resource extraction because it seeks permanent control of Indigenous land. Religious doctrines, including ideas of providence, discovery, civilization, and Christian destiny, were frequently used to justify settlement and dispossession.
Indigenous ceremonies were prohibited or condemned, sacred objects were removed, children were placed in missionary schools, and traditional spiritual leaders were marginalized. These policies damaged the transmission of language, memory, ecological knowledge, and community relationships.
Decolonizing religion in settler societies therefore involves more than symbolic recognition of Indigenous spirituality. It requires respect for Indigenous sovereignty, land rights, cultural authority, and the right of communities to govern their own spiritual practices and knowledge.
Churches and religious institutions may be called to participate in truth-telling, restitution, reparations, repatriation of sacred objects, protection of sacred lands, and the repudiation of doctrines that supported conquest. Indigenous theologies can also challenge Christianity to reconsider individualism, human domination of nature, and the separation of spiritual life from ecological responsibility.
Decolonization should not be reduced to personal lifestyle choices. Individual education and respect are valuable, but meaningful decolonization also concerns land, political authority, institutional power, and material repair.
Islam and Muslim Decolonial Thought
Colonialism transformed Muslim societies through military occupation, legal restructuring, educational reform, racial classification, and the displacement of Islamic intellectual institutions. European scholars frequently interpreted Islam through Orientalist categories that presented Muslim societies as static, irrational, or incapable of modern political thought.
Decolonizing Islamic studies calls for serious engagement with Islamic intellectual traditions as sources of theory and knowledge rather than merely as historical objects. It questions Eurocentric periodization, the dominance of Western academic methods, and the exclusion of Muslim scholarly voices.
Islamic liberation theology connects faith with struggles against empire, racism, caste hierarchy, economic exploitation, patriarchy, and authoritarianism. It draws upon concepts such as divine unity, justice, covenant, and communal responsibility while remaining attentive to the danger that decolonial language can be appropriated by nationalist or exclusionary movements.
Muslim scholars have also explored solidarity with Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial societies. Islamic covenant traditions and histories of anti-colonial resistance may provide ethical resources for supporting Indigenous sovereignty, although such relationships require accountability rather than assumptions of automatic solidarity.
Qur’anic studies are undergoing a related reassessment. Decolonial approaches criticize the tendency to treat European methods as neutral while viewing classical Islamic scholarship as confessional or intellectually limited. They seek a more balanced engagement between historical criticism, Muslim interpretive traditions, and the political conditions under which knowledge about the Qur’an is produced.
Buddhism, Hindu Traditions, and Asian Religions
European colonial rule reshaped the classification and institutional development of Asian religions. Colonial scholars helped create standardized ideas of Hinduism and Buddhism by selecting particular texts, doctrines, and elite authorities to represent diverse regional traditions.
The category of Hinduism, for example, brought many practices and philosophical systems under a single religious identity modeled partly on Western assumptions about unified religions. Modern reformers and nationalist movements later adopted and transformed these classifications.
Decolonizing Hindu studies requires distinguishing legitimate criticism of colonial knowledge from political projects that use decolonial rhetoric to defend majoritarian nationalism, caste privilege, or the marginalization of religious minorities. Opposition to Western colonialism does not automatically make a movement socially liberating or decolonial.
Buddhist studies has also been criticized for centering white converts and Western interpretations while separating Buddhism from Asian communities and histories. Decolonial scholars emphasize the colonial transformation of Buddhist institutions, the role of Asian migration, and the authority of practitioners whose traditions have often been represented by outsiders.
Debates over who owns or represents Buddhism illustrate a broader tension within religious studies. Complete scholarly detachment may conceal unequal power, but exclusive claims to insider authority can also restrict critical inquiry. Decolonial research seeks accountable relationships that recognize both community authority and the value of careful scholarship.
Asian religious traditions also provide ethical and philosophical concepts that can challenge universalist assumptions in fields such as education, comparative theology, and artificial intelligence. These concepts should be engaged as living intellectual traditions rather than extracted as exotic alternatives to Western thought.
Feminist, Womanist, and Queer Theologies
Colonial power operated through gender and sexuality as well as race, religion, and economics. Colonial governments and missionaries imposed or reinforced particular family structures, gender binaries, sexual norms, and ideas of respectable womanhood.
Postcolonial feminist theology criticizes approaches that treat the experiences of white Western women as universal. It emphasizes the intersections of gender with race, class, caste, colonialism, migration, religion, and national identity.
Womanist theology centers the religious experiences, survival, creativity, and political agency of Black women. It challenges racism within feminist movements, sexism within religious institutions, and the exclusion of Black women from dominant theological narratives.
Queer and trans theologies examine how colonialism shaped modern categories of sexuality and gender. In many societies, colonial law and Christian moral regulation suppressed identities and practices that did not conform to European norms. Claims that queer identities are foreign or un-African may themselves reproduce colonial assumptions.
Decolonial queer theology also draws from spiritual traditions that understand personhood, embodiment, and gender differently from modern Western binaries. Indigenous and African spiritual concepts can open possibilities for thinking about identity beyond colonial classifications.
Embodied approaches challenge the tendency of religious studies to treat religion primarily as abstract doctrine. Bodies, emotions, disability, sexuality, ritual, suffering, pleasure, migration, and material conditions are recognized as central to religious knowledge.
Ethics, Peacebuilding, and Public Religion
Religion is frequently included in peacebuilding and international development programs, but these programs may reproduce colonial relationships. Western institutions often define peace, select acceptable religious partners, control funding, and treat local religious communities as instruments for achieving externally determined goals.
Decolonial peacebuilding questions whether peace can be achieved without addressing land dispossession, racial hierarchy, economic exploitation, political domination, and the historical violence of colonialism. Peace is understood not merely as the absence of conflict but as the presence of justice and meaningful self-determination.
Case studies from Africa, Asia, and other postcolonial regions show that religious peacebuilding can be constrained by neoliberal funding structures and secular assumptions about what religion is supposed to do. Local religious actors may be valued only when they support institutional programs rather than when they challenge unjust political or economic systems.
A decolonial approach recognizes local communities as theorists and decision-makers. It values forms of religious knowledge expressed through ritual, memory, oral tradition, community organizing, and resistance.
Comparative religious ethics also requires reform. Ethical traditions have often been compared through concepts developed within European Christianity. Decolonial comparison examines the effects of race, empire, caste, and unequal representation while expanding the range of recognized moral knowledge.
Just-war theory, humanitarian intervention, and religious approaches to violence must similarly be reconsidered in light of histories of conquest and imperial power. Ethical traditions cannot be separated from the political settings in which they were developed and applied.
Challenges and Debates
Decolonization has become a widely used term, and its popularity creates the risk that it will be reduced to institutional rhetoric. Universities, churches, and cultural organizations may adopt decolonial language without redistributing authority, changing curricula, repairing harm, or relinquishing control.
Not every radical, nationalist, anti-Western, or culturally conservative movement is decolonial. Movements may oppose European dominance while preserving caste inequality, patriarchy, racial exclusion, authoritarianism, or religious majoritarianism.
There is also debate about the relationship between decolonization and secularism. Some theories of liberation assume that religion will disappear as societies modernize. Decolonial thinkers influenced by Frantz Fanon and other anti-colonial writers have questioned this assumption and examined religion as a potential source of both domination and resistance.
The project must also avoid romanticizing precolonial societies or treating Indigenous and local traditions as internally uniform. All traditions contain debate, hierarchy, conflict, change, and competing interpretations. Decolonial scholarship should recognize community authority while remaining attentive to inequalities within communities.
Decolonization is therefore an ongoing process rather than a completed intellectual method. It requires continued reflection on who speaks, who decides, who owns knowledge, who controls institutions, and who bears the material consequences of religious and academic practices.
Conclusion
Decolonizing religion involves a broad reconsideration of religious history, theology, education, institutions, scholarship, mission, ethics, and public life. It reveals how colonialism shaped the categories through which religions are studied and how religious ideas helped legitimize conquest, racial hierarchy, cultural suppression, and settler expansion.
The process also uncovers traditions of resistance. African theology, Indigenous spirituality, Islamic liberation theology, Black theology, feminist and womanist theology, queer theology, Asian religious thought, and community-based biblical interpretation provide resources for reconstructing religious knowledge outside colonial hierarchies.
Meaningful decolonization requires more than symbolic inclusion. It demands changes in authority, land relationships, curricula, institutional leadership, research practices, language, funding, and accountability. Religious communities and scholars must confront colonial histories while supporting the sovereignty and intellectual agency of peoples whose knowledge has long been marginalized.
Decolonizing religion is not the rejection of all inherited traditions. It is a critical effort to understand how power shaped those traditions, recover suppressed knowledge, create more reciprocal relationships, and build religious and scholarly institutions grounded in justice, plurality, and historical responsibility.
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Foundations and Decolonial Theory
Turning Decolonial Rhetoric into Anti-Colonial Praxis in Religious Education
| Yonah H. Matemba | Oxford Review of Education | 2026
Examines how religious education can move beyond symbolic decolonisation toward institutional and pedagogical anti-colonial change.
Decolonizing Knowledges, Undisciplining Religion
| Nina Hoel | Religions | 2025
Challenges disciplinary boundaries and colonial habits that determine whose religious knowledge counts as legitimate scholarship.
Decolonizing Religion: Engaging Indigenous Knowledge and Transforming Religious Studies
| Siti Sarah Muwahidah | Religion | 2025
Introduces work that centers Indigenous knowledge and rethinks the theories, methods, and institutions of religious studies.
Decolonising Studies of Religion in So-Called Australia
| Anna Halafoff et al. | Journal of Intercultural Studies | 2024
Calls for truth-telling, Indigenous sovereignty, and critical reform of religion scholarship in settler-colonial Australia.
Religious Studies and Theology: Decolonial Perspectives in “On the Disciplines”
| Joshua S. Lupo | Contending Modernities | 2023
Surveys teaching resources that expose colonial assumptions embedded in theology and the academic study of religion.
Decolonizing Religious Studies
| Natalie Avalos | Bulletin for the Study of Religion | 2023
Argues that decolonising religious studies requires structural transformation, Indigenous critique, and accountable scholarly practice.
Is Decolonial Theory Secular? Lessons from Frantz Fanon
| Nelson Maldonado-Torres | Contending Modernities | 2022
Uses Fanon to question secular assumptions within decolonial theory and its treatment of religion and liberation.
Reversing the Gaze? Or Decolonizing the Study of the Other?
| Sajjad H. Rizvi | Method & Theory in the Study of Religion | 2021
Critiques academic habits of objectifying religious others and proposes more reflexive, reciprocal modes of inquiry.
A Decolonial Theory of Religion: Race, Coloniality, and Secularity in the Americas
| An Yountae | Journal of the American Academy of Religion | 2020
Develops a theory connecting modern religion, racial formation, colonial power, and the production of secularity.
A Conservative Decoloniality?: On the Limitations of Irish Decolonization
| Maxwell Woods | Contending Modernities | 2020
Shows how national decolonisation can preserve conservative religious and social hierarchies rather than dismantle them.
Provincializing Theodicy
| Anthony Paul Smith | Contending Modernities | 2020
Reframes theodicy as a colonial technology that legitimises social orders and normalises suffering.
The Provincializing Work, or What Remains After and Outside Philosophy of Religion
| Danube Johnson | Contending Modernities | 2020
Questions philosophy of religion’s European universalism and explores knowledge traditions beyond its inherited boundaries.
Decolonizing Disenchantment
| Marika Rose | Contending Modernities | 2020
Links narratives of disenchantment to colonialism, slavery, and modern transformations of religious power.
Decoloniality and Philosophy of Religion
| Eleanor Craig and An Yountae | Contending Modernities | 2020
Interrogates whether philosophy of religion can survive the decolonial critique of its categories and exclusions.
Sovereignty, Blackness, and the Decolonial Task: Thought Experiments
| Joseph R. Winters | Contending Modernities | 2020
Explores sovereignty, Blackness, violence, and the ethical demands of decolonial religious thought.
Not Every Radical Philosophy Is Decolonial
| Santiago Slabodsky | Contending Modernities | 2020
Distinguishes European radical critique from approaches that genuinely center colonised peoples and colonial difference.
Religious Studies and/in the Decolonial Turn
| Nelson Maldonado-Torres | Contending Modernities | 2020
Explains how decolonial thought challenges the foundations, objects, and institutional practices of religious studies.
The Promise of Decolonization for the Study of Religions
| Abdulkader Tayob | Contending Modernities | 2020
Considers how decolonisation can reshape comparative inquiry without replacing one intellectual orthodoxy with another.
Introduction to Decoloniality and the Study of Religion
| Garrett FitzGerald | Contending Modernities | 2020
Introduces the coloniality of knowledge and outlines why religious studies must confront its modern imperial inheritance.
Decolonizing the Study of Religion
| Malory Nye | Open Library of Humanities | 2019
Maps practical changes needed in curriculum, citation, staffing, theory, and institutional cultures within religious studies.
Christian Theology and Church Reform
Contemporary Decolonial Theology Approach and Its Influence on Church Leadership in Indonesia
| Asep Afaradi | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2025
Applies decolonial theology to church leadership by integrating Indonesian practices of deliberation and mutual cooperation.
Decolonising Faith: Palestinian Liberation Theology in the Context of Settler-Colonialism
| Emile Badarin | Third World Quarterly | 2025
Situates Palestinian liberation theology within resistance to occupation, settler colonialism, and religious political domination.
A Colonial-Decolonial Critique of Theological and Religious Discourse in South Africa, 1975–2025
| Martin Mujinga | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2025
Traces fifty years of South African theological discourse from colonial exclusion toward reconstruction and decolonial engagement.
Decolonising Theology: Reforming Christian Faith Towards Freedom Based on Ephesians 2:14–16
| Moses Wibowo, Matheus Mangentang and Aprianus L. Moimau | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2025
Uses Ephesians to argue for a Christianity freed from colonial divisions, domination, and inherited cultural superiority.
Challenges for Theology in Settler Colonial Contexts
| Michael Mawson | Modern Believing | 2025
Examines theology’s responsibilities where churches remain entangled with settler sovereignty, dispossession, and Indigenous erasure.
Decolonial Thinking and Europe: Decolonisation between Particularism and Universalism
| Johann-Albrecht Meylahn | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2024
Considers whether European theology can engage decolonial critique without reclaiming universal authority.
Western Theology’s Whiteness and Some Liberation Responses
| Sibusiso Khuzwayo | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2024
Shows how Western theology sacralised whiteness and how liberation traditions contest its racialised images of Christ.
Theology at the Service of Decolonization with Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez
| Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez | Everyday Intellectually Transformative Work | 2023
Discusses theology as a practice of resistance, memory, reconciliation, and solidarity with communities damaged by colonial violence.
Whiteness in Christianity and Decoloniality of the African Theological Identity
| Moses Munyao | Religions | 2021
Critiques Christianity’s racialised whiteness and argues for recovery of an African theological identity and agency.
(Post)Colonial Theology in South Africa? A Conversation with Recent South African Theology at the Forefront of the Decolonial Turn
| Wessel Wessels | Stellenbosch Theological Journal | 2021
Assesses the promises, ambiguities, and unresolved identity politics within South African decolonial theology.
Guest Editorial: The Case for Postcolonial Theology
| Carlton Turner | Modern Believing | 2021
Argues that postcolonial theology remains necessary for exposing empire’s continuing influence on Christian belief and institutions.
Decolonial Theology as an Ongoing Process: The Importance of a Common Narrative
| Debora Tonelli | Annali di studi religiosi | 2020
Presents decolonial theology as an unfinished communal process requiring shared narratives without suppressing difference.
Postcolonial Theology: A European Outlook
| Wietske de Jong-Kumru | Journal of Catholic Social Thought | 2020
Examines how European theology can confront colonial memory, migration, race, and its own presumed intellectual centrality.
Decolonial Theology in the North Atlantic World
| Joseph Drexler-Dreis | Exchange | 2019
Explores how decolonial theology challenges North Atlantic Christianity’s institutions, epistemologies, and economic entanglements.
Re-Membering and Connecting: Decolonizing Theology through Storytelling
| Kaio Thompson | The Prophet | April 2, 2018
Uses Samoan storytelling, memory, and relationship to challenge detached and colonial forms of theological education.
Decolonizing Theology
| Graham Ward | Stellenbosch Theological Journal | 2017
Reflects on what theology must relinquish and reconstruct when confronted by colonial histories and global inequality.
The Option for the Poor as a Decolonial Option
| Joseph Drexler-Dreis | Political Theology | 2017
Reinterprets liberation theology’s option for the poor through coloniality, epistemic privilege, and political resistance.
Decolonizing Theology: The Case of Puerto Rico
| José D. Rodríguez | Journal of Lutheran Ethics | 2016
Connects biblical liberation, church responsibility, and Puerto Rico’s unresolved struggle against colonial governance.
Post-Colonial Theology
| Brian D. McLaren | Sojourners | 2010
Introduces postcolonial theology as a Christian reckoning with conquest, mission, empire, and cultural supremacy.
Decolonizing Theology in the Caribbean: Prospects for Hermeneutical Reconstruction
| Romney M. Moseley | Toronto Journal of Theology | 1990
Proposes a Caribbean theological reconstruction grounded in colonial history, local experience, and emancipatory interpretation.
Theological Education and Religious Studies Curricula
Decolonising Wisdom: Re-Reading the Magi as Professional Knowers beyond Israel in Matthew 2:1–12
| Rasebate I. Mokotso | HTS Teologiese Studies | June 15, 2026
Uses the Magi narrative to validate plural knowledge systems and challenge Eurocentric definitions of expertise.
Reforming Confessional Religious Education through Anti-Racist and Decolonial Comparative Theology
| Grace Blackmer | Journal of Religious Education | 2026
Proposes comparative theology as a way to transform confessional education through anti-racist and decolonial practice.
Decolonial Theological Education beyond the Church–Academy Divide
| Teddy Chalwe Sakupapa | Acta Theologica | 2025
Calls for theological formation that reunites scholarship, ministry, community life, and locally grounded knowledge.
Integrating African Indigenous Knowledge Systems into Theological Education
| Patrick Nanthambwe et al. | Religions | 2025
Argues for African Indigenous knowledge as a substantive source for theological curriculum rather than cultural decoration.
Markers and Tools to Facilitate Decolonisation of Theological Education in Africa
| Khamadi Joseph Pali | Religions | 2024
Offers practical indicators for evaluating whether African theological education is genuinely undergoing decolonial transformation.
The Mediation of Coloniality in Decolonisation Developments in South African Theological Education
| Marilyn Naidoo | Religions | 2024
Examines how colonial structures continue to shape institutional reform even when theological schools adopt decolonial language.
Charting a Praxical Course for Transforming Theological Education in Africa
| Benedict A. Msabah | Religions | 2024
Advocates contextual, community-engaged, and action-oriented theological education responsive to African realities.
Decolonising Intercultural Theology and Research
| Marianne Grohmann | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2024
Critiques unequal intercultural research relationships and proposes reciprocal, self-reflexive theological knowledge production.
Decolonising Theological Education in the Eyes of African Theologians
| Passmore Masvotore | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2024
Centers African theologians’ assessments of curriculum, institutional power, language, and theological relevance.
Lutheran Theological Education for Christian Ministry in Africa: A Decolonial Perspective
| J. K. Mashabela | Religions | 2024
Evaluates inherited Lutheran educational models and proposes contextual formation for ministry in African communities.
Pioneering a Theological Curriculum for Our Time and Place: The Case of Akrofi-Christaller Institute
| Gillian Mary Bediako | Religions | 2023
Describes a Ghanaian curriculum rooted in African Christian history, language, culture, and community transformation.
Practical Theology and Socially Just Pedagogies as Decolonising Praxis
| John Klaasen | Religions | 2023
Links practical theology with socially just pedagogy that redistributes voice, authority, and educational opportunity.
From Zerfass to Osmer and the Missing Black African Voice in Practical Theology
| Vhumani Magezi | Religions | 2023
Critiques dominant practical-theology models for marginalising Black African experience and intellectual traditions.
Experiencing Religion: Post-Colonial Views for Religious Education
| Ramon Baring | Religions | 2022
Reorients religious education toward lived experience, cultural plurality, and postcolonial critique of universalist frameworks.
Nurturing Intercultural Theological Education towards Social Cohesion
| Marilyn Naidoo | Religions | 2022
Explores how intercultural theological education can address division while resisting assimilation and unequal power.
Decolonizing Theological Education: Learning from Latinx, Womanist, and Asian Theologies
| Piotr Dominiak | Journal of Adult Theological Education | 2022
Uses Latinx, womanist, and Asian theologies to rethink curriculum, faculty authority, and contextual learning.
Decolonising the Concept of the Trinity to Decolonise the Religious Education Curriculum
| Anné H. Verhoef | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2021
Shows how inherited Trinitarian formulations shape curricula and proposes more contextual and liberating interpretations.
Decolonising or Africanisation of the Theological Curriculum
| Johannes J. Knoetze | Stellenbosch Theological Journal | 2021
Distinguishes decolonisation from Africanisation while examining their implications for curriculum design and institutional change.
Practical Theology and the Call for the Decolonisation of Higher Education in South Africa
| Jaco S. Dreyer | HTS Teologiese Studies | November 6, 2017
Proposes practical theology as a partner in transforming universities, knowledge hierarchies, and public responsibility.
Teaching Theology at African Public Universities as Decolonisation through Education
| Johan Buitendag | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2017
Examines public-university theology as a site for African intellectual agency, citizenship, and decolonial education.
Biblical Interpretation, Liturgy, and Mission
Reading Psalm 22 in Mark 15 through a Postcolonial Lens
| Masilo Hombana | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2025
Reads the crucifixion narrative through empire, suffering, and the interpretive experiences of formerly colonised communities.
Bhengu’s Decolonisation Vision of the Gospel in South Africa: An Analysis of the National Church
| Dan S. Lephoko | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2025
Examines Nicholas Bhengu’s vision of an African-led church freed from missionary paternalism and racial domination.
Augustine on Theosis and Divine Illumination as a Resource for Decolonial Theology
| G. T. Baleng | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2024
Reinterprets Augustine to support theological agency beyond colonial ownership of the Christian intellectual tradition.
Contextuality, Interculturality and Decolonisation as Instruments of Struggle
| Benson O. Igboin | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2023
Presents contextual and intercultural biblical interpretation as tools for resisting Western epistemological domination.
The Decolonising of Theology through African Proverbs
| Kelebogile T. Resane | In die Skriflig | 2023
Uses African proverbs as theological resources that reconnect Christian reflection with local languages and wisdom.
Reimagining African Identity in Evangelical Preaching
| Godwin N. Nganyu | International Journal of Theology and Reformed Tradition | 2023
Explores preaching that affirms African identity rather than reproducing colonial cultural and theological assumptions.
Mistakes of Western Christian Missions in Africa and Their Responses
| M. T. Masuku | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2023
Reviews mission practices that damaged African cultures and considers pathways toward repair and contextual Christianity.
Thy Kingdom Come? Visualizing (Post)Colonial Futures in Christian Mission
| Kristin Krause | Religions | 2023
Analyzes visual mission narratives and the ways colonial futures persist within contemporary Christian imagination.
Aware-Settler Biblical Studies: Breaking Claims of Textual Ownership
| Matthew Anderson | Journal of Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies | 2022
Challenges settler claims over biblical texts and foregrounds responsibility, location, and Indigenous presence.
Decolonisation: A Reading Strategy for the African (Re-)Interpretation of the Old Testament
| Rudolph de Wet Oosthuizen | Verbum et Ecclesia | 2022
Develops an African reading strategy that resists imported assumptions in Old Testament interpretation.
A Decolonial Biblical Perspective on Jesus Inspired by Fanon and Biko
| Jacobus Kok | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2021
Interprets Jesus as an anti-imperial prophet through conversation with Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko.
Liturgy and Non-Colonial Thinking: Speaking to and about the Other
| Johann-Albrecht Meylahn | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2021
Seeks liturgical language that does not reproduce binaries of master and victim or silence the other.
A Decolonial (Re)turn to Class in South African Biblical Scholarship
| Gerald O. West | Old Testament Essays | 2021
Restores class analysis to decolonial biblical scholarship and connects interpretation with organised community struggle.
Mission Studies at South African Higher Education Institutions: An Evaluation of Current Trends
| Eugene Baron | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2020
Evaluates whether mission-studies programmes have moved beyond colonial frameworks toward African contextual priorities.
Colonialism, Missions and the Imagination: Illustrations from Uganda
| Angus Crichton | Anvil | 2020
Uses Ugandan examples to show how mission histories still shape Christian imagination and institutional relationships.
Moving beyond Postcolonial Theory in Practical Theology
| Daniël J. Louw | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2017
Considers how practical theology can move from critique toward healing, dignity, and transformed pastoral practice.
Decolonising Western Missionaries’ Mission Theology and Practice in Ghana
| Peter White | In die Skriflig | 2017
Assesses Western mission legacies in Ghana and argues for locally accountable theology and ministry.
Missionaries and Indigenous Education in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
| Rebecca Swartz | History Compass | 2012
Reviews missionaries’ conflicting roles in Indigenous schooling, cultural disruption, literacy, and imperial administration.
Christian Missions and Colonial Empires Reconsidered: A Black Evangelist in West Africa, 1766–1816
| Edward E. Andrews | Journal of Church and State | 2009
Uses the career of a Black evangelist to complicate simple narratives of missions as colonial instruments.
Postcolonial Theory as a Hermeneutical Tool for Biblical Reading
| Lazare S. Rukundwa | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2008
Introduces postcolonial interpretation as a method for exposing empire, resistance, and marginalised voices in scripture.
African Religions and Black Theology
Colonial Rule and Religious Change: Evidence from Africa’s Colonial Borders
| Hector Galindo-Silva | arXiv | 2026
Uses colonial borders to study how different governing systems altered Christianity and Indigenous religious persistence.
Azania between History and Eschatology: Bonganjalo Goba’s Africanist Theology
| Obakeng G. Africa | Verbum et Ecclesia | November 14, 2025
Revisits Goba’s Africanist theology as a resource for Black liberation, history, and future-making.
The Unfinished Business: A Decolonial Reflection on the “State of Emergency” Song by Simphiwe Dana
| Itumeleng D. Mothoagae and Thembinkosi Ngwenya | Verbum et Ecclesia | September 10, 2025
Reads popular music as theological and political testimony against unfinished colonial and apartheid structures.
Addressing Systemic Racism in South Africa: A Missio-Public Theological Perspective
| Patrick Nanthambwe | Verbum et Ecclesia | February 19, 2025
Connects public theology, mission, and institutional action against enduring racial inequality.
Re-Imagining Fundamentalism in Traditional African Religion
| Benson O. Igboin | Religions | 2025
Examines how colonial pressures from Christianity and Islam shaped militant responses within an African religious movement.
Religious Complexity in Postcolonial South Africa
| Farisani Settler | Religions | 2025
Proposes religious complexity as a framework for understanding Indigenous traditions beyond colonial taxonomies.
Reading from This Place? A Personal Reckoning with Whiteness and Biblical Scholarship
| Dion A. Forster | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2025
Reflects on white location, privilege, and accountability in South African biblical scholarship.
Tracking the Decolonial in African Christian Theology
| Teddy Chalwe Sakupapa | International Review of Mission | November 29, 2023
Maps decolonial trends in African Christian theology and presents mission from the margins as a liberating practice.
Hashtagged and Black? A South African Black Theological Perspective on Decoloniality
| Reginald W. Nel | Religions | 2023
Examines digital activism and Black theology within contemporary South African decolonial struggles.
Transformative Education, Participative Black Theology of Liberation, and a Post-Apartheid University
| Anthony G. Reddie | Religions | 2023
Links participatory Black theology with university transformation, democratic learning, and social repair.
Constructing an Urban Theology of Liberation in South Africa
| Stephan F. de Beer | Missionalia | 2023
Develops an urban liberation theology attentive to apartheid spatial legacies and grassroots city-making.
Reasserting a Future Based on Spiritual Liberative Praxis
| Anthony G. Reddie | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2020
Argues that Black spirituality can reconnect liberation theology with ordinary people’s lived struggles.
James Cone vis-à-vis African Religiosity: A Decolonial Perspective
| Jakub Urbaniak | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2019
Critiques Cone’s ambivalence toward African religions and calls for fuller engagement with African religiosity.
Trajectories of Mutual Zombification in the Praxis of Postcolonial Christianity
| Bekithemba Dube | Acta Theologica | 2019
Uses the metaphor of zombification to critique exploitative religious power in postcolonial African Christianity.
Reflections on a Decolonial Future for African Theology
| Teddy Chalwe Sakupapa | Missionalia | 2018
Assesses major African theologians and argues for a more explicit decolonial epistemic foundation.
Decolonising Development? Re-Claiming Biko and a Black Theology of Liberation
| Nico B. du Toit | Missionalia | 2018
Uses Steve Biko and Black theology to critique development models that reproduce dependency and domination.
Mobilising Religious Assets for Social Transformation
| Chammah J. Kaunda | Religions | 2018
Examines African religious resources as sources of agency rather than deficits in development discourse.
Un-Thinking the West: The Spirit of Doing Black Theology of Liberation in Decolonial Times
| Vuyani S. Vellem | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2017
Calls Black theology to reject Western epistemic supremacy and recover an emancipatory spirituality of life.
Decolonial Critique of “Subaltern Whiteness” in South Africa
| Chammah J. Kaunda | HTS Teologiese Studies | 2017
Critiques claims of white marginality that obscure continuing privilege and colonial power relations.
Towards an African Ecogender Theology
| Chammah J. Kaunda | Stellenbosch Theological Journal | 2016
Integrates African cosmology, ecology, and gender justice in a theology resisting colonial and patriarchal frameworks.
Indigenous Spiritualities and Settler Colonialism
Providence and the Destiny of the “Heathen” in Australia’s Settler Colonial Theology
| Laura Rademaker | Journal of the American Academy of Religion | 2026
Shows how providential theology justified settler expansion and imagined Indigenous peoples within colonial destiny.
Settler Feminist Theology: The Potential for Postcoloniality
| Jaimee van Gemerden | Feminist Theology | 2025
Examines whether feminist theology produced by settlers can become accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and land.
They Took Part in Apache Ceremonies. Their Schools Expelled Them for “Satanic Activities”
| Nina Lakhani | The Guardian | June 24, 2024
Documents conflicts between Indigenous Apache ceremonies and Christian school policies on tribal lands.
Indigenous Faithful and Christians Work with Environmentalists to Conserve India’s Sacred Forests
| Deepa Bharath | Associated Press | 2024
Reports on religious collaboration that protects sacred forests while respecting Indigenous ecological traditions.
Decolonizing Views on Indigenous Spirituality among Latinxs
| Nicole Froio | HipLatina | November 15, 2023
Explores Latinx efforts to recover Indigenous spiritual practices obscured by colonisation and Christianisation.
Indigenous Spirituality, Decolonization, and Restoration of the Lost Relationship with Mother Earth
| Michael Yellow Bird | Oxford Academic | 2023
Connects Indigenous spiritual renewal with healing colonial damage and restoring reciprocal relations with Earth.
Decolonization at the Intersection of Political Theology and Settler Colonial Studies
| David Lloyd | Political Theology | 2023
Brings political theology into dialogue with settler-colonial studies, land struggle, and Indigenous resistance.
Christianity, Settler Colonialism, and Resource Extraction
| Jennifer H. Pranger | Dialog | 2023
Examines Christian complicity in extraction and the theological possibilities of land-based accountability.
Oceanian Indigenous Religions and Christianity: Decolonizing the Philosophy of Religion for Oceania
| Sam Tukidia | Journal of Dharma Studies | 2023
Reframes philosophy of religion through Oceanian Indigenous traditions and their encounters with Christianity.
Decolonizing the Church
| KAIROS Canada | KAIROS Canada | September 11, 2022
Outlines church responsibilities for truth, reparations, Indigenous rights, and dismantling colonial relationships.
Settler Colonialism
| Political Theology Network | Political Theology Network | July 19, 2022
Introduces scholarship connecting religion, sovereignty, land seizure, Indigenous resistance, and settler political orders.
Decolonization in Everyday Life
| The Indigenous Foundation | The Indigenous Foundation | February 28, 2022
Explains everyday practices of supporting Indigenous sovereignty, language, culture, land, and community leadership.
How Indigenous Theologies Can Transform Christianity
| Randy Woodley | Christians for Social Action | February 16, 2021
Shows how Indigenous relationality, creation care, and community can challenge colonial forms of Christianity.
Colonialism Still Affects How Black and Indigenous People See Gender
Connects colonial religion and governance with imposed gender binaries and the suppression of Indigenous identities.
Decolonizing Our American Christianity
| Mark Charles | Faith & Leadership | March 3, 2020
Calls American Christians to confront doctrines and national myths rooted in conquest and Indigenous dispossession.
Taking a Critical Indigenous and Ethnic Studies Approach to Decolonizing Religious Studies
| Natalie Avalos | Contending Modernities | 2020
Centers Indigenous sovereignty, land, race, and material power in efforts to decolonise religious studies.
What Decolonization Is, and What It Means to Me
| Tina Curiel-Allen | Teen Vogue | March 4, 2018
Explains decolonisation through Indigenous identity, land, education, and resistance to settler narratives.
Thanksgiving Whitewashes Not Only Genocide, but Gender Erasure
| Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson | Them | November 22, 2017
Links settler celebration, Christian colonialism, genocide, and erasure of Indigenous gender diversity.
Colonizing and Decolonizing Projects of Re/Covering Spirituality
| Jeong-eun Rhee and Binaya Subedi | Educational Studies | 2014
Examines spirituality as a contested site where colonial knowledge can be repeated or actively undone.
Spirituality as Decolonizing: Elders Albert Desjarlais, George McDermott, and Tom McCallum Share Understandings of Life in Healing Practices
| Judy Iseke | Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society | 2013
Centers Métis elders’ teachings on spirituality, healing, relationships, and decolonial knowledge transmission.
Islam, Qur’anic Studies, and Muslim Decolonial Thought
Emerging “Indigenous” Islam in Colombia: Conversions, Local Identities, and Decolonial Narratives
| Bastien Brodard | Religions | 2026
Examines Colombian Muslim converts who frame Islam through local identity, colonial history, and Indigenous belonging.
Decolonising Knowledge: A Call to Reclaim Islam’s Intellectual Legacy
| Shaykh M. A. Kholwadia | Al Jazeera | August 7, 2025
Calls for renewed Muslim intellectual agency beyond colonial educational systems and imported categories of knowledge.
Sayyida al-Ḥurra: An Early Modern Decolonial Muslim Woman
| Jessica I. Sparkes | Religions | 2025
Reconsiders a Muslim woman ruler as a figure of resistance to Iberian expansion and colonial modernity.
Decolonizing Islamic Studies: Rethinking Epistemology and Methodology in the Indonesian Context
| M. H. K. Huda | Al-Afkar Journal for Islamic Studies | 2024
Proposes Indonesian epistemologies and methodologies for Islamic studies beyond inherited colonial academic models.
Mobilising a Decolonial–Islamic Praxis: Covenants in Islam and Muslim–Indigenous Relations
| Halim Rane | Religions | 2024
Uses Islamic covenant traditions to develop ethical Muslim solidarity with Indigenous peoples in settler states.
Snapshots of Islamic Liberation Theology: Politics, Religion and the Post-Secular
| Siavash Saffari | Politics, Religion & Ideology | 2024
Surveys Islamic liberation theology as a post-secular politics of justice, critique, and collective emancipation.
Decolonising Islamic Intellectual History: Perspectives from Shiʿi Thought
| Sajjad H. Rizvi | Global Intellectual History | 2024
Challenges Eurocentric periodisation and recovers Shiʿi intellectual traditions as active producers of global thought.
Decolonising Islam: Indigenous Peoples, Muslim Communities, and Settler Colonialism
| Shadaab Rahemtulla | Religions | 2023
Places Islamic liberation theology in conversation with Indigenous rights and Muslim responsibilities in settler colonies.
Islamic Liberation Theology and Decolonial Studies
| Ashraf Kunnummal | Religions | 2023
Defends decolonial Islamic liberation theology against nationalist appropriation and caste-based exclusion.
The Future of Islamic Liberation Theology
| Shadaab Rahemtulla | Religions | 2023
Introduces emerging debates on tawhid, gender, race, coloniality, political struggle, and Muslim liberation.
Revivalism and Decoloniality: The Paradox of Muslim Political Thought
| Mobeen A. Rehman | Religions | 2023
Explores how Muslim revivalists reject Western domination while adopting modern state forms and political mechanisms.
Islamic Liberation Theology and the Decolonial Turn: A Historical and Theoretical Introduction
| Imraan Abbasi and Ashraf Kunnummal | Religions | 2023
Introduces the historical development, political commitments, and theoretical vocabulary of Islamic liberation theology.
Decolonizing Qurʾanic Studies
| Joseph E. B. Lumbard | Religions | 2022
Critiques Eurocentric Qurʾanic scholarship and calls for serious engagement with Islamic intellectual traditions.
Critical Muslim Studies: Decolonial Struggles and Liberation Theologies
| Islamic Human Rights Commission | IHRC | 2022
Introduces scholarship linking Muslim liberation theology, racial capitalism, empire, Islamophobia, and decolonial activism.
Decolonial Islamic Studies and Defending Muḥammad in Modern South Asia
| Sohaira Siddiqui | Contending Modernities | 2021
Examines Muslim defense of Muhammad as knowledge production shaped by colonial modernity in South Asia.
Decolonizing the Study of South Asian Islam: Reflections on Defending Muhammad in Modernity
| Waris Mazhari | Contending Modernities | 2021
Reflects on colonial categories, Muslim reform, and the study of prophetic devotion in South Asia.
Towards a Decolonial Approach to the Qur’an
| Asad Dandia | Contending Modernities | 2021
Proposes Qurʾanic interpretation attentive to coloniality, race, power, and the authority of Muslim traditions.
The Decolonial Turn in Liberation Theology: Between Theory and Praxis
| Ashraf Kunnummal | Contending Modernities | 2020
Connects Islamic liberation theology with decolonial thought while insisting on political praxis, not theory alone.
Decolonial Islam, Dissent, and Religious Feminism in Latin America
| Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente | Feminism and Religion | October 3, 2016
Links Muslim feminism, Latin American colonial history, religious dissent, and resistance to patriarchal authority.
The Islamic Liberation Theology of Ali Shariati
| Siavash Saffari | Decolonial Translation | 2015
Explains Shariati’s synthesis of Islam, anti-colonial struggle, social justice, and revolutionary subjectivity.
Buddhism, Hindu Traditions, and Asian Religions
The Invention of Hinduism: How a Civilisational Ecosystem Was Flattened into a Western Religious Mould
| Devdutt Pattanaik | The Economic Times | March 28, 2026
Argues that colonial classification compressed diverse traditions into a Western model of a single religion.
Appropriating Decolonization: A Culture-Centered Critique of Hindu Nationalism
| Mohan Jyoti Dutta | Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies | 2026
Argues that elite Hindu nationalism appropriates decolonial language while erasing caste violence and minority oppression.
Decolonial Pedagogies and South Asian Studies: Knowledge Production, Erasure and Recovery in Higher Education
| Ophira Gamliel and John Reuben Davies | Higher Education for the Future | 2026
Examines how South Asian studies can recover marginalised knowledge and transform colonial university practices.
India Overhauls Teaching in Himalayan Buddhist Monasteries to Counter China
| Krishna N. Das | Reuters | April 8, 2025
Reports on state efforts to reshape monastic education through nationalism, certification, and geopolitical competition.
“Decolonizing the Hindu Mind”: Authoritarian Populism and the Political Life of Decolonial Theory in India
| Shray Mehta | Sociology | 2025
Analyzes how Hindu nationalism repurposes decolonial rhetoric for authoritarian, majoritarian, and caste-privileged politics.
Fraught Solidarities: Diasporic Hindutva and Claims to Decolonial Politics
| Nikita Upadhyay | Social Dynamics | 2025
Critiques diasporic Hindutva claims to decolonial solidarity while caste and religious inequalities remain unaddressed.
Decolonising Education: Learning from Ancient South Asian Knowledge Traditions
| Janaka Jayawickrama | Interventions | 2025
Uses South Asian traditions to challenge colonial educational assumptions and recover alternative forms of learning.
The Transformation of Buddhism during British Colonialism
| Yarina Liston | The Open Buddhist University | December 29, 2024
Explains how colonial rule, Christian missions, and reform movements reshaped modern Buddhist institutions and identities.
Decolonising the Study of Religion: Who Owns Buddhism?
| Natalie Fisk Quli | Journal of Global Buddhism | 2024
Reviews decolonial debates over authority, representation, and ownership within Buddhist studies.
Response to Natalie Fisk Quli’s Review of Decolonising the Study of Religion
| Jørn Borup | Journal of Global Buddhism | 2024
Clarifies a proposed middle path between detached objectivism and insider ownership in Buddhist scholarship.
Curators of Global Buddhism: A Critical Genealogy and Decolonial Intervention
| Thomas E. Eaghll | SSRN | 2024
Examines who curates global Buddhism and how institutional power determines authentic representation.
Hindu-Christian Comparative Theology in a Decolonial Key
| Michael Voss | Modern Theology | 2024
Reworks comparative theology so Hindu-Christian encounter does not reproduce Christian or Western intellectual dominance.
Decolonizing Hinduism and Unraveling Hindutva
| Ananya Vajpeyi | Stanford Religious Studies | 2024
Distinguishes decolonial criticism of Hindu traditions from majoritarian Hindutva’s nationalist project.
What Could “Decolonisation” Mean for Contemporary South Asia?
| LSE South Asia Centre | LSE South Asia Blog | July 24, 2023
Explores decolonisation across South Asian knowledge, culture, politics, archives, and higher education.
J. Sai Deepak’s India That Is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution
| Anupama Sen | Social Dynamics | 2023
Critically examines claims that Hindu civilisational nationalism constitutes an authentic decolonial alternative.
Decolonial AI Alignment: Openness, Viśeṣa-Dharma, and Including Excluded Knowledges
| Kush R. Varshney | arXiv | 2023
Uses a Hindu ethical concept to challenge universalist moral assumptions in artificial-intelligence alignment.
Buddhism in the Far North of Australia Pre-WWII: (In)visibility, Post-Colonialism and Materiality
| Anna Halafoff et al. | Journal of Global Buddhism | 2022
Recovers Asian Buddhist histories obscured by narratives of white Christian Australia and white convert Buddhism.
Buddhist Studies Has a Whiteness Problem
| Funie Hsu | Contending Modernities | 2021
Critiques white-centered Buddhist studies and the colonial separation of Buddhism from Asian communities and cultures.
Decolonial/Anti-Racist Interventions in Tibetan/Buddhist Studies
| Natalie Avalos | Columbia Academic Commons | 2020
Offers decolonial and anti-racist strategies for Tibetan and Buddhist studies, including citation and institutional reform.
Sri Lankan Buddhism and Colonialism
| Stephen Berkwitz and David Robertson | The Religious Studies Project | 2016
Discusses how European colonialism and Christian missions transformed Sri Lankan Buddhist practice and identity.
Feminist, Womanist, Queer, and Embodied Theologies
A Transnational Feminist Reflection on “Doing Religion” and “Knowing Religion”
| Keunjoo Christine Pae | Contending Modernities | June 6, 2025
Applies transnational feminist ethics to religion, peacebuilding, and the colonial politics of scholarly knowledge.
Trans and Queer Latin American Theologies
| Hugo Córdova Quero | Preprints | April 19, 2025
Surveys Latin American trans and queer theologies shaped by colonial history, liberation, race, and embodiment.
Queer/ing Religion
| Melissa M. Wilcox | GLQ | April 1, 2024
Examines religion as a neglected site within queer theory and queerness as a challenge to religious categories.
The Decolonial Queer Possibilities of Ọgbanje Spiritualities
| Adriaan van Klinken | Religion and Gender | 2024
Uses Igbo ọgbanje spiritualities to rethink gender, personhood, and queerness beyond colonial binaries.
Epistemology of Bodies as Closets: Queer Theologies and Martyrdom in Latin America
| Marcelo Aguilar Contreras | Religions | 2024
Rethinks martyrdom, suffering, and resurrection through queer Latin American bodies and histories.
Womanist Theology
| Diana L. Hayes | St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology | 2024
Introduces a theology grounded in Black women’s agency, survival, faith, community, and resistance.
LGBTQ Catholics Need a Queer Theology of Liberation
| Ish Ruiz | Outreach | February 12, 2023
Calls Catholic theology to join queer liberation with resistance to racism, poverty, and colonial violence.
Queer Theology
| Jennifer Slater | St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology | 2023
Surveys queer theological methods that disrupt normative sexuality, gender, bodies, scripture, and church authority.
Contemplating the Lived Theology of the Devadāsīs as a Decolonial Practice
| Emily Parker | Studies in World Christianity | 2023
Centers devadāsī lives and practices against colonial and missionary narratives of religion, sexuality, and reform.
Post-Secular Feminist Research: The Concept of “Lived Religion” and Agency
| Sabine Grenz | Feminist Encounters | 2023
Uses lived religion to challenge secular feminist assumptions and recognize religious women’s complex agency.
Advancing Our Feminist and Womanist Theologies by Embracing Decoloniality
| Xochitl Alvizo | Feminism and Religion | July 6, 2022
Explains how decolonial voices deepen feminist and womanist theology’s understanding of relationship and justice.
Reading Religion and Queerness in Postcolonial Africa
| Adriaan van Klinken | Contending Modernities | October 19, 2021
Examines Kenyan queer Christian creativity against colonial claims that homosexuality is un-African or anti-religious.
Theorizing Bodies in Religious Studies
| Mayra Rivera | Contending Modernities | June 30, 2020
Centers embodiment to challenge abstract colonial knowledge and reconnect religion, race, materiality, and lived practice.
Persistent Becoming: Women’s Religious Thought and the Global
| Aruna Ranawana | Feminist Theology | 2020
Maps global feminist and womanist religious thought around domination, emancipation, struggle, and power.
Gender, Religion and Feminist Theologies: Challenges and Prospects
| Angela Impey Alak | Journal of Gender Studies | 2020
Reviews tensions among gender studies, religious traditions, and feminist theological approaches across contexts.
Postcolonial Feminist Theologies
| Elizabeth T. Higgs | Gender and Theology | 2017
Critiques white Western feminist universalism and centers colonialism, race, culture, and global power.
Religion, Intersectionality, and Epistemic Habits of Academic Feminism
| Elina Vuola | Feminist Encounters | 2017
Challenges secular habits in academic feminism and highlights global feminist theology’s intersectional contributions.
Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology
| Kwok Pui-lan | Asian American Theological Forum | January 30, 2016
Discusses feminist theology, empire, migration, cultural hybridity, and the creative possibilities of postcolonial imagination.
Christian Feminist Theology and Postcolonial Resistance
| Wonhee Anne Joh | Palgrave Macmillan | 2011
Connects Christian feminist theology with resistance to empire, racialisation, war, and gendered colonial violence.
Toward a Feminist Postmodern and Postcolonial Interpretation of Sin
| Margaret D. Kamitsuka | The Journal of Religion | 2004
Reworks Christian understandings of sin through feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial critique.
Ethics, Peacebuilding, and Public Religion
In the Ruins of the Modern
| Atalia Omer | Contending Modernities | July 9, 2025
Reflects on decolonial religion and peacebuilding amid Gaza, settler violence, and modernity’s catastrophic ruins.
A Call for a New Approach to Religion and Peacebuilding
| Emma Tomalin | Contending Modernities | July 2, 2025
Urges faith-based organisations to reject Western instrumentalisation of religion and empower local peacebuilders.
Engaging Our Imagination with Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding
| Jean-Pierre Reed | Contending Modernities | June 12, 2025
Examines both the liberating possibilities and institutional limits of religion-based peacebuilding.
Introduction to Symposium on Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding
| Joshua S. Lupo | Contending Modernities | May 30, 2025
Introduces a debate on neoliberalism, secularism, colonial knowledge, and religious peacebuilding practice.
Abundant Religious Pluralism
| Robert Orsi | Contending Modernities | May 30, 2025
Imagines religious plurality beyond modern secular classification through migration, spirits, ethics, and lived religion.
Decolonial Peace, Theory of Resistance and Justice
| Rewriting Peace and Conflict | Rewriting Peace and Conflict | 2025
Frames peace as resistance to colonial power rather than merely the management of conflict.
Review: Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding
| Francis Xavier Tang | Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy | 2025
Reviews Atalia Omer’s critique of colonial and neoliberal assumptions in the peacebuilding industry.
Empire, Colonialism, and Religious Mobility in the Global South
| A. K. M. Ahsan Ullah et al. | Religions | 2025
Examines how empire and colonial borders shape religious movement, migration, identity, and community formation.
The Legacy of Colonialism in the Recognition of Religions
| Cometan | Journal of Law, Religion and State | 2025
Explores how colonial legal categories continue to determine which traditions receive official religious recognition.
No Peace without Decolonization: A Lecture and Interview with Nelson Maldonado-Torres
| Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Atalia Omer and Joshua S. Lupo | Contending Modernities | April 9, 2024
Connects decolonisation, peace, racial justice, religious thought, and the unfinished work of liberation.
RCPI Book Series: Decolonizing Religion and the Practice of Peace
| Harvard Religion and Public Life | Harvard Divinity School | March 4, 2024
Features a discussion of colonial categories, religious actors, and peacebuilding practice in postcolonial societies.
Race, Caste and Christian Ethics: A Decolonial Proposal
| Anderson Jeremiah | Studies in Christian Ethics | 2024
Brings race and caste into Christian ethics and proposes a decolonial method of moral analysis.
Review of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding in African Affairs
| Mulugeta Kelecha | African Affairs | 2024
Reviews a major study of religious peacebuilding in Kenya and the Philippines through decolonial critique.
The Myth of the Secular Revolutionary: On Fanon’s Religion
| An Yountae | Contending Modernities | April 7, 2022
Challenges secular readings of Fanon and recovers religion’s role in revolutionary ethics and decolonial imagination.
Empire and Race in Comparative Religious Ethics
| Nicholas Andersen | Contending Modernities | January 22, 2021
Shows how empire and racial hierarchy shaped the categories and comparisons used in religious ethics.
Decolonizing Comparative Theology
| Girim Jung | Contending Modernities | November 16, 2020
Calls comparative theology to confront colonial power, unequal representation, and Christian-centered comparison.
Decolonizing Religion: The Future of Comparative Religious Ethics
| Irene Oh | Contending Modernities | May 29, 2020
Argues that comparative religious ethics must address colonial complicity and broaden its sources of moral knowledge.
Decolonial Ethics and Just War Reasoning
| Rosemary Kellison | Contending Modernities | April 24, 2020
Questions whether just-war traditions can be ethically separated from histories of conquest and empire.
Decolonizing Religion and the Practice of Peace: Two Case Studies from the Postcolonial World
| Atalia Omer | Critical Research on Religion | 2020
Analyzes religious peacebuilding in Kenya and the Philippines while exposing its colonial and neoliberal constraints.
Religion and Peacebuilding: A Postcolonial Perspective
| Kwok Pui-lan | Contending Modernities | October 21, 2019
Critiques Western peacebuilding models and centers postcolonial communities, gender, culture, and local religious agency.
