Let's Talk About: Christianity & Colonialism

What If Colonialism Lives On—in Our Bodies, Beliefs, and Churches?

In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Bradley Melle is joined once again by Rev. Joash Thomas for an in-person deep dive into Christianity, colonialism, and inherited trauma. From intergenerational disease to theological rigidity, they explore how the legacies of empire aren’t just historical—they’re physiological, spiritual, and still deeply active in the life of the church.

Together, they ask:

• What does it mean to decolonize theology without turning it into another empire?
• Could our inherited ideas of sin and salvation be more about trauma than rebellion?
• How do colonized peoples carry intergenerational wounds in the body—and how do colonizers carry the trauma of violence, too?
• Why do some deconstructing evangelicals seek refuge in ancient traditions—and what’s really behind the trend of converting to Eastern Orthodoxy?
• What can the Law of St. Thomas teach us about pluralism, humility, and the expansive reach of Christ?

Whether you're working through religious trauma, questioning the Western church's obsession with control, or just curious about how history shapes theology, this episode invites you into a richer, more embodied conversation about faith, power, and healing.

🎧 Tune in and join the dialogue.
📬 Got thoughts? Email Brad at freestyletheology [at] gmail.com or DM @freestyletheology on Instagram.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Freestyle Theology. I'm Dr. Bradley Mella, historian of global Christianity and culture. And I'm here with my friend, the Reverend Joash Thomas, for our second time together, which is really awesome. That's right. And we are finally in person. You might, if you're just listening to this, you can't see, but we are sitting here in chairs, physical chairs,

SPEAKER_01 0:34

in

SPEAKER_00 0:35

each other's presence. This is a subversive move. So it's good to have you here. Good to see you again. It's been a while.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Yeah. I mean, we had to schedule this thing. two or three months out in advance just to be in the same room, mostly because of my erratic life and travel schedule, but I'm glad

SPEAKER_00 0:53

we're here. Yeah, you have been all over for the last two months.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

That's

SPEAKER_00 0:56

right. Where are some of the places you've hit?

SPEAKER_01 0:59

So between the last time We saw each other in person. And now, which was really only two months ago, I've been to Bolivia. I've been to India. Three different cities there. I've been to the United Arab Emirates. I've been to Vancouver, Kelowna, Winnipeg, Dallas, Texas as of last week. And I'm headed to Calgary next week. So that's life. So you've been to the UAE

SPEAKER_00 1:23

and Winnipeg. Those are some pretty... Very different places. Yeah, very... Oh, that's cool, man. And

SPEAKER_01 1:38

you've been talking justice? important isn't being a teacher, going into these spaces and being seen as a teacher. What I'm really curious about is being a learner and going to these places and experiencing the culture and learning from them. And yeah, even if I have a teaching role and moment, I'm still trying to humble myself and learn from their perspectives and allow myself to be taught by the people there, whether that's Winnipeg or the UAE.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Well, I mean that definitely, you know, you use that word decolonized and that way of just approaching other people and other places. I see why you use that word. It sounds so obvious and so simple to go somewhere new and come with a humble posture, not as like the teacher, but as, as a learner, as a participant. And that, As the Padawan, as some folks might say. Yeah, some nerdy folks would say. But that gets right at what we're wanting to talk about today, which is we want to talk about colonialism and Christianity, which is a massive topic, something that I have studied, something that you have studied, something that we have both lived through, from very different ways of living with that legacy. And so kind of what I want to do here today is just let ourselves kind of explore when it comes to colonialism and Christianity, like where does your mind go? How does your body react? What do we need to think more about? So yeah, when I say... Let's talk about Christianity and colonialism. Where does your mind first go?

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Yeah, that's a great question. It's funny how we talked about Christian supremacy last time, and we're talking about Christian colonization this time, right? And that's the reality of history. It makes us uncomfortable, but it sets us free at the same time. All of us... have inherited our faith from somewhere, those of us who identify as Christians specifically. Our faith doesn't exist in a vacuum. We've inherited it. And I think what I've really appreciated in studying the history of these things is better understanding my faith, how it's been shaped historically by these things. And colonization is just one of those things that has shaped modern day history today. There's no escaping it. Whether you realize it or not, you're either a beneficiary of colonization or you're someone who's a survivor of colonization. Or in the case of many of us, or most of us, it's likely both. We're beneficiaries and survivors. So I became a beneficiary of colonization the day I moved to the US and then to Canada, living on stolen land. But I'm also a survivor of colonization because I grew up in India. But to go back back to the original question, what do I think of? I just can't help but think of my ancestors and my family history because colonization isn't an academic theory for me. It's definitely an academic theory, but it's not just an academic theory for me. It's lived experience. This is a bit of a side trail, so just track with my ADHD brain a little bit here. A few months ago, I would was getting my annual physical at the doctor's. And the doctor was kind of like, have you been drinking more alcohol? Because your liver is developing a lot of fat around it, like fatty liver. And so I went down this rabbit trail of looking into fatty liver. I was like, this thing was almost non-existent in my last checkup. Where did this come from? And I realized that there's history for this that's tied to colonization. Really? Yeah, where essentially so many of us who come from communities that were colonized find ourselves developing fatty liver in our 30s, mysteriously. And there's genetic reasons for it because our ancestors were starved because of colonialism. So our bodies are genetically not like our bodies today aren't accustomed to holding as much food as compared to our ancestors and because they were starved. And so because I'm a well-fed 21st century North American, I am very vulnerable to developing fatty liver. So that's something I have to watch out for, regardless of what I'm eating or drinking. So it's lived experience for us in ways that we don't even realize. That's the first thought that comes to mind. Yeah, that's... My fatty liver. That's what comes to mind from colonization.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Your fatty liver. No, that's... I mean, that gets us into, you know, moving away from just an intellectualized history or even just like a social structures-based history, but the body's history.

UNKNOWN 7:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Like the genetic code has a history. Again, it sounds like you're, you're right. Your ancestors, their bodies started to shift in order to hold on to, you know, fat and energy. Yeah. And that gets passed on. And I mean, that touches on so many of the things that we both talk about, which is from, from different perspectives, the trauma of the past that gets passed on. Right. Um, And colonialism, colonization, is a major source of sort of the environment of trauma for people.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

And yes, for non-Western people, that trauma experienced as more so as violence, right? Various forms of violence, whether that's dispossession, whether that's imprisonment or actual violence. And then for the colonizer and their ancestor, or sorry, their descendants, of which I would be one, it's still an environment of trauma because doing things to people and witnessing that and experiencing that also damages the person. And that reminds me of that book, My Grandmother's Hands, if you've read that. I haven't. No? Tell us about it. My Grandmother's Hands by Risma Menakin, I think is his name. But My Grandmother's Hand is a book about racialized intergenerational trauma. Wow. And he explores it in three different groups, like black Americans, white Americans, and police Americans. So black bodies, white bodies, and police bodies. And he shows how, you know, he's a trauma therapist. He actually works with the Minneapolis Police Department training them, which is really something given what happened with George Floyd. I've always wondered what that experience was like for him having worked with the Minneapolis Police Department. Wow. But that book really shows how something that you talk about a lot, which is you know, you talk about how colonization was bad for the colonized and the colonizer. And this, that book will get it right into, you'll get right into like how that affects the bodies of different peoples, how they carry this trauma in different ways, which if it goes unacknowledged, unprocessed, unengaged with, it will erupt again and again and again, and then perpetuate itself. Right. Wow. So yeah. I think colonization and the body, I'm glad you went there first because it's... I think that's arguably one of the most important things to explore and open

SPEAKER_01 10:10

up. Wow. Let me ask you this. How did you tie the two together? Because, I mean, you're an academic who has studied, you have your PhD in colonialism and how it shaped Christianity in North America, indigenous communities. But how did... the body come into this? Because when we're academics, it's so easy for us to be disembodied in how we look at things, even history. So yeah, just out of curiosity, how did that bodily theory kind of get enmeshed with your research focus?

SPEAKER_00 10:44

The honest truth, though, is that in my actual dissertation research, what I studied was, just in case anyone doesn't know, what I studied was evangelicalism. and indigenous communities. So I wanted to explore the indigenous history of Christianity in the time sort of after residential schools because I wondered what happened there. And I knew there was some evangelical growth and I wanted to understand how could that possibly have happened. So that asked me, eventually I had to look back at the colonial legacy in order to understand what if any, like, what's the word, resonances, evangelicalism, even fundamentalist evangelicalism had with indigenous populations who had been colonized. I wanted to explore, like, there must be some resonances or else this movement wouldn't exist, and it does. So that history was more structural and cultural. I didn't really incorporate much of the body into that at that time. Really, it wasn't until my own experience, my own bodily experience with trauma, which would have been from when I was in the middle of my doctoral program, developed a very serious case of ulcerative colitis, where my body is attacking itself and was just kind of destroying itself. It's like an autoimmune disease. And so that was my, because I have grown up, Very privileged up until that point in many, many ways. Kind of in every way. That was my first experience with kind of everything breaking down. Wow. And then, you know, you go through the whole thing trying to find treatments. Eventually you find something that works. I was excited. I'm like, it's all going to go back to normal. But the mental toll and like sort of the body keeping the score of losing faith in your body's ability to like heal itself and protect you. the mental effects were so intense that I developed some really potent agoraphobia and panic disorder. Goodness. And so it wasn't until then, it's just so interesting to me how I was able to keep that so separate from what I was actually looking at. Because when you study history, all you're doing is studying human beings, communities of human beings.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

And I was, you know, very deeply Western, and you can kind of forget that people are bodies. They're not... They're not intellects. They're bodies. They're

SPEAKER_01 13:28

not beliefs. They're not

SPEAKER_00 13:30

just what they believe. Exactly. And so eventually a light went on when I was suffering with this crippling panic disorder that the only way forward for me was because I kind of tried a bunch of different things. you know, like praying it away wasn't working. In fact, a lot of my praying was now I realized just looped anxiety.

SPEAKER_02 13:55

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

I would wake up in the morning and feel kind of like extremely anxious just about anything. And I would do what I always, what I had kind of learned to do as a teenager, which was my prayer life was mostly just me begging God for forgiveness, even though I I wouldn't have done anything. There was nothing I was asking for forgiveness for. My prayer life was just begging for forgiveness because that's what I knew you did with feelings of anxiety. Wow. So it's like the very bodily sensation I was experiencing was anxiety, and I had learned that that means something's wrong. You need to ask for forgiveness.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Let me ask you this. Was there an element of... I need to ask for forgiveness because I'm suffering and maybe the two are co-related. I must have done something to kind of cause the suffering. Was that an element of this faith journey at that point at all?

SPEAKER_00 14:55

It's complicated because I had a fairly well-developed intellectual understanding of how that's not the case. Yeah. You know, I was like, my suffering is just a part of, what would I have said at that time? You know, just like a result of the fallen world. Right. But kind of in a little bit of a Christian nihilistic way where it's just like, that's just the way things are until God magically makes it all better, which isn't really how I would approach it now.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

But at a bodily level, yes. Because I can remember I would like, if bad things would happen, if my kids would get sick, it's like, even though in my childhood, neocortex my cognitive brain I was thinking this has nothing to do with anything I've done this is just life um at some bodily level I would still be like begging for forgiveness I must have done something wrong and so it's twisted right like it's twisted and it's one of these it's one of these unexpected effects of sort of a kind of a what's the word um an absolutizing of original sin. Yes. Where it's like what you're taught at a theoretical level is that every person is truly deserving of God's rejection and punishment. And anything that happens that's good is because God is gracious. And I'm just like, I don't think Augustine's intention Wow. Yeah. Yeah. putting too much weight on, on a certain doctrine and trying to explain the whole world through it.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Yeah. Yeah. You were almost conditioned into doing that. It was your muscular response. Yeah, exactly. Your spiritual muscular response to a situation of suffering was to ask for forgiveness.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Spiritual muscle memory. Yes. To experience any. Muscle memory. Yeah. I

SPEAKER_01 17:12

know I said muscular.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

To, to interpret any kind of, negative bodily sensation or emotion as conviction or... You know?

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Right. No, this is good. I mean, let's keep going down that trail a little bit. Because you and I have had conversations about original sin recently. And I'd love to bring folks into that. So I've been reading Richard Rohr's new book, The Tears of Prophets. It's funny how I discovered this book. I was looking on the Amazon Canada bestsellers for the categories that my book was in. And my book was number one, humble brag, number one for the first week of pre-orders in four different categories. except for one category, Christian ethics, where it was number two. And the number one book in that category was Richard Rohr's new book, which is how I was like, well, first off, deservedly so. And secondly, I need to buy that book and keep it number one because it's Richard Rohr and I'm a huge fan of his Franciscan theology. But Richard Rohr in his book, The Tears of Saints, talks about original sin. And the way he frames it is so beautiful. He says, you know, what has often happened including in the Bible, been misdiagnosed maybe as original sin is probably just generational trauma. And that blew my mind and it made me think of you and your work. So how do you see that original sin tying into colonialism? So now we're getting the historian and the theologian here to mesh these two worlds together, but I'd love your thoughts and your take.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

Yeah, I was happy when you shared that quote because I find that that's really speaking to a direction I'm moving in. Wow. Because I've, some of you probably know, I do talk about intergenerational trauma in the church to help explain some of Western Christianity's dysfunctions. Right. But I'm realizing that it goes much further than that because here's what I'll say. You know, you try to figure out why there are things like empire, right? why is there something like an empire that is so hell bent on dominating, taking away freedoms or, or, you know, bestowing freedom to the people that it wants to exploiting people. Like a lot of these, these actions that empires take, we gloss them over with these narratives of glory, majesty. And then we have this architecture and you don't have to like You don't have to throw all that out. Human beings make cool things. When we have resources, we make cool things. Sure. But we also... Especially when you steal resources. Exactly. You can make better things. You make better and better things the more resources you get. Okay, this is sounding like colonialism. There's too many directions to go. But I just had this simple thought, which is like, what is the sort of bodily origin of empire?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

We talk about it ideologically, but the human experience, our thoughts, our ideas about things, at least this is what I've come to believe, and there's certain schools of thought that would agree, like the somatic approach to therapy, that our body experiences, like our sensations experience things first. It's so rapid that we connect them instantaneously, but the... the thinking part of our brain is the youngest. It's the most recently evolved. It's the most, and it has given humans this incredible advantage. We can strategize, plan ahead. And it's also come with a lot of curses, like we can see our own death, right? So it's like our thinking brain has unlocked all kinds of new anxieties and traumas, even as it's also given us all these gifts, right? Wow. But I think at its core, The experience of scarcity, the experience of loss, of being oppressed yourself, of being maimed, of having your resources taken away, all of that impacts the human person and community at the most fundamental level. And it unlocks some of our greatest cruelties when we're afraid, when we won't Like we're afraid of our next meal. In a way, it comes out of, you know, we're thinking of our children and we're willing to do some pretty horrible things. Absolutely. And that gets passed on as trauma. And what I'm coming to really believe is that empires begin as like scared people who are willing to do whatever it takes to never run out of resources again. And to never lose and suffer in the same way again. And once we start a project like that, which you can feel empathy for, it's weird to be speaking so empathetically about empire. But I think it starts with the experience of trauma. And then that gets passed on as cultural norms. And then it gets passed on as some people are superior to others. That's how the Romans and Greeks thought of themselves. Everyone else was inferior. Some people were even... subhuman some you know women were seen as a lesser species of human all kinds of new inequalities come new toxic ideas that is our thinking minds interpreting our experience yeah and so you're like we've started to dominate we are better we have defeated the weak now we get all their resources they are our slaves but i think if you go drill down to its core yeah It starts with an experience of pain. It's like that never again. Right. I think that's what Israel, the state of Israel, is doing.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

A thousand percent.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Never again. I mean, that was like one of the mottos. Fair enough. Never again to the Holocaust. But the state of Israel right now shows exactly this process of extreme trauma turning into a protective form of oppression of Palestinians.

UNKNOWN 23:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

Totally. The oppressed can become the oppressors. And this is one of the greatest lessons that history can teach us. is that there are never clear categories of the oppressed and the oppressor, especially in terms of people groups, because they can switch sides. And this is where I found Catholic social teaching to be helpful in understanding God's preferential option for the poor and the oppressed, which basically says that God stands on the side of people who are oppressed. And if the oppressed and oppressors ever switch sides, then God also switches sides to stand with the newly oppressed group of people. But just going back a little bit to what you said about trauma and how that shapes people to becoming the oppressors and to going from being the oppressed to the oppressors. I think of the Portuguese Catholic Jesuits in Portugal. India in the 1600s. You have all these stories of these Jesuits, which is fascinating because I've got dear Jesuit friends here in Ontario, and I have these discussions with them too, and they lament and grieve with me. But there's this phase where Portuguese Catholic Jesuits would go into Hindu temples and just do mission in very insensitive ways by yelling obscenities at Hindu deities, by cursing out, by causing a ruckus, by just being jerks, honestly. And one of them who was actually a Jesuit ambassador to the court of the Mughal emperor of India, Emperor Akbar, found his death that way. And he wanted that martyrdom. He wanted to be killed in a Hindu temple. And he prayed St. Stephen's prayer as he was being stoned to death. But it's coming from a place of trauma. Because I've been reading secular Hindu Indian historians who write about this phase of history, and they make connections to what was happening. to the Catholic Church in Europe at the same time, post-Reformation, where the Catholic Church was being accused of not being evangelistic enough, of not caring about the salvation of souls enough, of being too paganistic. And so they react to these ways by then going overseas, hand in hand with colonial empires, and then oppressing others so that they're never classified into being that again. And so again, that's just one tangible historical example oppressed becoming the oppressors after being shaped by trauma.

SPEAKER_00 26:09

And I mean, what it's making me think of is the oppressed turning into the oppressor is a pattern, but it's not a inevitable process. Because if there's one thing I can say, and there's a lot of things you can say about the indigenous peoples of North America, it is that Throughout the last 500 years, over and over and over again, collectively, Indigenous people, communities have been emotionally mature, even with some of the greatest suffering imaginable, like having everything taken away. Yeah. Not just your land. I mean, that's the big one. Right. But even just the respect for your ways. And there are good ways, very good ways of living in the world.

UNKNOWN 27:01

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 27:02

very sustainable, very harmonious. Like this is not me romanticizing indigenous communities because you will find this in the sources. Because we studied this. I did a PhD in this, but go on. You'll find this in the sources of their biggest enemies who are still saying like, there is a lot of harmony here. And so I just have noticed that there is an element of like, you have this traumatic history What are you going to do with it? And while I'm not trying to paint everyone with a broad brush, I'm just saying historically in Canada and the United States, Indigenous peoples were welcoming and mature when newcomers, you know, European colonizers arrived and have consistently come to the table for like treaty conversations and have given the settler populations more chances than they should ever have been allowed and continue to do this. And then, you know, one of the major shifts of the 20th century in indigenous history was, at least in Canada, a lot of people, we learn a little bit about colonization and we're starting to learn about residential schools, but we don't really know the history of kind of what happens after the 60s. Okay. And you have two major movements that sort of are shaping Indigenous life as a whole. And one is like the political sovereignty movement, like reclaiming self-respect and sovereign control over territories, however small they might be.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

And the second is called the Aboriginal Healing Movement. There has been a concerted effort, and this is one of the main things I've studied, in Indigenous communities in North America, Canada, and the U.S., to pursue... healing as like the the way forward the future and i just find that to be so inspiring and then you're you know you're talking about this this uh the sort of background to the jesuits and the portuguese jesuits

SPEAKER_02 29:13

yeah

SPEAKER_00 29:14

and in that case it's like responding to trauma in a really immature way right like the way like a bully does yeah a bully is is bullied at home and then bullies. And that's a child. We shouldn't expect a child to be acting. They are immature. But adults, it's like, this touches on so much because in the therapeutic world, of which there's a lot of different modalities, a lot of different ways of pursuing healing, some better than others.

UNKNOWN 29:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

You know, it's more common now to kind of be opening up our childhoods or our backgrounds and kind of placing blame there. But a lot of people get stuck there

SPEAKER_03 29:54

because

SPEAKER_00 29:54

it feels kind of good and progressive, not progressive politically, but like you are making progress to be like, I've located the source of my dysfunctions. It's their fault. Wow. But it's kind of like once, like you are not responsible for what happened to you. Things happened to you. But once you are an adult, it is your responsibility to be like, where am I going to move with this?

SPEAKER_01 30:22

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

And so we've all inherited trauma, some of us more than others. It lies behind all kinds of things. So I think Richard Rohr's point about maybe original sin, what Augustine was seeing, Because he wasn't just reading the Bible and being like, I've distilled the truth. He was experiencing a world. He was actually experiencing the destruction of Rome, the Roman world, in his lifetime. He watched his city burn by the vandals, right? And his theology is impacted by the trauma he's living in. And so original sin, you can see how that would make sense. But if we start to look at it through the lens of intergenerational trauma, I think it actually makes more sense of what we're doing. And it doesn't take any teeth out of the problems in the world. It just gives us a new way to be like, this is a simple question, but what does a person do? What can people or communities do to process and metabolize this traumatic past and move into a new future?

SPEAKER_01 31:37

Right, right. You know, just going back to connecting this to something we talked about earlier, which is Zionism. I find it fascinating that I think the numbers are overwhelming. It's like 70% of, over 70% of the Jewish community in the US does not support Zionism, does not support the state of Israel and being an oppressor to its Palestinian neighbors. 70% of Jewish folks in America, contrast that with over 80% of white evangelicals in the US are Zionists, actually support the bombing of children in Gaza, right? I mean, again, talking about trauma responses, right? It seems like the Jewish community in the US is quite mature about the trauma that they've endured, but then you've got others white evangelical folks in America who feel this persecution complex because of trauma, likely, feeling isolated and left out and threatened and, yeah, feel like their power and their dominion is being threatened. Their resources could be taken away. Just fears like that coming from a place of trauma, and that's shaping them into their Zionism, into bombing children in Gaza, into starving children in Gaza to death, right? It's fascinating what trauma does if we look at the world and sin through that lens.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

Yeah, I think it really does. It doesn't actually, interestingly, it doesn't actually change the notion that sin is kind of woven through creation. It just shifts the, it's like it changes the narrative a little bit, where it's like sin doesn't just mean the bad things you do. Sin is all the hurt. all the damage, all the tears, all the pain that is woven through the world. And I think in a way, intergenerational trauma is, it lines up so well with this vision that like something is wrong And some wrongness is woven into the world. Yeah, so I love that we've

SPEAKER_01 34:03

been talking about trauma and the oppressor, colonialism, all light topics so far. Let's talk about another interesting trend happening in the North American church right now, which is, and I see this as funny, like I've had my journey into sacramentalism from evangelicalism because I've thought that so much of Western evangelicalism. It's too patriarchal, too oppressive, too colonialistic. And that's kind of driven me into a more sacramental direction. But at the same time, I'm learning that there are a lot of people, men in particular, who are leaving the evangelical church and going into a more sacramental tradition, specifically the Orthodox church, for the complete opposite reason, which is they think that the evangelical church is not colonialistic enough, not patriarchal enough, not strong or masculine enough. And you've got this exodus of those folks joining the Orthodox Church, which is actually causing a lot of divisiveness in the Orthodox Church and to our Orthodox Christian neighbors, because now all of a sudden they're being inundated with this divisive rhetoric and people coming in with their own agendas, wanting to shape an ancient tradition, an Eastern tradition that's been minding its own business for 2,000 years, right? How do you think that ties into everything

SPEAKER_00 35:26

we've talked about so far? Yeah, this is actually something that I've thought about and noticed. Because from what I've studied of the Western church, which is quite a bit, you know, yes, I studied colonial Christianity, but in order to study a historical era, you need to study its roots. And that's why I keep ending up back in the medieval era. I'm not a medieval historian, but the medieval church, the Western medieval church is the background to Christianity. the modern church. So it's like it's family history. And ever since the Reformation, this was the point of my last podcast episode was talking about fragmentation. And I was saying how fragmentation, the experience of fragmentation is the deep context of the Western world for the last 500 years. I argued that that's not all bad because fragmentation, breaking apart the old medieval certainty and Wow. Wow. was the right authority. There was no question about who got to interpret the Bible. It was the Catholic Church. There was a security and a safety in that kind of solid unity. Again, I think that that was not sustainable in the long term, and it really changed when the colonial period was initiated because now you realize this institution, this religion, that said it kind of had all the answers, it didn't even know that there was another half of the world. And so people's minds are expanding very, very rapidly. It's disorienting, right? Like what else did they not know? But ever since the Reformation, you have all these different groups claiming they're the true church, they're the true church, we understand what the Bible really means, et cetera, et cetera. And that kind of marks Protestantism at its heart, right? It's like an attempt to rediscover and re-enliven the true church. And so what I've noticed is it's not super surprising to me that Protestants, very committed to that project of finding and identifying with the one true church, are now bypassing the Catholic Church, because we have all this historical baggage with the Catholic Church, It's part of Protestantism, just at some fundamental level, is kind of an anti-Catholicism. And they see the Orthodox Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Protestants are, quote, converting to Orthodoxy.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

And I know that this is not everyone's experience. Some people just find themselves drawn into Orthodoxy because that's where the Spirit is leading them. That's very different than a lot of what you're talking about, which is... I see this in my comment section a lot because I talk, I bring up the Eastern traditions of Christianity, not because I'm trying to say they're the right ones and the West is wrong, but because I need Western Christians to understand that the, you know, let's say Augustinian ways of doing theology have never been the way everyone does theology. So I bring it up to de-center the West, but I get a lot of people saying like, well, you need to just convert to Orthodoxy because that's the true church. And I'm like, oh, you're just, it's Protestants doing Orthodox cosplay for a lot of people. They're growing the beard, they're going to the divine liturgy, but they're still Protestants. And they're looking at other Christians and saying, you're the heretics, you're outside the true church. And I'm like, that's what we know.

SPEAKER_01 39:25

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

And

SPEAKER_01 39:26

it's such a colonial way of looking at the world too. And, you know, I just graduated from, the top western evangelical seminary in the world that has a tagline of teach truth love well right and that teaching truth part can be beautiful if you see truth as jesus but it can also be weaponized at the same time when you're approaching it from a western colonized lens and saying oh teach truth you know and you have all these undertones implications that uh truth isn't The LGBTQ agenda, the Marxist agenda, the woke agenda, the Global South agenda, or whatever the flavor du jour is that day. Yeah, so it's fascinating that you have such an emphasis on truth, gospel, and these are words that... than to get weaponized so much. They're beautiful words, but they're weaponized often in Western evangelical context and brandished and used as a sword to smack people in the head with if they step out of line. When in reality, it assumes a posture of pride and arrogance. And we know what the truth is. We're gatekeepers of the truth. These are all pagans and heathens. We need to save them. We already have the truth. We're OK. We don't need further transformation. They need to be saved with our truth and our version of the truth. And you see these two things clashing. You see the colonizer's gospel and the gospel of St. Thomas Indian Christians, a pre-colonial, pre-Columbus Christian tradition. that's been worshipping Jesus longer than many parts of the West were worshipping Jesus. And then you have the Catholic Church come to India, run into St. Thomas Indian Christians, my ancestors, and tell us St. Peter is here as St. Thomas is here. And St. Peter is superior to St. Thomas for our listeners who can't watch us gesticulating with our hands right now. And there's this whole posture of superiority that comes in with colonialism that's influenced the western church even today in the way these protestant christians who are leaving the protestant church are looking at other traditions and saying well if the truth isn't here and our version of the truth isn't here then it has to be somewhere else but it has to be in one place we're going to go look for that one place when in reality jesus is everywhere if you're looking at truth as jesus jesus is everywhere if we have the eyes to see him everywhere right you can't put god in a box you can't put the spirit and the spirit's working of transformation in a box. But that's what the colonizers did. And that's what people shaped by the colonizers gospel still do today in the church.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

I think that gets to the very core nucleus of colonialism. Now it has a few, the nucleus of colonialism has a few key components. One just being the desire for more land, like the acquisition of land. But colonialism doesn't It did and does have a religious component from day one. I, for a long time, tried to get around Christianity's role in colonialism, trying to be like, colonialism wasn't generated by Christianity. Christianity just got tagged along and was complicit. And I'm like, that's not true. And the way you just said it really clarified it. The truth, if the truth is not here, it must be over here because it must be in one place. That says it all. That's what the Western church, that's how it developed. That truth was the exclusive possession of one institution.

SPEAKER_02 43:17

And

SPEAKER_00 43:18

the Reformation did not change that. That's the strange thing. You had the one institution break apart into many, many, many pieces.

UNKNOWN 43:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

each one claiming that this institution possessed the truth. And this is the part of colonialism. There's so much we can say about it, but that drives me crazy. This is the immature part of it. You discover that there is another half of the earth, tens of millions of other people who have no connection to you, who have lived doing their thing for 10,000 years or more, And your response to that is, well, we need to kind of make them like us. The absolute arrogance of that, and Christianity as it developed in Western Europe,

SPEAKER_02 44:08

is...

SPEAKER_00 44:09

Right on board with that. Yes, you have a select few. There's always exceptions to every single historical pattern. There are people who are defending indigenous rights early on. There are people who are trying to learn indigenous languages and ways with some respect, like some of the Jesuits did.

UNKNOWN 44:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:30

But you have, what's the larger pattern? That's what's important historically, right? Yes, there's exceptions. What's the larger pattern? The larger pattern is, wow, there's another whole part of the earth that we need to crusade in, that we need to bring under the one church. I have a lot of respect for the ancient church, ancient Christianity. I do not see ancient Christianity as more authoritative. I just don't. Yeah. That would go against everything we just talked about right now. Exactly. And so like, again, with the Orthodox sort of Protestant conversion to Orthodoxy thing, there's this new kind of thing that these Protestant Orthodox people do, which is they'll start treating the church fathers almost as if they're this new infallible source of like pure theology. The church fathers have a lot of great stuff, especially if you understand them in their Time and place in their linguistic, cultural, historical context. Then what they have to say comes to life. And you can say, wow, there's some of this I really don't understand and other stuff really resonates. That's great. But treating the church fathers as if they are the pure truth is the classic Western tradition. error of absolutizing knowledge and being like, here it is in this one place. And everything since then is a degradation. No, that's not how the spirit works. And so how this connects is everything that happens in the history of Christianity before the year 1492 is pre-Columbian Christianity. This is pre-Western hemisphere. So to claim that like the church had the whole truth and it didn't even know there was another half of the earth is What that means theologically is, where are the new church fathers and mothers? There are countless indigenous cultures and societies. The reason we use the word indigenous is because the diversity is so great that it would take us all day to explore Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Sioux, Lakota, and that's just a slice of them,

SPEAKER_02 46:42

right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:43

The church fathers who were usually in a Greek or Latin context or Syriac or a few Indian, their theology came out of their particular cultural Miloos, right? Where is that when it comes to encountering totally new peoples? Mayan theology, Aztec. And you can quickly be like, well, those places were doing human sacrifice. You're stereotyping an entire people with a whole history. You want to do that with Western Europe? Easy.

SPEAKER_02 47:11

You

SPEAKER_00 47:12

know, they're just people who use the Iron Maiden and like, you know, imprisoned heretics and burned women.

SPEAKER_01 47:17

Yeah. Yeah. You know, this also makes me think of salvation or soteriology, as is known in theology. Big graduate using the fancy terms. Got to drop those words now. I have permission to drop those words now. But it has me thinking and wondering often, you know, what did my St. Thomas pastor, Christian ancestors believed in India before the colonizers show up. And that's something I'm curious to maybe even pursue a PhD research in. But one of the things that I stumbled across in my research as I was researching for the book, so the book I write is called The Justice of Jesus. Preorder is alive now. It comes out this September. But you can preorder your copy wherever you preorder copies today. I had to slide a plug for the book.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

Every time, you got to do it. You have my

SPEAKER_01 48:08

blessing. But as I was researching for this book, because I try to tell the story of my St. Thomas Indian Christian ancestors, and that as I talk about justice, and I talk about lessons that the modern Western evangelical church can learn from pre-Columbian, pre-colonial Christian traditions, you know, I look at This thing that I came across, this doctrine, that's actually called the Law of St. Thomas. The Law of St. Thomas. Now, you could look this up. I don't know how much you'd find. You'd probably have to look at some primary sources from St. Thomas Indian Christians. And I write about this a good bit in the book, where basically what you really had when the colonizers came was a clash of two different ways of looking at truth.

SPEAKER_00 49:01

where

SPEAKER_01 49:03

the Western colonizers came and told my St. Thomas Christian ancestors who held to the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed that their Christianity wasn't authoritative truth, that the Catholic Church was authoritative truth. But St. Thomas Indian Christians had a completely different way of looking at truth called the Law of St. Thomas. And if you look into the Law of St. Thomas, it's basically anyone and everyone can be saved through Christ. Whichever means of divine grace is available to them because Christ is everywhere. And so St. Thomas Indian Christians actually did not feel this pressure for 1,500 years before the colonizers showed up. They did not feel this pressure to convert their Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain neighbors. They didn't feel the pressure because they had the Law of St. Thomas that they believed was passed on to them by the Apostle Thomas, which is actually not too different from what a lot of the early church fathers believed when it comes to doctrine of salvation and Christian universalism. Historical facts makes us uncomfortable in the Western church, but it was actually quite in line with that. But then the Catholic church changed a lot of that theology over time as it fell in love with control, as we talked about in the last episode we did together. And they then exported that version of Christianity to India where it was actually a very pluralistic society where Christians were so pluralistic that they were actually universalists, Christian universalists, according to the Law of St. Thomas. And the way that the Portuguese Catholic Church reacted to this after discovering the Law of St. Thomas was by burning all the ancient church documents that talked about the law of St. Thomas and that had liturgies. So this was actually done at a synod called the Synod of the Emperor in 1599. I've heard of it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So Synod of the Emperor was that synod where the Catholic Church was like, sorry, St. Thomas Indian Christians, you are going to subscribe to our norms, our way of worshiping Jesus. And that includes the law of St. Thomas. Can't have that. That contradicts with the teaching of the Catholic Church. But again, going back to a historical example of colonialism, where you see the colonizer's gospel, the colonial way of looking at Jesus, and truth as, you know, truth can only be found in one place, the way we determine it to be in the church, and truth anywhere else does exist. Whereas you had even pre-colonial Christian traditions who saw things very differently, much in line with the early church, right? And so It's interesting to live in the tension of these historical

SPEAKER_00 51:48

facts. There's way more we need to talk about. I already have ideas of where we need to go next. Good thing we're doing this more regularly. Regularly, yeah. That is good because this is too much. To be able to hear about the Law of St. Thomas, you're not going to hear about that anywhere else. I had no clue about that. And these are the first things that jump out. Maybe we need to just talk about these next time. But the fact that you had to say, you know, you're talking about Christian universalism, you're rooting it in ancient sources, so not just making up some modern idea because, you know, the doctrine of hell makes us uncomfortable. It's funny you said this might make some Westerners uncomfortable, but universalism was one of the common things options or one of the streams and we're like, oh, that makes us uncomfortable. Why? Why would that make us uncomfortable? It's because my takeaway, and this will connect with the trauma in the church thing, is the reason that encountering some kind of universalism makes Western Christians uncomfortable is because we're scared that if we move in that direction, we're courting hell and damnation for ourselves and for our family and for others. So it's better. It doesn't really matter what early church theologians had to say. What matters is staying hyper vigilant because if there's a chance that hell is this eternal conscious punishment that happens to anyone who just doesn't believe the right way, it's better to live your life in that fear than to suffer for eternity. So that, that is the, that vigilance is a traumatic response. And that's why like what we need to explore. I'm actually working on a, cause I've done some posts on hell lately, quite a few. So I've decided I'm going to do like a seminar, online seminar on just a much like, cause a lot of people have wanted more on that. two minute videos aren't enough. So I've decided I'm going to do a longer seminar on the history of hell and connecting it with trauma in the church. I'll talk more about that when people can sign up.

SPEAKER_01 54:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sign me up, man. I'm lining up for that seminar.

SPEAKER_00 54:14

That sounds incredible. So yeah, that's one of the things that we need to talk more about, I think. Some of this universalist stuff. That posture of the St. Thomas Christians to the culture that they were living in, which was, like you said, already a very hyper-pluralist kind of religious tradition, right? The religious traditions of India are so rich and varied and it is just like a rainforest of different practices and postures or spiritualities, right? And I don't know, there's something, you look at how this, oh yeah, this was the other thing I wanted to say. You look at how much fear there is in the West about Christianity and disappearing and going extinct. And you look at how little fear there is among the St. Thomas Christians about that, when they're much smaller, a tiny minority in India, and they've been there for 2,000 years. And the West, Christianity has been so dominant, it has shaped every single person's life. And it's crippled with this fear that it's all going to be lost if we don't

SPEAKER_01 55:23

regain control. It's like Gollum and the Ring of Power from the Lord of the Rings, right? The more you have it, the more you want to hold on to it. And you're afraid of letting it go. Everyone's a threat. You can't have

SPEAKER_00 55:33

the precious. Everyone's a threat. So I want to talk about that too. Love that. And just, I guess, as we wrap up, like we didn't talk that much about colonialism, but we talked a lot about its effects. And its effects. This is becoming like a common sort of contemporary wisdom thing. emphasizing the importance of curiosity. And I just think that there's so much life in that. If you're not curious about other people, if your default is they're a threat, they're a danger, you need to examine that because that is a response of someone in kind of a dysregulated state. Curiosity is the opposite of colonialism. And that is how... the second half of the earth should have been encountered with curiosity. But it's like right away, the Western tradition switched into domination mode. Because that's what it had learned you do with your enemies. You pacify them. Pacify is just a nice way of saying conquer. So... Great place to close.

SPEAKER_01 56:46

Can't

SPEAKER_00 56:47

top that. There's so much more here, and I am so glad. Thanks for being here with me, Joash. And yeah, we're going to be talking together more regularly. which is really exciting. Which also means I'll be

SPEAKER_01 57:00

home a bit more in the future. So, yeah. No, this has been great. I mean, I was in Dallas, Texas, and someone I ran into there was like, oh, I saw you on Free South Theology. I heard you on Free South Theology. And I was like, this is amazing. This is an international podcast.

SPEAKER_00 57:16

International. That was so exciting to hear. So, yeah. Thank you for hanging out. And we'll talk again soon. Sounds great. Until next time.