May 19, 2025 • 57 mins
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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.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Welcome to Freestyle Theology.
I'm Dr.
Bradley Mella, historian ofglobal Christianity and culture.
And I'm here with my friend, theReverend Joash Thomas, for our
(00:21):
second time together, which isreally awesome.
That's right.
And we are finally in person.
You might, if you're justlistening to this, you can't
see, but we are sitting here inchairs, physical chairs,
SPEAKER_01 (00:34):
in
SPEAKER_00 (00:35):
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 (00:43):
Yeah.
I mean, we had to schedule thisthing.
two or three months out inadvance just to be in the same
room, mostly because of myerratic life and travel
schedule, but I'm glad
SPEAKER_00 (00:53):
we're here.
Yeah, you have been all over forthe last two months.
SPEAKER_01 (00:56):
That's
SPEAKER_00 (00:56):
right.
Where are some of the placesyou've hit?
SPEAKER_01 (00:59):
So between the last time We saw each other in
person.
And now, which was really onlytwo months ago, I've been to
Bolivia.
I've been to India.
Three different cities there.
I've been to the United ArabEmirates.
I've been to Vancouver, Kelowna,Winnipeg, Dallas, Texas as of
last week.
And I'm headed to Calgary nextweek.
(01:20):
So that's life.
So you've been to the UAE
SPEAKER_00 (01:23):
and Winnipeg.
Those are some pretty...
Very different places.
Yeah, very...
Oh, that's cool, man.
And
SPEAKER_01 (01:38):
you've been talking justice?
(01:58):
important isn't being a teacher,going into these spaces and
being seen as a teacher.
What I'm really curious about isbeing a learner and going to
these places and experiencingthe culture and learning from
them.
And yeah, even if I have ateaching role and moment, I'm
still trying to humble myselfand learn from their
(02:19):
perspectives and allow myself tobe taught by the people there,
whether that's Winnipeg or theUAE.
SPEAKER_00 (02:26):
Well, I mean that definitely, you know, you use
that word decolonized and thatway of just approaching other
people and other places.
I see why you use that word.
It sounds so obvious and sosimple to go somewhere new and
(02:47):
come with a humble posture, notas like the teacher, but as, as
a learner, as a participant.
And that, As the Padawan, assome folks might say.
Yeah, some nerdy folks wouldsay.
But that gets right at whatwe're wanting to talk about
today, which is we want to talkabout colonialism and
(03:11):
Christianity, which is a massivetopic, something that I have
studied, something that you havestudied, something that we have
both lived through, from verydifferent ways of living with
that legacy.
(03:31):
And so kind of what I want to dohere today is just let ourselves
kind of explore when it comes tocolonialism and Christianity,
like where does your mind go?
How does your body react?
What do we need to think moreabout?
So yeah, when I say...
(03:54):
Let's talk about Christianityand colonialism.
Where does your mind first go?
SPEAKER_01 (04:02):
Yeah, that's a great question.
It's funny how we talked aboutChristian supremacy last time,
and we're talking aboutChristian colonization this
time, right?
And that's the reality ofhistory.
It makes us uncomfortable, butit sets us free at the same
time.
All of us...
have inherited our faith fromsomewhere, those of us who
(04:24):
identify as Christiansspecifically.
Our faith doesn't exist in avacuum.
We've inherited it.
And I think what I've reallyappreciated in studying the
history of these things isbetter understanding my faith,
how it's been shapedhistorically by these things.
And colonization is just one ofthose things that has shaped
modern day history today.
(04:45):
There's no escaping it.
Whether you realize it or not,you're either a beneficiary of
colonization or you're someonewho's a survivor of
colonization.
Or in the case of many of us, ormost of us, it's likely both.
We're beneficiaries andsurvivors.
So I became a beneficiary ofcolonization the day I moved to
(05:06):
the US and then to Canada,living on stolen land.
But I'm also a survivor ofcolonization because I grew up
in India.
But to go back back to theoriginal question, what do I
think of?
I just can't help but think ofmy ancestors and my family
history because colonizationisn't an academic theory for me.
(05:29):
It's definitely an academictheory, 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 wasgetting my annual physical at
the doctor's.
And the doctor was kind of like,have you been drinking more
(05:51):
alcohol?
Because your liver is developinga lot of fat around it, like
fatty liver.
And so I went down this rabbittrail of looking into fatty
liver.
I was like, this thing wasalmost non-existent in my last
checkup.
Where did this come from?
And I realized that there'shistory for this that's tied to
colonization.
Really?
Yeah, where essentially so manyof us who come from communities
(06:13):
that were colonized findourselves developing fatty liver
in our 30s, mysteriously.
And there's genetic reasons forit because our ancestors were
starved because of colonialism.
So our bodies are geneticallynot like our bodies today aren't
accustomed to holding as muchfood as compared to our
ancestors and because they werestarved.
(06:34):
And so because I'm a well-fed21st century North American, I
am very vulnerable to developingfatty liver.
So that's something I have towatch out for, regardless of
what I'm eating or drinking.
So it's lived experience for usin ways that we don't even
realize.
That's the first thought thatcomes to mind.
Yeah, that's...
My fatty liver.
That's what comes to mind fromcolonization.
SPEAKER_00 (06:55):
Your fatty liver.
No, that's...
I mean, that gets us into, youknow, moving away from just an
intellectualized history or evenjust like a social
structures-based history, butthe body's history.
UNKNOWN (07:13):
Yes.
SPEAKER_00 (07:14):
Like the genetic code has a history.
Again, it sounds like you're,you're right.
Your ancestors, their bodiesstarted to shift in order to
hold on to, you know, fat andenergy.
Yeah.
And that gets passed on.
And I mean, that touches on somany of the things that we both
(07:35):
talk about, which is from, fromdifferent perspectives, the
trauma of the past that getspassed on.
Right.
Um, And colonialism,colonization, is a major source
of sort of the environment oftrauma for people.
SPEAKER_01 (07:56):
Wow.
SPEAKER_00 (07:57):
And yes, for non-Western people, that trauma
experienced as more so asviolence, right?
Various forms of violence,whether that's dispossession,
whether that's imprisonment oractual violence.
And then for the colonizer andtheir ancestor, or sorry, their
descendants, of which I would beone, it's still an environment
(08:22):
of trauma because doing thingsto people and witnessing that
and experiencing that alsodamages the person.
And that reminds me of thatbook, My Grandmother's Hands, if
you've read that.
I haven't.
No?
Tell us about it.
My Grandmother's Hands by RismaMenakin, I think is his name.
(08:43):
But My Grandmother's Hand is abook about racialized
intergenerational trauma.
Wow.
And he explores it in threedifferent groups, like black
Americans, white Americans, andpolice Americans.
So black bodies, white bodies,and police bodies.
(09:03):
And he shows how, you know, he'sa trauma therapist.
He actually works with theMinneapolis Police Department
training them, which is reallysomething given what happened
with George Floyd.
I've always wondered what thatexperience was like for him
having worked with theMinneapolis Police Department.
Wow.
(09:24):
But that book really shows howsomething that you talk about a
lot, which is you know, you talkabout how colonization was bad
for the colonized and thecolonizer.
And this, that book will get itright into, you'll get right
into like how that affects thebodies of different peoples, how
they carry this trauma indifferent ways, which if it goes
(09:47):
unacknowledged, unprocessed,unengaged with, it will erupt
again and again and again, andthen perpetuate itself.
Right.
Wow.
So yeah.
I think colonization and thebody, I'm glad you went there
first because it's...
I think that's arguably one ofthe most important things to
(10:09):
explore and open
SPEAKER_01 (10:10):
up.
Wow.
Let me ask you this.
How did you tie the twotogether?
Because, I mean, you're anacademic who has studied, you
have your PhD in colonialism andhow it shaped Christianity in
North America, indigenouscommunities.
But how did...
the body come into this?
Because when we're academics,it's so easy for us to be
(10:32):
disembodied in how we look atthings, even history.
So yeah, just out of curiosity,how did that bodily theory kind
of get enmeshed with yourresearch focus?
SPEAKER_00 (10:44):
The honest truth, though, is that in my actual
dissertation research, what Istudied was, just in case anyone
doesn't know, what I studied wasevangelicalism.
and indigenous communities.
So I wanted to explore theindigenous history of
(11:04):
Christianity in the time sort ofafter residential schools
because I wondered what happenedthere.
And I knew there was someevangelical growth and I wanted
to understand how could thatpossibly have happened.
So that asked me, eventually Ihad to look back at the colonial
legacy in order to understandwhat if any, like, what's the
(11:29):
word, resonances,evangelicalism, even
fundamentalist evangelicalismhad with indigenous populations
who had been colonized.
I wanted to explore, like, theremust be some resonances or else
this movement wouldn't exist,and it does.
So that history was morestructural and cultural.
(11:51):
I didn't really incorporate muchof the body into that at that
time.
Really, it wasn't until my ownexperience, my own bodily
experience with trauma, whichwould have been from when I was
in the middle of my doctoralprogram, developed a very
serious case of ulcerativecolitis, where my body is
(12:14):
attacking itself and was justkind of destroying itself.
It's like an autoimmune disease.
And so that was my, because Ihave grown up, Very privileged
up until that point in many,many ways.
Kind of in every way.
That was my first experiencewith kind of everything breaking
down.
(12:36):
Wow.
And then, you know, you gothrough the whole thing trying
to find treatments.
Eventually you find somethingthat works.
I was excited.
I'm like, it's all going to goback to normal.
But the mental toll and likesort of the body keeping the
score of losing faith in yourbody's ability to like heal
itself and protect you.
the mental effects were sointense that I developed some
(12:59):
really potent agoraphobia andpanic disorder.
Goodness.
And so it wasn't until then,it's just so interesting to me
how I was able to keep that soseparate from what I was
actually looking at.
Because when you study history,all you're doing is studying
human beings, communities ofhuman 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 arebodies.
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 wenton when I was suffering with
this crippling panic disorderthat the only way forward for me
was because I kind of tried abunch of different things.
you know, like praying it awaywasn't working.
(13:50):
In fact, a lot of my praying wasnow 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 justabout anything.
And I would do what I always,what I had kind of learned to do
as a teenager, which was myprayer life was mostly just me
begging God for forgiveness,even though I I wouldn't have
done anything.
(14:16):
There was nothing I was askingfor forgiveness for.
My prayer life was just beggingfor forgiveness because that's
what I knew you did withfeelings of anxiety.
Wow.
So it's like the very bodilysensation I was experiencing was
anxiety, and I had learned thatthat means something's wrong.
(14:37):
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 forgivenessbecause I'm suffering and maybe
the two are co-related.
I must have done something tokind of cause the suffering.
Was that an element of thisfaith journey at that point at
all?
SPEAKER_00 (14:55):
It's complicated because I had a fairly
well-developed intellectualunderstanding of how that's not
the case.
Yeah.
You know, I was like, mysuffering is just a part of,
what would I have said at thattime?
You know, just like a result ofthe fallen world.
Right.
But kind of in a little bit of aChristian nihilistic way where
(15:16):
it's just like, that's just theway 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 wouldlike, if bad things would
happen, if my kids would getsick, it's like, even though in
my childhood, neocortex mycognitive brain I was thinking
this has nothing to do withanything I've done this is just
life um at some bodily level Iwould still be like begging for
(15:48):
forgiveness I must have donesomething wrong and so it's
twisted right like it's twistedand it's one of these it's one
of these unexpected effects ofsort of a kind of a what's the
word um an absolutizing oforiginal sin.
(16:08):
Yes.
Where it's like what you'retaught at a theoretical level is
that every person is trulydeserving of God's rejection and
punishment.
And anything that happens that'sgood is because God is gracious.
And I'm just like, I don't thinkAugustine's intention Wow.
(16:31):
Yeah.
Yeah.
(16:52):
putting too much weight on, on acertain doctrine and trying to
explain the whole world throughit.
SPEAKER_01 (16:57):
Yeah.
Yeah.
You were almost conditioned intodoing that.
It was your muscular response.
Yeah, exactly.
Your spiritual muscular responseto 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 asconviction or...
You know?
SPEAKER_01 (17:23):
Right.
No, this is good.
I mean, let's keep going downthat trail a little bit.
Because you and I have hadconversations about original sin
recently.
And I'd love to bring folks intothat.
So I've been reading RichardRohr's new book, The Tears of
Prophets.
It's funny how I discovered thisbook.
I was looking on the AmazonCanada bestsellers for the
(17:43):
categories that my book was in.
And my book was number one,humble brag, number one for the
first week of pre-orders in fourdifferent categories.
except for one category,Christian ethics, where it was
number two.
And the number one book in thatcategory was Richard Rohr's new
book, which is how I was like,well, first off, deservedly so.
(18:03):
And secondly, I need to buy thatbook and keep it number one
because it's Richard Rohr andI'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 sobeautiful.
He says, you know, what hasoften happened including in the
Bible, been misdiagnosed maybeas original sin is probably just
(18:27):
generational trauma.
And that blew my mind and itmade me think of you and your
work.
So how do you see that originalsin tying into colonialism?
So now we're getting thehistorian and the theologian
here to mesh these two worldstogether, 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'sreally speaking to a direction
I'm moving in.
Wow.
Because I've, some of youprobably know, I do talk about
intergenerational trauma in thechurch to help explain some of
Western Christianity'sdysfunctions.
Right.
But I'm realizing that it goesmuch further than that because
(19:11):
here's what I'll say.
You know, you try to figure outwhy there are things like
empire, right?
why is there something like anempire that is so hell bent on
dominating, taking away freedomsor, or, you know, bestowing
freedom to the people that itwants to exploiting people.
(19:33):
Like a lot of these, theseactions that empires take, we
gloss them over with thesenarratives of glory, majesty.
And then we have thisarchitecture and you don't have
to like You don't have to throwall that out.
Human beings make cool things.
When we have resources, we makecool things.
Sure.
But we also...
(19:54):
Especially when you stealresources.
Exactly.
You can make better things.
You make better and betterthings the more resources you
get.
Okay, this is sounding likecolonialism.
There's too many directions togo.
But I just had this simplethought, which is like, what is
the sort of bodily origin ofempire?
SPEAKER_01 (20:13):
Wow.
SPEAKER_00 (20:14):
We talk about it ideologically, but the human
experience, our thoughts, ourideas about things, at least
this is what I've come tobelieve, and there's certain
schools of thought that wouldagree, like the somatic approach
to therapy, that our bodyexperiences, like our sensations
experience things first.
(20:36):
It's so rapid that we connectthem instantaneously, but the...
the thinking part of our brainis the youngest.
It's the most recently evolved.
It's the most, and it has givenhumans this incredible
advantage.
We can strategize, plan ahead.
And it's also come with a lot ofcurses, like we can see our own
death, right?
(20:56):
So it's like our thinking brainhas unlocked all kinds of new
anxieties and traumas, even asit's also given us all these
gifts, right?
Wow.
But I think at its core, Theexperience of scarcity, the
experience of loss, of beingoppressed yourself, of being
(21:21):
maimed, of having your resourcestaken away, all of that impacts
the human person and communityat the most fundamental level.
And it unlocks some of ourgreatest cruelties when we're
afraid, when we won't Like we'reafraid of our next meal.
In a way, it comes out of, youknow, we're thinking of our
(21:44):
children and we're willing to dosome pretty horrible things.
Absolutely.
And that gets passed on astrauma.
And what I'm coming to reallybelieve is that empires begin as
like scared people who arewilling to do whatever it takes
to never run out of resourcesagain.
(22:07):
And to never lose and suffer inthe same way again.
And once we start a project likethat, which you can feel empathy
for, it's weird to be speakingso empathetically about empire.
But I think it starts with theexperience of trauma.
And then that gets passed on ascultural norms.
And then it gets passed on assome people are superior to
(22:27):
others.
That's how the Romans and Greeksthought of themselves.
Everyone else was inferior.
Some people were even...
subhuman some you know womenwere seen as a lesser species of
human all kinds of newinequalities come new toxic
ideas that is our thinking mindsinterpreting our experience yeah
(22:48):
and so you're like we've startedto dominate we are better we
have defeated the weak now weget all their resources they are
our slaves but i think if you godrill down to its core yeah It
starts with an experience ofpain.
It's like that never again.
Right.
I think that's what Israel, thestate of Israel, is doing.
SPEAKER_01 (23:08):
A thousand percent.
SPEAKER_00 (23:09):
Never again.
I mean, that was like one of themottos.
Fair enough.
Never again to the Holocaust.
But the state of Israel rightnow shows exactly this process
of extreme trauma turning into aprotective form of oppression of
Palestinians.
UNKNOWN (23:25):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (23:25):
Totally.
The oppressed can become theoppressors.
And this is one of the greatestlessons that history can teach
us.
is that there are never clearcategories of the oppressed and
the oppressor, especially interms of people groups, because
they can switch sides.
And this is where I foundCatholic social teaching to be
helpful in understanding God'spreferential option for the poor
(23:49):
and the oppressed, whichbasically says that God stands
on the side of people who areoppressed.
And if the oppressed andoppressors ever switch sides,
then God also switches sides tostand with the newly oppressed
group of people.
But just going back a little bitto what you said about trauma
(24:09):
and how that shapes people tobecoming the oppressors and to
going from being the oppressedto the oppressors.
I think of the PortugueseCatholic Jesuits in Portugal.
India in the 1600s.
You have all these stories ofthese Jesuits, which is
fascinating because I've gotdear Jesuit friends here in
(24:29):
Ontario, and I have thesediscussions with them too, and
they lament and grieve with me.
But there's this phase wherePortuguese Catholic Jesuits
would go into Hindu temples andjust do mission in very
insensitive ways by yellingobscenities at Hindu deities, by
(24:52):
cursing out, by causing aruckus, by just being jerks,
honestly.
And one of them who was actuallya 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 aHindu temple.
(25:14):
And he prayed St.
Stephen's prayer as he was beingstoned to death.
But it's coming from a place oftrauma.
Because I've been readingsecular Hindu Indian historians
who write about this phase ofhistory, and they make
connections to what washappening.
to the Catholic Church in Europeat the same time,
(25:36):
post-Reformation, where theCatholic Church was being
accused of not beingevangelistic enough, of not
caring about the salvation ofsouls enough, of being too
paganistic.
And so they react to these waysby then going overseas, hand in
hand with colonial empires, andthen oppressing others so that
(25:58):
they're never classified intobeing that again.
And so again, that's just onetangible historical example
oppressed becoming theoppressors after being shaped by
trauma.
SPEAKER_00 (26:09):
And I mean, what it's making me think of is the
oppressed turning into theoppressor is a pattern, but it's
not a inevitable process.
Because if there's one thing Ican say, and there's a lot of
things you can say about theindigenous peoples of North
America, it is that Throughoutthe last 500 years, over and
(26:34):
over and over again,collectively, Indigenous people,
communities have beenemotionally mature, even with
some of the greatest sufferingimaginable, like having
everything taken away.
Yeah.
Not just your land.
I mean, that's the big one.
Right.
But even just the respect foryour ways.
(26:57):
And there are good ways, verygood ways of living in the
world.
UNKNOWN (27:01):
Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00 (27:02):
very sustainable, very harmonious.
Like this is not meromanticizing indigenous
communities because you willfind this in the sources.
Because we studied this.
I did a PhD in this, but go on.
You'll find this in the sourcesof their biggest enemies who are
still saying like, there is alot of harmony here.
(27:23):
And so I just have noticed thatthere is an element of like, you
have this traumatic history Whatare you going to do with it?
And while I'm not trying topaint everyone with a broad
brush, I'm just sayinghistorically in Canada and the
United States, Indigenouspeoples were welcoming and
(27:46):
mature when newcomers, you know,European colonizers arrived and
have consistently come to thetable for like treaty
conversations and have given thesettler populations more chances
than they should ever have beenallowed and continue to do this.
(28:06):
And then, you know, one of themajor shifts of the 20th century
in indigenous history was, atleast in Canada, a lot of
people, we learn a little bitabout colonization and we're
starting to learn aboutresidential schools, but we
don't really know the history ofkind of what happens after the
60s.
(28:27):
Okay.
And you have two major movementsthat sort of are shaping
Indigenous life as a whole.
And one is like the politicalsovereignty movement, like
reclaiming self-respect andsovereign control over
territories, however small theymight be.
SPEAKER_01 (28:43):
Wow.
SPEAKER_00 (28:44):
And the second is called the Aboriginal Healing
Movement.
There has been a concertedeffort, and this is one of the
main things I've studied, inIndigenous communities in North
America, Canada, and the U.S.,to pursue...
healing as like the the wayforward the future and i just
find that to be so inspiring andthen you're you know you're
(29:06):
talking about this this uh thesort of background to the
jesuits and the portuguesejesuits
SPEAKER_02 (29:13):
yeah
SPEAKER_00 (29:14):
and in that case it's like responding to trauma
in a really immature way rightlike the way like a bully does
yeah a bully is is bullied athome and then bullies.
And that's a child.
We shouldn't expect a child tobe acting.
They are immature.
But adults, it's like, thistouches on so much because in
(29:37):
the therapeutic world, of whichthere's a lot of different
modalities, a lot of differentways 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 ourbackgrounds and kind of placing
blame there.
But a lot of people get stuckthere
SPEAKER_03 (29:54):
because
SPEAKER_00 (29:54):
it feels kind of good and progressive, not
progressive politically, butlike you are making progress to
be like, I've located the sourceof my dysfunctions.
It's their fault.
Wow.
But it's kind of like once, likeyou are not responsible for what
happened to you.
Things happened to you.
(30:15):
But once you are an adult, it isyour responsibility to be like,
where am I going to move withthis?
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 ofthings.
So I think Richard Rohr's pointabout maybe original sin, what
Augustine was seeing, Because hewasn't just reading the Bible
and being like, I've distilledthe truth.
(30:44):
He was experiencing a world.
He was actually experiencing thedestruction of Rome, the Roman
world, in his lifetime.
He watched his city burn by thevandals, right?
And his theology is impacted bythe trauma he's living in.
And so original sin, you can seehow that would make sense.
(31:07):
But if we start to look at itthrough the lens of
intergenerational trauma, Ithink it actually makes more
sense of what we're doing.
And it doesn't take any teethout of the problems in the
world.
It just gives us a new way to belike, this is a simple question,
but what does a person do?
What can people or communitiesdo to process and metabolize
(31:33):
this traumatic past and moveinto a new future?
SPEAKER_01 (31:37):
Right, right.
You know, just going back toconnecting this to something we
talked about earlier, which isZionism.
I find it fascinating that Ithink the numbers are
overwhelming.
It's like 70% of, over 70% ofthe Jewish community in the US
does not support Zionism, doesnot support the state of Israel
(32:01):
and being an oppressor to itsPalestinian neighbors.
70% of Jewish folks in America,contrast that with over 80% of
white evangelicals in the US areZionists, actually support the
bombing of children in Gaza,right?
I mean, again, talking abouttrauma responses, right?
(32:23):
It seems like the Jewishcommunity in the US is quite
mature about the trauma thatthey've endured, but then you've
got others white evangelicalfolks in America who feel this
persecution complex because oftrauma, likely, feeling isolated
(32:48):
and left out and threatened and,yeah, feel like their power and
their dominion is beingthreatened.
Their resources could be takenaway.
Just fears like that coming froma place of trauma, and that's
shaping them into their Zionism,into bombing children in Gaza,
into starving children in Gazato death, right?
It's fascinating what traumadoes if we look at the world and
(33:12):
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 thatsin is kind of woven through
creation.
It just shifts the, it's like itchanges the narrative a little
bit, where it's like sin doesn'tjust mean the bad things you do.
(33:39):
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 thisvision that like something is
wrong And some wrongness iswoven into the world.
(34:03):
Yeah, so I love that we've
SPEAKER_01 (34:03):
been talking about trauma and the oppressor,
colonialism, all light topics sofar.
Let's talk about anotherinteresting trend happening in
the North American church rightnow, which is, and I see this as
funny, like I've had my journeyinto sacramentalism from
(34:24):
evangelicalism because I'vethought that so much of Western
evangelicalism.
It's too patriarchal, toooppressive, too colonialistic.
And that's kind of driven meinto a more sacramental
direction.
But at the same time, I'mlearning that there are a lot of
people, men in particular, whoare leaving the evangelical
(34:46):
church and going into a moresacramental tradition,
specifically the Orthodoxchurch, for the complete
opposite reason, which is theythink that the evangelical
church is not colonialisticenough, not patriarchal enough,
not strong or masculine enough.
And you've got this exodus ofthose folks joining the Orthodox
Church, which is actuallycausing a lot of divisiveness in
(35:08):
the Orthodox Church and to ourOrthodox Christian neighbors,
because now all of a suddenthey're being inundated with
this divisive rhetoric andpeople coming in with their own
agendas, wanting to shape anancient tradition, an Eastern
tradition that's been mindingits own business for 2,000
years, right?
How do you think that ties intoeverything
SPEAKER_00 (35:26):
we've talked about so far?
Yeah, this is actually somethingthat I've thought about and
noticed.
Because from what I've studiedof the Western church, which is
quite a bit, you know, yes, Istudied colonial Christianity,
but in order to study ahistorical era, you need to
study its roots.
And that's why I keep ending upback in the medieval era.
(35:47):
I'm not a medieval historian,but the medieval church, the
Western medieval church is thebackground to Christianity.
the modern church.
So it's like it's familyhistory.
And ever since the Reformation,this was the point of my last
podcast episode was talkingabout fragmentation.
And I was saying howfragmentation, the experience of
(36:09):
fragmentation is the deepcontext of the Western world for
the last 500 years.
I argued that that's not all badbecause fragmentation, breaking
apart the old medieval certaintyand Wow.
Wow.
(36:46):
was the right authority.
There was no question about whogot to interpret the Bible.
It was the Catholic Church.
There was a security and asafety in that kind of solid
unity.
Again, I think that that was notsustainable in the long term,
and it really changed when thecolonial period was initiated
(37:07):
because now you realize thisinstitution, this religion, that
said it kind of had all theanswers, it didn't even know
that there was another half ofthe world.
And so people's minds areexpanding very, very rapidly.
It's disorienting, right?
Like what else did they notknow?
(37:30):
But ever since the Reformation,you have all these different
groups claiming they're the truechurch, they're the true church,
we understand what the Biblereally means, et cetera, et
cetera.
And that kind of marksProtestantism at its heart,
right?
It's like an attempt torediscover and re-enliven the
true church.
(37:51):
And so what I've noticed is it'snot super surprising to me that
Protestants, very committed tothat project of finding and
identifying with the one truechurch, are now bypassing the
Catholic Church, because we haveall this historical baggage with
the Catholic Church, It's partof Protestantism, just at some
(38:14):
fundamental level, is kind of ananti-Catholicism.
And they see the OrthodoxChurch, 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 themselvesdrawn into Orthodoxy because
that's where the Spirit isleading them.
That's very different than a lotof what you're talking about,
which is...
I see this in my comment sectiona lot because I talk, I bring up
the Eastern traditions ofChristianity, not because I'm
trying to say they're the rightones and the West is wrong, but
(38:47):
because I need WesternChristians to understand that
the, you know, let's sayAugustinian ways of doing
theology have never been the wayeveryone does theology.
So I bring it up to de-centerthe West, but I get a lot of
people saying like, well, youneed to just convert to
Orthodoxy because that's thetrue church.
And I'm like, oh, you're just,it's Protestants doing Orthodox
(39:08):
cosplay for a lot of people.
They're growing the beard,they're going to the divine
liturgy, but they're stillProtestants.
And they're looking at otherChristians and saying, you're
the heretics, you're outside thetrue church.
And I'm like, that's what weknow.
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 graduatedfrom, the top western
evangelical seminary in theworld that has a tagline of
teach truth love well right andthat teaching truth part can be
beautiful if you see truth asjesus but it can also be
(39:46):
weaponized at the same time whenyou're approaching it from a
western colonized lens andsaying oh teach truth you know
and you have all theseundertones 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.
(40:07):
Yeah, so it's fascinating thatyou have such an emphasis on
truth, gospel, and these arewords that...
than to get weaponized so much.
They're beautiful words, butthey're weaponized often in
Western evangelical context andbrandished and used as a sword
(40:28):
to smack people in the head withif they step out of line.
When in reality, it assumes aposture of pride and arrogance.
And we know what the truth is.
We're gatekeepers of the truth.
These are all pagans andheathens.
We need to save them.
We already have the truth.
(40:48):
We're OK.
We don't need furthertransformation.
They need to be saved with ourtruth and our version of the
truth.
And you see these two thingsclashing.
You see the colonizer's gospeland the gospel of St.
Thomas Indian Christians, apre-colonial, pre-Columbus
Christian tradition.
(41:09):
that's been worshipping Jesuslonger than many parts of the
West were worshipping Jesus.
And then you have the CatholicChurch come to India, run into
St.
Thomas Indian Christians, myancestors, and tell us St.
Peter is here as St.
Thomas is here.
And St.
Peter is superior to St.
Thomas for our listeners whocan't watch us gesticulating
(41:33):
with our hands right now.
And there's this whole postureof superiority that comes in
with colonialism that'sinfluenced the western church
even today in the way theseprotestant christians who are
leaving the protestant churchare looking at other traditions
and saying well if the truthisn't here and our version of
the truth isn't here then it hasto be somewhere else but it has
(41:54):
to be in one place we're goingto go look for that one place
when in reality jesus iseverywhere if you're looking at
truth as jesus jesus iseverywhere if we have the eyes
to see him everywhere right youcan't put god in a box you can't
put the spirit and the spirit'sworking of transformation in a
box.
But that's what the colonizersdid.
(42:14):
And that's what people shaped bythe 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 ofcolonialism has a few key
components.
One just being the desire formore land, like the acquisition
of land.
But colonialism doesn't It didand does have a religious
(42:39):
component from day one.
I, for a long time, tried to getaround Christianity's role in
colonialism, trying to be like,colonialism wasn't generated by
Christianity.
Christianity just got taggedalong and was complicit.
And I'm like, that's not true.
And the way you just said itreally clarified it.
(43:01):
The truth, if the truth is nothere, 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 exclusivepossession 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 institutionbreak 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 ofcolonialism.
There's so much we can say aboutit, but that drives me crazy.
This is the immature part of it.
You discover that there isanother half of the earth, tens
(43:47):
of millions of other people whohave no connection to you, who
have lived doing their thing for10,000 years or more, And your
response to that is, well, weneed 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 toevery single historical pattern.
There are people who aredefending indigenous rights
early on.
There are people who are tryingto learn indigenous languages
and ways with some respect, likesome of the Jesuits did.
UNKNOWN (44:30):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (44:30):
But you have, what's the larger pattern?
That's what's importanthistorically, 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 tocrusade in, that we need to
bring under the one church.
I have a lot of respect for theancient church, ancient
(44:52):
Christianity.
I do not see ancientChristianity as more
authoritative.
I just don't.
Yeah.
That would go against everythingwe just talked about right now.
Exactly.
And so like, again, with theOrthodox sort of Protestant
conversion to Orthodoxy thing,there's this new kind of thing
that these Protestant Orthodoxpeople do, which is they'll
(45:15):
start treating the churchfathers almost as if they're
this new infallible source oflike pure theology.
The church fathers have a lot ofgreat stuff, especially if you
understand them in their Timeand place in their linguistic,
cultural, historical context.
Then what they have to say comesto life.
(45:35):
And you can say, wow, there'ssome of this I really don't
understand and other stuffreally resonates.
That's great.
But treating the church fathersas if they are the pure truth is
the classic Western tradition.
error of absolutizing knowledgeand being like, here it is in
this one place.
And everything since then is adegradation.
(45:56):
No, that's not how the spiritworks.
And so how this connects iseverything that happens in the
history of Christianity beforethe year 1492 is pre-Columbian
Christianity.
This is pre-Western hemisphere.
So to claim that like the churchhad the whole truth and it
didn't even know there wasanother half of the earth is
(46:17):
What that means theologicallyis, where are the new church
fathers and mothers?
There are countless indigenouscultures and societies.
The reason we use the wordindigenous is because the
diversity is so great that itwould take us all day to explore
Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Sioux,Lakota, and that's just a slice
(46:41):
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 fewIndian, their theology came out
of their particular culturalMiloos, right?
Where is that when it comes toencountering totally new
peoples?
Mayan theology, Aztec.
And you can quickly be like,well, those places were doing
(47:05):
human sacrifice.
You're stereotyping an entirepeople with a whole history.
You want to do that with WesternEurope?
Easy.
SPEAKER_02 (47:11):
You
SPEAKER_00 (47:12):
know, they're just people who use the Iron Maiden
and like, you know, imprisonedheretics and burned women.
SPEAKER_01 (47:17):
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, this also makes methink of salvation or
soteriology, as is known intheology.
Big graduate using the fancyterms.
Got to drop those words now.
I have permission to drop thosewords now.
But it has me thinking andwondering often, you know, what
did my St.
(47:38):
Thomas pastor, Christianancestors believed in India
before the colonizers show up.
And that's something I'm curiousto maybe even pursue a PhD
research in.
But one of the things that Istumbled across in my research
as I was researching for thebook, 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 copywherever you preorder copies
(48:00):
today.
I had to slide a plug for thebook.
SPEAKER_00 (48:04):
Every time, you got to do it.
You have my
SPEAKER_01 (48:08):
blessing.
But as I was researching forthis book, because I try to tell
the story of my St.
Thomas Indian Christianancestors, and that as I talk
about justice, and I talk aboutlessons that the modern Western
evangelical church can learnfrom pre-Columbian, pre-colonial
Christian traditions, you know,I look at This thing that I came
(48:34):
across, this doctrine, that'sactually called the Law of St.
Thomas.
The Law of St.
Thomas.
Now, you could look this up.
I don't know how much you'dfind.
You'd probably have to look atsome primary sources from St.
Thomas Indian Christians.
And I write about this a goodbit in the book, where basically
what you really had when thecolonizers came was a clash of
(48:58):
two different ways of looking attruth.
SPEAKER_00 (49:01):
where
SPEAKER_01 (49:03):
the Western colonizers came and told my St.
Thomas Christian ancestors whoheld to the Apostles' Creed and
the Nicene Creed that theirChristianity wasn't
authoritative truth, that theCatholic Church was
authoritative truth.
But St.
Thomas Indian Christians had acompletely different way of
looking at truth called the Lawof St.
Thomas.
And if you look into the Law ofSt.
(49:24):
Thomas, it's basically anyoneand everyone can be saved
through Christ.
Whichever means of divine graceis available to them because
Christ is everywhere.
And so St.
Thomas Indian Christiansactually did not feel this
pressure for 1,500 years beforethe colonizers showed up.
(49:44):
They did not feel this pressureto convert their Hindu, Muslim,
Sikh, Buddhist, Jain neighbors.
They didn't feel the pressurebecause they had the Law of St.
Thomas that they believed waspassed on to them by the Apostle
Thomas, which is actually nottoo different from what a lot of
the early church fathersbelieved when it comes to
(50:05):
doctrine of salvation andChristian universalism.
Historical facts makes usuncomfortable in the Western
church, but it was actuallyquite in line with that.
But then the Catholic churchchanged a lot of that theology
over time as it fell in lovewith control, as we talked about
in the last episode we didtogether.
And they then exported thatversion of Christianity to India
(50:26):
where it was actually a verypluralistic society where
Christians were so pluralisticthat they were actually
universalists, Christianuniversalists, according to the
Law of St.
Thomas.
And the way that the PortugueseCatholic Church reacted to this
after discovering the Law of St.
Thomas was by burning all theancient church documents that
(50:51):
talked about the law of St.
Thomas and that had liturgies.
So this was actually done at asynod called the Synod of the
Emperor in 1599.
I've heard of it.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So Synod of the Emperor was thatsynod where the Catholic Church
was like, sorry, St.
Thomas Indian Christians, youare going to subscribe to our
norms, our way of worshipingJesus.
And that includes the law of St.
(51:11):
Thomas.
Can't have that.
That contradicts with theteaching of the Catholic Church.
But again, going back to ahistorical example of
colonialism, where you see thecolonizer's gospel, the colonial
way of looking at Jesus, andtruth as, you know, truth can
only be found in one place, theway we determine it to be in the
(51:33):
church, and truth anywhere elsedoes exist.
Whereas you had evenpre-colonial Christian
traditions who saw things verydifferently, much in line with
the early church, right?
And so It's interesting to livein the tension of these
historical
SPEAKER_00 (51:48):
facts.
There's way more we need to talkabout.
I already have ideas of where weneed to go next.
Good thing we're doing this moreregularly.
Regularly, yeah.
That is good because this is toomuch.
To be able to hear about the Lawof St.
Thomas, you're not going to hearabout that anywhere else.
(52:08):
I had no clue about that.
And these are the first thingsthat jump out.
Maybe we need to just talk aboutthese next time.
But the fact that you had tosay, you know, you're talking
about Christian universalism,you're rooting it in ancient
sources, so not just making upsome modern idea because, you
(52:28):
know, the doctrine of hell makesus uncomfortable.
It's funny you said this mightmake some Westerners
uncomfortable, but universalismwas one of the common things
options or one of the streamsand we're like, oh, that makes
us uncomfortable.
Why?
Why would that make usuncomfortable?
It's because my takeaway, andthis will connect with the
(52:51):
trauma in the church thing, isthe reason that encountering
some kind of universalism makesWestern Christians uncomfortable
is because we're scared that ifwe move in that direction, we're
courting hell and damnation forourselves and for our family and
for others.
(53:12):
So it's better.
It doesn't really matter whatearly church theologians had to
say.
What matters is staying hypervigilant because if there's a
chance that hell is this eternalconscious punishment that
happens to anyone who justdoesn't believe the right way,
it's better to live your life inthat fear than to suffer for
(53:35):
eternity.
So that, that is the, thatvigilance is a traumatic
response.
And that's why like what we needto explore.
I'm actually working on a, causeI've done some posts on hell
lately, quite a few.
So I've decided I'm going to dolike a seminar, online seminar
(53:56):
on just a much like, cause a lotof people have wanted more on
that.
two minute videos aren't enough.
So I've decided I'm going to doa longer seminar on the history
of hell and connecting it withtrauma in the church.
I'll talk more about that whenpeople 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 thethings that we need to talk more
about, I think.
Some of this universalist stuff.
That posture of the St.
Thomas Christians to the culturethat they were living in, which
was, like you said, already avery hyper-pluralist kind of
religious tradition, right?
The religious traditions ofIndia are so rich and varied and
(54:36):
it is just like a rainforest ofdifferent practices and postures
or spiritualities, right?
And I don't know, there'ssomething, you look at how this,
oh yeah, this was the otherthing I wanted to say.
You look at how much fear thereis in the West about
Christianity and disappearingand going extinct.
(54:59):
And you look at how little fearthere is among the St.
Thomas Christians about that,when they're much smaller, a
tiny minority in India, andthey've been there for 2,000
years.
And the West, Christianity hasbeen so dominant, it has shaped
every single person's life.
And it's crippled with this fearthat it's all going to be lost
(55:22):
if we don't
SPEAKER_01 (55:23):
regain control.
It's like Gollum and the Ring ofPower from the Lord of the
Rings, right?
The more you have it, the moreyou want to hold on to it.
And you're afraid of letting itgo.
Everyone's a threat.
You can't have
SPEAKER_00 (55:33):
the precious.
Everyone's a threat.
So I want to talk about thattoo.
Love that.
And just, I guess, as we wrapup, like we didn't talk that
much about colonialism, but wetalked a lot about its effects.
And its effects.
This is becoming like a commonsort of contemporary wisdom
thing.
emphasizing the importance ofcuriosity.
(55:55):
And I just think that there's somuch life in that.
If you're not curious aboutother people, if your default is
they're a threat, they're adanger, you need to examine that
because that is a response ofsomeone in kind of a
dysregulated state.
Curiosity is the opposite ofcolonialism.
(56:20):
And that is how...
the second half of the earthshould have been encountered
with curiosity.
But it's like right away, theWestern tradition switched into
domination mode.
Because that's what it hadlearned you do with your
enemies.
You pacify them.
(56:40):
Pacify is just a nice way ofsaying 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 Iam so glad.
Thanks for being here with me,Joash.
And yeah, we're going to betalking 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 FreeSouth Theology.
I heard you on Free SouthTheology.
And I was like, this is amazing.
This is an internationalpodcast.
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.
Welcome to Freestyle Theology.
I'm Dr.
Bradley Mella, historian ofglobal Christianity and culture.
And I'm here with my friend, theReverend Joash Thomas, for our
(00:21):
second time together, which isreally awesome.
That's right.
And we are finally in person.
You might, if you're justlistening to this, you can't
see, but we are sitting here inchairs, physical chairs,
SPEAKER_01 (00:34):
in
SPEAKER_00 (00:35):
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 (00:43):
Yeah.
I mean, we had to schedule thisthing.
two or three months out inadvance just to be in the same
room, mostly because of myerratic life and travel
schedule, but I'm glad
SPEAKER_00 (00:53):
we're here.
Yeah, you have been all over forthe last two months.
SPEAKER_01 (00:56):
That's
SPEAKER_00 (00:56):
right.
Where are some of the placesyou've hit?
SPEAKER_01 (00:59):
So between the last time We saw each other in
person.
And now, which was really onlytwo months ago, I've been to
Bolivia.
I've been to India.
Three different cities there.
I've been to the United ArabEmirates.
I've been to Vancouver, Kelowna,Winnipeg, Dallas, Texas as of
last week.
And I'm headed to Calgary nextweek.
(01:20):
So that's life.
So you've been to the UAE
SPEAKER_00 (01:23):
and Winnipeg.
Those are some pretty...
Very different places.
Yeah, very...
Oh, that's cool, man.
And
SPEAKER_01 (01:38):
you've been talking justice?
(01:58):
important isn't being a teacher,going into these spaces and
being seen as a teacher.
What I'm really curious about isbeing a learner and going to
these places and experiencingthe culture and learning from
them.
And yeah, even if I have ateaching role and moment, I'm
still trying to humble myselfand learn from their
(02:19):
perspectives and allow myself tobe taught by the people there,
whether that's Winnipeg or theUAE.
SPEAKER_00 (02:26):
Well, I mean that definitely, you know, you use
that word decolonized and thatway of just approaching other
people and other places.
I see why you use that word.
It sounds so obvious and sosimple to go somewhere new and
(02:47):
come with a humble posture, notas like the teacher, but as, as
a learner, as a participant.
And that, As the Padawan, assome folks might say.
Yeah, some nerdy folks wouldsay.
But that gets right at whatwe're wanting to talk about
today, which is we want to talkabout colonialism and
(03:11):
Christianity, which is a massivetopic, something that I have
studied, something that you havestudied, something that we have
both lived through, from verydifferent ways of living with
that legacy.
(03:31):
And so kind of what I want to dohere today is just let ourselves
kind of explore when it comes tocolonialism and Christianity,
like where does your mind go?
How does your body react?
What do we need to think moreabout?
So yeah, when I say...
(03:54):
Let's talk about Christianityand colonialism.
Where does your mind first go?
SPEAKER_01 (04:02):
Yeah, that's a great question.
It's funny how we talked aboutChristian supremacy last time,
and we're talking aboutChristian colonization this
time, right?
And that's the reality ofhistory.
It makes us uncomfortable, butit sets us free at the same
time.
All of us...
have inherited our faith fromsomewhere, those of us who
(04:24):
identify as Christiansspecifically.
Our faith doesn't exist in avacuum.
We've inherited it.
And I think what I've reallyappreciated in studying the
history of these things isbetter understanding my faith,
how it's been shapedhistorically by these things.
And colonization is just one ofthose things that has shaped
modern day history today.
(04:45):
There's no escaping it.
Whether you realize it or not,you're either a beneficiary of
colonization or you're someonewho's a survivor of
colonization.
Or in the case of many of us, ormost of us, it's likely both.
We're beneficiaries andsurvivors.
So I became a beneficiary ofcolonization the day I moved to
(05:06):
the US and then to Canada,living on stolen land.
But I'm also a survivor ofcolonization because I grew up
in India.
But to go back back to theoriginal question, what do I
think of?
I just can't help but think ofmy ancestors and my family
history because colonizationisn't an academic theory for me.
(05:29):
It's definitely an academictheory, 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 wasgetting my annual physical at
the doctor's.
And the doctor was kind of like,have you been drinking more
(05:51):
alcohol?
Because your liver is developinga lot of fat around it, like
fatty liver.
And so I went down this rabbittrail of looking into fatty
liver.
I was like, this thing wasalmost non-existent in my last
checkup.
Where did this come from?
And I realized that there'shistory for this that's tied to
colonization.
Really?
Yeah, where essentially so manyof us who come from communities
(06:13):
that were colonized findourselves developing fatty liver
in our 30s, mysteriously.
And there's genetic reasons forit because our ancestors were
starved because of colonialism.
So our bodies are geneticallynot like our bodies today aren't
accustomed to holding as muchfood as compared to our
ancestors and because they werestarved.
(06:34):
And so because I'm a well-fed21st century North American, I
am very vulnerable to developingfatty liver.
So that's something I have towatch out for, regardless of
what I'm eating or drinking.
So it's lived experience for usin ways that we don't even
realize.
That's the first thought thatcomes to mind.
Yeah, that's...
My fatty liver.
That's what comes to mind fromcolonization.
SPEAKER_00 (06:55):
Your fatty liver.
No, that's...
I mean, that gets us into, youknow, moving away from just an
intellectualized history or evenjust like a social
structures-based history, butthe body's history.
UNKNOWN (07:13):
Yes.
SPEAKER_00 (07:14):
Like the genetic code has a history.
Again, it sounds like you're,you're right.
Your ancestors, their bodiesstarted to shift in order to
hold on to, you know, fat andenergy.
Yeah.
And that gets passed on.
And I mean, that touches on somany of the things that we both
(07:35):
talk about, which is from, fromdifferent perspectives, the
trauma of the past that getspassed on.
Right.
Um, And colonialism,colonization, is a major source
of sort of the environment oftrauma for people.
SPEAKER_01 (07:56):
Wow.
SPEAKER_00 (07:57):
And yes, for non-Western people, that trauma
experienced as more so asviolence, right?
Various forms of violence,whether that's dispossession,
whether that's imprisonment oractual violence.
And then for the colonizer andtheir ancestor, or sorry, their
descendants, of which I would beone, it's still an environment
(08:22):
of trauma because doing thingsto people and witnessing that
and experiencing that alsodamages the person.
And that reminds me of thatbook, My Grandmother's Hands, if
you've read that.
I haven't.
No?
Tell us about it.
My Grandmother's Hands by RismaMenakin, I think is his name.
(08:43):
But My Grandmother's Hand is abook about racialized
intergenerational trauma.
Wow.
And he explores it in threedifferent groups, like black
Americans, white Americans, andpolice Americans.
So black bodies, white bodies,and police bodies.
(09:03):
And he shows how, you know, he'sa trauma therapist.
He actually works with theMinneapolis Police Department
training them, which is reallysomething given what happened
with George Floyd.
I've always wondered what thatexperience was like for him
having worked with theMinneapolis Police Department.
Wow.
(09:24):
But that book really shows howsomething that you talk about a
lot, which is you know, you talkabout how colonization was bad
for the colonized and thecolonizer.
And this, that book will get itright into, you'll get right
into like how that affects thebodies of different peoples, how
they carry this trauma indifferent ways, which if it goes
(09:47):
unacknowledged, unprocessed,unengaged with, it will erupt
again and again and again, andthen perpetuate itself.
Right.
Wow.
So yeah.
I think colonization and thebody, I'm glad you went there
first because it's...
I think that's arguably one ofthe most important things to
(10:09):
explore and open
SPEAKER_01 (10:10):
up.
Wow.
Let me ask you this.
How did you tie the twotogether?
Because, I mean, you're anacademic who has studied, you
have your PhD in colonialism andhow it shaped Christianity in
North America, indigenouscommunities.
But how did...
the body come into this?
Because when we're academics,it's so easy for us to be
(10:32):
disembodied in how we look atthings, even history.
So yeah, just out of curiosity,how did that bodily theory kind
of get enmeshed with yourresearch focus?
SPEAKER_00 (10:44):
The honest truth, though, is that in my actual
dissertation research, what Istudied was, just in case anyone
doesn't know, what I studied wasevangelicalism.
and indigenous communities.
So I wanted to explore theindigenous history of
(11:04):
Christianity in the time sort ofafter residential schools
because I wondered what happenedthere.
And I knew there was someevangelical growth and I wanted
to understand how could thatpossibly have happened.
So that asked me, eventually Ihad to look back at the colonial
legacy in order to understandwhat if any, like, what's the
(11:29):
word, resonances,evangelicalism, even
fundamentalist evangelicalismhad with indigenous populations
who had been colonized.
I wanted to explore, like, theremust be some resonances or else
this movement wouldn't exist,and it does.
So that history was morestructural and cultural.
(11:51):
I didn't really incorporate muchof the body into that at that
time.
Really, it wasn't until my ownexperience, my own bodily
experience with trauma, whichwould have been from when I was
in the middle of my doctoralprogram, developed a very
serious case of ulcerativecolitis, where my body is
(12:14):
attacking itself and was justkind of destroying itself.
It's like an autoimmune disease.
And so that was my, because Ihave grown up, Very privileged
up until that point in many,many ways.
Kind of in every way.
That was my first experiencewith kind of everything breaking
down.
(12:36):
Wow.
And then, you know, you gothrough the whole thing trying
to find treatments.
Eventually you find somethingthat works.
I was excited.
I'm like, it's all going to goback to normal.
But the mental toll and likesort of the body keeping the
score of losing faith in yourbody's ability to like heal
itself and protect you.
the mental effects were sointense that I developed some
(12:59):
really potent agoraphobia andpanic disorder.
Goodness.
And so it wasn't until then,it's just so interesting to me
how I was able to keep that soseparate from what I was
actually looking at.
Because when you study history,all you're doing is studying
human beings, communities ofhuman 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 arebodies.
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 wenton when I was suffering with
this crippling panic disorderthat the only way forward for me
was because I kind of tried abunch of different things.
you know, like praying it awaywasn't working.
(13:50):
In fact, a lot of my praying wasnow 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 justabout anything.
And I would do what I always,what I had kind of learned to do
as a teenager, which was myprayer life was mostly just me
begging God for forgiveness,even though I I wouldn't have
done anything.
(14:16):
There was nothing I was askingfor forgiveness for.
My prayer life was just beggingfor forgiveness because that's
what I knew you did withfeelings of anxiety.
Wow.
So it's like the very bodilysensation I was experiencing was
anxiety, and I had learned thatthat means something's wrong.
(14:37):
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 forgivenessbecause I'm suffering and maybe
the two are co-related.
I must have done something tokind of cause the suffering.
Was that an element of thisfaith journey at that point at
all?
SPEAKER_00 (14:55):
It's complicated because I had a fairly
well-developed intellectualunderstanding of how that's not
the case.
Yeah.
You know, I was like, mysuffering is just a part of,
what would I have said at thattime?
You know, just like a result ofthe fallen world.
Right.
But kind of in a little bit of aChristian nihilistic way where
(15:16):
it's just like, that's just theway 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 wouldlike, if bad things would
happen, if my kids would getsick, it's like, even though in
my childhood, neocortex mycognitive brain I was thinking
this has nothing to do withanything I've done this is just
life um at some bodily level Iwould still be like begging for
(15:48):
forgiveness I must have donesomething wrong and so it's
twisted right like it's twistedand it's one of these it's one
of these unexpected effects ofsort of a kind of a what's the
word um an absolutizing oforiginal sin.
(16:08):
Yes.
Where it's like what you'retaught at a theoretical level is
that every person is trulydeserving of God's rejection and
punishment.
And anything that happens that'sgood is because God is gracious.
And I'm just like, I don't thinkAugustine's intention Wow.
(16:31):
Yeah.
Yeah.
(16:52):
putting too much weight on, on acertain doctrine and trying to
explain the whole world throughit.
SPEAKER_01 (16:57):
Yeah.
Yeah.
You were almost conditioned intodoing that.
It was your muscular response.
Yeah, exactly.
Your spiritual muscular responseto 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 asconviction or...
You know?
SPEAKER_01 (17:23):
Right.
No, this is good.
I mean, let's keep going downthat trail a little bit.
Because you and I have hadconversations about original sin
recently.
And I'd love to bring folks intothat.
So I've been reading RichardRohr's new book, The Tears of
Prophets.
It's funny how I discovered thisbook.
I was looking on the AmazonCanada bestsellers for the
(17:43):
categories that my book was in.
And my book was number one,humble brag, number one for the
first week of pre-orders in fourdifferent categories.
except for one category,Christian ethics, where it was
number two.
And the number one book in thatcategory was Richard Rohr's new
book, which is how I was like,well, first off, deservedly so.
(18:03):
And secondly, I need to buy thatbook and keep it number one
because it's Richard Rohr andI'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 sobeautiful.
He says, you know, what hasoften happened including in the
Bible, been misdiagnosed maybeas original sin is probably just
(18:27):
generational trauma.
And that blew my mind and itmade me think of you and your
work.
So how do you see that originalsin tying into colonialism?
So now we're getting thehistorian and the theologian
here to mesh these two worldstogether, 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'sreally speaking to a direction
I'm moving in.
Wow.
Because I've, some of youprobably know, I do talk about
intergenerational trauma in thechurch to help explain some of
Western Christianity'sdysfunctions.
Right.
But I'm realizing that it goesmuch further than that because
(19:11):
here's what I'll say.
You know, you try to figure outwhy there are things like
empire, right?
why is there something like anempire that is so hell bent on
dominating, taking away freedomsor, or, you know, bestowing
freedom to the people that itwants to exploiting people.
(19:33):
Like a lot of these, theseactions that empires take, we
gloss them over with thesenarratives of glory, majesty.
And then we have thisarchitecture and you don't have
to like You don't have to throwall that out.
Human beings make cool things.
When we have resources, we makecool things.
Sure.
But we also...
(19:54):
Especially when you stealresources.
Exactly.
You can make better things.
You make better and betterthings the more resources you
get.
Okay, this is sounding likecolonialism.
There's too many directions togo.
But I just had this simplethought, which is like, what is
the sort of bodily origin ofempire?
SPEAKER_01 (20:13):
Wow.
SPEAKER_00 (20:14):
We talk about it ideologically, but the human
experience, our thoughts, ourideas about things, at least
this is what I've come tobelieve, and there's certain
schools of thought that wouldagree, like the somatic approach
to therapy, that our bodyexperiences, like our sensations
experience things first.
(20:36):
It's so rapid that we connectthem instantaneously, but the...
the thinking part of our brainis the youngest.
It's the most recently evolved.
It's the most, and it has givenhumans this incredible
advantage.
We can strategize, plan ahead.
And it's also come with a lot ofcurses, like we can see our own
death, right?
(20:56):
So it's like our thinking brainhas unlocked all kinds of new
anxieties and traumas, even asit's also given us all these
gifts, right?
Wow.
But I think at its core, Theexperience of scarcity, the
experience of loss, of beingoppressed yourself, of being
(21:21):
maimed, of having your resourcestaken away, all of that impacts
the human person and communityat the most fundamental level.
And it unlocks some of ourgreatest cruelties when we're
afraid, when we won't Like we'reafraid of our next meal.
In a way, it comes out of, youknow, we're thinking of our
(21:44):
children and we're willing to dosome pretty horrible things.
Absolutely.
And that gets passed on astrauma.
And what I'm coming to reallybelieve is that empires begin as
like scared people who arewilling to do whatever it takes
to never run out of resourcesagain.
(22:07):
And to never lose and suffer inthe same way again.
And once we start a project likethat, which you can feel empathy
for, it's weird to be speakingso empathetically about empire.
But I think it starts with theexperience of trauma.
And then that gets passed on ascultural norms.
And then it gets passed on assome people are superior to
(22:27):
others.
That's how the Romans and Greeksthought of themselves.
Everyone else was inferior.
Some people were even...
subhuman some you know womenwere seen as a lesser species of
human all kinds of newinequalities come new toxic
ideas that is our thinking mindsinterpreting our experience yeah
(22:48):
and so you're like we've startedto dominate we are better we
have defeated the weak now weget all their resources they are
our slaves but i think if you godrill down to its core yeah It
starts with an experience ofpain.
It's like that never again.
Right.
I think that's what Israel, thestate of Israel, is doing.
SPEAKER_01 (23:08):
A thousand percent.
SPEAKER_00 (23:09):
Never again.
I mean, that was like one of themottos.
Fair enough.
Never again to the Holocaust.
But the state of Israel rightnow shows exactly this process
of extreme trauma turning into aprotective form of oppression of
Palestinians.
UNKNOWN (23:25):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (23:25):
Totally.
The oppressed can become theoppressors.
And this is one of the greatestlessons that history can teach
us.
is that there are never clearcategories of the oppressed and
the oppressor, especially interms of people groups, because
they can switch sides.
And this is where I foundCatholic social teaching to be
helpful in understanding God'spreferential option for the poor
(23:49):
and the oppressed, whichbasically says that God stands
on the side of people who areoppressed.
And if the oppressed andoppressors ever switch sides,
then God also switches sides tostand with the newly oppressed
group of people.
But just going back a little bitto what you said about trauma
(24:09):
and how that shapes people tobecoming the oppressors and to
going from being the oppressedto the oppressors.
I think of the PortugueseCatholic Jesuits in Portugal.
India in the 1600s.
You have all these stories ofthese Jesuits, which is
fascinating because I've gotdear Jesuit friends here in
(24:29):
Ontario, and I have thesediscussions with them too, and
they lament and grieve with me.
But there's this phase wherePortuguese Catholic Jesuits
would go into Hindu temples andjust do mission in very
insensitive ways by yellingobscenities at Hindu deities, by
(24:52):
cursing out, by causing aruckus, by just being jerks,
honestly.
And one of them who was actuallya 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 aHindu temple.
(25:14):
And he prayed St.
Stephen's prayer as he was beingstoned to death.
But it's coming from a place oftrauma.
Because I've been readingsecular Hindu Indian historians
who write about this phase ofhistory, and they make
connections to what washappening.
to the Catholic Church in Europeat the same time,
(25:36):
post-Reformation, where theCatholic Church was being
accused of not beingevangelistic enough, of not
caring about the salvation ofsouls enough, of being too
paganistic.
And so they react to these waysby then going overseas, hand in
hand with colonial empires, andthen oppressing others so that
(25:58):
they're never classified intobeing that again.
And so again, that's just onetangible historical example
oppressed becoming theoppressors after being shaped by
trauma.
SPEAKER_00 (26:09):
And I mean, what it's making me think of is the
oppressed turning into theoppressor is a pattern, but it's
not a inevitable process.
Because if there's one thing Ican say, and there's a lot of
things you can say about theindigenous peoples of North
America, it is that Throughoutthe last 500 years, over and
(26:34):
over and over again,collectively, Indigenous people,
communities have beenemotionally mature, even with
some of the greatest sufferingimaginable, like having
everything taken away.
Yeah.
Not just your land.
I mean, that's the big one.
Right.
But even just the respect foryour ways.
(26:57):
And there are good ways, verygood ways of living in the
world.
UNKNOWN (27:01):
Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00 (27:02):
very sustainable, very harmonious.
Like this is not meromanticizing indigenous
communities because you willfind this in the sources.
Because we studied this.
I did a PhD in this, but go on.
You'll find this in the sourcesof their biggest enemies who are
still saying like, there is alot of harmony here.
(27:23):
And so I just have noticed thatthere is an element of like, you
have this traumatic history Whatare you going to do with it?
And while I'm not trying topaint everyone with a broad
brush, I'm just sayinghistorically in Canada and the
United States, Indigenouspeoples were welcoming and
(27:46):
mature when newcomers, you know,European colonizers arrived and
have consistently come to thetable for like treaty
conversations and have given thesettler populations more chances
than they should ever have beenallowed and continue to do this.
(28:06):
And then, you know, one of themajor shifts of the 20th century
in indigenous history was, atleast in Canada, a lot of
people, we learn a little bitabout colonization and we're
starting to learn aboutresidential schools, but we
don't really know the history ofkind of what happens after the
60s.
(28:27):
Okay.
And you have two major movementsthat sort of are shaping
Indigenous life as a whole.
And one is like the politicalsovereignty movement, like
reclaiming self-respect andsovereign control over
territories, however small theymight be.
SPEAKER_01 (28:43):
Wow.
SPEAKER_00 (28:44):
And the second is called the Aboriginal Healing
Movement.
There has been a concertedeffort, and this is one of the
main things I've studied, inIndigenous communities in North
America, Canada, and the U.S.,to pursue...
healing as like the the wayforward the future and i just
find that to be so inspiring andthen you're you know you're
(29:06):
talking about this this uh thesort of background to the
jesuits and the portuguesejesuits
SPEAKER_02 (29:13):
yeah
SPEAKER_00 (29:14):
and in that case it's like responding to trauma
in a really immature way rightlike the way like a bully does
yeah a bully is is bullied athome and then bullies.
And that's a child.
We shouldn't expect a child tobe acting.
They are immature.
But adults, it's like, thistouches on so much because in
(29:37):
the therapeutic world, of whichthere's a lot of different
modalities, a lot of differentways 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 ourbackgrounds and kind of placing
blame there.
But a lot of people get stuckthere
SPEAKER_03 (29:54):
because
SPEAKER_00 (29:54):
it feels kind of good and progressive, not
progressive politically, butlike you are making progress to
be like, I've located the sourceof my dysfunctions.
It's their fault.
Wow.
But it's kind of like once, likeyou are not responsible for what
happened to you.
Things happened to you.
(30:15):
But once you are an adult, it isyour responsibility to be like,
where am I going to move withthis?
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 ofthings.
So I think Richard Rohr's pointabout maybe original sin, what
Augustine was seeing, Because hewasn't just reading the Bible
and being like, I've distilledthe truth.
(30:44):
He was experiencing a world.
He was actually experiencing thedestruction of Rome, the Roman
world, in his lifetime.
He watched his city burn by thevandals, right?
And his theology is impacted bythe trauma he's living in.
And so original sin, you can seehow that would make sense.
(31:07):
But if we start to look at itthrough the lens of
intergenerational trauma, Ithink it actually makes more
sense of what we're doing.
And it doesn't take any teethout of the problems in the
world.
It just gives us a new way to belike, this is a simple question,
but what does a person do?
What can people or communitiesdo to process and metabolize
(31:33):
this traumatic past and moveinto a new future?
SPEAKER_01 (31:37):
Right, right.
You know, just going back toconnecting this to something we
talked about earlier, which isZionism.
I find it fascinating that Ithink the numbers are
overwhelming.
It's like 70% of, over 70% ofthe Jewish community in the US
does not support Zionism, doesnot support the state of Israel
(32:01):
and being an oppressor to itsPalestinian neighbors.
70% of Jewish folks in America,contrast that with over 80% of
white evangelicals in the US areZionists, actually support the
bombing of children in Gaza,right?
I mean, again, talking abouttrauma responses, right?
(32:23):
It seems like the Jewishcommunity in the US is quite
mature about the trauma thatthey've endured, but then you've
got others white evangelicalfolks in America who feel this
persecution complex because oftrauma, likely, feeling isolated
(32:48):
and left out and threatened and,yeah, feel like their power and
their dominion is beingthreatened.
Their resources could be takenaway.
Just fears like that coming froma place of trauma, and that's
shaping them into their Zionism,into bombing children in Gaza,
into starving children in Gazato death, right?
It's fascinating what traumadoes if we look at the world and
(33:12):
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 thatsin is kind of woven through
creation.
It just shifts the, it's like itchanges the narrative a little
bit, where it's like sin doesn'tjust mean the bad things you do.
(33:39):
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 thisvision that like something is
wrong And some wrongness iswoven into the world.
(34:03):
Yeah, so I love that we've
SPEAKER_01 (34:03):
been talking about trauma and the oppressor,
colonialism, all light topics sofar.
Let's talk about anotherinteresting trend happening in
the North American church rightnow, which is, and I see this as
funny, like I've had my journeyinto sacramentalism from
(34:24):
evangelicalism because I'vethought that so much of Western
evangelicalism.
It's too patriarchal, toooppressive, too colonialistic.
And that's kind of driven meinto a more sacramental
direction.
But at the same time, I'mlearning that there are a lot of
people, men in particular, whoare leaving the evangelical
(34:46):
church and going into a moresacramental tradition,
specifically the Orthodoxchurch, for the complete
opposite reason, which is theythink that the evangelical
church is not colonialisticenough, not patriarchal enough,
not strong or masculine enough.
And you've got this exodus ofthose folks joining the Orthodox
Church, which is actuallycausing a lot of divisiveness in
(35:08):
the Orthodox Church and to ourOrthodox Christian neighbors,
because now all of a suddenthey're being inundated with
this divisive rhetoric andpeople coming in with their own
agendas, wanting to shape anancient tradition, an Eastern
tradition that's been mindingits own business for 2,000
years, right?
How do you think that ties intoeverything
SPEAKER_00 (35:26):
we've talked about so far?
Yeah, this is actually somethingthat I've thought about and
noticed.
Because from what I've studiedof the Western church, which is
quite a bit, you know, yes, Istudied colonial Christianity,
but in order to study ahistorical era, you need to
study its roots.
And that's why I keep ending upback in the medieval era.
(35:47):
I'm not a medieval historian,but the medieval church, the
Western medieval church is thebackground to Christianity.
the modern church.
So it's like it's familyhistory.
And ever since the Reformation,this was the point of my last
podcast episode was talkingabout fragmentation.
And I was saying howfragmentation, the experience of
(36:09):
fragmentation is the deepcontext of the Western world for
the last 500 years.
I argued that that's not all badbecause fragmentation, breaking
apart the old medieval certaintyand Wow.
Wow.
(36:46):
was the right authority.
There was no question about whogot to interpret the Bible.
It was the Catholic Church.
There was a security and asafety in that kind of solid
unity.
Again, I think that that was notsustainable in the long term,
and it really changed when thecolonial period was initiated
(37:07):
because now you realize thisinstitution, this religion, that
said it kind of had all theanswers, it didn't even know
that there was another half ofthe world.
And so people's minds areexpanding very, very rapidly.
It's disorienting, right?
Like what else did they notknow?
(37:30):
But ever since the Reformation,you have all these different
groups claiming they're the truechurch, they're the true church,
we understand what the Biblereally means, et cetera, et
cetera.
And that kind of marksProtestantism at its heart,
right?
It's like an attempt torediscover and re-enliven the
true church.
(37:51):
And so what I've noticed is it'snot super surprising to me that
Protestants, very committed tothat project of finding and
identifying with the one truechurch, are now bypassing the
Catholic Church, because we haveall this historical baggage with
the Catholic Church, It's partof Protestantism, just at some
(38:14):
fundamental level, is kind of ananti-Catholicism.
And they see the OrthodoxChurch, 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 themselvesdrawn into Orthodoxy because
that's where the Spirit isleading them.
That's very different than a lotof what you're talking about,
which is...
I see this in my comment sectiona lot because I talk, I bring up
the Eastern traditions ofChristianity, not because I'm
trying to say they're the rightones and the West is wrong, but
(38:47):
because I need WesternChristians to understand that
the, you know, let's sayAugustinian ways of doing
theology have never been the wayeveryone does theology.
So I bring it up to de-centerthe West, but I get a lot of
people saying like, well, youneed to just convert to
Orthodoxy because that's thetrue church.
And I'm like, oh, you're just,it's Protestants doing Orthodox
(39:08):
cosplay for a lot of people.
They're growing the beard,they're going to the divine
liturgy, but they're stillProtestants.
And they're looking at otherChristians and saying, you're
the heretics, you're outside thetrue church.
And I'm like, that's what weknow.
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 graduatedfrom, the top western
evangelical seminary in theworld that has a tagline of
teach truth love well right andthat teaching truth part can be
beautiful if you see truth asjesus but it can also be
(39:46):
weaponized at the same time whenyou're approaching it from a
western colonized lens andsaying oh teach truth you know
and you have all theseundertones 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.
(40:07):
Yeah, so it's fascinating thatyou have such an emphasis on
truth, gospel, and these arewords that...
than to get weaponized so much.
They're beautiful words, butthey're weaponized often in
Western evangelical context andbrandished and used as a sword
(40:28):
to smack people in the head withif they step out of line.
When in reality, it assumes aposture of pride and arrogance.
And we know what the truth is.
We're gatekeepers of the truth.
These are all pagans andheathens.
We need to save them.
We already have the truth.
(40:48):
We're OK.
We don't need furthertransformation.
They need to be saved with ourtruth and our version of the
truth.
And you see these two thingsclashing.
You see the colonizer's gospeland the gospel of St.
Thomas Indian Christians, apre-colonial, pre-Columbus
Christian tradition.
(41:09):
that's been worshipping Jesuslonger than many parts of the
West were worshipping Jesus.
And then you have the CatholicChurch come to India, run into
St.
Thomas Indian Christians, myancestors, and tell us St.
Peter is here as St.
Thomas is here.
And St.
Peter is superior to St.
Thomas for our listeners whocan't watch us gesticulating
(41:33):
with our hands right now.
And there's this whole postureof superiority that comes in
with colonialism that'sinfluenced the western church
even today in the way theseprotestant christians who are
leaving the protestant churchare looking at other traditions
and saying well if the truthisn't here and our version of
the truth isn't here then it hasto be somewhere else but it has
(41:54):
to be in one place we're goingto go look for that one place
when in reality jesus iseverywhere if you're looking at
truth as jesus jesus iseverywhere if we have the eyes
to see him everywhere right youcan't put god in a box you can't
put the spirit and the spirit'sworking of transformation in a
box.
But that's what the colonizersdid.
(42:14):
And that's what people shaped bythe 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 ofcolonialism has a few key
components.
One just being the desire formore land, like the acquisition
of land.
But colonialism doesn't It didand does have a religious
(42:39):
component from day one.
I, for a long time, tried to getaround Christianity's role in
colonialism, trying to be like,colonialism wasn't generated by
Christianity.
Christianity just got taggedalong and was complicit.
And I'm like, that's not true.
And the way you just said itreally clarified it.
(43:01):
The truth, if the truth is nothere, 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 exclusivepossession 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 institutionbreak 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 ofcolonialism.
There's so much we can say aboutit, but that drives me crazy.
This is the immature part of it.
You discover that there isanother half of the earth, tens
(43:47):
of millions of other people whohave no connection to you, who
have lived doing their thing for10,000 years or more, And your
response to that is, well, weneed 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 toevery single historical pattern.
There are people who aredefending indigenous rights
early on.
There are people who are tryingto learn indigenous languages
and ways with some respect, likesome of the Jesuits did.
UNKNOWN (44:30):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (44:30):
But you have, what's the larger pattern?
That's what's importanthistorically, 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 tocrusade in, that we need to
bring under the one church.
I have a lot of respect for theancient church, ancient
(44:52):
Christianity.
I do not see ancientChristianity as more
authoritative.
I just don't.
Yeah.
That would go against everythingwe just talked about right now.
Exactly.
And so like, again, with theOrthodox sort of Protestant
conversion to Orthodoxy thing,there's this new kind of thing
that these Protestant Orthodoxpeople do, which is they'll
(45:15):
start treating the churchfathers almost as if they're
this new infallible source oflike pure theology.
The church fathers have a lot ofgreat stuff, especially if you
understand them in their Timeand place in their linguistic,
cultural, historical context.
Then what they have to say comesto life.
(45:35):
And you can say, wow, there'ssome of this I really don't
understand and other stuffreally resonates.
That's great.
But treating the church fathersas if they are the pure truth is
the classic Western tradition.
error of absolutizing knowledgeand being like, here it is in
this one place.
And everything since then is adegradation.
(45:56):
No, that's not how the spiritworks.
And so how this connects iseverything that happens in the
history of Christianity beforethe year 1492 is pre-Columbian
Christianity.
This is pre-Western hemisphere.
So to claim that like the churchhad the whole truth and it
didn't even know there wasanother half of the earth is
(46:17):
What that means theologicallyis, where are the new church
fathers and mothers?
There are countless indigenouscultures and societies.
The reason we use the wordindigenous is because the
diversity is so great that itwould take us all day to explore
Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Sioux,Lakota, and that's just a slice
(46:41):
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 fewIndian, their theology came out
of their particular culturalMiloos, right?
Where is that when it comes toencountering totally new
peoples?
Mayan theology, Aztec.
And you can quickly be like,well, those places were doing
(47:05):
human sacrifice.
You're stereotyping an entirepeople with a whole history.
You want to do that with WesternEurope?
Easy.
SPEAKER_02 (47:11):
You
SPEAKER_00 (47:12):
know, they're just people who use the Iron Maiden
and like, you know, imprisonedheretics and burned women.
SPEAKER_01 (47:17):
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, this also makes methink of salvation or
soteriology, as is known intheology.
Big graduate using the fancyterms.
Got to drop those words now.
I have permission to drop thosewords now.
But it has me thinking andwondering often, you know, what
did my St.
(47:38):
Thomas pastor, Christianancestors believed in India
before the colonizers show up.
And that's something I'm curiousto maybe even pursue a PhD
research in.
But one of the things that Istumbled across in my research
as I was researching for thebook, 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 copywherever you preorder copies
(48:00):
today.
I had to slide a plug for thebook.
SPEAKER_00 (48:04):
Every time, you got to do it.
You have my
SPEAKER_01 (48:08):
blessing.
But as I was researching forthis book, because I try to tell
the story of my St.
Thomas Indian Christianancestors, and that as I talk
about justice, and I talk aboutlessons that the modern Western
evangelical church can learnfrom pre-Columbian, pre-colonial
Christian traditions, you know,I look at This thing that I came
(48:34):
across, this doctrine, that'sactually called the Law of St.
Thomas.
The Law of St.
Thomas.
Now, you could look this up.
I don't know how much you'dfind.
You'd probably have to look atsome primary sources from St.
Thomas Indian Christians.
And I write about this a goodbit in the book, where basically
what you really had when thecolonizers came was a clash of
(48:58):
two different ways of looking attruth.
SPEAKER_00 (49:01):
where
SPEAKER_01 (49:03):
the Western colonizers came and told my St.
Thomas Christian ancestors whoheld to the Apostles' Creed and
the Nicene Creed that theirChristianity wasn't
authoritative truth, that theCatholic Church was
authoritative truth.
But St.
Thomas Indian Christians had acompletely different way of
looking at truth called the Lawof St.
Thomas.
And if you look into the Law ofSt.
(49:24):
Thomas, it's basically anyoneand everyone can be saved
through Christ.
Whichever means of divine graceis available to them because
Christ is everywhere.
And so St.
Thomas Indian Christiansactually did not feel this
pressure for 1,500 years beforethe colonizers showed up.
(49:44):
They did not feel this pressureto convert their Hindu, Muslim,
Sikh, Buddhist, Jain neighbors.
They didn't feel the pressurebecause they had the Law of St.
Thomas that they believed waspassed on to them by the Apostle
Thomas, which is actually nottoo different from what a lot of
the early church fathersbelieved when it comes to
(50:05):
doctrine of salvation andChristian universalism.
Historical facts makes usuncomfortable in the Western
church, but it was actuallyquite in line with that.
But then the Catholic churchchanged a lot of that theology
over time as it fell in lovewith control, as we talked about
in the last episode we didtogether.
And they then exported thatversion of Christianity to India
(50:26):
where it was actually a verypluralistic society where
Christians were so pluralisticthat they were actually
universalists, Christianuniversalists, according to the
Law of St.
Thomas.
And the way that the PortugueseCatholic Church reacted to this
after discovering the Law of St.
Thomas was by burning all theancient church documents that
(50:51):
talked about the law of St.
Thomas and that had liturgies.
So this was actually done at asynod called the Synod of the
Emperor in 1599.
I've heard of it.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So Synod of the Emperor was thatsynod where the Catholic Church
was like, sorry, St.
Thomas Indian Christians, youare going to subscribe to our
norms, our way of worshipingJesus.
And that includes the law of St.
(51:11):
Thomas.
Can't have that.
That contradicts with theteaching of the Catholic Church.
But again, going back to ahistorical example of
colonialism, where you see thecolonizer's gospel, the colonial
way of looking at Jesus, andtruth as, you know, truth can
only be found in one place, theway we determine it to be in the
(51:33):
church, and truth anywhere elsedoes exist.
Whereas you had evenpre-colonial Christian
traditions who saw things verydifferently, much in line with
the early church, right?
And so It's interesting to livein the tension of these
historical
SPEAKER_00 (51:48):
facts.
There's way more we need to talkabout.
I already have ideas of where weneed to go next.
Good thing we're doing this moreregularly.
Regularly, yeah.
That is good because this is toomuch.
To be able to hear about the Lawof St.
Thomas, you're not going to hearabout that anywhere else.
(52:08):
I had no clue about that.
And these are the first thingsthat jump out.
Maybe we need to just talk aboutthese next time.
But the fact that you had tosay, you know, you're talking
about Christian universalism,you're rooting it in ancient
sources, so not just making upsome modern idea because, you
(52:28):
know, the doctrine of hell makesus uncomfortable.
It's funny you said this mightmake some Westerners
uncomfortable, but universalismwas one of the common things
options or one of the streamsand we're like, oh, that makes
us uncomfortable.
Why?
Why would that make usuncomfortable?
It's because my takeaway, andthis will connect with the
(52:51):
trauma in the church thing, isthe reason that encountering
some kind of universalism makesWestern Christians uncomfortable
is because we're scared that ifwe move in that direction, we're
courting hell and damnation forourselves and for our family and
for others.
(53:12):
So it's better.
It doesn't really matter whatearly church theologians had to
say.
What matters is staying hypervigilant because if there's a
chance that hell is this eternalconscious punishment that
happens to anyone who justdoesn't believe the right way,
it's better to live your life inthat fear than to suffer for
(53:35):
eternity.
So that, that is the, thatvigilance is a traumatic
response.
And that's why like what we needto explore.
I'm actually working on a, causeI've done some posts on hell
lately, quite a few.
So I've decided I'm going to dolike a seminar, online seminar
(53:56):
on just a much like, cause a lotof people have wanted more on
that.
two minute videos aren't enough.
So I've decided I'm going to doa longer seminar on the history
of hell and connecting it withtrauma in the church.
I'll talk more about that whenpeople 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 thethings that we need to talk more
about, I think.
Some of this universalist stuff.
That posture of the St.
Thomas Christians to the culturethat they were living in, which
was, like you said, already avery hyper-pluralist kind of
religious tradition, right?
The religious traditions ofIndia are so rich and varied and
(54:36):
it is just like a rainforest ofdifferent practices and postures
or spiritualities, right?
And I don't know, there'ssomething, you look at how this,
oh yeah, this was the otherthing I wanted to say.
You look at how much fear thereis in the West about
Christianity and disappearingand going extinct.
(54:59):
And you look at how little fearthere is among the St.
Thomas Christians about that,when they're much smaller, a
tiny minority in India, andthey've been there for 2,000
years.
And the West, Christianity hasbeen so dominant, it has shaped
every single person's life.
And it's crippled with this fearthat it's all going to be lost
(55:22):
if we don't
SPEAKER_01 (55:23):
regain control.
It's like Gollum and the Ring ofPower from the Lord of the
Rings, right?
The more you have it, the moreyou want to hold on to it.
And you're afraid of letting itgo.
Everyone's a threat.
You can't have
SPEAKER_00 (55:33):
the precious.
Everyone's a threat.
So I want to talk about thattoo.
Love that.
And just, I guess, as we wrapup, like we didn't talk that
much about colonialism, but wetalked a lot about its effects.
And its effects.
This is becoming like a commonsort of contemporary wisdom
thing.
emphasizing the importance ofcuriosity.
(55:55):
And I just think that there's somuch life in that.
If you're not curious aboutother people, if your default is
they're a threat, they're adanger, you need to examine that
because that is a response ofsomeone in kind of a
dysregulated state.
Curiosity is the opposite ofcolonialism.
(56:20):
And that is how...
the second half of the earthshould have been encountered
with curiosity.
But it's like right away, theWestern tradition switched into
domination mode.
Because that's what it hadlearned you do with your
enemies.
You pacify them.
(56:40):
Pacify is just a nice way ofsaying 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 Iam so glad.
Thanks for being here with me,Joash.
And yeah, we're going to betalking 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 FreeSouth Theology.
I heard you on Free SouthTheology.
And I was like, this is amazing.
This is an internationalpodcast.
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.
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