Decolonizing Christianity: Embracing Self-Love and Divine Alignment
For many BIPOC individuals, religion and spirituality form a foundational aspect of their culture. In her book “Black Families in Therapy,” Nancy Boyd states, “Spirituality is an essential and deeply embedded part of the African and African American psyche” (Boyd, 2003, p. 126).
The Indigenous Peoples of this land and West Africans who were brought here on slave ships had an in-depth way of life that circled around spirituality, medicine, and nature wisdom and reverence. When the colonizers first arrived, the spiritual and life practices of the Indigenous and Africans were deemed as unscientific, superstitious, and savage. The colonizers then forced (often through violence) assimilation to the European version of Christianity and way of life.
This version of Christianity have led to many of us being taught to chase God through shame, obedience, and sacrifice. We were told that if we just prayed harder, followed the rules more perfectly, or suffered more silently, we would finally be seen as worthy in the eyes of God. We were made to believe that salvation had to be earned and that peace, love, or acceptance were only available on the other side of pain, perfection, and performance.
But what if that was never the intention of God?
What if Christ was never meant to become a religion, but a way of being?
What if all along, the Kingdom we’ve been taught to search for in institutions, rituals, and pulpits has been quietly alive within us?
Reclaiming the Sacred: Ancestral Spirituality and the Wounds of Colonized Religion
When we say “You only need to return to stillness, to your body, to your breath, to your truth”, we are not simply speaking of a personal choice. We are naming an ancestral memory. A spiritual call that lives deep in the bones of BIPOC people across the globe. Because long before Christianity was used as a tool of domination, our ancestors already knew God.
The Role of Spirituality in Indigenous Cultures
For Indigenous peoples across Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and beyond, spirituality was never separate from life, it was the foundation of it. Spirituality was not locked in buildings or books. It was embodied.
The earth was sacred
Ancestors were honored
Rituals were woven into everyday life
Community and connection were the highest forms of worship
The divine was not feared but welcomed and felt through song, rhythm, fire, water, dreams, and breath
These practices weren’t “religion” in the Western sense. They were relational systems of harmony, grounded in land, lineage, and the invisible world. They allowed people to feel rooted, guided, and whole connected to both Creator and Creation.
To be spiritual was to remember who you are and to know that who you are is already enough.
The Impact of Colonization and Slavery on BIPOC Spirituality
When colonizers arrived, they didn’t just take land. They took language, memory, identity, and faith. Christianity became a tool of empire, wielded to dismantle Indigenous spiritual systems and replace them with one rooted in hierarchy, fear, and obedience.
African spiritual traditions were labeled demonic
Native ceremonies were outlawed
Ancestor veneration was replaced with saints chosen by colonizers
Oral traditions were erased and replaced with dogma
The idea of God was severed from the body and relocated into the hands of European institutions
For enslaved Africans, spiritual expression was often punishable by death. But still, they prayed. They sang. They held secret rituals under the moonlight, mixing the names of Jesus with the rhythm of their drums. This dynamic still exists today with the practice of Hoodoo. Faith survived, but it was forced to hide itself under the cloak of Christianity to stay alive.
This trauma lives on. Many BIPOC people today wrestle with:
Deep mistrust of organized religion
Internalized fear of ancestral traditions
Guilt around questioning the faith they were handed
A painful split between their spiritual intuition and inherited doctrine
But Jesus Was Never the Colonizer’s Christ
This is where the truth becomes revolutionary. Christ was never the architect of these systems. He was the one sent to dismantle them. Jesus did not come to create a new religion. He came to awaken our original divinity.
Throughout His life, Christ modeled everything colonial Christianity tried to erase:
He withdrew to the wilderness to commune with Spirit. Not in temples, but in nature
He spoke in parables, activating people’s inner wisdom, not controlling them through fear
He touched the untouchables, dismantling purity culture
He challenged systems of religious power that used God as a weapon
He rested, wept, healed, and questioned. All things that were punished under empire
When Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you,” He was calling us back to what Indigenous people already knew that God is not up there, but in here, He didn’t demand we earn salvation. He reminded us that we are already divine reflections of the Source.
Christ Teaches Us to Return
Our newest workbook “Returning to the Heart of God – A 7-Day Devotional for Deconstructing and Decolonizing Christianity” reflects on how Jesus’ path was one of radical presence, embodied divinity, and unconditional love. He taught stillness over striving. He modeled inner freedom over outer conformity.
He showed us how to:
Return to ourselves
Return to our breath
Return to the God within
Return to ancestral wisdom without shame
Return to a way of being where love, not law, was the center
Christ was not the gatekeeper. He was the key. And His teachings were always an invitation to return. Not to religion. Not to empire. But to the sacred knowing that we are one with God.
Conclusion: The Sacred Work of Returning
To decolonize your faith is not to reject Christ. It is to finally meet Him as He truly is outside the walls, in the margins, inside your spirit, and rooted in love.
It is to reclaim your right to:
Speak to God in your native tongue
Honor your ancestors without guilt
Heal without shame
Rest without punishment
And exist without needing to be “fixed”
You were never meant to beg for God’s love. You were never meant to live in fear. You were never meant to surrender your soul for someone else’s comfort. You were always meant to return to your truth, your people, your body, your God. And Jesus is not the barrier. He is the bridge.