Decolonising Evangelism As Praxis? (Beyond Deconstruction to Discipleship as Decoloniality)
Dwight Schrute, Desmond Tutu, Pauline Hanson's Racism and taking back Matthew 28:16-20 from the chaplains of colonisation to embody the nonviolent-justice-seeking Way of Jesus
In 1984 just before leaving to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, South African Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, told what would go on to become one of his favourite jokes to an audience gathered in New York,
“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land… ”
Many people end the anecdote there. Yet Tutu’s unique contribution is what he shared next. Much like those who read my mate, Fr. Joash P. Thomas’ important article, Decolonising ‘The Great Commission’ we need to take in this reality before moving on. Fr Joash’s asks,
“What if I told you that ‘The Great Commission’ is historically, a modern, western, colonial invention to steal, kill & destroy?”
What I want to contribute here builds upon this, not as ideas but as practice. The remainder of the quote from Tutu that often gets left off is,
“If you wanted to oppress, to subjugate people, the last thing you should do then is to place in their hands the Bible. For this is the most revolutionary thing, so utterly subversive of all injustice and oppression.”
The B I B L E, Yes, that’s a Book for Revolutionaries?
I want to explore what Matthew 28:16-20 means as a praxis of boycotting all stealing, killing, and destroying, and instead experimenting with a Transfiguring Power that Desmond Tutu names as “the most revolutionary thing, so utterly subversive of all injustice and oppression.”
To do so, I will draw on leading thinkers who, for over two decades, have pushed me to confront my own enculturation in the camouflaged colonial projects that lie just underneath the sunburnt settler society of Australia, as we open Matthew 28:16-20.
When I started Transfiguring Power on Substack 4 months ago, I shared that my intention is to create a space “where the important work of deconstructing religious trauma can deepen into a sustained journey of decolonising spiritualities, from glory to glory.”
But first, a standard dyslexia disclaimer. I also want to hear what your keen to see next from me. At the end, a further disclaimer about this post in particular.
Disclaimer: My dyslexia is a little extra. If you’re reading this in an email, please click the headline, and it will take you to the updated version online, where the "read to me" feature helps me catch more spelling and grammar “creativity”.
My standard jokes include, 'Well, at least you know I’m not AI!' and, 'You can be assured that I’m consistently anti-fascist—grammar nazis included.' Thank you for your subscriptions, comments, likes, shares, and financial support in this work to further articulate and embody the beauty of Christ's nonviolent-liberating-love. If you’d like a paid subscription but can’t afford it, I GOT YOU. Details below. Also…
“Christianity, When it isn’t Fascism…”
If Christianity is inherently a colonial form of imperial domination it must be abandoned immediately. So why, ‘if ever I loved thee, my Jesus, ‘tis now’?
(Or if hymns from 1862 aren’t your thing, why does my love for Jesus make Evangelicals feel so pressed?)
In part, it’s cos like -fire shut up in my bones- I feel the good news for the poor that our brother David Dark names when he whispers…
“Christianity, when it isn't fascism, is a prophetic movement of creative nonviolence to which everyone is invited.”
Goodness. I love that sentence.
If Christianity is to embody the healing-fire of the prophets and their unarmed-Messiah, if Christianity is to truly be a movement of creative nonviolence to which everyone is invited, colonialism must be exorcised in the name of Jesus.
With the help of Aimé Césaire, we can name the imperial boomerang effect: if you throw colonialism into the air, don’t curse others when fascism rains down on your head. When a colonial society does to itself what it has done to others, we call it fascism. Fascism is the antithesis of the Torah and the Prophets. So, what do we call it when Christianity becomes mere devotional decoration for this diabolical way of organizing societies around scapegoating authoritarian violence?
"Call it 'Christofascism' with Dorothee Sölle; call it 'authoritarian reactionary Christianity' with David P. Gushee; call it 'neo-fascist Christianism' with political scientists; call it 'Christian Nationalism' with the researchers and journalists; or simply call it 'Christendom' with Christian traditions critical of the Frankenstein’s monster that stitched a living church into the corpse of the Roman Empire, resulting in a horror that mixes charity with guns, liturgies with land theft, and ‘evangelisation’ with epistemicide, ethnocide, ecocide and genocide.
Regardless of what you call white supremacist, authoritarian state capture wrapped in Christian symbols, it must be called out. It must be cast out!
Fascism—even when (especially when?!?!) carrying a leather-bound Bible and listening to Contemporary Christian Music (™) while goosestepping to a worship service where “Christian love” only extends to a few that look like you and share the same passport —cannot be allowed to dictate what Christianity is.
As one of the English-speaking world’s most important theologians, David Bentley Hart, recently said to Rainn Wilson (yes, who played Dwight Schrute on The Office),
"As long as the temptation of power, the discourse of rescuing civilisation—in which we love the preeminence of the throne and altar accommodations of the 'great age of Christendom' more than we love the humility and compassion of Christ… I want to see the whole project of Christianism, of Christendom, collapse under its own weight in an absolute abject historical failure so vast that the very words Christian civilisation will have to be nothing other than soup kitchens.”
Rainn Wilson: “Those are some mighty words. And then out of that collapse, out of the ashes rises the phoenix of what?”
David Bentley Hart: “Maybe an actual attention to God as love. You know, love of God and neighbour as being the whole of the law and the prophets.”
Jesus commands Christianity to abandon all violent power in favor of the justice-seeking transfiguring-power of nonviolence, to trade cultural domination for radical compassion as an embodied invitation, and to reject the temptation of ‘Christian civilization,’ so we can take up the cross of creative-confrontational-love and get on with following him.
We cannot be faithful to Jesus of Nazareth while remaining silent about forms of Christianity that engage in the devil’s work: dehumanisation in all its dignity denying horror. Those faithful to Jesus will confront injustice together while standing in solidarity with the dispossessed. As Gustavo Gutiérrez reminds us, “The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.” When Christianity blesses the way things are, it has ceased to seek first the peaceable ‘kingdom of God’, on earth as it is in heaven.
That is why talk of 'Western civilisation' or 'Judeo-Christian values' (especially in the mouths of pollies looking for votes in an election season) is so often a cover for what is so clearly anti-Jesus.
Supporting Pauline Hanson as a Christian is like Supporting Abattoirs as a Vegan.
The following quote is from Australia’s loudest far-right racist politician:
“We oppose entirely people coming into this country and bringing with them the troubles they have left behind; coming to this country and ignoring our values, our language, our traditions, our dress and the fact that we are predominately a Judeo-Christian society.”
- Pauline Hanson, National Press Club address, 17th June, 2026
“Judeo-Christian society”?
In the putrid mix of white supremacist slop served up for mainstream Australia by Pauline Hanson at the National Press Club this week, she attacked the invitation from First Nations Peoples across this continent to be included in the 50 thousand+ years of the oldest living cultures in the world. She then showed her hand as Australia’s Temu-Trump—complete with attacks on journalists for doing their jobs—and label multiculturalism, and our Muslim neighbours, a "social cancer". With her mining billionaire funded foot to the floor, she framed the reality that the majority of Australians (51.5%), myself included, being born overseas or had one parent born overseas, as a terrible thing. I don’t take it personally because two of Pauline’s own kids are in the same boat, given their father was a refugee from Poland!
Apparently, worse still for Pauline is that 1 in 4 of us Aussies speak more than one language at home. Buíochas le Dia! Predictably, she blamed inequality and the housing crisis on everyone who isn't pale and prone to sunburn. If that seems like a silly distinction, welcome to the logic of racism. She then attacked Aussie workers as "bludgers"—which is rich coming from someone who fails to show up for her own job 53% of the time!
But at least she is consistent; for 30 years, her voting record has been perfectly in keeping with her now billionaire backer, private jet-donating, Donald Trump schmoozing ticket to Mar-a-Lago parties, Gina Rinehart. Like Gina, Pauline is a champion of reducing minimum wage rises for working Australians, destroying workplace rights, anti-Aboriginal Land Rights, anti-science when it comes to climate action, and tax cuts and social welfare for the richest of rich.
The naked ugliness of punching down and scapegoating the most vulnerable parts of society is visible from the International Space Station. And while it’s clearly, anti-Jesus—which is to say, antichrist— it arrives while referring to Australia as a, “predominantly Judeo-Christian society”.
…because nothing says, “I worship the historically brown-Jewish-Afro-Asiatic-Palestinian-Messiah Jesus of Nazareth (who taught love for God expressed as nonviolent-love to neighbours, strangers and even enemies)” like,
*checks notes*
…white supremacy?!?!
What I’m saying is, supporting Pauline Hanson as a Christian is like supporting abattoirs as a vegan. Supporting any form of fascism as a Christian is like supporting abattoirs as a vegan, if Christianity is to have anything to do with Jesus Christ.
‘Judeo-Christian values’ When it isn’t Fascism…
‘Judeo-Christian values’ when it isn’t fascism (and friends, today the term so often is a cover for just that!), would be a prophetic passion for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger into which everyone is invited.
That is to say, healing justice for the most vulnerable is the fixation of those who speak for God, in the Scriptures, and in the sanctuaries, seminaries and streets today. The orphan and the widow are anyone, no matter how young, or what gender, who lacks social protection, legal standing, and are denied human rights, locked out of dignified economic participation making them vulnerable to exploitation.
And the stranger?
This needs to be said explicitly: the stranger is any outsider, any foreigner, any migrant, or immigrant, but in particular it is the vulnerable asylum seeker and refugee.
Christianity’s love for God can be judged by three criteria (according to Jesus):
Love of neighbour (And Jesus defines neighbour as everyone)
Love of the stranger (the outsider, foreigner, refugee, and asylum seeker that many are tempted to leave out of their definition of “everyone”)
Love of enemies (the subject of another post but I want to argue conversion to Christ always involves inheriting the enemies of the poor, the outcast, the scapegoated, the disinherited—those whom Christ was incarnate amongst. Our enemies are those who work against the dignity of all (our neighbours), especially those whom many are wanting to exclude from “us” (the outsider/stranger).
So here is a quick Christian fascism test:
Q: Do you share God’s passion for liberation for those doing it tough, especially First Nations peoples and refugees?
If yes, Jesus’s agenda is present.
If no… the absence of Jesus’ agenda leaves us susceptible to fascism.
The uniqueness of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is a record of a people who instead of telling of their greatness call out their failures. If anything is the legacy of the Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity (or “Judeo-Christian” in polly-speak) its love expressed in brutally honest self-critique, fixating on how we treat the most vulnerable.
Rabbi Jonathan Sach’s insists another unique contribution to humanity from the Hebrew Bible is an ethical concern for the outsider, the foreigner, the stranger, the refugee.
Please for the love of God (and I mean that), rescue people from the seduction of fascism by calling them to welcome and support refugees and stand in solidarity with First Nations Peoples. Christ comes to us, to save us from ourselves, as the refugee seeking safety, and the dispossessed of the land.
As Rev Dr Naim Ateek says,
“The God of the Bible is uniquely preoccupied with the marginalised, symbolised by the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. Any theology that justifies the dispossession of a people, the creation of refugees, the oppression of the vulnerable fails the primary biblical test of justice.”
This is why Terry Eagleton says there is “a document that records God’s endless, dispiriting struggle with organised religion, known as the Bible.”
How do I know God sides with the oppressed? The Bible tells me so.
Beyond Deconstruction to Decoloniality
Christianities from the underside of Christendom, in their solidary and service to the refugee seeking safety and their solidarity with the enslaved and the dispossessed, continue to witness to the reality that Christianity *can* look like the liberating-love seen in Christ. When Christian theology was structurally converted into imperial logistics it became possible to be formed in “faith” without a faithfulness that practices the teachings of Jesus as he embodied them and asked us to follow in.
For many who have only experienced Christianity as the spirituality of empire, a journey of deconstruction is necessary, yet a journey of decolonization isn’t an inevitability. It is possible to heal from religious trauma and be well adjusted in a society that rejects the refugee, has no interest in handing back stolen land, cares not for the poor, and refuses to practice jubilee to the [formally] enslaved. Neither religion nor religious trauma is a requirement while still participating in the ongoing harm of societies that run on land theft, resource extraction, and coercive power that seek to displace, or replace, Indigenous communities and their wisdom for caring for creation.
Matthew 28:16-20 in the Hands of the Oppressed
To return to Desmond Tutu’s quote:
“If you wanted to oppress, to subjugate people, the last thing you should do then is to place in their hands the Bible. For this is the most revolutionary thing, so utterly subversive of all injustice and oppression.”
So, what does this mean for Matthew 28:16-20? With the help of Aníbal Quijano, Lilla Watson, Frantz Fanon, M. Shawn Copeland, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Paulo Freire and others some 'cheat notes' for interpreting Matthew 28:16-20 with the colonised, rather than for the colonisers.
Verse 16: “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.”
the disciples are not sent to the centres of power. The disciples are not sent to Sepphoris, the home of the puppet king Herod and his uber-wealthy supporting elites. The disciples are not sent to Jerusalem, the bustling Roman administration hub in Palestine where the equivalent to today’s billionaires were based as they profited from the mechanisms of exploitation, high taxation and debt of the majority on the land (who are victims of land theft). The disciples were not sent to Rome, the Roman Empire’s centre of power for whom Palestine was just a provincial problem and hotbed of insurgents. No, Jesus sent them back to where people where under the boot of a colonising power. Jesus sent them back to where people, their people, where on the receiving end of injustice and colonisation to be in his ministry of solidarity.
Jesus sent them to the mountain in Galilee to which he had directed them. In Matthew there are 7 mounts in the Gospel, 3 of them situated in Galilee, one of them returned to here. So, which one? The mounts in Galilee mentioned in Matthew are:
1. the site of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7)
2. the site of the Mount of Healing and Feeding (Matthew 15:29-39)
3) the site of the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17:1-9).
Given we are about to read “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”, the mountain is clearly where Matthew’s Gospel situates “everything [Jesus has] commanded”, the Sermon on the Mount. Just as Moses gives the Ten Commandments to get free of Egypt’s empire, so Jesus in Matthew chapters 5-7 gives his commandments to get free of every empire. It is here the Gospel writer is transporting us back to through the Cross in light of the Resurrection as a liberating praxis.
A decolonised reading, and even more so a reading of decoloniality, refuses to separate the radical teachings of Christ from the meaning of Christ, and therefore what it means for us to claim to follow him. Refusing to strip Christ of the content of his life; his ministry, miracles, parables, and teachings, is a form of resistance to the colonisation of Christ.
The 14 (or 15 depending how you count) commandments in the Sermon on the Mount are the setting of the Resurrected Jesus instructing the disciples as to “what’s next”. Whatever is next cannot be separated from Jesus’ radical teachings on nonviolent-liberating-love and all their implications for a gospel that is good news to the poor, the oppressed, for those needing to resistance empire, and embody an alternative economics of mutual aid that bless the earth.
Verse 17: “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.”
doubt is not the enemy of ‘walking in the resurrection’, as the early anabaptists would say. Doubt is a dance partner, albeit one that shouldn’t be left to lead most of the time. “Some doubted” is not reported disparagingly but realistically about the community that listens and practices hospitality to the Resurrected One.
As Dr M. Shawn Copeland reminds us, “The Crucified One must be embraced if the Resurrected One is to be recognised.” The vulnerability of the community at worship as they listen to Christ is not held together by a staunch commitment to a fixed religious ideology to which they must all adhere. The community is held together by the nail-scarred hands of the Resurrected One inviting us to share in a life running on the power that undoes all domination and is stronger than death.
Friends, I’m aware how deep the reframing work of decoloniality is and how long this post has already gone, so I’ll include the remaining verses in next week’s post.
I have no interest in setting up another hierarchy of accessibility, especially to access my work. The inequity of financial contributions dictating privilege, access, and influence, is what the Good News ends. I don’t want any part in building round what I write in another system that is based on that same logic. So, let’s reimagine these systems together! Yes, there are courses that I run that are only open to paid subscribers. If you’d like to be a paid subscriber but can’t afford it, I GOT YOU! Paid subscription for courses is a way of maintaining the safety of everyone, especially those more vulnerable to hateful attacks. Just contact me and we can find a way to practice a lil’ jubilee economics.
Let’s become a parable together… “The Reign of God is like someone who had no money yet is a paid subscriber because of the generosity of another, who redistributed their wealth to provide fair remuneration for labour and the possibility of participation by everyone.” Amen.
Special Disclaimer: None of these insights have happened in isolation. Yes, I’ve been teaching versions of decolonising Matthew 28:16-20 for 15 years but that has deepened as I’ve continued to unearth that which doesn’t dignify but dehumanises, both in myself and in our society, and trade it in for the beauty we see in Christ.
I had started to name Aboriginal leaders from this continent I’ve learnt from, been mentored by, or worked alongside, who have deeply impacted how I see these things. I wrote a list of over 30 people. I worried I might hurt friends who names weren’t on the top of my head, or despite my intentions to honour others it would be seen as virtue signaling. So l’ll just name one community and four friends.
A special shout out to my global Decolonising Sunday School community that grew out of InVerse Podcast. For years we weekly read First Nations theologies, listened to one another and had guest First Nations leaders on every continent with the exception of Antarctica. (although if you know someone…). I love you all. I did want to mention my mate Mziwandile Nkutha who deepened my intellectual journey pushing me beyond decolonisation into decoloniality. I also want to mention Uncle [Rev Dr] Terry Leblanc, and Rev Dr Mark Brett for expanding my engagement with First Nations theology beyond the lands of this continent found on maps as Australia (and Rev Dr Ian Robinson for my introduction to them both!). Finally, Uncle [Rev] Sealin Garlett for teaching me the spirituality of living this journey on the daily with the land. I'm thankful for you all.
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