How should the church respond to the colonialism that runs through its blood?

What Robert Heaney calls coloniality encompasses a multitude of sins. It begins with fear, invariably an unacknowledged fear, rooted in anxiety about identity. Fragile identity is shored up by jobs, neighborhood, prestige, values, tradition, and power. When people appear to jeopardize such things, those people, a minority, are cast as the other. They become subject to stereotyping, scapegoating, and dehumanizing. Any kind of connection or compromise with such people becomes intolerable. Imperialism becomes the better of two grim alternatives; the other is genocide. Thus coloniality and hate are inextricably linked. This much Heaney’s upbringing as a Protes­tant in Northern Ireland has taught him.

In this book, Heaney broadens his vision to perceive a great swath of wrong, across the world, that bears a significant family resemblance to the pattern of coloniality he has diagnosed in Ireland. The locations are legion; the evils include land theft, rape, murder, enslavement, torture, pollution, depredation of the earth, racism, and genocide.

As grievous as this history is, even more bewildering is the degree of complicity with these evils exhibited by the church and its theologians. Those theologians who attempt to construct postcolonial theology face three challenges: the church has been up to its neck in coloniality; even today among the northern ruling elites of theology there remains widespread skepticism about the methods, quality, and resources of the particular theologies that seek to disrupt its complacency; and among postcolonial theorists at large, theology is not highly regarded as a resource for resistance.