Editor’s Note: A version of the following first appeared on the author’s Substack.
Colonization is the act of one country seizing and taking another country as its own. The result is a place where social class is stratified according to the race, culture, faith and language that separates the colonized from the colonizer. From the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, western European countries like England, Spain and France seized large swaths of land across what they deemed the “New World,” Asia, and Africa.
The actions these countries committed across this time period are directly responsible for much of the social unrest we see today, not to mention the millions of lives lost to colonization’s all-consuming expansion. Westerners introduced disease to indigenous people of the Americas—sometimes incidentally, sometimes by intentionally exposing tribes to contamination. In Africa, humans were kidnapped and sold into slavery, many lingering near death at sea in unsanitary conditions for weeks.
Other victims of colonization were murdered without a chance to know what was happening to them.
Colonization is never willingly ceded. It requires coercion and control.
That’s why the themes of colonization and cult influence pair together so well. Colonization is the outward manifestation of what cults attempt to do to the mind. The result is a type of colonization of the soul.
No one comes out clean in this. The colonial period ended, but the effects linger.
In her memoir Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl, journalist Susan B. Campbell describes the impact visiting Haiti had on her faith. Here was a place that repeated colonization had laid low—a place where the supposed “good fruits” of Christianity were seemingly invisible.
Christianity has been historically tied to colonization. In fact, one of the significant “moral” arguments for the Transatlantic Slave Trade was the prospect of religious conversion.
In Haiti (formerly St. Domingue), Barabara Rosendale Duggal writes that “slave owners on the island…were compelled by law to baptize their slaves.” It goes without saying that Christians participating in this colonization were hardly practicing what they preached.
Alfred Metraux writes in Voodoo in Haiti that while Christianity was encouraged through baptism, the Haitian adherence to Voodoo was permitted to persist, as “in Catholic religion they saw nothing but the teaching of an equality that would be dangerous to put in the minds of slaves.”
Not only did these individuals literally fail to “practice what they preach,” they were well aware of it. Yet, their fear a true adherence to the Catholic faith would disrupt their own greed and ambition reveals the power of this theology.
A gospel that directly preaches hope for the outcast and downtrodden is dangerous for someone bent on control. This faith, left to speak for itself, had immense capacity to inspire liberation.
In other parts of the world, biblical texts were twisted, taken out of context, or even omitted so that they would be “safe” for the uneducated and the colonized to consume. The most infamous example of this is a bible published in 1809 that redacted passages pertaining to freedom.
And so, even today, we live with strained ideas of this faith that were formulated to teach populations that Western Europeans wanted to control.
Largely due to the overwhelming reach of Western colonization, Westernized concepts and symbolism often supersede our perception of the world around us. For example, for the Christian, the cross is a symbol of crucifixion.
If you see someone wearing a cross necklace, you can safely assume they are a Christian. But, before colonization, Africa had its own conception of the cross: as an intersection between the earth and the spiritual realm, where “everything that is most important happens at the spot where they meet.”
What would happen if we accepted this? If we opened ourselves up to a post-colonial interpretation of a faith that was twisted for the purpose of control?
Maybe if we did, the world would feel a little less out of control.
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Victoria Richard is writer and graduate student based in Cleveland, MS. You can find her on Substack @angelsoverpresleyboulevard.
