Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
Reclaiming Faith: Dismantling White Christian Supremacy and Healing Through Indigenous Spirituality
What if the very religion that oppressed your ancestors could also be your path to liberation? Join us as we engage with Soulforce's representatives—Reverend Alba Onofrio, Nadia Arellano, and Karina Vargas—in a powerful conversation about dismantling white Christian supremacy and Christian nationalism. We share insights from a recent gathering at Syracuse University, highlighting the crucial role of community and continuous dialogue in tackling these urgent issues.
Our journey doesn't stop there. We explore the intricate relationship between Christianity and Indigenous spirituality, examining how faith, once a tool of colonialism, can now be reclaimed for healing and empowerment. I, a queer Christian minister immersed in earth-based healing practices, share my personal reconciliation with Christianity's historical harms. Together, we dissect the Doctrine of Discovery and its ongoing impact, addressing the spiritual violence perpetuated by religious institutions and the generational trauma that still lingers.
We also shed light on efforts to reclaim Indigenous food and healing practices as acts of resistance against Christian supremacy. By reconnecting with our ancestral ways through conscious choices and daily acts of disobedience, we find paths to wholeness and cultural reclamation. Discover how movements like eco-spirituality and feminist theology are paving the way for a more inclusive and respectful approach to spirituality, honoring the diverse traditions that shape our world. Join us for this enlightening episode and uncover how we can collectively heal and dismantle oppressive systems.
View the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org. Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.
I'm a faculty person in religion at Syracuse University, also core faculty in Native American Indigenous Studies, and founding director of the Scano Great Law Peace Center.
Speaker 2:And hi, I'm Sandy Bigtree, a citizen of the Mohawk Nation at Alpha Sosni, and I'm on the board of the Indigenous Values Initiative as well as on the academic collaborative for the Scano Great Log.
Speaker 1:Welcome, yeah, and today we're coming to you from the heartland of the Haudenosaunee Onondaga Nation Territory and we're being sponsored by Henry Luth Foundation. Today we're really happy to be able to bring you a conversation with Soul Force. We have three guests, three very important guests that have been doing remarkable work in various ways, and we just want to introduce you all to what they're doing and how they are changing and composting the white Christian supremacy. So we just had a conversation about that and maybe we'll elaborate, but we were brought together through the Henry Luce Foundation. Dean Emily Towns and Dr Theresa Smallwood introduced us all and we've been trying to coordinate and get this conversation together ever since, but please, maybe one at a time, you could introduce yourselves and the work you're doing at SoulForce, starting with you, alba.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much for having us on the podcast. We're delighted to be here. We were so grateful to be in community on Haudenosaunee territory earlier end of last year, so we are grateful to be here.
Speaker 4:I am Reverend Alba Onofrio. I'm the executive director of Soulforce and one of the founding co-founders of Teología sin Vergüenza, which is a queer and feminist podcast about Christian theology at the margins, and we have been around for about 25 years at the margins. And we have been around for about 25 years. I am currently on Cherokee land down here in Appalachia, which is where I grew up, and we are an organization that has been working to end the political and religious discrimination and oppression of LGBT people for 25 years, and we're excited to be with y'all this time.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 5:I can go next.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you Hi everyone.
Speaker 5:I'm a huge fan of the podcast, so I'm very excited to be here. My name is Nadia Arellano. I am from Mexico City, born and raised. I am the associate director at South Force and I also do a lot of the Latin American programming work I have been involved in. I've been studying theology Christian theology and, in particular, feminist and queer injustice, the different languages it uses to oppress and how it weaponizes things that are important for people, specifically, spirituality and faith. So I am very excited to be here and, yeah, thank you for having me Welcome. Thank you.
Speaker 1:And Karina.
Speaker 3:Yeah, can you hear me there yet?
Speaker 2:Yes, oh yes.
Speaker 3:Okay, thank you. So my name is Karina Vargas, I am from Costa Rica and at Soulforce I coordinate in the Institute on Spiritual Violence, healing and Social Change and I have a formation in theology and psychology. I have a formation in theology and psychology and sabotaging hegemonic religion is something I connect a lot with and there are reasons why, culturally, it needs to be done in this way, but we can talk about that later and I want to say that I enjoyed a lot the time we had in Syracuse last December and I'm very excited to be part of this conversation this morning. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you all for coming. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Last December was something we're still sort of thinking about, grappling with, wondering what the next steps are. I mean, it was an incredibly diverse group of people. We were really gratified so many people turned out to come and really participate in in this conversation, which is so. What I appreciate about soul force is that, um, and also my discipline in general history of religions is that religion has, religion is the problem, and religion uh, religious studies has to be involved in anything that we do to solve the problem and conundrums of our current crises, you know name it.
Speaker 1:You know the current election cycle, or whatever, is always going to be framed around white Christian nationalism, and so that's why I'm drawn to what you all are doing, because we're all in religious studies in various ways, or either in the academic study of religion or in some aspect of religion, and I'm wondering how you deal with issues of white Christian supremacy or Christian nationalism in your own way from a you know, a variety from your varieties of points of view. Right, it's always at top of mind for us. I see it in the news cycle every single day, and yet I don't see many people talking about it at its fundamental root.
Speaker 2:And also maybe some of you could elaborate on how Soulforce came about. Yeah, yeah, that would be very helpful for our listening audience. Maybe you could start with Ola.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'd love to tell you a little bit about Soulforce came out from a religious right background into a public eye and fear to say that one could be both queer and Christian at the same time, that that was possible, that they were examples of living into the idea that all of us are made in the image of the divine and therefore all of us have a right to human dignity and to our religion or our spirituality. And so 25 years ago there was an important book written called Strangers that Gave, which was one of the first mainstream books that came out about being both gay and Christian in the US and got a lot of press because our founder had been a ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell and some of the other folks on the religious right and the moral majority at that time. So that's how we started. Then we had a section of about a decade where groups of young people would be coming together and their allies, but mostly LGBT youth, would come together and ride buses all around the country for three months at a time, living together and visiting Christian college campuses and showing up into spaces physically and saying here we are, we exist, we are part of this faith, we are part of this tradition and we belong, and would often get arrested because they were on private property and campuses would entirely shut down. It was called a huge thing and yet all these years later, we're still hearing. In fact, just yesterday I was speaking with someone who was telling me about how Soulforce came to her undergraduate and that was the beginning of her process of coming to terms with her own orientation. So that was a very beautiful time.
Speaker 4:We also had a period where we did a lot of public actions at Christian denominations and Catholic denominations at the Vatican, at the Southern Baptist Convention, at the Superdome in New Orleans, and we would go and make this kind of public, what shouldn't be a protest but turned into a protest of just saying we are also Christian. So Catholics getting denied communion at the Vatican, at the US Conference of Bishops because of being gay, folks at the Southern Baptist Convention getting arrested because those folks were LGBT, and trying to just name spiritual violence as it had happened to them personally, and trying to just name spiritual violence as it had happened to them personally and being able to do that with really important figures at the time, like Billy Porter, like Gandhi's granddaughter, like Martin Luther King Jr's daughter folks like that. We have some really great legends who stood alongside of us back in those days, and now we're working on the ideologies, exactly what you were talking about, about the roots of what is this Christianity that has made legitimate and seemingly okay so many horrors across time. And so now we're trying to get at those deeper, foundational issues of why is it that we have folks who are complicit with systems of domination?
Speaker 4:Why is it that we have folks who are complicit with systems of domination? Why do we have folks who cannot conceive of reparations or returning indigenous land? What is the moral ideology behind that that somehow told us that this is okay? Would all of us know at a human right, at a human level, that no one has the right to take someone else's body or land, or culture or language for their own gain and for their own profit? We know that, just as human beings cannot be correct. So what is the contorted and twisted language of religion in this case Christianity that allows folks to believe that at one point and continue to be complicit with it as we move forward into the future? So that's what sabotaging white Christian supremacy is about. It's about religion that has been co-opted and stolen and put on the sheep's clothing of Christianity in order to benefit white supremacy, systems of power and domination, imperialism, capitalism, those kinds of things.
Speaker 2:Well, I expect that you had not been. The Doctrine of Discovery had not been part of this original discourse. So how has that knowledge affected your movement of?
Speaker 4:colonization so many generations ago, and I would love for maybe Nadia Ocarina to talk a little bit about that, because it was in the last few years, the last three years in fact, that we have really focused more on Latin America, having so much of our team coming from Latin America and first generation in the United States. And so I think that that discourse around colonization and really honing in we had touched on it before when talking about chattel slavery actually, and the papal bulls that came before the authorized chattel slavery, that then made their way into the doctrine of discovery around land but it really has been a centerpiece of our work in the last few years as we have spent more and more time working with folks in Latin America.
Speaker 5:Nadia, what do you think history and see how, as all social, social movements do, the more that we started or the more, the more that people started confronting like social movements involved and our ideas are on our understanding of the.
Speaker 5:The roots of the problem are more clear and I do believe that at the beginning there was more not just in so forth. In general, progressive religious, ish or faith um oriented efforts were were very interested in like this approach of there. We can be Christians and gay and we like a lot of focus on the clover passages of the Bible, a lot of trying to legitimize themselves and their existence, which makes a lot of sense because they will. There were being targeted, so there was a lot of sense because they were being targeted. So there was a lot of like confronting those arguments and saying, no, we are worthy, we are important, we have something to say.
Speaker 5:And the more the movement grew, I think the analysis became more like but who are you to say who's worthy or why am I supposed to explain myself for this? And then I think the element of parasitic relationship between religion and power became the route that we had to approach if we wanted to talk about queer people and faith, but also all all the other marginalized communities that have been left behind and that have been, yeah, like, like killed for their otherness because they do not feel the the sacred idea of what god is, that sacred idea that is co-opted by power. So I think right now, our work in Soulforce is way more invested in understanding those systems of power and not trying to make ourselves more respectable for those powers.
Speaker 5:Yeah, and I think, as Alba was saying, talking about that, in Latin America, talking about faith in Latin America needs to be accompanied by a very big analysis of imperialism and colonization. So when we started doing a lot of work with queer and feminist theologians in Latin America and the Caribbean, it was very clear that spiritual violence as a form is a colonial force, it's an imperialistic force. It's an imperialistic force and once we approach that theme, I think there is a lot of work to be done and that's why we love your work so much, because the things that you are highlighting with your project are super connected to what we want to say about the weaponization of religion and how it has always been in the center of how people are marginalized in the global South. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2:Well, I give you a lot of credit, all of you, for working within this binary structure of Christianity that came and created a war between these two divided forces. Right, indigenous people did not live that way. They did not have that understanding of living in the world because it's interactionary with many, many kinds of beings. So, to stay within the structure of the church, when it was very much defined in the binary of good and evil, I give you a lot of credit. I mean that's incredible. But wow, it's part of the process and you're doing the very hard work no-transcript.
Speaker 4:we recognize that religion was forced on us in a particular way, at the end of a spade, at the end of a sword, and that means that we have a lot of power to reclaim the parts of Christianity that were forced upon us but for a lot of our people were sources of freedom and liberation. It was a lot of biblical arguments that got used in multiple struggles for liberation for women, for enslaved folks, for people reclaiming their independence as territories and lands across the global South. So we recognize that it's part of a legacy for many of us of something that is liberating. But we also recognize with the same rigor that there is so much that has been poisoned that we actually do have the freedom to reach back to what our ancestors practiced, to reach into the natural world to rebuild those relationships, and that that's going to look messy and not cleanly in one thing or another.
Speaker 4:So I'm a Christian minister, I am deeply Christian, but I also feel like this is the consequence of the colonizers forcing their religion on my people. It's me, this queer person who is also Christian, who is also practicing earth-based healing practices on the land here in Appalachia, who is also moving to the global south. So that's me, and every one of us has our own version of that kind of story, but what we have in common is recognizing that Christianity has been used for great harm and used as a weapon, and that is not acceptable and we have to come together around that to uncover it, to demystify it, to decode it, so that we can work in resistance to it and against it, so that we can be on our own healing journeys, rather than attributing to Creator all of that stuff that has been causing us pain and harm, exclusion, marginalization and taking us away from our families, our communities and our land.
Speaker 1:That's deep stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We were just in London talking to many of these Christian groups. I mean, we were asked to speak at St James in Piccadilly, which is, you know, high church Anglican, but they're also really invested in what they call eco-spirituality and we were asked to speak about that and indigenous perspectives and they connected us with Adam can help me here with Iona community in Northern Scotland. There are a lot of these groups trying to reconnect with a Celtic sort of indigenous spirituality but are also active Christian organizations or contemplative communities that are reconnecting with the land. So I think, you know, we're at an interesting moment right now. We're at a crisis moment. Of course it's 100 degrees outside and for most of us, which is very, that's just totally weird for us here in northern new york state, um. But so I think people are trying to trying to.
Speaker 1:I I would say it this way, and this is echoing what nadia was saying earlier it's like we're at a moment where activism is meeting. You know the academy, you know. So we're trying to have a kind of engaged scholarship that is not just, you know, enamored with archives for the sake of archives, but trying to illuminate how these systems of domination were formed and created in the first place so that that can be. We can then, you know, reflect on how that has impacted our world today and continues to, you know, you know so. So I mean, um, I see you as, uh, I feel soul forces is somehow already uh, maybe way before these other movements, who knows but there there are these um back going back to the 70s with finhorn and other other groups in scotland, in the uk, that are trying to connect or reconnect with this sense of being part of the world or part of the land.
Speaker 2:And make sense of these systems of domination? How do you work through it? How do you see your way through this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Is there a way to?
Speaker 2:see through it. Yeah, these are serious questions. Yeah, we are To see through it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, these are serious questions, so I'll invite Karina to say something You're aching to get in here.
Speaker 6:Yeah, phil, her audio is having an issue. Let me unmute it. Karina, I think you should be able to talk now. No, that's just a hand raise, yeah, okay. No, that's just a hand raise, yeah, okay. So, karina, I see it's saying that your headphones are plugged in. Maybe try plugging and unplugging your headphones or something.
Speaker 1:Play with the volume.
Speaker 6:Yeah, because it's showing an input there. Say something no, no, okay, all right, karina, in the top right corner you'll see where it says call settings. Click on that and try changing audio input and see if that works.
Speaker 2:Did it work.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, okay, thank you very much for the help. What I wanted to say is that, thinking our relationship north-south, being there in December listening more about the Doctrine of Discovery, it's amazing how the same thing happened to our people in all places and how this weaponized Christianity is at the bottom of the. This weaponized Christianity is at the bottom of the conquering, colonizing system strategy. And something I enjoy about the work we do in Soulforce is that we can be in a conference with you in all these very complex analysis of the subject. But then we are with people in our events who, many of them, are people who struggle with understanding what religion did to them and also struggling with, um, yeah, just questioning if they are, if they can practice a spirituality that will not, uh, damage them again, that will not be violent with them. And from there, also a challenge for us as social scientists is how do we keep this conversation that is so complex in a level that is understandable, that it's, um, full of empathy, uh, for the terms that people bring to the conversation, because they will use colonized language of religion. They will talk to you in the categories they know, which are talking about sin, talking about guilt, talking about the need of confessing their fears and for some people this might look like oh come on, you're so behind in understanding, I mean, or how you are so into these religious things. If you're a rational person, but being grown in latin america inside of these churches, you can understand how hard it's to move from these places, not only rationally but emotionally, because the scars are new, the fear is new and this fear, even though I read something from 200 or 300 years ago on the strategies they use with other people, I can feel it in me in 2025, I mean 24, 24 how the same strategies just change its forms. But it's a very successful strategy in terms of dominating and in terms of continue in a colonization of ideology.
Speaker 3:So what we try to do, it's a work that is very complex, which is working ideology at the level of people, at the level of this conversation that may be, with, one day, with very conservative people of churches who are interested in maybe growing in their critical thinking about religion, but other day it's a conversation with lawyers and psychologists who are trying to help, uh, survivors of violence, but they don't know how to listen to them because they don't speak the religious language they don't know how to talk about this fear and and sometimes this is something where we professional in social sciences need to come and, and I think because of our professions and disciplines and and all this time we invest in trying to understand this, it's our part to walk to those places.
Speaker 3:And when I say walk, I'm talking about how do we design strategies, and that's something I love about Soulforce that we are all the time thinking how will this that is so complex and intense can enter a conversation, that is language that can be understood by a lot of people in different contexts, and I find that as a huge challenge for me as a person in social sciences.
Speaker 3:Sometimes it's easier to write a paper than try to think of strategies to connect with people not only in a rational way, but to develop this empathy for what colonization and violence has done in us and that this is happening here in the South or in the North, because you also have a lot of damage there, a lot of colonization there, and then, at the same time, a lot of the colony comes from you to the south, and so we are in this huge matrix of violence. But I think this healing we try to do might help understand each other and try to develop the strategies that can dismantle this huge lie that is covered by these holy sacred jurisdiction that can it's so hard to judge? Uh, because there are not even systems that are ready to enter this into a with the name that it has. That it's violence, not.
Speaker 2:It cannot be named like that no, we have a whole history of bad relationships. Some people take a whole life to recover from a bad relationship with one person, and we're talking about an institution that made us all obedient. There's no real relationship there. And then they laden us with guilt because of the diseases that were planted in all our territories North and South America and that we were dying because of our faulty creator, you know. And so we're out of fear. Fear was established in a very profound way at the very beginning, using religion and disease to pull us into the belief that their god was superior. And that's, it's a horrible relationship. Talk about generational trauma. The whole mindset is is rooted in fear and guilt. Yeah, it's, it's almost an impossible task. Sometimes you cannot recover from that and you need to divorce from that situation. But you, you know, I guess, can work through it. But you know it's not a rocky road, whichever way you look at it.
Speaker 1:Before Nadia jumps in, I wanted to say too that one of the liberating factors of doing Doctrine of Discovery work we've been doing it about 20 years now and having these conferences and what I find is that all of our students, all of the indigenous peoples we encounter and we were just at a national or international conference of Indigenous peoples in Norway and they're all dealing with trauma at various levels. I mean it's personal, I mean, and the thing about trauma is you can it's very easily personalized in a way that you know it's somehow a personal deficiency or something wrong with me or something like that. And and when we talk about the doctrine of discovery, there's something liberating about the fact that it's not any. It's not your fault, right that you have, you have these struggles in your life, right that these are not things. This is not a worldview that you created or your, you know is somehow your create your own, you know personal hell, but rather it's something that has been indoctrinated into all of us in various ways.
Speaker 1:I mean, what's striking to me is that in our department religion, in our religion department many of our grad students are trying to recover from their religious upbringing. You know, I mean, and somehow, you know, thinking about religion and putting it in a kind of historical context of this, you know, violent way of thinking, helps them, you know, grapple with their own trauma. We find that people can come together around the doctrine of discovery. It's appropriate for settler, colonial people to be talking about as well as indigenous people. So we have, you know, there's a kind of a meeting of the minds around these issues of the doctrine of discovery and it's just becoming more and more prevalent as we, you know, continue these podcasts. But, nadia, you wanted to jump in yeah, thank you.
Speaker 5:I well, first, thank you for what you're saying and I like this image that you were, that we were saying sandy about their relationship right, we have a relationship with this. Well, we think we saying Sandy about the relationship right, we have a relationship with this. Well, we think we have a relationship with this institution, but it's a very conditional, it's a very violent relationship. There's a very big distance between who we are and how that those institutions can, can embrace it, right, and there is not like there is a very violent relationship with the institutions but at the same time, yes, and at the same time, we have deep, deep relationships with the people that control, like, are a part of those institutions. And when we talk to survivors of spiritual violence, the people that that that hurt them are are not an institution, are their families, are pastors that that were like, like family to them. It's this very complex understanding of how we always talk about spiritual violence and how this is so systemic and structural and it's a system that is everywhere and it's centuries old and it's everywhere and it's centuries old and it's also intimate. It's the most intimate things like. It is both. It is the structure, the system that's bigger than our countries and it's bigger than the institutions and it's also in our own bodies and it inhabits the most intimate thoughts in one's own identity. So how do we navigate those complexities? And the other thing that I was going to say, and so that we can hop on to the topic of our recent programming in Quito, ecuador, in North Carolina, and also we were working in Bogota, colombia.
Speaker 5:We have been working in Bogota, colombia and a lot of places in Latin America. When we were in Quito, we did workshops with pastors, we did workshops with sex workers and we did workshops with midwives from Cotacachi, from a union of 41 communities in Ecuador, indigenous communities in Ecuador, indigenous communities and specifically the sex workers and the midwives indigenous midwives. They were Catholic. They were very, very devout Catholics and for us that are in Latin America, that's not surprised any time. If you've ever talked to an indigenous person in Latin America, catholic faith is it's so, so, so important for their community life, for their own sense of selves, and it was like those people were the ones that were like don't mess with God. But also what you're saying makes a lot of sense, because I have this story of this, this church that did this to me and I would like to hear Alba talk more about those experiences. But in any of the workshops that we do, the same thing happens.
Speaker 5:We've been doing a lot of work with Latinx people in the US South.
Speaker 5:Specifically, we recently did work with a centro hispano in North Carolina, which is an organization that has a lot of history of working with Latin American people in the United States that recently migrated to the US, and in those places people have deep-rooted faith LGBTQ people that, having told God doesn't love them, they will tell you how hard they love God and how they don't like us being all weird about the Bible because it feels wrong.
Speaker 5:And when we start talking about spiritual violence in this perspective, when we give it a language, when we understand that we cannot. There is no Christianity in this continent that is not infused by blood and power. Those are facts that people understand as facts and that is a good way to start. And once we start framing that as a first step to talk about these things, understanding that the complexity and contradictions are there, people are super receptive and they start bringing deep hurt and stories that they never thought they could talk out loud, they never thought they could question. Even so, yeah, all of this to say is super complex we are. We're still battling that contradiction every day in our work and in our own lives.
Speaker 1:That's very helpful.
Speaker 2:Well, at Onondaga, of course no indigenous community could practice their ceremonies right and you talk about. You know we're taught that church and state is divided, but indeed it's not. You cannot talk about colonialism without talking about Christianity. And Christianity came in first and changed the whole dynamic, did not allow indigenous people to meet privately. They're communal people, you know.
Speaker 2:At Onondaga they have a rigorous ceremonial schedule. Every single month they gather for funerals, for weddings, for celebratory anything down there, and it's not in a church. But when the church was prevalent down there they were not permitted to meet at all. They could only meet in the church. They had to be obedient to the pastor of the church. They were fed the most food at church. So of course everyone would gather to the church and they survived the onslaught of colonization and the church by being together. Of course their heart is in that. The heart is with each other and it's really hard to say it's not the church that brought you together. You're indigenous. It's these long ancient traditions that existed thousands and thousands of years before the church came in and reoriented you to something outside of this earth. You know.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate that, nadia, because the US Catholic bishops and I don't know if you're aware of this or this might be fair to bring this up, but just last week the US Catholic bishops, who we didn't think were paying attention to indigenous issues at all, came out with an apology for their role in, you know, native American boarding schools, and there's a long document. It's about 50 pages long. I'm working through it, but essentially it is a document that addresses indigenous catholic people. Now, when we were in the vatican, we were trying to get them um, and and the harms that the church had caused to indigenous, native american I'm talking about you, you know, within the United States, indigenous or Native American people who converted to Catholicism and then were subjected to boarding schools. So it's kind of a particular group that they're speaking to, and when we were in the Vatican last year, we were advocating for for the Vatican to speak to non-Christian indigenous peoples as well, right, but I appreciate what you're saying and I'm wondering the applicability of this statement, wondering the applicability of this statement that came out last week to Latin America, you know, because they are speaking to their own community in some way.
Speaker 1:Right, the bishops are trying to regather, or are they trying to reform the church? I mean, what is going on here, I guess, is my question, like, are they trying to make amends for, you know the past violence to their own people? Are they trying to, you know, reform the church? Is it risk management, you know to, basically, you know, because the church is bleeding out money in you know sexual abuse cases in all kinds of ways, right? So I mean, I'm aware this just came out and you know it's probably not something you've looked at. Yet issue of the church trying to, the Catholic Church trying to address these past wrongs seems to be fashionable in the way over the last year or so. I don't know if anyone wants to address that. I would like oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:I would like to give credit to that to the people. I mean the Buddha impression on the church, because normally what I see with these huge institutions is that you see the fights of people for years and years trying to make them acknowledge what they did. This pressure comes in a huge way and it's good to see this possibility of questioning religion. For example, when we work with Christianized indigenous people, first thing they feel free to do in our gatherings is to speak up about what has happened with religious leadership in their places, and normally we have a lot of stories of abuse, sexual abuse and a lot of hidden stories that cannot be named. So I think something we as Soulforce can do is to open these spaces where it is okay that you question the authority of religion.
Speaker 3:It is okay to say, say this is not okay, this is, or okay, well, you say the bible says that we are theologians. Show me where in the bible you can support it, because we're not playing games here. We care about the bible and this is why we started the bible in a serious way. So if you come here and just tell me this, show me where in the Bible you're saying this is support. And I think this possibility of giving people a chance to question something that has been sacred for so many centuries shifts something in people and that can lead you to question other things, other authorities. But and this is the place where we understand spirituality is the right of people. People can practice whatever they want and explore their traditions.
Speaker 3:The problem we have is that the colonization established one way to do it, one institution or certain form of leadership that is the only one authorized to be the religious authority in the world.
Speaker 3:So I think we are dangerous and somehow our strategy is sabotaging, because we are inviting people to question that and, besides that, to whisper in their ears. And what if the most sacred spirit in the world wishes this for you, that you question all this violence that came in the form of a sacred being that is basically manipulating them for critically think, for reading, for looking for other sources, for practicing other traditions that are not Christianity, for example, or to practice a Christianity like the one we are promoting in our events, which is a church called Queerly Beloved. How about if you are a queer person and if you are a drag and you are the main presentation during the religious service we have? That totally makes the minds of people blown Like how is it possible that we have a church where we have drag queens as part of the holy presentation and the way we celebrate our bodies and our diversity? So that's something I think is very powerful and, at the same time, something that some people or some huge institutions might fear about us. Oh wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, shape the foundations, then Absolutely.
Speaker 4:And I think there's something really important about just naming Like I want to just re-amplify what both Karina and Nadia said what our main strategy is in the world and all the things that we do whether it's in Eastern Africa, latin America, the US, south, with indigenous folks, with sex workers, with groups of pastors is we give a name to the violence that happens not only to our bodies, because many of us know the history of colonization. Many of us know that that was a violent moment but we leave it in the past as that part of the past thing that happened. But when we talk about spiritual violence and what happens in the wounds that we may not be able to see 500 years later, or the wounds that we may not like maybe our families didn't actually physically hit us but they calling us abomination or telling us that we were outside the will of God, or for folks to practice other forms of spirituality, which crap we were doing, rich crap in a negative way because something people use that in a positive way now as a reclamation. But to like those things are also painful. You know the idea that words never hurt me is a lie. We know that words are very important, especially when they have the full force of the state and the military behind them to enforce those kinds of laws, those kinds of rules. So it's not just that the church didn't allow people to gather, or that the church didn't allow folks to speak their indigenous language or do their practices. It was, as they had, the full power of the military behind those rules and threats. Right, so it's not just that the preacher said, it's that we know that behind that is an entire system of power and violence.
Speaker 4:And so when we talk about the harm, that is actually violence that happens to our spirits, where we can't see what Nadia is talking about, our most intimate thoughts, where we think is this punishment from God because of the blank thing that is, a violence that is equal and often even more pervasive and long-lasting than a physical bruise or cut or even gunshot wound? Because we start telling ourselves the same narrative, we repeat the colonizer's messages. So that's how I still see colonization showing up now, generations later, even if we fix everything, which is not really possible we still have the full weight of generations who have been told these things about our peoples and about our practices and about our ways and about our knowings and about our bodies that we have to carry and work on burying and composting and recreating what this version post-colonization looks like, because we can't go back to before those times, and I think that's part of our strategy is just naming. This is what spiritual violence is given immutable rights to self-determination, to dignity, to peace, to love, to protection, to just life period.
Speaker 4:Whenever that is attacked in the name of God or in the name of Creator or in the name of what the Bible says. That is spiritual violence and it happens at every level of society, from the biggest institutions, from the biggest governments, to what your family members said about your spiritual practices, your gender, your sexuality, your marriage choices, your children, whatever those things are a violence that enters our bodies. And because it has the full weight of the hegemonic religion and the full weight of entire nations and transnational powers, then that is a violence that reaches us, to our core, that we have to and we have to hear.
Speaker 6:Excuse me, all hell breakers and we have to hear it. Excuse me All hell breakers, give it a second we got everything. Hey, phil, you're coughing, muted the mic and Nadia wants to jump in.
Speaker 5:You're on mute, Phil and Sandy. I don't know if this is, I think. Nadia can just jump in.
Speaker 4:Yeah, go for it.
Speaker 5:Nadia, I just wanted to say that I think what you brought up, phil, about the apologies and how the institutions are reacting to our organizing and people's questioning, is super important and we always have to be aware of how they're presenting it, how the language they're using and, as you said, who are they trying to convince, who are they targeting, who are they talking to.
Speaker 5:I do believe that one of the most important characteristics of white Christian adapt and mutate and change and transform, and because of that, marginalized communities everywhere have learned to be experts in suspicion and experts in like this act of questioning, like you're saying the right things but you're saying it to these people in this specific time and I don't believe you right, or you're doing this other thing while you are apologizing, so I don't believe you. So I think that is, on itself, a spiritual act of reclamation and survival and resilience and it is also what has kept us alive queer people, people of color, indigenous communities. It is also a problem for us as social scientists or people that do research on religion to see how much that shifts.
Speaker 5:For example, in Latin America, a lot of the liberatory, like a lot of organizations that are doing what many would consider decolonizing work have roots in Christianity, catholic institutions that have been shifting and there are also dynamics on Catholic and then evangelical things that come from the United States and then evangelical things that come from the United States, I'm talking about Latin America in particular and how that shifts the power dynamics and which powers are talking to the people and how people interact with those approaches, faith approaches, and it's ever-changing with those approaches, faith approaches and, if ever changing, it is something that those of us who study religion need to grapple with. But, as Alba was saying, we will keep naming the things, we will keep creating alliances with researchers and survivors and organizations and activists and confront it. We will keep being suspicious. We will keep creating our own faith, spiritual practices that feel safe and that feel liberatory. Yeah, I think.
Speaker 1:Maybe you could spend a few minutes on what you're doing now, what you've done recently, and then what you're planning to do in the future, that is, soul force or individually or whatever, just so our listeners know where soul force is and where you're headed.
Speaker 4:Maybe I'll start just by talking a little bit about our spiritual resource library, if that's okay.
Speaker 4:We have a free downloadable on our website, soulforceorg.
Speaker 4:We have an entire theological resource library that really tackle particularly gender and sexuality issues from within a Christian context, and Southern Africans as well, and our partners there have asked to translate and have translated with their local translators these resources that tackle some of the most ongoing questions like what is the truth about Sodom and Gomorrah in their gender diversity in the Bible, the truth, or what you need to know about the Bible in our.
Speaker 4:In the Spanish language, the title sounds like what they still haven't told you about the Bible, which just basically gives some more context for understanding that some of the things that have been lifted up as untouchable or sacred also have an entire history of where powerful men were sitting in rooms making decisions about which books get put where, what translators' decisions are around, how they gender things like the Holy Spirit or how they interpret different words from across many languages across many generations.
Speaker 4:So I would highly recommend for folks who are interested in that kind of work of understanding, especially if you're a Christian, to understand where our faith comes from so that you recognize what pieces of that are ours and what pieces of that have been imposed in some of the most intense, deep and most spiritually maturing work that we can do as people of faith and for those folks who are fighting white Christian supremacy. Because of the struggles for human rights and for human dignity across many different sectors, we find that the resource library is useful to understand what you're having conversations about with your Christian colleagues or your.
Speaker 4:Christian opponents as often as often as the case, unfortunately and Karina and I and another theologian from Colombia wrote a very important book for us, a 150 page book, which is also available for free download on the internet, which touches a little bit on the Doctrine of Discovery actually it's currently only in Spanish, but it introduces five concepts, and those five concepts are Christian supremacy, spiritual violence, religious abuse, spiritual terrorism and spiritual trauma. And for each one of those we go through a little bit about what the definition is, some history around it, a real-life, true story of somebody who has experienced that as an example to see how the concepts work. And then we have a section where we talk about how that moves in our body. We talk about how that moves in our body and our third person, dr Puli she worked on body exercises of how we move that through our bodies as we're processing memories and these concepts and these stories as they come up.
Speaker 4:And so that is part of that book with sections about what are the paths to healing. How do we start that? Karina has sections in each chapter about what are some of the first steps to move from that kind of colonized religion and harmful experiences and how it's in the process of healing, which is lifelong processes, as you said, Sandy. Processes, as you said Sandy. And now, right now, we're working on that same book in English and adapting it for a US audience because, of course, the colonizers were a little bit different, the religion and its expression was a little bit different, and we're kind of moving that through.
Speaker 4:We'll still be from a Latin American perspective, but we really want our English audiences, and particularly all of us who come from Latin America and have migrated north, to be able to find more peace and find ourselves in this kind of clash of different kinds of cultures, understand a little bit more about where we come from and what colonization and religion looks like from that perspective.
Speaker 4:So, that should be forthcoming, also sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation, also sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation. So we were excited about that. And then we have a very big gathering happening in October in Mexico City where we're bringing together Latin American, feminist and queer theologians, both from Latin America and from the diaspora here in the United States, to have conversations about weaponized religion, spiritual violence. Conversations about weaponized religion, spiritual violence, particularly as it applies to LGBT folks and women and other marginalized communities, and we're excited about what's going to happen coming out of that.
Speaker 1:So, sidebar, if you have a kind of shortish version of the book that's coming out, we'd like to, or we'll. We'll announce it on our list, certainly, and then also, if you have a, an announcement for the conference in Mexico City will certainly spread that around. Well, I mean, I've got you know a few students of mine would be very interested in that it's a really special experience and we are encouraging students to come join.
Speaker 4:Some of the biggest names in feminist theological work in Latin America will be joining us. Maricel Mena, who does Afro-Colombian biblical study in Colombia, will be there with us. Several people from Mexico and more that we haven't confirmed yet, so it's a very unique opportunity for students in particular, where we're mostly keeping it for folks who are part of that community already and students. So we have done almost 70 episodes of Teología sin Vergüenza, this podcast in Spanish on queer and feminist theology, and so those are the folks that will be the primary people coming to the event.
Speaker 4:But we're also opening space for students because we think it's really, really important for them to kind of see.
Speaker 4:because of the language and colonizer language, a lot of us who are Latinx in the US we never get to see what is happening in the theological sphere both indigenous theology, afro descendiente theology and queer and feminist theology in Latin America, because those things are published in Spanish and we often don't have access to that language anymore. Even if it's a colonized language, we still don't have access to that because we've assimilated into US culture, where English was the language our families took up for survival purposes. So we would be very excited to host students who are willing to come. It will be in Spanish, so folks will need to have some access to Spanish, but it feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me and I've been doing this for 10 years and I am just beside myself with pleasure because, as far as we know, this hasn't happened before.
Speaker 4:Wow.
Speaker 2:I guess I'd like to mention you were talking about energies, these negative energies through your body and some of this work you've been doing, and it just brought to mind that we're talking about spirit and the very food you know, we understand we're comprised of the earth and spirituality is a material reality, and the food that you ingest does a lot of the work of moving, you know, this negative energy through your body and it's this re-engagement that is not so much going back to pre-existence but it's re-engaging with the natural world as well and connecting to the regeneration that creates our life and all life on the planet. So just something to you know, think about you know, that's why we have ceremonies and dances for certain, like vegetables or animals or plants, right?
Speaker 2:Because, it's a very real thing. I mean, it's all medicine, all the foods that we ingest in the air. That's all I wanted to add.
Speaker 5:Just a quick fun fact, angel Mendez, which is a Mexican queer theologian. He does a lot of work around queer theology, body pleasure, and his other big area of study is food. Is food and desire? Of course it's, and and he's a dancer, he's a theologian and a dancer. So I was just highlighting how it is so connected. And queer theology, queer and feminist theologiesologies have a big history of understanding, approaching the body in its material and spiritual realities and understanding pleasure. There's a lot to be said about how this white christian supremacy, weaponization of religion have targeted pleasure and bodies and how we look, how we act, how we move um and, yeah, just a quick thing, about how the food we eat, the land we walk on um, all of those things are connected through our bodies and have been domesticated by power. Yeah, so it is connected. Fruits and Teologías en Vergüenza are Latin American theology, queer and feminist theology program our logo, our fruits, let me have, oh, fruits from Latin America, specifically from different parts. So it is, it is connected, just a little.
Speaker 2:I think the colonizer understood a lot of that too, because they ruined our fields, our indigenous crops, and replaced the basic corn with their white flour, Because they knew it would change our ceremonies and our way of connecting with the earth.
Speaker 4:That was impacted all over South America and North America and they already knew how this effectively made people sick and disrupted culture at its core, which is part of why some of the work that we do that gives people feels like it gives people permission which of course we don't need permission to reach back into our own ways, which of course we don't need permission to reach back. That our people ate, that is a superfood and it is a choice between whether or not we want to choose to eat amaranth as opposed to other grains, and so making some of those choices that for some of us feels unfamiliar is part of the ways that we sabotage Christian supremacy, because sometimes people feel like you have to do this whole re-envisioning of yourself and your world.
Speaker 4:But there are these small acts of disobedience and these small acts of rebeldia or rebellion that we do in our daily lives, that help reorient ourselves to what it feels like to be in our full bodies and to try to heal and calm some of those ancient narratives that tell us that we are in danger if we don't obey wow, yeah, thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. Um, I think that's a good place to wrap it up. We could go on for a very long time, but we're trying the patience of our listeners. So thank you, Karina, Nadia and Alba for Oops. Thank you.
