IAPT – 2/2021 typoscript [FP] – 09.06.2021 – Seite 13 – 2. Satzlauf Decoloniality: Theory and Methodology Cláudio Carvalhaes The author describes the work of decoloniality within Christianity and proposes a methodology for this process, drawing on anthropophagy, perspectivism, carnival and social movements from Latin America. To take on the theological decoloniality option, one needs to re-consider the sources, foundations and practices of an universal Christianity and re-read it from local commu- nities, its instances of power, presences and absences. Influenced by the indigenous people of Rio Grande do Sul and the Xingu, Indigenous epistemologies, we are called to dream not only about a religion of humans, but also dream of animals, mountains, soil, water, seeds, and nature. 1 Introduction Cláudio Carvalhaes, Associate Professor of Worship at Union Theological Seminary – New York City. His work Welcome to Brazil-il-il-il: a country that lives be- and research centers on liturgy, liberation theologies, de- tween the first and fourth worlds. The first world is colonial studies, performance theories, and ecologies. the few ruthless people who control the power: agri- His upcoming book is on eco-liturgical liberation theolo- business, bankers, and landowners. The second gy. His recent books are Liturgies from Below: Prayers world is the voraciously greedy upper class, corrupt from People at the Ends of the World (Abingdon Press, 2020) and Praying With Every Heart – Orienting Our Lives politicians, TV owners, social media, and religious to the Wholeness of the World (Cascade Books, 2021). leaders. The third world is a prejudiced middle class that hates poor people while dreaming of being rich. And the fourth world is the vast majority of its in- habitants: all poor, white, indigenous, black, almost Catholic church with neo-Pentecostal churches. black, all very poor. Their shared agenda is “family, tradition, and prop- Welcome to Brazil: the country of high colonial- erty”, and they support the most radically conserva- ity where imported “cordial racism” is a potent tive forms of living and repressive policies. Welcome weapon of domination that has been hidden for to a country where stratified mainline Protestants years and is now on public display. The very nice range from neo-Calvinism and its vicious ethics of Brazil we all once thought existed has recently suppression and control, to a small number of shown its true face and it is much scarier than many churches and pastors offering a counternarrative, of us Brazilians ever imagined. standing outside the game because they are a very Welcome to a terribly Christian, imperialist, reli- small presence, without much power. gious Brazil: formed by the union of a right-wing Welcome to a country of religious diversity with a variety of Afro-religions who suffer from a certain Christianity that has historically specialized in an- 1 This article was presented as a performance-lecture with nihilating anything sacred to Afro-religions, de- movements and many layered symbols, some of them you can see in the pictures. Also people watched the 2019 stroying temples and threatening the lives of their samba music from Estação Primeira de Mangueira: leaders. História Pra Ninar Gente Grande (https://www.youtube. The current president of Brazil-il-il was elected com/watch?v=F9nRZt86zbc) during the lecture. based on his approval of torture and promises to Valburga Schmiedt Streck, Júlio Cézar Adam, Cláudio Carvalhaes, eds. 2021. (De)coloniality and religious 13 practices: liberating hope. IAPT.CS 2: 13–21 Doi: 10.25785/iapt.cs.v2i0.206 ORCID-ID: 0000-0003-4098-0376 IAPT – 2/2021 typoscript [FP] – 09.06.2021 – Seite 14 – 2. Satzlauf Cláudio Carvalhaes arm the population, exterminate Indigenous people, nizing movement that is still alive today, the civiliz- slaughter the Black population, rule over women, ing and conquering forms of European renaissance abandon children, leave the LGBTQ community and modernity. We are the result and the embodi- openly exposed to patriarchal structures of violence, ment of European thought gone universal. We are and deliver the Brazilian economy to the Chicago black, white, brown, yellow and red, but almost all neoliberal school of Milton Friedman. Welcome to a Black because of the “denigrating” processes creat- living nightmare, one that has always been here for ed by Europe: to de-nigrate, that is, to make all all of the oppressed communities! Brazil’s president non-Europeans, niggers, Blacks. In meeting the is a worse version of the USA’s Trump and a similar barbarous Muslims and Jews of Europe and then version of the Philippines’ Duterte. the almost-human Indigenous peoples of the In spite of all the above, we do have many en- Americas, and the almost-Black humans of Africa, chanting attributes. We are a land of beautiful inter- European thought developed its entire framework sections and unique differences! A country of many of mirror images and created an imperialist civili- passages. If you ever read Clarice Lispector or Gui- zation process of exclusion that fashioned ways of marães Rosa, listened to Caetano Veloso or Gilberto assigning differences and offering identities and Gil, saw the Grupo Corpo and felt the soul of the similarities from unique ways of thinking, acting, people of Bahia, or have been immersed in the end- perceiving, believing, feeling and even defining less wisdom of our Indigenous people, you will see what human being was supposed to be. When Eu- the eternal brilliance of this country. In spite of ropeans told us what was right, they also told us many historical attempts of domination by brutal what was wrong. and ignorant groups of white settlers and renters of The construction of Western Europe occurred the nation, our plurality is an antidote to fascism through the extensive control of the global slave through our varied earthly landscape, the people’s trade market by trans-Atlantic voyages, used to miscegenation in confused hybridities, untamed re- plunder the non-European world with its religious ligious mixtures, social complexities, rich episte- logic, “civilizing” mission, and distribution of dis- mologies, and fusions of feelings and thinking. We eases. Colonialism, a consequence of imperialism, carry the vast intricacies of Native worldviews; we was formed by multiple arms of civilizing domina- are the expanded systems of the African Orixas, the tion: economics, politics, extraction, slavery, law, Africanization of the Tai Chi, the wild and outra- health, and religion. geous malemolence (fluidity, improperness) that The force of this new dominant condition of makes peoples of white orientations furious, we are geo-political imposition makes European thought the fullness of guiltlessness, and the soaring of sen- (organized from abstract fictions) become a univer- sual delightful bodies in fusions. Here philosophers sal theory and practice. From their villages, Europe- make songs and singers write compendiums of so- an thinkers have become universal necessities. For cial histories. We live from reversed anthropologies, example: people’s counter-theologies, invented spiritualities, Kant’s reason and categorical imperatives would transverse liberation theologies and practices from also become reason and categorical imperatives in the people below. We both are and are not the the New World; church, anti-church ministries, unhinged pastoral The theological-Christian perspective of Hegel’s ministry, and creativity beyond the pale. history, clearly a European history, now becomes So even before welcoming you to colonial Brazil, universal, and the (Christian European) Spirit of we should welcome you from Abya Ayala, the name history is the absolute spirit that becomes an over- given to the Americas by the Kuna-Tule people. powering force over any other spirit; From São Leopoldo, and all the regions here, we The hierarchical structuring of Western thought must honor the life of the Arachás, Carijós, was presented by Heidegger through the division Caigangues, and other ancestral first nations. between humanity and the rest: animals and plants. “Man” has language while animals do not. By reject- ing other forms of communication as language, an- Decoloniality imals are assigned to a lower category while humans are consequently above other creatures; When we speak of decoloniality, we speak of ways Descartes’s “proof of existence” through think- to detach and unlearn from the imperialist-colo- ing as a condition of being, fundamentally individ- 14 IAPT – 2/2021 typoscript [FP] – 09.06.2021 – Seite 15 – 2. Satzlauf Decoloniality: Theory and Methodology ualized, crushed other ways of being and thinking that hides in the coloniality of the processes of des- not done from the cartesian modes of perception; titution and shows itself clearly but also opaquely in The onto-theological thinking of Marx defines all modern denotative thinking (Mignolo and Indigenous people as the past of history, while also Walsh 2018, 186). This is what Mignolo calls thema - designating whites, from capitalism, as the future of trix of colonial power (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, history; 111). There is no humanity except through the lens of This notion ofmatrix of colonial power was al- European epistemologies. There is no nature except ready at the center of the word colonialism, formed that organized in a hierarchical binary of man-na- by colon, cultus and culture. Alfredo Bosi in his book ture, established by modernity. There is no politics “The Dialectics of Colonization” says that coloniza- except in the expressions of the politics of emanci- tion is the taking of land, culture and “religion” as pation of modernity. There is no God but the God of an ancestral memory, “a totalizing project whose European Christianity. There is no Jesus but the Je- driving forces can always be sought at the level of sus re-read by the Greeks and European theolo- the colon: occupy a new ground, exploit their pos- gians. There is no other knowledge but modern epis- sessions, submit their natives” (Bosi 1992, 15).