By the time protests about race and policing in America broke out in the summer of 2020, I was tired. Being a theologically conservative Christian in the Midwest means I’m mostly surrounded by politically conservative people, and my own politics are further left. We shared one faith, but because of the cultural moment, it seemed like whatever I said about politics was easily dismissed as “critical race theory” or “wokeism.” I started thinking about moving to California.
I was intrigued by the idea of disentangling my faith and culture from broad assumptions of Western or European cultural superiority, learning about history without glossing over colonial atrocity in the New World, and healing from internalized racism.
I was ready to throw out the colonial bathwater—and the tub and the soap too. Yet I could not abandon Jesus. I’d already had my crisis of faith. I’d already deconstructed and reconstructed. I’d already decided to follow Jesus after God came to me unexpectedly. But along with returning to my grandmother’s faith, I’d returned to her culture. I’d rejected the assumption I found among many white Christians, even if subconsciously held, that European colonial culture and its derivatives were superior to latinidad. I was in turmoil. One particularly tumultuous Sunday morning, I sat with my eyes closed and my head against the pew in front of me at my Anglican church (the irony doesn’t escape me). I told God, “I don’t know how to do this.”
. He loved my roots, my ancestry. He was calling me to follow him as a Chicano. That invitation is not unique to me. God fashioned each of us within a culture, and he says the same to all of us: “Come, follow me.”
When Jesus called his first disciples, he never asked them to stop being Jewish—yet their Jewishness would now be formed in Jesus. Likewise, as Gentile converts flowed into the early church, the apostle James, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, determined that Jewish Christians “should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God” by demanding cultural change that God did not require on top of conformation to God’s ethics (Acts 15:19–20). Jesus was meeting the Gentiles within their cultures, as Gentiles.
Kosuke Koyama’s theology makes a parallel point: following Christ does not require abandoning one’s cultural roots. Japanese Christians need not shed Buddhist cultural formation any more than Gentile converts needed to become culturally Jewish. The gospel meets people within their existing cultural identity rather than erasing it.Decolonization still has its place in the pursuit of justice, but I want to be identified more by what I affirm—the gospel and the beauty of my culture—than by what I’m against.
Rationalist epistemology draws lines between culture and faith, identity and belief. Connatural knowing — knowledge rooted in lived experience rather than abstract analysis — affirms what is already in the bones. The post-rationalist move is not to abandon reason but to recognize that some truths are carried in the body before they are articulated by the mind. postratI think of my abuelita, who sang worship songs in Spanish, who prayed while she cooked rice and beans, who was never ashamed to be Mexican, and who demonstrated faith and faithfulness in a hard and contentious world. All this can be brought into allegiance to Jesus.
