Decolonizing the divine isn’t about rejecting God. It’s about meeting the God who was ours before anyone told us how to pray.
There is a moment, for a lot of us, when the prayers stop landing.
You kneel the way you were taught. You say the words you inherited. And somewhere underneath the performance of it, a quiet voice asks a question you were trained never to ask: whose God is this?
I want to be careful here, because decolonizing the divine is not what people assume it is. It is not throwing God away. It is not bitterness dressed up as awakening. It is something far more tender and far more radical than that. It is the work of separating the sacred from the systems that captured it — and meeting the divine who was ours long before anyone handed us a version of holiness with their own face on it.
The God we were given came with conditions
When our ancestors were stolen, they did not arrive empty. They carried cosmologies older than the empires that enslaved them — ways of knowing the divine that lived in water, in drum, in the body, in the land, in the lineage. And one of the first things colonization did, before it was finished with the chains, was to convince us that all of that was darkness. That God was elsewhere. That the holy had to be supervised, translated, and approved by the very people profiting from our suffering.
So we received a divine that was conditional. A God who required us to be smaller, quieter, more obedient, more ashamed. A holiness that asked us to distrust our own bodies and our own knowing. We were taught that reverence meant self-erasure.
That is not God. That is control wearing God’s clothes.
The divine was never the problem. The cage they built around it was.
What was ours before
When I say decolonize the divine, I mean go back and get what was always yours.
I mean the spirituality that did not require a middleman. The one where your grandmother’s hum over a pot was prayer. Where the river knew your name. Where the body was not a site of sin but a sacred instrument, and pleasure, rest, and joy were not indulgences to be confessed but evidence of a God who delights in you.
Our people knew a divine that was immanent — present, close, woven into the everyday and the everybody. Not a distant judge, but a living presence you could feel in your own chest. That nearness is your inheritance. It did not die in the crossing. It went quiet, waiting for you to come back for it.
This is not a rejection. It is a return.
I think people brace for anger when they hear this work, and there is room for anger — grief, too. But underneath both is something softer: homesickness. A longing for a way of being holy that doesn’t cost you yourself.
Decolonizing the divine is the practice of coming home to that. It looks like asking which of your beliefs actually belong to you and which were installed. It looks like trusting your body again. It looks like letting the sacred be wide enough to hold your softness, your sensuality, your ambition, your rest. It looks like reverence without self-abandonment.
You do not have to perform your way into worthiness. You were never separate from the source. That separation was the lie — maybe the oldest one told to us.
So this is the invitation, and it’s the one I’ll keep extending in everything I write here: come back for the parts of yourself the world asked you to leave at the door. The divine is not waiting for you to be good enough. It has been waiting for you to remember it was always inside.
That remembering is the whole work. And it begins the moment you let yourself ask the forbidden question — and stay long enough to hear the answer in your own voice.
If you want to know what this remembering actually feels like as it unfolds, You Were Whole Before the World Told You Otherwise picks up right where this leaves off.
This is the heart of my book, Decolonizing the Divine, and the work we do together inside the community. If something in you just exhaled, you’re already on your way home.