Decolonizing Theology or Colonizing Decoloniality?: Radical Dissent and the Institutional Capture of Decolonization

In recent years, the language of “decolonizing the academy” has moved rapidly from the margins of activist scholarship into the institutional center of many anglophone universities. While this shift signals an important recognition of the colonial foundations of modern knowledge, it also raises a critical question: what happens when the language of decolonization becomes institutionalized within the very structures it seeks to dismantle? Engaging Latin American decolonial thought—particularly the work of Nicolás Panotto—this paper argues that contemporary academic uses of “decolonization” risk reproducing a second-order coloniality in which decolonial discourse itself becomes institutionalized. Bringing Panotto into conversation with dissenting Baptist and Anabaptist epistemologies rooted in forms of border thinking, the paper suggests that radical ecclesial traditions reveal both the possibilities and limits of escaping coloniality. Decolonization does not begin on a blank slate but amid the shards of inherited colonial histories, requiring rhizomatic and communal forms of theological knowledge beyond the academy.