Who Gets to Say They’re Decolonizing? Theological Education, Rhetorical Performance, and Abyssal Thinking

Drawing upon Andreotti et al.’s work mapping interpretations of decolonization in higher education and de Sousa Santos’ concept of abyssal thinking, I offer an autoethnographic account of my experiences as a female-identifying, queer Latina teaching religiously diverse white students in a progressive, historically and currently eurodominant, mainline Protestant theological school. From this account, I argue that progressive theological institutions rhetorically perform decolonization by asserting that they exist within/execute from a radical-reform or even beyond-reform space. In turn, students mirror these rhetorical performances of decolonization within and beyond the classroom in ways that perpetuate interpersonal and institutional colonial dynamics and processes through a reliance on abyssal thinking. Ultimately, I conclude that colonial epistemologies are too tethered within the arena of theological education to truly decolonize, especially when those who say that the institution, individual, or community is decolonizing still operate from fixations on the abyssal line.