In 2012, I realized that being a Black person attempting to be faithful to the Christianity I had inherited required silencing key aspects of my lived experience. The faith that had shaped me did not – could not – account for the reality of being Black in America. My questions about justice, my grief over systemic oppression, and even the fullness of my cultural identity had to be managed, minimized or spiritualized away.
I watched as the White evangelical leadership who convinced me to vote against the person who looked like me in 2008 – because of “Christian values” – elected a man who did not resemble Jesus in any way. Their justifications were many, but at the core, I realized something deeper: their theology, their way of seeing and knowing, was fundamentally positioned against my well-being. This was not a mere political disagreement; this was an epistemological and spiritual rupture.
I had to ask: What kind of Christianity requires me to erase myself in order to belong?
What does it mean to be faithful to a faith that is unfaithful to my humanity?
What I’ve come to realize, in light of my departure from the theology I now identify as leavened, is that I am not the only one asking those questions. Christianity, at least in how it has functioned in the West – imperial, hierarchical, exclusionary – is unraveling, and not just in the institutional sense but at the level of meaning, imagination and legitimacy. The inherited frameworks no longer hold, but not for the reasons many assume.
What kind of Christianity requires me to erase myself in order to belong?
The decline of church membership, the rise of religious “nones,” and the exodus of young people from Christian institutions are not simply signs of a secular age overtaking faith. They are the inevitable outcome of a Christianity that has been leavened with White supremacy, exclusivity and empire.
For centuries, American Christianity has functioned as a mechanism of control, casting people into rigid categories of saved or unsaved, good or bad, orthodox or heretic. These binaries, inherited from colonial power structures, have formed a fragile wineskin that cannot stretch to hold the complexity of our social, cultural, political, and theological moment. And because these wineskins cannot expand, they are bursting.
What does it mean to be faithful to a faith that is unfaithful to my humanity?
The problem is not faith itself. Jesus is beautiful. The story of Jesus, the message of Jesus, can transform the world. The problem is that his message has been entangled with a White supremacist imagination that has actively distorted it. If Christianity is to survive as anything more than a relic of a fallen empire, it must undergo a surgical removal of its diseased foundation.
The leaven of White supremacy in Christianity
Whiteness is an ideology that normalizes the practices, beliefs, perspectives and culture of White people so that they are the unspoken standard by which everything else is measured. In other words, it is the normalizing of White supremacy. It was born of a foundational system of beliefs that regarded innocence, virtue, purity, authority, value, beauty, objectivity and intellect as inherent possessions of White people. Whiteness isn’t an ethnicity. It is the subtext of everything, whether theology, ethics, story or economics. It is a logic and a hermeneutic, a way to interpret and view the world. Like leaven, Whiteness is the agent we cannot see that gives rise to many of the situations, institutions and myths that we encounter daily.
The story of Jesus, the message of Jesus, can transform the world. The problem is that his message has been entangled with a White supremacist imagination that has actively distorted it.
White supremacy is not just an ethical failing within Christianity; it is a hidden, pervasive ingredient that has shaped its theology, its institutions, and its social power. Like leaven in bread, it is subtle yet totalizing, rising through doctrine, worship, and practice in ways many never even notice. It shows up in at least three ways:
- CASTE – Christianity in America has functioned as a hierarchical system where power is distributed based on race, class and gender. The church has long positioned itself as the divine gatekeeper, deciding who is in and who is out. White supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism have reinforced these rigid structures, making faith less about liberation and more about control.
- BINARIES – The dominant forms of Christianity in America are obsessed with dualism: saved vs. damned, believer vs. heretic, good vs. evil. But reality is far more complex than that. This binary thinking has made it impossible for traditional Christian institutions to hold evolving conversations on gender, race, queerness, and justice. The rigidity of these categories has forced countless people to abandon Christian spaces, not because they reject faith, but because they refuse to contort themselves to fit a framework that cannot hold them.
- CONTROL – Christianity has claimed a monopoly on divine meaning. It has policed language, identity and belief, demanding strict allegiance to particular dogmas while silencing those who challenge them. Colonization, political influence and cultural gatekeeping wield this control, ensuring that faith remains a tool of empire rather than a pathway to liberation.
The collapse of American Christianity is not happening because people are abandoning God. It is happening because people are rejecting the exclusivity, supremacy and coercion that have defined Christian institutions for too long. No amount of rebranding or fresh paint on a broken foundation will save it. If these institutions refuse to examine the foundation, they will recreate the same harm in new packaging.
The collapse of American Christianity is … happening because people are rejecting the exclusivity, supremacy and coercion that have defined Christian institutions for too long.
According to a recent Barna report on church attendance, the most significant shifts away from Christianity are not coming from people who have stopped believing in God, but from those who have stopped believing in the institutional expressions of Christianity. People are leaving because they see these institutions as complicit in political extremism, racial injustice and a theological imagination that does not align with their moral and spiritual convictions. This shift is not due to a loss of faith.
It is a rejection of a version of faith that has aligned itself more with power than justice.
You can’t fix a rotten foundation with fresh paint
Many Christian organizations, in an attempt to course-correct, are focusing on optics by creating new initiatives, diversifying leadership and crafting more inclusive messaging. But a house with a rotten foundation cannot be repaired with fresh paint. No amount of surface-level change will make a difference if these institutions do not first examine the structural integrity of what they are trying to preserve.
Whiteness, when unexamined, acts as the default setting, silently shaping doctrine, ethics and institutional priorities in ways that reinforce supremacy.
The problem is, many Christian institutions do not know how to examine the foundation because they are led by people who have never had to think about Whiteness. White Christian leaders often assume their theology is neutral, their structures are fair and their vision of Christianity is universal. But Whiteness, when unexamined, acts as the default setting, silently shaping doctrine, ethics and institutional priorities in ways that reinforce supremacy. Without doing the work of excavation, these institutions will continue to recreate the same problems, even as they claim to be reimagining the future.
Hospicing White Christianity, midwifing something new
Rooted in a queer, Black, post-Christian perspective, the R.E.S.T. Mixtape resists the colonial impulse to erase the past in search of something new. R.E.S.T. stands for Radical Ethical Spirituality Tethered to the wisdom of ancestral tradition. Each component forms a container for those feeling increasingly distanced from Christianity. It offers a way to be expansive without becoming uprooted.
It asks: What in our inherited wisdom helped us survive, thrive, and create beauty — even under empire? I use the term post-Christian as a statement about the fact that Christianity, at least as we’ve known it in the West, is unraveling. For many, the inherited faith no longer holds, not because spirituality itself is obsolete, but because empire, hierarchy and exclusion have compromised its framework. And yet, the answer isn’t to abandon tradition altogether. Instead, we need a new wineskin that can hold the wisdom we’ve composted from Christianity while leaving behind the toxicity that made it unsustainable.
What in our inherited wisdom helped us survive, thrive, and create beauty — even under empire?
That’s where the R.E.S.T. Mixtape comes in. Rather than discarding everything, it excavates, recovering the stories, the miraculous moments and the ways our people cultivated wisdom despite oppression. Paired with Mixtape Methodology, which allows each person to curate individual spiritual paths, this approach treats tradition as a living, breathing practice of remembrance, remix, and reinterpretation. It resists rigid, top-down solutions and instead honors individual agency, collective wisdom, and the creative power to shape what comes next while remaining tethered to the ancestral stories and spiritual technologies that have carried us through generations.
In White Christian spaces, the work is prophetic. The role of the Mixtape here is to name the disease, encourage excavation and remove the leaven of White supremacy. If institutions are unwilling to do this work, they will not survive— because people are no longer willing to tolerate a faith that functions as a tool of oppression.
In Black Christian spaces, the work is pastoral. The Black church, while often a site of resistance, has also absorbed elements of the dominant framework, sometimes due to proximity to White institutions, other times due to fear and trauma. Christianity was a survival mechanism for Black people, a space of refuge and resistance in a world that sought to erase them. Because of this, questioning faith can feel like abandoning safety. Leaving harmful theology can feel like leaving family. The Mixtape’s role in these spaces is to care for people as they navigate spiritual transition, offering a pathway beyond harm without forcing rupture.
The reality is that many Black people are already leaving Christian institutions — not because they reject Jesus, but because they refuse to stay in spaces that demand their erasure, silence, and obedience. And yet, when they leave, they are often met with hostility from their own communities, because their departure brings up generational fears.
…the most significant shifts away from Christianity are not coming from people who have stopped believing in God, but from those who have stopped believing in the institutional expressions of Christianity.
But fear is not a sustainable foundation for faith. Christianity cannot be sustained by nostalgia, tradition for tradition’s sake or coercion. If Christianity is to survive, it must be willing to let some things die — not Jesus, not spirituality, but the toxic, empire-formed theology that has distorted Jesus’s message into a tool of power.
A call to let the leaven die
We are living in a moment of profound spiritual transition. Christianity, in its form familiar in America, is unraveling. But that unraveling is not a crisis. It is an opportunity. It is an invitation to shed what has been diseased and recover what has been lost. Jesus did not come to preserve power structures. He did not come to build an empire. He came to announce a new way of being, a new imagination of God, a new way of belonging that was not built on control. If Christianity is to survive, it must return to that radical core.
If Christianity is to survive, it must return to that radical core.
But that cannot happen unless we are willing to remove the leaven. And that is a choice that institutions and individuals must make now. Because if they don’t, it will continue to rise, and the wineskins will continue to burst. And then, no amount of fresh paint will be able to cover what has been lost.
Many Presbyterian churches nationwide are beginning to wrestle with what this means in practice. Some have started reparations funds, not as a symbolic gesture, but as an acknowledgment of the material harm their institutions have caused through their historic complicity in slavery, segregation and displacement. In 2021, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) committed $5 million to reparations, recognizing that justice demands not just confession, but restitution. Churches in places like Louisville and Philadelphia have begun returning land to Black and Indigenous communities, shifting power in tangible ways rather than simply offering apologies.
Removing the leaven also means unlearning the logic of Whiteness — redefining success, power and leadership. This looks like rejecting hierarchical models that equate worth with productivity and domination, and instead embracing Indigenous ways of knowing, which value wisdom, patience and the rhythm of seasons. In some spaces, it means moving at the pace of trust, rather than urgency. It means naming the roots of our problems, not just their symptoms. It means asking who benefits from the current system, and who is harmed by it? And then, it means acting accordingly.
In practice, this could look like a church refusing to expand just for the sake of growth, instead investing in restorative economies that support local Black and Indigenous businesses. It could look like seminaries changing their curriculum to center decolonized theologies, teaching future leaders to prioritize community wisdom over institutional survival. It looks like a faith that repairs what was broken, restores what was stolen, and reimagines what is possible—not as an act of charity but as a commitment to truth and justice.
The early church didn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach; it adapted, reimagined, and built something that made sense for its time and place. That same principle applies today.
It will look different everywhere, just as it did in the first century. Then, as now, the empire applied pressure, the temptation to choose greed over spirit was ever-present, and the social, economic, and political dynamics shaped how communities responded. The early church didn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach; it adapted, reimagined, and built something that made sense for its time and place. That same principle applies today. The ways faith communities show up will depend on their region, neighborhood and socio-economic realities. But the spirit can be the same; the unity can be the same.
If we all move in Radical Ethical Spirituality – one that is tethered to tradition, rooted in justice and responsive to the world as it is – it could be life-giving for individuals and the world. This means faith that names the harm, moves at the pace of trust, and resists urgency as a tool of empire. It means faith that disrupts hierarchy, redefines power and prioritizes reparations over performative inclusion. It means faith that listens to ancestral wisdom, honors place-based knowledge, and measures success by collective flourishing rather than institutional expansion. The early church wasn’t trying to preserve an institution; it was cultivating a way of being that offered an alternative to empire’s logic. That’s what we need now. If we compost what no longer serves, carry forward what is liberating and curate tradition rather than being confined by it, we might just create something true — something that is, as Jesus put it, life for the world.
