Panel: DECONVERSION AND RELIGIOUS BELONGING (ECCLESIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH NETWORK)



1143.1 - DE-CONVERSION AND RE-CONVERSION: FROM CHRISTIAN SUPREMACY BACK TO EARTH-TAUGHT MUTUALITY

AUTHORS:
Perkinson J.W. (Ecumenical Theological Seminary ~ Detroit, Michigan ~ United States of America)
Text:
De-conversion in this paper will be explored in a confessional mode on the part of a white Euro-settler evangelical/charismatic Christian colonist, living for more than 40 years in eastside inner city Detroit, gradually undergoing an initiatory re-arrangement of molecules and motor-muscle memory—much less spiritual ideas and faith commitments—under tutelage to low income black folk, and later on a Filipina partner and various Native American teachers.  Today, my commitments are overwhelmingly oriented in the direction of "indigenous" (land-taught) spiritual practice and priorities, informed by Black liberation theology and hip-hop poetry, Babaylan healing wisdom and Celtic cairn cosmology and mythology—all without leaving behind either Christian commitment or continuous re-reading of biblical texts in pushing back on imperial Roman warping of the original Galilean "back-to-land" movement of Jesus and John or the Euro-colonialist perversion of the same in the direction of Native genocide and African enslavement.  Deconversion in my case is actually a creative venture of re-conversion: a matter of "crossing over" to indigenous traditions and communities here, in the Philippines, and back in pre-Christian/pre-imperial (pagan) Europe, learning from extant traditions of living close to the land in those places and their own terms and then "coming back" over to mainstream, biblical Christianity. Deconversion in this mode is not abstract, individualist, and socially mediated, by rather informed by deep grief, inchoate longing to be "earthed," and a growing certainty that our species presumption of being supreme among life forms on the planet and thus unrestrained in our extraction, exploitation, and discard as garbage, of any and every other creaturely reality (plant, animal, water, metal, mineral, air, fossil, etc.) is profoundly geocidal and in dire need of being taught and converted by the ways of living of most of our indigenous ancestry.