On the Formation of Populations of the Living and of the Dead

The logic of orthodoxy, like that of the modern-colonial matrix in which Christian theologies are presently articulated,Footnote ⁴ is the logic of the body. Both formed within and generative of networks of power, this logic marks select bodies as something other than bodies alone, namely, lives that must be nurtured and defended.Footnote ⁵ Thus interpellated, these lives together comprise the ‘body catholic’, an assemblage analogous to the Foucauldian ‘social body’ that circumscribes the domain of Christian intelligibility by defining the manner in which individual bodies become recognizable qua Christian.Footnote ⁶ As an assemblage, the body catholic is an unstable configuration irreducible not only to the geopolitical, national, and social formations in which its members participate but also to the identities of those members themselves, a configuration, note, that is always haunted by its potential to be other than that which it is in the process of becoming.Footnote ⁷ Orthodoxy, on this account, is thus less an index of the specific beliefs or doctrinal positions to which ‘proper’ Christian bodies-cum-lives subscribe (although it is certainly still that) than a set of regulative principles that orient vectors of belief and, in so doing, construct hegemonic (in pretense if not always in fact) regimes of Christian intelligibility.Footnote ⁸ Said principles govern ways of believing rather than beliefs per se, forcing the former into alignment so as to produce the illusion of a cohesive corporate body with a clearly delimited extension. ‘Biopower’ and ‘necropower’ represent distinguishable but inseparable sides of this ‘body-political’ logic,Footnote ⁹ the complementary operation of which generates both the subjectivities of individual Christians (by assigning those individuals subjectivities that are legible within the Christian imagination, of which the most salient are the orthodox believer and, paradoxically, the unorthodox heretic) as well as the bio-spiritual identity of the Church as the Body of Christ.

Since initially theorized by Michel Foucault to describe the shift, coincident with the advent of modernity, in which the administration of life superseded the dispensation of death as power’s principal function and prerogative,Footnote ¹⁰ biopower – and, with it, biopolitics – has received significant, if critical, attention from scholars interested in advancing decolonial projects.Footnote ¹¹ This engagement is perhaps unsurprising given the centrality of such concepts as ‘recognition’ within settler-colonial narratives (including, as we shall see below, the rhetoric of ecclesial entities such as GAFCON), wherein the legitimacy of the colonial state and its associated institutions is predicated on that state’s authority to asymmetrically acknowledge the existence of dispossessed and colonized peoples according to the colonizers’ own legal, philosophical, and theological frameworks.Footnote ¹² By (re-)naming populations as such, the settler-colonial society arrogates to itself the right to assign those collective bodies positions within the settlers’ own history. The result is the imposition of ‘settler time’ onto colonized peoples, which transforms a people’s past into a linear progression with two major segments, namely, the periods ‘pre-contact’ and ‘post-contact’. With the delineation of this division there comes a further demand that colonized populations locate themselves within the latter to the exclusion of any continued connection with the contents of the former (for instance, through notions of ancestral inheritance). Far from signaling a benign acknowledgment of identities that exist independent of the settler (read: ChristianFootnote ¹³ ) gaze, then, recognition is instead a biopolitical intervention that brings populations into being in forms that, whatever their superficial similarities to entities within the imaginaries of colonized peoples themselves, are only legible because they represent elements within the settlers’ vision of the cosmos.

Biopower thus produces subjects by investing bodies with histories that impose obligations on those bodies in the present.Footnote ¹⁴ Unlike what I term the ‘bare past’ (so called because it lacks the identity-forming influence of history proper), an archive of contingencies that attests the manifold ways in which the present could be otherwise, such histories are articulated within the body-political register as an inevitable progression that culminates, necessarily, in the modern-colonial, orthodox moment.Footnote ¹⁵ Since it is as an actor within the latter drama that the orthodox subject is recognizable as such, she is indebted for her own subjectivity to the body-political narrative itself. This debt, in turn, compels her to comport herself according to the standards of intelligibility that the script for said narrative dictates, chiefly by refusing to allow the contingent possibilities of the bare past to intrude upon, and thereby disrupt the necessity of, the body-political present. By conforming to these standards, the orthodox subject renders herself eligible for further biopolitical interventions designed to promote her flourishing, thereby tacitly communicating to the members of other populations that in order to benefit from the colonial moment they, too, must participate in the settlers’ society on the colonists’ own terms. In line with Foucault’s insight that power is ubiquitous rather than localized to any single institutional apparatus or individual,Footnote ¹⁶ it is a straightforward exercise to identify further examples of such biopolitical interventions within Christian milieux. The most obvious is perhaps the publication of obituaries and, for a particularly exemplary few, hagiographies, which invites others to meditate on the contents of select lives and comport themselves accordingly.Footnote ¹⁷ Notable in this instance are those bodies the memories of which are not preserved in this fashion, prominent examples of which include the victims of lynching violence and those Native American children who suffered from the systemic abuses that obtained at Christian-run (including Anglican) residential schools.Footnote ¹⁸

As this latter remark suggests, the obverse of biopower is necropower,Footnote ¹⁹ which identifies and expunges those elements that pose a real or perceived threat to the health of the body catholic (the distinction between real and perceived dangers being ultimately irrelevant for the operation of this power formation).Footnote ²⁰ Unlike biopower, which produces living subjects, necropower aggregates bodies into populations of the ‘living dead’ by classifying the spaces occupied by those bodies as zones of death.Footnote ²¹ Demarcated by malleable and, in many instances, fuzzy borders from those spaces in which biopolitical interventions occur,Footnote ²² zones of death are spaces in which violence is the condition of existence. Because the conditions of biopolitical intelligibility do not hold in such spaces, bodies register within the necropolitical calculus as at once threatening and disposable by virtue of merely being located therein. Insofar as they figure ways of being that are inconsistent with the principles of orthodoxy, these bodies must be destroyed lest the exceptional subjective modalities they represent come to challenge the principles of orthodoxy for normative status. That same exceptionalism ensures, however, that whatever trappings of the flourishing life these entities might possess, they are marked by an ineradicable otherness vis-à-vis the living such that, although slaughtered en masse, these bodies can never be killed – being, in a sense, dead already, they can merely be disposed of in the same way that necrotic tissue is removed from an infirm patient.Footnote ²³ Body-political dominion is predicated on the ability to define a space as one in which the operation of necropower prevails and, hence, in which bodies are formed as (non-)subjects that must needs be eliminated.Footnote ²⁴

In denominating zones of death, body power elides the differences between the individual bodies located therein, amalgamating the inhabitants of that space into a single class of entities in order to cement the partition between that grouping and the populations that benefit from biopolitical interventions. The organization of the colony evidences this dynamic writ large, with this space constituting one in which, from the colonizer’s perspective, there is no distinction between the enemy combatant and the native. To be the latter is to be the former, regardless of one’s other affiliations or biological attributes (e.g., sex and age); hence, during colonial conflicts between European empires and Native American nations, not only Native warriors but also women and children were the frequent targets of indiscriminate, mass violence. This conflation reflects the settlers’ own anthropological commitments, as Achille Mbembe explains: ‘That colonies might be ruled over in absolute lawlessness stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native. In the eyes of the conqueror, savage life is just another form of animal life, a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension.’Footnote ²⁵ The assimilation (‘civilizing’) of colonial subjects through the erasure of their Native identities (and, often, the imposition of Christian onesFootnote ²⁶ ) is thus a principal goal of the colonial enterprise, one that found tangible expression in American and Canadian residential school programs that sought to ‘kill the Indian … and save the man’.Footnote ²⁷ For there can be no rapprochement between a zone of death and the regime of body-political intelligibility unless the former is transformed, violently, into a space in which the only entities that remain are those properly disposed towards conformity with the principles of colonial orthodoxy.

Informed by the foregoing review of the bio- and necropolitical dimensions of body politics, it is possible to account for the internal logic of orthodox ecclesiologies such as the one proffered by GAFCON. Those formed within the body catholic as living subjects benefit from the operation of biopower, which, by investing their bodies with an apostolic history, interpellates these figures as members of a trans-temporal community of faithful believers whose theological views represent something other than the idiosyncratic convictions of a particular religious faction, namely, truths the acceptance of which is ‘identical with fidelity to Christ himself’.Footnote ²⁸ From an emic perspective, the modalities of theological reflection espoused by the members of this population constitute vectors of Christian thought the adoption of which brings subjects into communion not only with the Church, but also – and more significantly – with the ‘God of the living’ (Lk. 20.38) who authored that population’s traditions. Hence, to depart from this community is to negate the possibility of not only flourishing but, insofar as one thereby abnegates access to the ultimate source of life, survival itself.Footnote ²⁹

Necropower, on the other hand, forms that population’s Others into heretical subjects who, lacking a pretension to apostolic history, are recognizable within the Christian imagination as entities that are Christian in appearance alone rather than in essence. Such figures might attend a church, recite creedal formulations, partake of the sacraments, and claim to have personally encountered divinity. Yet, lacking a genuine Christian heritage, these heretical subjects are little more than wraiths doomed to a final destruction that, on this view, will necessarily obtain at the eschaton when God sentences these bodies to an eternity of suffering in hell.Footnote ³⁰ Since their demise is assured, heretics occupy a liminal space between life and death in their present existence, with this state leaving them vulnerable to acts of violence against their bodies by Christian believers who arrogate to themselves the right to act as agents of divine wrath.Footnote ³¹

In short, Christian orthodoxy as such is body political and, which is the same, colonial. That Christianity (and, within that, Anglicanism) has, both historically and in the present, readily aligned itself with European and American imperial projects of conquest, assimilation, and violent occupation is for this reason unsurprising: the two share a common architecture. But this account of the body politics of orthodoxy remains abstract. It is to the task of rendering it more concrete that I now turn.

The Body Catholic Must Be Defended

Following the vote at the June 2002 synod of the Diocese of New Westminster (Anglican Church of Canada [ACC]) to sanction the creation of a rite of blessing for homosexual unions, delegates from nine parishes staged a walkout to register their dissent.Footnote ³² Included among the protestors was theologian J.I. Packer, who justified his departure by characterizing the synod’s decision as one that ‘falsifies the gospel of Christ, abandons the authority of Scripture, jeopardizes the salvation of fellow human beings, and betrays the church in its God-appointed role as the bastion and bulwark of divine truth’.Footnote ³³ Packer’s church – St John’s, Shaughnessy, then among the largest congregations in the ACCFootnote ³⁴ – elected shortly after the conclusion of the synod to withhold its financial contributions to the diocese. On February 14, 2008, the congregation voted to disaffiliate with the ACC entirely and place itself, instead, under the ecclesial oversight of the Province of the Southern Cone, with church spokeswoman Lesley Bentley stating after that decision was reached that the doctrinal disagreements between the congregation and diocesan bishop Michael Ingham were such that the two represented ‘different religions’.Footnote ³⁵ With these remarks, Packer and Bentley neatly captured the concern, prevalent amongst both the architects of GAFCON as well as many of those ecclesial leaders who identify as members of the so-called ‘Global South’, that in order to support the inclusion of LGBTQ persons within the Church one must adopt ways of imagining the Christian body catholic that so radically depart from historic and essential Christian teaching as to be unrecognizable as vectors of Christian thought at all.Footnote ³⁶

Of the numerous misunderstandings that haunt the arguments offered by participants in, and commentators on, the present controversy over human sexuality within the Anglican Communion, the one that is perhaps most likely to prevent rapprochement between the parties involved is the mistaken view that the dispute concerns sexuality as such. To be sure, the ubiquitous (even obsessive) attention that questions of sex and sexuality have received from both lay and ordained interlocutors within the Communion would appear to warrant those interpretations of ecclesial affairs that reduce the ‘crisis’ within world Anglicanism to a series of seemingly intractable disagreements over the place of LGBTQ persons within the Church.Footnote ³⁷ Yet such an analysis, insofar as it treats questions of human sexuality in isolation from the larger questions of Christian subjectivity of which the former are merely a subset, overlooks the common cause that unites those in favour of accepting LGBTQ persons with those opposed thereto, namely, the body-political project of safeguarding the life of the Anglican body catholic. For however much they differ in how they denominate the category and assign entities to populate it, neither side wishes to admit heretics into the Church.Footnote ³⁸

In the geographic and theological realignments taking place within the Communion, we are thus witnessing the construction of histories and counter-histories rather than narratives of genuine difference. Histories bind a population to its ancestral past, one that, in the case of GAFCON, is not only Christian but also supposedly unmarred by colonialism. Counter-histories, by contrast, are those ‘histories’ claimed by a population’s Others, which, on the emic view of that population’s members, are little more than simulacra of tradition and, consequently, are incapable of imposing obligations on those bodies that live in the present. As such, the designation ‘counter-history’ is typically imposed (albeit often obliquely) by those advancing a claim to body-political dominion rather than asserted by a population of its own identity-forming narratives (and thus parallels the imposition of settler time).

Although it depicts the localized experience of an affluent parish in Vancouver, Canada, the vignette with which this section opened indexes the rhetorical strategies by means of which opponents of LGBTQ inclusion within the rest of the Anglican Communion produce and deploy histories and counter-histories to position themselves as stalwart defenders of the orthodox Church; the writings of Peter Jensen, GAFCON’s former General Secretary and the retired Archbishop of Sydney (Australia), are similarly insightful. Acting as a spokesperson for the movement, Jensen published a series of articles in which he attempted to rebut the charge that GAFCON is a source of division within global Anglicanism. To the contrary, he argued, GAFCON is ‘a great force for unity’ that offers faithful Anglicans an ecclesial body with which to affiliate themselves when existing structures embrace ‘teaching [that] endangers the gospel itself’.Footnote ³⁹ Acceptance of same-sex partnerships, marital or otherwise, figured prominently in Jensen’s delineation of such condemnable teachings. Insofar as both the biblical texts and ‘the continuous interpretative tradition of the church catholic’ proscribe homosexuality,Footnote ⁴⁰ any effort to extend Christian approval thereto necessarily represents ‘a choice to rewrite the Bible and so the Christian faith’.Footnote ⁴¹ By so turning away from strict observance of the ‘biblical’ sexual ethic to which Jensen subscribes, many contemporary Anglicans have yielded to the ‘return to paganism’ inaugurated during the 1960s with the advent of the sexual revolution.Footnote ⁴² This capitulation has deleterious implications for the spiritual health of individuals, to be sure, since it entails substituting a ‘false Jesus’ for the ‘true Jesus’ who alone is capable of liberating persons ‘from bondage to immoral sex and greed’.Footnote ⁴³ However, in a telling body-political move, it was a defined set of corporate populaces who Jensen predicted would suffer the most severe effect of ‘bow[ing] the knee to Baal’, namely, death;Footnote ⁴⁴ thus his assertion that ‘[a]lready the churches of the West have abandoned their first love …. Here is the slumber of the spirit which leads to death.’Footnote ⁴⁵

Far from anomalous, Jensen’s warnings about the rise of paganism and the prospect of impending ecclesial ruin gave voice to anxieties that were central to the critiques of the Anglican Communion expressed both in the official statements produced by delegates to the 2008 and 2013 GAFCON meetings as well as in the materials published in advance of, and as a result of, the 2018 GAFCON in Jerusalem.Footnote ⁴⁶ Released on 29 June 2008, the ‘Jerusalem Statement’ proffered a ‘framework for renewed Anglican orthodoxy’ to which members of the GAFCON coalition (which comprised ‘Evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics and Charismatics’) committed themselves in an effort ‘to counter a false gospel … spreading throughout the Communion’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Despite being opposed to apostolic teaching, this false gospel (on their view an especially pernicious Anglican counter-history) was ascendant in those Western provinces that represented ‘the most economically developed nations’, chiefly The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, neither of which had been subjected to effective discipline from the existing instruments of communion despite having embraced ‘overt heterodoxy’.Footnote ⁴⁸ That these churches could act with apparent impunity indicated, for the Statement’s authors, that the Anglican Communion continued to have ‘a colonial structure’.Footnote ⁴⁹ A similar appraisal was offered in the Global South Primates’ response to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, which objected to both the paucity of non-Western voices at the Conference’s evening plenaries as well as ‘the continuing patronising attitude of the West towards the rest of the churches worldwide’.Footnote ⁵⁰

By characterizing the Communion as a colonial apparatus, delegates to the 2008 GAFCON tacitly positioned their own push for ecclesial reform as a decolonizing project, a rhetorical gambit that produced a point of tension within the Jerusalem Statement between, on the one hand, the framers’ disavowal of Anglicanism’s colonial legacy and, on the other hand, their unwillingness to renounce in toto that legacy’s purchase on contemporary Anglican theological reflection. This double movement is apparent in the prefatory remarks that framed the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’ (a 14-point enumeration of the ‘tenets of orthodoxy’ that together served as the ‘basis of [GAFCON’s] fellowship’),Footnote ⁵¹ with the Statement’s authors therein insisting that, although recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury could no longer be treated as determinative of one’s Anglican identity, the ‘doctrinal foundation of [said] identity’ remained the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (BCP).Footnote ⁵² By construing their own actions as in continuity with the contents of the latter elements, the delegates implicitly disjoined the Articles of Religion and the BCP from the ‘colonial structure’ to which they objected, an untenable (and rather curious) move given the BCP’s historic deployment as a means of effecting a measure of both religious and social cohesion within the British Empire.Footnote ⁵³

The Jerusalem Declaration itself is notable less for the specific sins it proscribed (which, unsurprisingly, included non-heterosexual coital relations) than for the body-political commitments it inscribed into Anglican identity. Article 13 is in this respect germane, with the Declaration’s authors therein rejecting ‘the authority of those churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith in word and deed’ and, in so doing, articulating in summary form the drive to demarcate heretics from the body catholic that animates the GAFCON movement as a whole.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indicative of its centrality for the authors’ self-understanding of GAFCON’s raison d’être, this rejection in turn provided the theological architecture for the ecclesiological proposals that followed in the subsequent two sections of the Jerusalem Statement. Thus, in calling for the creation of a Primates’ Council to provide leadership for the movement, the Statement’s authors ‘urge[d said] Primates’ Council to authenticate and recognise confessing Anglican jurisdictions, clergy and congregations and to encourage all Anglicans to promote the gospel and defend the faith’; justifying this injunction, the framers then acknowledged that they ‘recognise[d] the desirability of territorial jurisdiction for provinces and dioceses of the Anglican Communion, except in those areas where churches and leaders are denying the orthodox faith or are preventing its spread’.Footnote ⁵⁵ With these remarks, the Statement’s authors threw the body-political logic of the GAFCON movement into sharp relief. Evidencing the biopolitical dimension of their project, they not only moved to affirm the legitimacy of those bodies (both corporate and individual) that figured subjectivities worth defending, but further assumed responsibility for the well-being of these subjects by supporting initiatives to provide ‘orthodox oversight to churches under false leadership, especially in North and South America’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Conversely, they disclosed their necropolitical commitments by simultaneously endeavoring to expunge from the Communion those malignant bodies that instead posed a threat to the welfare of the universal Church (in this case by divesting the institutions in which those bodies were members of ecclesial jurisdiction).

While the latter entailed defining both The Episcopal Church and the ACC as zones of death, the constituents of which were marred by their common adherence to a toxic ‘false gospel’ and, consequently, did not represent genuine Christian lives (a move that invested GAFCON with body-political dominion), this necropolitical maneuver remained largely tacit in the Jerusalem Statement itself. However, it would be given more direct articulation in the 2013 Nairobi Communiqué and again in the materials released before and as a result of the June 2018 GAFCON in Jerusalem. Since both sets of documents revisited many of the same points that were advanced in the Jerusalem Statement, they may be dealt with more briefly here.

With the publication of the Nairobi Communiqué, delegates to the second GAFCON laid out a body-political vision for the movement’s future vis-à-vis the future of the global Anglican Communion. This vision was predicated on their ‘willingness to submit to the written Word of God and … unwillingness to be in Christian fellowship with those who will not, … [a position] clearly expressed in The Jerusalem Statement and Declaration’.Footnote ⁵⁷ On the delegates’ view, the Church was qualitatively dissimilar from other forms of human community insofar as its members were in communion not only with each other but also with the Triune God. Consequently, it represented a space circumscribed by the contents of Scripture in which ‘the truth matters, where it is guarded and where alternatives are exposed for what they are – an exchange of the truth of God for a lie’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Arrogating to themselves the responsibility for launching a defense of the body catholic, the Communiqué’s authors resolved to ‘continue publicly to expose any false gospel that is not consistent with apostolic teaching and clearly to articulate the gospel in the church and in the world’,Footnote ⁵⁹ a course of action that was codified in the nine-part ‘Nairobi Commitment’ with which the Communiqué concluded. There, the delegates pledged to intervene in those dioceses wherein Anglicans were being marginalized for ‘standing for apostolic truth’, even when interposing themselves in this manner ‘threatens existing structures of human authority’.Footnote ⁶⁰ As an example of a successful intervention of this kind, the Communiqué’s framers called attention (in an earlier location within the document) to GAFCON’s ‘instrumental’ role in the formation of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), noting that the ‘Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans’ (GFCA) both extended recognition to this ecclesial body and granted its archbishop a position on GAFCON’s Primates’ Council.Footnote ⁶¹

Whereas the membership of ACNA warranted biopolitical support insofar as it had remained faithful to the forms of theological reflection espoused by GAFCON, both The Episcopal Church and the ACC had been infected by a ‘false gospel’ and, ipso facto, faced the looming prospect of destruction.Footnote ⁶² The contrast between these two populations was articulated in stark terms in an article introducing the June 2018 GAFCON in Jerusalem, the authors of which, after registering their concerns about the ability of the existing instruments of communion to place a check on The Episcopal Church’s continued participation in the Communion, averred that:

True to the body-political logic of their project, the leadership of GAFCON herein delineated two competing modalities of theological reflection. Those who adhered to the first way, which included the members of GAFCON itself, would flourish because they had been assimilated into a population of the faithful that was governed by both the principles of the Bible and, ultimately, the living God. By contrast, the population that, by accepting a false gospel, instead observed the second way, of which the membership of The Episcopal Church was a prominent constituency, found itself on a path towards death because its identity was undergirded by a non-Christian past rather than the biblical history.

As the rhetoric of both the Jerusalem Statement and the Nairobi Communiqué attests, in calling attention to this latter population’s vacuous counter-history, the leaders of GAFCON licensed themselves to act as a catalyst for this group’s inevitable demise, specifically by destabilizing those institutional apparatuses that sustain this population’s existence in the present. Or, as the language of the communiqué from the 2018 Jerusalem Conference – entitled ‘Letter to the Churches’ – framed the matter: ‘Over the past twenty years, we have seen the hand of God leading us toward a reordering of the Anglican Communion.’Footnote ⁶⁴ That reordering is one that the Archbishop of Canterbury ought to urge forward, or so the framers of the communiqué indicated when they issued that figure a double injunction to extend invitations to Lambeth 2020 to the bishops of ACNA and the Anglican Church in Brazil but to refuse to proffer such invitations to the bishops of those other Anglican provinces that ‘are in contradiction to the teaching of Scripture and Resolution I.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Calling not only for a strong separation of the insiders from the outsiders, the living from the dead,Footnote ⁶⁶ but, moreover, for that separation to be effected and enforced through an imperial action by the Archbishop of Canterbury to recognize only some populations as legitimate Anglican bodies, this document fit squarely within GAFCON’s body-political project. If the Communion was indeed undergoing a divinely ordained “reordering,” it was along colonial lines.

Conclusion: Whither the Church of the Dead?

The leaders of GAFCON portray their movement as a decolonial trajectory within global Anglicanism. In this article, I have called that portrayal into question.Footnote ⁶⁷ Orthodoxy and colonialism share a common body-political logic, one in which biopower and necropower manufacture subjects that are deserving of life and of death, respectively. That same logic permeates the theology of GAFCON, finding expression in both the writings of General Secretary Peter Jensen as well as in the official documents released after the movement’s 2008, 2013 and 2018 meetings.

Yet the GAFCON movement is by no means unique in that, despite its leaders’ express claims to the contrary, it has been unable to escape the long shadow of Christian colonialism. Christian history is littered with the corpses of those who encountered a putative gospel of life and found only death; it is upon their remains, rather than the faith of dogmaticians or ecclesial leaders, that the Church is founded. Resurrected to a spectral existence in the limen between the life they were denied and the abyss into which theo-colonialists past and present have consistently endeavored to cast their memory, these bodies continue, uncannily, to haunt adherents of Christians orthodoxy, making their presence known in the faces and voices of those populations that Christians continue to consign to oblivion. A viable decolonial theology is, consequently, first and foremost a macabre one, that is, a theology, not so much proclaimed as whispered in the dark, that is as much a cenotaph for the innumerable departed as it is a temple for the God of the Dead. Abandoning orthodoxy in an effort to reimagine the contours of catholicity, it is a heretical theology done by and for the fallen, yet one the articulation of which ought also to give hope to those who count themselves among the living. For, in the final analysis, orthodoxy makes corpses of us all.