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61. Lisa Sharon Harper (Episcopal) | White Supremacy, Evangelicalism & Decolonizing Christianity
What if the Christianity many Americans are deconstructing isn’t Christianity itself-but a version shaped by whiteness, empire, and power?
Lisa Sharon Harper is a public theologian, author, activist, playwright, founder and president of FreedomRoad, and is currently discerning ordination in the Episcopal Church.
Lisa traces the complicated history of American evangelicalism—from the Black church and abolitionist movements to fundamentalism, the Southern Baptist Convention, segregation, and the modern political power of white evangelicalism.
Then she challenges one of the central ideas of modern faith deconstruction:
Christianity was never a white faith.
Jesus and the earliest Christians emerged from colonized people in the ancient Near East. Lisa argues that abandoning Christianity because of white Christian racism can leave the supremacy of Western Christianity itself uninterrogated.
She doesn’t call us to deconstruct Christianity.
She calls us to decolonize it.
We explore Acts 2, implicit bias, the Black church, fundamentalism, Christian nationalism, religious certainty-and what happens when we rediscover Jesus outside the version of Christianity we inherited.
Lisa leaves us with three words:
“Seek brown Jesus.”
✨ GUEST + FOLLOW
Lisa Sharon Harper (Episcopal) IG: @lisasharper
Founder & President, FreedomRoad @freedomroad.us
📚 MENTIONED + RESOURCES
Christena Cleveland (PhD) — IG: @christenacleveland
Rev. Dr. David P. Gushee — IG: @d_pgushee
Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas — IG: @revdrkbd
Sojourners — Independent Christian magazine exploring faith, culture, politics & social justice.
📖 Lisa’s 2015 essay that opens this episode:
“Four Easy Ways to Be a White Supremacist”
https://sojo.net/magazine/septemberoctober-2015/four-easy-ways-be-white-supremacist
📰 Explore Sojourners: @sojogram
https://sojo.net
⛪ THE SACRED SLOPE LABS
Three virtual labs, 2 options per lab, open to everyone, everywhere. Attend one, two, or all three.
LAB 1: I Thought This Was Christianity
📅 October 22 & 23
LAB 2: Who Formed Us?
📅 November 5 & 6
LAB 3: Speaking Across the Faith Divide
📅 November 12 & 13
🎟️ Register: thesacredslope.com
🥚 Listen all the way through for an Easter egg revealing our first guest speaker for Lab 1.
⏱️ EPISODE CHAPTERS
02:42 — White Supremacy: Explicit vs. Implicit Bias
09:56 — Meet Lisa Sharon Harper
12:23 — PhD in Womanist Ethics
18:56 — Evangelical ≠ Republican or Democrat
21:48 — What Does “Evangelical” Mean?
28:00 — The Black Church & Second Great Awakening
32:43 — Slaveholder Faith & American Christianity
36:38 — What’s Behind “Non-Denominational”?
41:36 — Should We Save Evangelicalism?
44:00 — Fundamentalism & Certainty
45:23 — What Happens After Deconstruction?
47:06 — Christianity Was Never a White Faith
52:51 — Decolonizing Acts 2
55:47 — “I’m Not for Deconstructing. I’m for Decolonizing.”
57:13 — “Seek Brown Jesus”
57:20 — Sacred Slope Labs + Easter Egg
#LisaSharonHarper #DecolonizingChristianity #Deconstruction #Evangelicalism #ChristianNationalism
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About The Sacred Slope
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Where the slippery slope becomes sacred ground.
For the spiritually tender - raised in or rooted in Christianity.
Come explore our global, diverse, inclusive Christian faith, deconstruction, and spiritual identity in a rapidly changing world. Through conversations with clergy, scholars, and cultural voices, the show creates space for people navigating faith after certainty, church harm, or political co-option of religion.
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