Detoxifying Theology, Theological Pathologies and Liberative Antidotes from Palestine and Queer/Cuir/Marica Dissidence

This article advances a systematic theological diagnosis of the contemporary crisis in Christian thought, contending that dominant modes of theologizing have become epistemically, politically, and spiritually toxic. Beginning with a critical analysis of the habitus of theologization, it demonstrates how inherited theological dispositions reproduce and normalize forms of violence embedded within colonial, cisheteropatriarchal, and necropolitical regimes. The study then interrogates the proliferation of theological narratives of terror and the corrosive effects of decent, docile, and obedient theologies that legitimize exclusion, dehumanization, and imperial projects—most starkly exemplified in the deployment of theological discourses to rationalize the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the systematic marginalization of queer/cuir/maricas, trans, and gender-nonconforming bodies. Against this backdrop, the article proposes two liberative antidotes. The first is Palestinian Liberation Theologies (PLT), which reclaim theological imagination through situated resistance, political commitment, and forms of spiritual endurance. The second emerges from Latin American Liberation Theology (LLT), as reconfigured through queer/cuir/marica dissident experiences, whose embodied, indecent, and decolonial imaginaries disrupt regimes of theological purity and open pathways for insurgent, life-affirming practices. Taken together, these antitoxic interventions articulate a decolonial and emancipatory horizon for theology—one grounded in relationality, insurgent imagination, and activist commitment. In this sense, theological detoxification is not merely a critical task but an indispensable condition for envisioning alternative worlds amid ongoing civilizational collapse.