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

1. The Habitus of Theologization

Our first task is to reflect critically on the discipline in which we situate ourselves: Theology. It is a field that often eludes me, perhaps because I resist being domesticated into a specific habitus of theologization—a disciplinary formation shaped by intellectual sanitization, depersonalization, and appeals to authorized voices.8

Theology and Theologizing, as a situated and embodied practice, are never neutral. Following Bourdieu, habitus can be understood as a system of dispositions that shapes perception, judgment, and action.9 Transposed into the theological field, the habitus of theologization names the assemblage of epistemic, discursive, and ritual matrices that regulate who may speak of God, how, from where, and with what effects. It is not simply an intellectual exercise, but an embodied form of power.10 This habitus, however, is not a transparent medium of transcendence. It has been historically configured in ways that sustain domination.11 Its toxicity exceeds doctrinal error, operating instead through affective economies, selective hermeneutics, liturgical grammars, and metaphysical architectures that establish hierarchies between lives deemed worthy and unworthy. In this sense, hegemonic Christianity has not only spoken about God; it has normalized forms of theological expression that reproduce exclusion while presenting themselves as revelation.12

A particularly effective mechanism within this system is the corpus of “texts of terror.” These are not simply scriptural passages historically mobilized to justify conquest, slavery, misogyny, or the criminalization of sexual dissidence. Rather, they function as theopolitical devices that produce a pedagogy of fear: fear of bodies, of non-normative sexualities, of feminine autonomy, of racialized and colonized worlds, and of spiritual practices that exceed institutional control. Their power lies not in the text itself, but in their deployment as instruments of existential domestication, securing obedience at the cost of critical consciousness and imaginative possibility.

This textual regime is sustained by a broader socio-theological formation: sacralized cisheteropatriarchy. Here, white supremacy, hegemonic masculinity, sexual regulation, colonial epistemologies, and clerical authority converge to produce theology as a technology of normalization—enforcing compulsory gender, binary ontology, and institutional obedience, and other terrible prisons. The problem is not merely that cisheteropatriarchy operates within Christianity, but that it has been naturalized as part of its revelatory structure. What is culturally white, cisheterosexual, and male becomes divine; the dissident and the peripheral are pathologized, as the richness of plurality and diversity is rendered suspect.

Under these conditions, the hegemonic habitus of theologization generates perceptual frameworks incapable of encountering alterity without translating it into threat.13 The issue, then, is not only the existence of toxic theologies, but the normalization of theological toxicity as an environment so pervasive that it obscures the distinction between the divine and the theo(ideo)logical apparatus that speaks in its name.14

However, the Christian tradition is not monolithic; beyond the hegemony that presents itself as singular, forms of resistance have always existed. Alongside its hegemonic forms, a critical and prophetic lineage persists—one that gives rise to insurrectionary practices of theologization emerging from the margins of social death. If the dominant habitus operates through fear and hierarchy, these alternative practices cultivate dignity, relationality, and emancipation. They do not abandon theology but reconfigure it: transforming scripture from an instrument of control into a space of expanded habitation, and faith from obedience into collective imagination.

Detoxifying theology and processes of theologizing, then, is not merely an academic task but a form of theo-spiritual public health. It requires interrupting the reproduction of symbolic violence, dismantling pedagogies of fear, and learning to name God beyond the colonial grammars of domination. This entails constructing a habitus of theologization that enables life: where mystery does not legitimize power but shelters difference, and where theology ceases to function as moral surveillance of cisheteropatriarchal order and becomes a site of liberation.15

The theology that emerges from Palestine, from sexual and gender dissidence, and from other global margins points in this direction. It is a theology that does not fear bodies, domesticate resistance, or sanctify power—a theology not only about life, but capable of sustaining it. The future of Christianity, therefore, does not depend on new doctrinal formulations but on dismantling the conditions that have rendered it uninhabitable for so many.

2. General Diagnosis: Our Epistemologies, Discourses, and Practices Are Poisoned

Theology has not merely been affected by the world’s toxicity; it has actively participated in its production.16 It has shaped and legitimized forms of violence within the collective imagination under the guise of the sacred. If global institutions warn of the poisoning of the planet and its inhabitants, theology must recognize its own role in this process.17 Dominant representations of the divine—embedded in doctrines, images, and interpretive traditions—function as persistent symbolic contaminants: they accumulate, resist transformation, and sediment across generations. In this sense, they operate as theological “forever chemicals,” colonizing religious consciousness and requiring long historical processes to be dismantled.18

These toxic formations do not arise in isolation. They are embedded within broader regimes of symbolic extractivism and necropolitics. Just as extractive economies produce territories of sacrifice,19 hegemonic theologies have generated spiritual “sacrifice zones”: bodies and communities made to bear the weight of a God constructed in the image of domination.20 The critical question, then, is not whether theology contaminates, but how its categories, narratives, and practices distribute harm and legitimize exclusion.

The highest concentrations of this toxicity emerge where theology functions as a legitimating apparatus for hierarchical and sacrificial orders. Contemporary forms of capitalism—understood as a quasi-religious system—demand continuous offerings: feminized, racialized, precarized, migrant, and dissident lives.21 What doctrinal oil spills suffocate critical thought? What invisible gases circulate like sacred incense, choking those who inhale them? What semantic landmines explode in the corridors of dogmatics, destroying those who dare to walk there?

In this context, theology often does not merely accompany violence but renders it meaningful, even necessary. When it refuses to interrogate such structures, silence itself becomes a liturgical act—one that normalizes devastation, even as we acknowledge the unequal risks faced by those who choose to speak.

Hegemonic theology, when it refuses to interrogate these structures and opts instead for silence, does not merely bless them—it liturgizes them. It must be acknowledged that, for some theologians, speaking out and acting in such a context may entail persecution, exclusion, and significant risks to personal security. Yet the prevailing silence remains overwhelming; it reverberates like an echo that, through its indifference, tacitly consents to genocide.

I pose these questions to those who encounter this reflection, and simultaneously to myself: Is there truly nothing to be said? Is there no contribution I am able to make? Am I entirely constrained, with no room for action? Is there not a local community in which my hands and feet—my prayers and my songs—might participate meaningfully? Is even a modest act of material support beyond reach? Have I, at the very least, attempted to reach out to any community—whether theological or otherwise—to offer solidarity?

The honest answers that each theologian can offer to these questions mark a present, personal diagnosis. Moreover, if in this kind of examination of conscience we include the contextualization and characterization of terms such as “Palestine,” “Sudan,” “Congo,” “Iran,” “queer people,” “trans people,” “immigrants,” “Black people,” “victims of sexual violence,” “survivors of spiritual and religious abuse,” and so forth, we can readily recognize all that—sometimes near, at other times more distant—we have ignored.

The current situation in Gaza makes this complicity particularly visible. Genocide is not an “external” tragedy to the theological field; it is a visceral symptom of its long-standing complicity. In the name of a supremacist biblical hermeneutic, a discourse has taken root that not only explains violence but sanctifies it. Richard Dworkin warned that certain cultures may justify even genocide if they believe it protects their identity: “many cultures insist that the destiny of one religion or ethnic group or nation is far more important than that of others, such that genocide becomes permissible to protect religious, racial, or national identity.”22 Today, this logic is embodied in fundamentalist religious Zionism, which has instrumentalized Scripture to justify exclusion, occupation, and extermination.23 The problem is not love for a sacred text but its (theo)ideological kidnapping: The Bible reduced to a property deed, to a certificate of ethnic exceptionality, to a celestial authorization for dispossession. This hermeneutic, far from declaring justice, suffocates “the voice crying out for justice, peace, and sovereignty;”24 it distorts the sacred to make it compatible with domination. Narratives calling for universal compassion or care for the stranger are drowned out by the theological noise of exclusive privilege.

This literalist, selective, decontextualized use of Scripture is not an interpretive accident but a political strategy. When one insists that everything must occur precisely as it appears in the Scriptures, what is being defended is not the integrity of a religious tradition but its instrumentalization to fortify power.25 What is presented as theology is a technology of supremacy. Similar logics operate in other religious nationalisms that, as numerous analyses show, mobilize the myth of being a “chosen people”26 to consolidate exclusionary, hierarchical, exceptionalist projects. This “poison of nationalism” is not an isolated case but part of a global pattern in which religious fundamentalism and state projects feed one another.27 As a religious, colonial, and nationalist fundamentalism, it carries with it “repression, poverty, and humiliation, all combined to push [Palestinians], by means of genocide, out of their land until it is cleared, as in the legend of the Promised Land.”28

Fundamentalist Zionism—and its geopolitical alliances with empires, economic lobbies, and theo-political evangelicals—is a conspicuous example, but not the only one.29 It is one node within a broader historical structure: a Christianity that invented crusades,30 evangelized by the sword, blessed colonialism, nourished supremacies, legitimized enslavement, molded hegemonic masculinities, and exported an armed God.31 This pattern of sacralized violence produces not only physical deaths but also “social deaths”: bodies expelled from networks of recognition, removed from legitimate speech, stripped of the right to name God, etc. This violence is not merely to kill but to erase, disappear, invalidate, and silence.

Yet this process not only destroys the lives of others; it also corrodes the theological-spiritual experience of those who uphold it. Fundamentalist, cisheteropatriarchal, anti-rights structures do not merely administer violence—they internalize it. They generate anxiety, shame, desire-repression, control of subjectivity, imposition of binary norms, and mutilation of moral, political, and theological imagination. They produce docile believers, unable to recognize that they have been catechized into sustaining theologies that dehumanize them and spiritualities that demand suffering and penitence. Colonization, therefore, is not merely territorial; it is psychological, affective, erotic, corporeal, and spiritual. As incisive analyses note, the fundamentalist project does not seek liberation but the “masculine return”32 of power: the fabrication of a phallocentric world,33 a theopolitics in which the divine upholds the empire of the male, white supremacy, nation, doctrinal purity, and corrective violence.

Given this diagnosis, theology cannot offer cosmetic improvements or decorative reforms. The task is not to “clean up” language, nor to insert fashionable terminology to appear progressive, nor to perform inclusion by speaking in the first person about experiences not lived. Theology that refuses to consent to catastrophe must commit to concrete actions and responsible narratives that enable the detoxification of theological imaginaries—a detoxification urgently needed because theology has been one of the most effective weapons of imperial and colonial projects. In Hanna Reichel's words:

How do we live in these ruins, if not by attending to their distinctly theological formation? What can we rebuild from the rubble? Can we at least remove some of the theological bullets that have been shot at people and are bleeding them out? In which theological swords may we recognize repurposed plowshares, and which devices of war might we yet be able to turn into instruments of peace?34

We must acknowledge the diagnosis: our epistemologies, discourses, and practices are poisoned. I repeat insistently: The task is not merely to revise language but to dismantle the structures that render theology harmful and to generate alternative epistemologies, non-exclusionary narratives and practices no longer grounded in sacrifice or domination of any kind. This requires a deliberate process of detoxification: unlearning sacralized violence, interrupting alliances between religion and necropolitics, and undoing the cisheteropatriarchal, classist, misogynistic, and racist logics sedimented across generations.

Such work is not only intellectual. It must also be affective, embodied, and communal, confronting the gap between theological discourse and lived realities. Detoxification entails recovering what has been condemned, refusing death-driven mandates, and decolonizing the language of the divine. It also requires leaving behind both the security of orthodoxy when it functions as control and the insulation of academic enclaves, to engage the margins where alternative spiritualities and forms of life persist.

If theology has contributed to the poisoning of the world, it may also participate in its healing—but only by reconstituting itself from below. The task is not to manage toxicity but to dismantle it, within theological practice and in the relational worlds it shapes. Only then can theology become a practice that sustains life, fosters dignity, and helps render the world more habitable for all.

3. Highly Toxic Potions: Theological Narratives of Terror

I reiterate: the act of theologizing has never been neutral. It has produced languages capable of sustaining hope, but also doctrinal formations that circulate as everyday “potions”: consumed, taught, and institutionalized as salvation while functioning to regulate, discipline, and harm bodies, territories, and subjectivities. Within Christianity—understood not only as a religious tradition but as a historical and civilizational formation entangled with colonial expansion— theology has not merely interpreted the world; it has participated in shaping colonial regimes of domination. While not all theological production is reducible to such dynamics, significant strands of its dominant habitus have generated configurations that normalize violence, legitimize it, or render it sacred.

To name these dynamics requires moving beyond an exclusive focus on overtly extremist actors. Theological terror does not emerge only from spectacular acts of violence or from self-identified fundamentalist groups; it is also produced within the ordinary operations of theological discourse, institutional practice, and religious subject formation. What is at stake, therefore, is the identification of theological-spiritual dispositifs that function as terrorist assemblages of fear, control, obedience, and legitimation.35

Recognizing this requires acknowledging complicity. As Judith Butler reminds us, critique does not operate from a position of exteriority; it is always entangled in the very relations of power it seeks to contest.36 Accordingly, the problem is not limited to particular doctrines or interpretations, but extends to the mechanisms that shape theological subjectivity itself: the formation of desire, the regulation of speech, the authorization of certain voices, and the affective economies that orient bodies toward obedience. Transforming these dynamics demands more than doctrinal correction; it requires intervening in the symbolic infrastructures that render theology a medium for fear, exclusion, and silence.

One of the most enduring mechanisms within this infrastructure is the use of Scripture as an instrument of harm. Phyllis Trible’s notion of “texts of terror” designates passages whose narrative force has been mobilized to legitimize oppression and violence.37 These texts are not inherently terrorizing; their effects depend on how they are activated within interpretive, doctrinal, and institutional frameworks.38 When deployed as theopolitical devices, they operate as tools of discipline, producing a pedagogy of fear directed toward particular bodies and forms of life.

The biblical corpus includes narratives in which violence is not explicitly condemned but narrated as part of the religious imagination: the dismemberment of the concubine in Judges, the rape of Tamar, Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter, the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, or the destruction of Sodom, later mobilized in homophobic discourses despite alternative prophetic interpretations.39 These narratives have functioned historically as matrices through which sacred violence is normalized, especially when detached from critical hermeneutical engagement.40

Trible’s intervention does not seek to resolve or redeem these texts, but to dwell in their violence, preserving their memory without neutralization. In doing so, she reconfigures the hermeneutical task: rather than transforming victims into abstract moral figures, she restores their status as subjects whose suffering demands recognition. This approach reveals that theological harm does not arise solely from misinterpretation, but from interpretive practices that align scripture with structures of domination. Following South African liberation hermeneutics, the Bible must be understood as a “site-of-struggle,” a field of political contestation rather than a neutral repository of transcendent truths.41

It is worth asking whether, when we hear one of these biblical texts deployed as a lethal weapon against others, we do anything at all: Do we challenge and critically contest such interpretations? Do we defend those harmed by these forms of preaching? Do we at least withdraw from spaces that wield scripture as a machine gun, firing relentlessly at excluded populations? Do we refuse to minimize phobic narratives and insist that those who utter them be held accountable for their words? Do we simply remain silent—acquiescing in indifference, looking away, and leaving their victims alone because we are not the ones under attack? If we choose the latter path, we must acknowledge our exceedingly high level of theological and spiritual toxicity.

The effects of theological terror, however, cannot be reduced to textual content alone. They must be understood across multiple, interrelated registers. First, scriptural texts whose narrative or rhetorical force can be mobilized to authorize exclusion or violence. Second, doctrinal formations that stabilize and systematize such readings, embedding them within institutional teaching and pastoral practice. Third, broader theopolitical deployments in which these elements are translated into projects of governance, territorial control, and social regulation. Harm emerges through the articulation of these registers: through the pulpit that activates the text, the doctrine that canonizes it, the institution that enforces it, the political order that benefits from it, and the congregant who acquiesces to what is said.

In this sense, theological terror operates not as an isolated phenomenon but as an accumulation of practices that shape both social structures and individual subjectivities. As Hannah Arendt observed in a different context, systems of violence often depend less on exceptional cruelty than on ordinary forms of compliance and the suspension of critical reflection.42 Similarly, theological terror is sustained through everyday practices: liturgies that normalize hierarchy, pedagogies that discourage questioning, and institutional cultures that reward conformity.

Critical voices within Christian traditions have long recognized these dynamics. Dorothee Sölle argued that any theology that legitimizes oppression ceases to be authentically Christian, insofar as it abandons its ethical commitment to the other.43 Leonardo Boff, reflecting on the affective architecture of fear within religious systems, exposed how doctrines such as hell can function as instruments of control when deployed to secure obedience. These critiques highlight that theological violence operates not only through explicit coercion but through internalized fear and moral regulation.44

The contemporary relevance of these dynamics is evident in contexts where theological narratives intersect with geopolitical conflicts, systematic genocidal actions, neocolonial dynamics, and neoliberal projects. If the twenty-first century has been described as an “age of terror,”45 this characterization must also account for the role of theological-spiritual narratives in producing and sustaining environments of fear, control, and domination. The devastating situation in Gaza, for instance, illustrates how certain supremacist hermeneutics can be mobilized to justify exclusion, occupation, and violence. Predominantly, in the majority of cases, Scripture is transformed into an instrument of authorization, and theology becomes entangled with political projects that claim divine legitimacy.46

This becomes especially evident in the ascendant Christian Zionism—or Zionist Christianity47—an eschatological-geopolitical dispositif that converts territorial occupation into a theological mandate, militarism into a prophetic sign, and sexual/ethnic/racial cleansing into an inevitable appendix of the divine timetable.48 This is no accidental phenomenon; it is theopolitical engineering. Christian Zionism understands the State of Israel not as a modern national construction but as an accelerator of apocalypse, the stage for celestial consummation of power. Supporting Israel thus becomes not merely a political option but a theological and spiritual obligation.49 Theology becomes an engine of geostrategy; prophecy, an operational manual; the Bible, a tactical map; salvation, a colonial reward. In Abya Yala, this dispositif has been disseminated through U.S. missionary interventions, religious diplomacy, neo-Pentecostal imaginaries and prosperity theologies, foreign policy alignments, media industries of faith, and alliances between political and clerical elites that consolidate what Rodrigo Karmy Bolton calls the “Israelization” of politics.50 Here, theology does not interpret history; it places it in the service of the powerful, reshaping it to their advantage and, in the process, sacrificing countless lives.

This “sacred terror”51 operates within broader matrices of coloniality described by Mbembe, Mignolo, Spivak, Quijano, and Castro-Gómez as regimes of knowledge, extraction, and death.52 Paul B. Preciado frames this as a rationality: “we have ruptured the earth to extract fossilized sunlight and burned it incessantly; transformed nonhuman animals into digestible protein packages; and rendered the subaltern human body an energetic package from which to extract labor, reproduction, and potentia gaudendi.”53 What role has theology played in this sacrificial economy? A liturgical one: consecrating extraction, blessing conquest, declaring hierarchy divine, moralizing accumulation, spiritualizing dispossession, and stigmatizing dissidence as enmity against God. Theology has gregorianized and pontificated the funerary sound of a collapsing world.

Terror does not operate only by narrative excess but also by narrative saturation: “a dense forest with disappointingly homogeneous contours,”54 where violence ceases to be an event and becomes an unalterable, inevitable echo. Theology, by omission or direct participation, has served the construction of terror-spaces nourished by myth and silence in which violence persists.55 Theological terrorism does not speak only when it screams; it also speaks when it falls silent—when it spiritualizes death, resigns injustice as divine design, individualizes social guilt, privatizes political suffering, and depoliticizes hope.

What remains, then, for theology expelled from the paradise of interpretive privilege? What remains is radical detoxification. The task is not merely to craft new hermeneutics, but to dismantle the economies of fear, the grammars of extermination, the canons of exclusion, the colonial metalanguages, the pedagogies of hatred, and the liturgies of submission. What is needed is a theology that does not treat terror with more pious versions of the same power, but interrupts it, confronts it, and delegitimizes it. A theology that acknowledges that the problem is not only re-reading the Bible but imagining life beyond Christianity’s monopoly over the sacred. A theology no longer aspiring to be privileged, universal, normative, or regulatory, but situated, wounded, decentered, vulnerable, litigating, impure, decolonial, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, trans-feminist, trans-affirming, post-Christian, and fiercely anti-theocratic.

Theological detoxification will not consist in purifying the doctrinal deposit, but in dismantling the laboratory. It requires abandoning the fantasy of an innocent, naïve theology in need only of exegetical refinements or conceptual updates. Rather, it calls for recognizing that theology is compromised not only in its conclusions but in its very conditions of possibility: in who is authorized to speak of God and who is consigned to silence; in which bodies the sacred is deemed credible and in which skins grace is rendered suspect; in which languages God becomes unintelligible and in which geographies faith becomes an instrument of occupation.

A detoxified theology will not offer new formulas of universal salvation. It will resemble instead a practice of political healing, critical memory, and embodied justice. It will have fewer cathedrals and more archipelagos; fewer dogmas and more covenants of care; fewer prophetic heroes and more reparative communities; less apologetics and more listening. It will not aim to reclaim the world for God, but to protect the world from those who have destroyed it in God’s name.

For the salvation that is needed today is not salvation through theology, but salvation from theology. Not saving the world with our gods, but saving the world from our gods. Not protecting faith from terror, but protecting people from faith weaponized as terror. That is the detoxification still pending. That is the antidote yet undistilled. That is the inescapable risk—and ethical imperative—of theological thought in the twenty-first century: never again to repackage the poison under new labels of benevolence, and never again to turn God into a weapon, Scripture into a club, doctrine into a border, or hope into an alibi for extermination. I dream of this other theology, even if only as a possibility.

4. Decent, Docile, and Obedient Theologies in the Service of the Cisheteropatriarchy

As previously indicated, theology—far from being an aseptic discourse or an ethereal reflection—has often functioned as a doctrinal apparatus serving a civilizational project that fuses religious supremacy, coloniality, racism, and cisheteropatriarchy. This project, still incarnated in institutions, methods, and theological sensibilities, operates as a slow-acting poison: it does not destroy immediately, but infiltrates, anesthetizes, normalizes, and ultimately reorganizes the entire body of faith. The problem is not merely conceptual errors or interpretive missteps; it is, as noted earlier, a habitus of theologization that has learned to discipline bodies and domesticate God to sustain an order in which the masculine, the white, the heterosexual, the cisgender, and the imperial function as the exclusive mediators of the sacred.

Daniel Boyarin captured this pathology with striking symbolic clarity when he described Christian Zionist fundamentalism as a “masculine return to Phallustine, not Palestine”56: a return not to an actual land or real peoples, but to the fantasy of phallic, territorial, and military domination cloaked in messianic and eschatological language. In this gesture, the deepest impulse of theological cisheteropatriarchy becomes visible: to conquer to interpret, to occupy to redeem, to possess to save. Elizabeth Stuart articulated the urgency in her incisive question: “What is the ultimate value of incorporation into an institution which even heterosexuals are asking serious questions about, an institution which was born, formed, and structured for and by patriarchy?”57 Her question exposes the mechanism: dominant and institutional theology does not seek reform or pursue structural change; it demands adoption, submission, obedience, and compliance.

This poison has produced an obedient and timid theology—narratively impoverished and politically complicit. A theology that, as Nicolás Panotto warns, has lost bodily, aesthetic, and social relevance because it fears everything that does not conform to its preconfigured grammar.58 A theology reduced to anecdote—devoid of present and bereft of critical futurity—able to speak of the world only by looking backward, recounting what was lived in other times, incapable of surviving the incursion of new bodies and sentipensares that unsettle the cisheteropatriarchal syntax of the sacred.59

Against this backdrop, queer/cuir/maricas and trans theologies have not emerged as mere “thematic niches” within the broader theological enterprise—though they may at times appear as such—, but as movements that denaturalize the sex-gender, epistemic, and temporal scripts that hegemonic Christianity has imposed as inevitable. When queer/cuir/marica and trans studies argue that time itself has been molded by cisheteronormativity,60 they are not speaking metaphorically: they are naming a technology of power that distributes life rhythms, defines legitimate biographies, assigns credible genealogies, and determines which bodies are allowed a future.61 For centuries, this matrix has decided not only who can love, but who may inherit, who may teach, who may be remembered, who may embody God, and who may speak in God’s name. This is why Marcella Althaus-Reid insisted on indecency as method: liberating God from the closet of traditional theological thought is not a rhetorical flourish but an act of insurrection against a regime that has made sexual morality its preferred device of surveillance and expulsion.62

The same regime is evident in the field of biblical studies, where—as critical scholars have repeatedly demonstrated—a profoundly white, cis, heterosexual, and androcentric orientation continues not only to dominate interpretation but to define which interpretations are even thinkable63: “in Christian queer and liberation theologies decenter the cisheteropatriarchal scripts that are accessories to, yet oppressively interpellated with, traditional thought and practice.”64 Biblical reading is thus not a neutral activity but a political project that has legitimized colonization, slavery, territorial annexation, and the execution of dissident bodies. Re-reading the texts historically used to justify sexual and gender terror is not an auxiliary hermeneutical exercise; it is the dismantling of technologies that organized moral panic as a mode of governance. The historical fury unleashed against sexual dissidence is not an emotional excess, but the logical effect of a system that transforms sexuality into a theological border, a political laboratory, a civilizational marker.

If sexuality has been a border, territory has been its mirror. Christian Zionism, particularly in its dispensationalist form, represents the convergence of eschatological, imperial, and bodily theologies in their most distilled expression.65 Its logic is linear and brutal: supporting the State of Israel is not a political stance but an eschatological command; occupying Palestine is not a tragedy but a necessary prelude to the consummation of the divine plan revealed in Scripture, especially in texts such as Genesis 12:3 and the Revelations.66 The destruction of Palestinian lives is thus not a scandal for this supremacist, fundamentalist, and hegemonic theology, but a kind of “prophetic rubric.” It is no surprise, then, that Boyarin describes the project as a “phallic return”: its goal is not redemption but geopolitical erection, military domination, and cosmic authorization to rule.

In Abya Yala, this eschatological imaginary translated into a teopolitical enthusiasm that unabashedly embraces coloniality: evangelical missions that exported biblical interpretation as an instrument of occupation; leaders who celebrate Israel not out of political solidarity but apocalyptic expectation; theological dialogues rendered timid and complicit, unable to pronounce the word Palestine without doctrinal anxiety.67 As theologian Sarojini Nadar has reminded us, “the bodies of Palestinian children in Gaza do not lie. They tell a story of real suffering. Bodies do not lie, and bodies are imbued with names, identities, and characteristics.”68 To refuse to name the crime as it unfolds—in theological, religious, and spiritual terms—is to administer it; to fail to denounce it is to enact a liturgy of complicity; to pray for peace while maintaining economic pacts with entities that promote occupation, apartheid, and genocide is to empty prayer of all moral legitimacy and convert it into a contradictory gesture. I will repeat it as many times as necessary.

The vast majority of theologians worldwide have remained silent during this time of genocide, as though a “preferential option for the Palestinians” were not urgent—precisely the charge Nadar leveled in her keynote address at the DARE 2025 Conference, “Beyond Neutrality: An Epistemological Preference for Palestine.”69

Even the notable silence and timidity of a significant number of “intellectual voices” within Liberation Theologies regarding the genocide in Gaza is a symptom that exceeds the current moment: it is evidence of an epistemic and theological limit. The “preferential option for the poor” appears to shrink its prophetic grammar when the poor are Palestinians and the aggressor quotes the Bible, and likewise when the poor are dissident from the sex-gender system.

It is here that Elizabeth Phillips’s warning becomes crucial. If Christian Zionism has been studied more through journalism or pastoral caution than through academic theology itself, the issue is not the absence of evidence but the refusal to break the pact of complicity and face its consequences.70 The critique has been descriptive, not structural and anatomical. Christian Zionism is not merely a dangerous doctrine; it is a mode of world-ordering. A mode that entangles theology, white supremacy, empire, militarization, and cisheteromasculinity as technologies of destiny; a mode characterized as the “Israelization” of politics—the transfer of securitarian, colonial, and theocratic logics into the organization of state and religious life.71 This Israelization is not a simple importation; it demands active adoption, facilitated through political alliances, theological narratives, and cultural mechanisms that allow it to take root. It offers a mythic script in which power is assumed as divine right and violence is authorized as redemptive mandate, inviting local actors to embody and reproduce it as their own. This has historically found its primary terrain of expansion within Christian churches (Catholic, mainline Christian, Protestant, Evangelical, and Neo-Pentecostal, etc.).

Thus, to speak of the poisoning of theology is not an aesthetic maneuver: it is a diagnosis. The toxic element is not the terminology, but the assemblage produced by the following convergence: cisheteronormativity + coloniality + imperial eschatology + white supremacy + extractivist biblicism + teopolitical masculinism. From this assemblage emerges a Christianity that not only tolerates oppression but requires it to confirm itself as true.

Detoxifying theology requires more than new topics; it demands a new sensorium, a reconfigured perceptual apparatus. It requires recognizing that what has been presented as “tradition” is, in many respects, a pedagogy of subjugation; that what has been defended as “orthodoxy” constitutes a choreography of power; that what has been narrated as “mission” is a story of territorial and theological-spiritual expansion; and that what has been glorified as “morality” is essentially a sexual grammar of control.

Liberative, antipatriarchal, antiracist, decolonial, transfeminist, queer/cuir/marica, trans, and nonbinary theologies are not contemporary addenda—they are dismantling operations. Their aim is not to dialogue with theological cisheteropatriarchy as one reforms an institution, but to interrupt it as one disables a machine. They refuse neutrality because they know neutrality, indifference, and silence are the courtesies of executioners. They refuse elegance and respectability because they recognize that moderation is a pedagogy of docility and training. They refuse obedience because they have identified that every obedient theology ultimately blesses and reproduces the violence it claims to oppose.

Let us speak metaphorically, once again: the task is not to add voices to the choir, but to alter the score. Not to demand seats at the table, but to question the table itself. Not to reform the traditional theological subject, but to destabilize the conditions of its possibility. The aim is to speak not of inclusion but of interruption; not of recognition but of epistemic insurrection; not of a God who tolerates diversity but of a God who collapses the hierarchies that made the divine name the empire’s preferred password. Only then can theology cease to be the characteristic language of submission and become, at last, the sacred grammar of liberation. This is precisely what the Palestinian people have historically taught us.

5. An Antidote: Palestinian Liberation Theologies

Contemporary theology—ailing from its complacency with supremacy, its domestication of Scripture, and its alliance with violent geopolitical projects—requires antidotes that do not merely alleviate the surface but reconfigure the very conditions of possibility for theological thought. Raheb argues that empires cultivate an “imperial theology”: theological and ideological frameworks that justify imperialism through religion, because empires cannot survive “by their military, political, and economic power and might alone.”72 In contrast, Palestinian Liberation Theology (PLT) emerges as a theological praxis that confronts the poisoning of the habitus of theologization and offers a situated, decolonial, and visceral alternative: a theologization that does not presume to heal the social body from an ivory tower but rather sustains besieged bodies and territories amid the catastrophe (al-Nakba), which also provoked a “Nakba of faith,” shaking the very core of the Palestinian Christian belief system.73

From its inception, PLT relocates Christology in the flesh of expropriated land and wounded bodies: Christ ceases to be an imperial liturgical icon and becomes a colonized and displaced body again. In this reorientation, the cross sheds its status as an atemporal emblem and becomes a political memory of state executions; walls are material structures of apartheid; and resurrection becomes a daily practice of insurrection against genocidal erasure. This theological displacement is not merely metaphorical. It elaborates ethics and hermeneutics that place concrete life—bodies, land, contexts, names—at the center of theological discourse. It is no surprise, then, that the Palestinian landscape has been described as the “fifth Gospel.”74

PLT is, in its genesis and ongoing development, a response to the sacred instrumentalization of the colonizing project. Ateek articulates this clearly in the preface to his work: “Palestinian liberation theology, as other liberation theologies, begins with its context and takes that context very seriously.”75 This implies a hermeneutic that attends first to the place of enunciation and to the victims of dispossession, and only then to the readings that, from the centers of power, have legitimized occupation.76 The Kairos document encapsulates this stance: “In this historic document, we Palestinian Christians declare that the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity, and that any theology that legitimizes the occupation is far from Christian teachings because true Christian theology is a theology of love and solidarity with the oppressed, a call to justice and equality among peoples.”77 PLT does not evade the socio-political nature of the text; it claims it as a criterion of moral truth.

PLT also confronts the colonial epistemology embedded in many of its own early articulations. The Munayer brothers identify a crucial problem: while Naim Ateek and Mitri Raheb were indispensable pioneers, their work—predominantly oriented toward Western audiences—risks anchoring Palestinian theology within epistemic frames of coloniality.78 As they state: “The main theological focus of PLT is hermeneutics; PLT seeks to critique Christian Zionism and other forms of colonial theologies that oppress Palestinians.”79 Their critique is accompanied by a methodological reflection on sources, audiences, and priorities: decolonization is not only the denunciation of Christian Zionism; it is the construction of theologies born of local experience that fortify communities within their own contexts.80 Thus, in the midst of settler colonialism and the ongoing genocide, they underline the urgency of decolonizing faith.

In this spirit, Nur Masalha calls for the decolonization of methodologies and sources, proposing a “civil liberation theology” that recovers indigenous knowledge, genealogies, and resistance practices.81 The task is not to translate Palestinian experience into languages that comfort the Global North, but to strengthen a theology that empowers those living under oppression. The Munayer brothers synthesize the challenge: “Decolonising and indigenising theology are difficult tasks… as we too are influenced and affected by coloniality and its epistemic and academic dominance.”82 PLT must therefore articulate itself as an autonomous practice that dialogues with neighboring traditions (Islam, critical Judaism, popular cultures) and with emancipatory theologies (womanist theology, Black theology, queer liberative thought), without being subsumed by the demand for external validation.83 Instead of maintaining theologies of empire and domination, we can embrace theologies of compassion, truth, and justice to navigate the desert of genocide.84 True transformation emerges from within. It begins with unlearning every form of hatred—racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, xenophobia—that we have been conditioned to internalize about the other.85

A central virtue of PLT is its retrieval of indigenous categories of resistance as theological sources: Sumud (steadfastness) and Intifada (uprising) are, as the Munayer brothers assert, “the Gospel of Liberation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century historical Palestine.”86 These categories reconfigure the theological imagination: faith expresses itself in the resolve to remain, in collective care, and in forms of resistance that exceed violence and instead constitute practices of subsistence, memory, and dignity.

Sumud is theology in the flesh, a mode of inhabiting the land as sacrament and of understanding the relationship to land as a theological and ethical foundation. This is why Palestinian theological thought emerges as a theology of the oppressed and stands as a form of spiritual ṣumūd and resistance against Western colonial, exclusivist, and racist theological constructs.87 In 1988, several Palestinian Christian leaders signed a declaration supporting the Intifada, “calling on their churches and congregations to assist the resistance efforts.”88 Thus, Palestinian Christian support for the First Intifada provided significant foundations for a Palestinian Liberation Theology.

PLT also articulates a forceful critique of the instrumentalization of the Hebrew Bible and sacred scriptures as a theopolitical justification for settlement: “Zionism has methodically leveraged the Hebrew Bible to confer theological normativity for the purpose of establishing an exclusive Jewish sovereignty in Palestine through settler-colonial practices.”89 De-Zionizing the Bible is not an apologetic endeavor but a hermeneutical repair that disarms instrumental readings that have naturalized colonization. In Justice and Only Justice, Ateek outlines the central pillars of PLT: faith, context, and justice. These three pillars function as primary interpretive principles through which Palestinian theology seeks to “de-Zionize” Scripture and restore its spiritual and liberative impetus.90 This resonates with the broader claim:

Theology is not exempt to the hegemony of the West, even if it is written by those suffering under colonial power structures and norms. So, being aware of the challenge coloniality possesses, we must question epistemological assumptions and approaches to ‘doing’ theology – particularly when such theology is meant to depict the experience of, advocate for and empower the weakest in society.91

There is an undeniable urgency to interrogate the categories of theological legitimacy.

PLT also inaugurates a fraternal dialogue with other struggles against racial and gender hierarchies. As the literature on interdependent resistances makes clear: womanist theology prompts Palestinian liberation theologians to confront questions of race and gender, while Palestinian Liberation Theology challenges Black and womanist theologians to unlearn the erasure of Palestine.92 This mutual recognition embodies Fannie Lou Hamer’s famous axiom: “Nobody’s Free until Everybody’s Free.”93 PLT is therefore not an isolated movement; it is a node within a theological ecology that insists on interconnected resistance.

The potency of PLT is also aesthetic and testimonial: Palestinian poetry—such as “God is a Gaza Refugee” (Ramzy Baroud)94, “Syllogism for Palestinian Grief” (Summer Awad)95, or “Sumud” (Lucas Al-Zoughbi)96—does not function as ornamental supplement but as theological vocabulary that retrieves the affective memory and spirituality often eroded by traditional academic theology. These texts make explicit that “God is Palestinian,” as S. Awad writes—not as a theoretical provocation but as an affirmation that divinity is revealed in the lived experience and suffering of the oppressed. I include the poem here in full:

Jesus is Palestinian.

Jesus is God (or so they tell me),

Therefore God is Palestinian.

God is Palestinian,

And so the Mother of God lives in Gaza,

And there are so many of her,

And there are so many of her son, splayed

Like a cross on the floor of Al-Shifa Hospital.

And she picks up his flesh, limp and lifeless,

The color missing from his lips, the lips

That learned to give Mama boosa

Before he was weaned from her milk.

And the Mother of God is sobbing through a zaghroota,

She is wailing Yamma, Yamma, Habibi, in that curious way

That Arab parents address us by their own names.

Ibni shaheed, she cries, Yamma, Yamma, ibni shaheed!

Would all these Maryams have denied what God placed

In her womb, declined a boy destined to die,

Kan maktoob min al-bidaya, it was always maktoob

To lose him. Would she have gifted him back to God

Before it all began, refused to use her body

To usher him earthside?

The Mother of God pulls the white

Of the shroud back from her son’s face

To stroke his hair for the last time, takes a deep

Breath before committing him back to Allah.

God is Palestinian, and we have all killed him,

Snuffed him out, missile by missile.

But the Mother of God knows,

By a primal, maternal intuition,

Inno maktoob for him to rise again.

This poem by S. Awad displaces theological discourse toward a zone of trembling where Christology becomes flesh in the shattered bodies of Gaza. By declaring that “God is Palestinian,” the poet dismantles the borders of abstract Christian universalism and reinscribes divinity in the concrete pain of a massacred people. Here, the mystery of incarnation stops functioning as a metaphysical category and becomes a historical experience of dispossession, mothering, and grief. Mary is not an idealized figure or iconic virgin but a Palestinian mother who “picks up his flesh, limp and lifeless” from the ruins of a bombed hospital. The scene is theologically subversive: passion and crucifixion do not unfold in first-century Jerusalem but in the corridors of Al-Shifa; resurrection is not a distant promise but the obstinate persistence of Palestinian life that, “by a primal, maternal intuition,” knows that “Inno maktoob for him to rise again.” Palestinian Liberation Theology can thus be understood as a hermeneutic of wounded incarnation: God is not revealed in the temples of power but in the mothers, who mourn, in the defiled land, in bodies crucified by colonization. This theological poetics embodies a radical inversion: the task is not to worship the god of empire who blesses missiles, but to recognize the murdered divinity who rises in the resistance of the people.

Undoubtedly, PLT offers a theological-practical horizon for detoxifying theology: prioritizing context, decolonizing methods, rebuilding communal fabrics, articulating interracial and interethnic solidarity, and dismantling instrumental readings of sacred texts that legitimize violence. It is a theology that aims not to preserve privilege but to redistribute it; not to homogenize suffering but to translate it into emancipatory praxis. As the Kairos document affirms, any theology that legitimizes occupation is far from Christian teachings; PLT instead advances “a theology of love and solidarity with the oppressed.”97

If the dominant habitus of theologization has been corrosive, PLT offers an antidote: a situated theological practice, irreversible in its commitment to land and life, and grounded in the understanding that liberation is necessarily collective. It is not merely an academic gesture but an ethical imperative that calls theologians, communities, and churches to interrogate their complicities, abandon “neutrality” as a form of collaboration, and embrace a theology whose first addressee is the concrete humanity that suffers. At the heart of this imperative pulses a simple and decisive question: with whom are we truly doing theology—with the powerful who legitimize oppression, or with those who resist? PLT answers with radical clarity: with those who resist.

6. Another Antidote: The Liberationist Potential of Queer/Cuir/Maricas Theological Voices

If the first antidote emerged from Palestinian theological resistance, the second springs from the lived experiences of queer/cuir/maricas dissident bodies—those who refuse to be treated as objects of theological-moral sacrifice.98 Here, queer/cuir/marica existence is neither a late cultural category nor a mere academic neologism. Instead, it manifests as an epiphany of spiritual subversion: a disruptive force that dismantles the symbolic architecture used by hegemonic theology to police bodies, domesticate pleasure, and canonize violence.99

These theologies do not "erupt" into history by seeking permission to exist. Rather, they stand as acts of spiritual self-defense—embodied, insurgent responses to a theological poisoning that long pathologized sexual and gender diversity as deviations from the divine order.100 Their emergence constitutes a radical reconfiguration of the theological field, one that places desire, embodiment, and vulnerability at the center of liberative reflection and praxis.

A theologizing habitus reveals its cisheteropatriarchal toxicity when it asks: “What does sexuality have to do with LLT?”101 As argued in the previous sections, hegemonic theology (T-Theology) has functioned historically as a regime of purity and decency.102 Its sacrificial logic requires bodies that expiate systemic tensions: subalternized, discarded, racialized, feminized, impoverished, or dissident bodies cast to the margins of the sacred, the ecclesial, and the communal. Against this theological economy of sacrifice, queer/cuir/marica thought operates as a de-sacrificial dispositif—a mode of thinking and living that interrupts the equivalence between purity and divinity, between sexual-bodily discipline and sanctity. In this sense, queer/cuir/maricas theologies rewrite the symbolic economy of sin and redemption, disarming their theopolitical uses as colonial instruments of exclusion, domination, and control. Their gesture is neither nihilistic nor merely iconoclastic, but profoundly theopoetic. They cultivate liturgies of survival and communities of unconditional grace—sacred spaces where spirituality unfolds through the erotic plurality of bodies, embracing all their vulnerabilities, affects, and transitions.

Marcella Althaus-Reid identified this theological poisoning with pioneering clarity when she asked: “How did Liberation Theology lose the body [and sexuality]?”103 In her critique of “decently dressed theology,” she demonstrated that even emancipatory theological projects reproduced the sanitizing mechanisms of colonial Christianity by excluding desire, pleasure, and unruly corporealities from their redemptive narratives. For that reason, she proposed an “indecent theology,” not as rhetorical provocation but as a methodological and spiritual act that subverts sex-gender assumptions and reformulates their foundations.104 Such a theology knows itself to be “without underwear”—a theology that exposes its own sexuality, declares its desires, and acknowledges the sexed and gendered constitution of its discourse.105 This indecency functions as a practice of detoxification, revealing that theological neutrality never existed: all theology has a body, a desire, and a positionality. Hugo Córdova Quero extends this insight by noting that

Many of these stories remain untold and are filtered through moral judgments, especially when they involve the intersection of sexuality and religion. In some way, society segregates these stories into cultural closets from which only certain heterosexual narratives have the privilege of emerging.106

Theology cannot continue as a “catalog of topics authorized by the Church.”107 Its place is in exiled stories, in the cultural closets where what was deemed impure or improper has been sequestered. From there, queer/cuir/maricas theologies not only expand the canon; they reconfigure theological epistemology by showing that sexuality is not a peripheral addition but the very mode through which the divine becomes incarnate in human life.

Within this horizon, imagination becomes a theological category. As Mouton (2008) argues, “theology is the capacity of human imagination to redescribe reality, to rename experiences, to recount stories from new angles.”108 Althaus-Reid radicalizes this claim by warning that imagining a map of redemption not preceded by the colonial territorialization of the sexual body marks the beginning of a truly liberating theology.109 Thus, queer/cuir/maricas theologies become heroic forms of indecency—theologies born from embodied knowledge, from rebellious spirits that refuse to perpetuate the fiction of a theo(ideo)logized normality.

The danger, however, comes not only from religious orthodoxies. Neoliberal sexual politics have also deployed new mechanisms of domestication under the guise of inclusion or universalization. Jasbir K. Puar has shown that homonationalism constitutes a mutation of contemporary biopolitics:110 homosexuality, once stigmatized as a sign of death, is now recast as a symbol of life, progress, and liberal citizenship, incorporated into the imaginaries of the nation-state while other bodies—Arab, Muslim, migrant—are “queerized” as threats.111 This increasingly widespread assimilation produces homonormativity, a sexual politics of consumption and respectability that reinforces rather than subverts the cisheteropatriarchal order through its “inclusive” façade.112

Israeli pinkwashing exemplifies the most sophisticated expression of this strategy. Under the veneer of a “gay-friendly” state, Israel instrumentalizes LGBTIQ+ rights to conceal its occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people, presenting sexual diversity as a marker of civilization against supposed Muslim homophobic barbarism. Critical scholarship notes that “it would seem that Zionist homophobia, rooted in religious fundamentalism and biblical literalism, becomes muted, while systematic discrimination is camouflaged beneath the rainbow.”113 This theopolitical dispositif not only colonizes sexuality but also produces a domesticated “Theology of Pride,” a sacramental narrative of liberalism that sanctifies colonial violence under the colors of inclusion.

Because “unsurprisingly, the mainstream gay movement has not sought to challenge Zionism, but instead to be welcomed into its fold,”114 distinguishing diversity from dissidence becomes urgent. Diversity can be absorbed by neoliberal rights and markets; dissidence entails an epistemic rupture. To “dissent” is to sever oneself from common doctrine—from hegemonic logics of citizenship, nation, and church.115 As Susan Stryker reminds us, sex-gender dissidences do not merely describe orientations; they traverse and destabilize the very category of identity, exposing its instability and constructedness.116 Dissidence thus emerges as an urgent theological imperative: a mode of resisting the sacred fictions that sustain moral order, a way of imagining alternative spiritual grammars of existence, and a practice of fracturing any project invested in rendering theology respectable. In this sense, dissidence is not merely oppositional but generative, opening spaces where theological language can be unsettled, reworked, and reinhabited from the margins.

This dissidence has taken concrete political form in movements such as al-Qaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society (al-Qaws li-ta‘addudiyya al-jinsiyya wa-al-jandariyya fi al-mujtama‘ al-filastini), which emerged after the Second Intifada (2000) and articulates queer radicality as a decolonizing and de-Zionizing praxis.117 Their work seeks to dismantle three intertwined hegemonies: (i) Palestinian patriarchal culture, (ii) Western LGBT hegemony, and (iii) the fundamentalist colonization of Zionism.118 As Walaa Alqaisiya’s Decolonial Queering in Palestine (2023) compellingly demonstrates, such formations are best understood not as the application of external queer frameworks to Palestinian realities, but as expressions of a decolonial queering that destabilizes the Zionist sensual regime from within anticolonial struggle itself.119 Read in this light, al-Qaws is not invoked here as an object of uncritical celebration, but as a Palestinian-led praxis that has long refused both pinkwashing and Western homonormativity, grounding theoretical claims in a situated and ongoing political practice.

Within this horizon, Palestinian dissident existence exceeds the register of sexual identity; it becomes an embodied act of spiritual resistance. It becomes theology-in-action: a praxis that “brings to light what has become unintelligible and foregrounds political subjectivities and voices that have been further marginalized,”120 thereby enabling the labor of unmaking and remaking divine language from bodies that do not fit the empire’s theological cartographies.

In response to pinkwashing, pinkwatching has emerged as a global counter-narrative. Palestinian queer activists and allies expose the cooptation of LGBT struggles by states and corporations, reclaiming pride as riot and community, not corporate parade. The movement Queers for Palestine, for instance, invokes the memory of Stonewall—led by Black and Latina working-class trans women—to recall that queer and trans liberation was, and must remain, a collective, communal insurrection, not a neoliberal or capitalist slogan, nor an individualistic academic enterprise.121 Confronting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Queers for Palestine insist on the decolonization of Pride:

Pride has become a silencing device. We have been collectively alienated from the landscape of our own homosexuality, where we now find police, deportation facilitators, TERFS, banks, and corporations that have nothing to do with queer liberation and justice, and everything to do with oppression, queer and otherwise. They have shown us who they are and who they stand for time and time again over the years, despite constant rejection from the community. The first Pride was a riot, and it came from a queer community led by working-class Black and Latina trans women, so united in resistance that they knew if one of them threw the first brick, the others would follow and throw the next. As trans Palestinian MX Yaffa said, “A riot is about community. There are no riots without community, so what are you doing for community?” It is community, collective trust, that allows us to fight back.122

This insurgent community is not founded on identity but on collective trust—on the political and spiritual gesture of caring and resisting together against the necropolitics that decides who deserves to live and who may die.

The concept of queer necropolitics, inspired by Achille Mbembe, names the increasing indifference of certain LGBT elites toward trans, Black, migrant, or Palestinian lives.123 This necropolitics constitutes the shadow side of rainbow liberalism: a narcissistic, intimist spirituality that replaces solidarity with consumption and desire with competition.124 Against this, dissident gatherings reactivate the communal and affective dimension of liberation, recalling— as the Latin American marica Pedro Lemebel testifies— that mariconaje guerrero is a form of embodied spirituality, a mode of resisting necropolitical individualism through shared tenderness and rage.125

Within this framework, decolonial queerness/mariquismo emerges as an integral theological-political project: it does not seek mere recognition but the abolition of the colonial categories of sex, gender, race, class, and nation. To decolonize theology is to dismantle the religious foundations of cisheteropatriarchy, Christian supremacism, and fundamentalist Zionism—that is, to break the alliance between theology, patriarchy, state, and capital, and to reclaim desire as a creative force of community and transcendence. Queer/cuir/marica existence thus becomes a theological antidote because its potency lies not in supplying doctrinal answers but in keeping wounds and desires open—in disorganizing orthodoxy and restoring to theological thought its insurgent and imaginative character. Indeed, these liberationist theologies grounded in sex-gender dissidence remind us that the theologizing habitus “has never been and will never be a monolithic enterprise.”126 Dissident, polyphonic, dissonant, and resonant voices will always cultivate plural horizons that intersect in shared struggles.

Althaus-Reid called this gesture “theology without underwear,”127 proposing a radical displacement: the task is not to speak about bodies but from bodies in their nakedness. Theological detoxification requires abandoning the asepsis of theological, academic, and ecclesial discourse, allowing the experiences of dissident bodies—their joys, traumas, fluids, loves, and resistances—to become a hermeneutical principle. Ultimately, this decentering functions as a form of redemption: not the sacrificial redemption of purity and decency, but the communal redemption of desire—redemption as care, rebellion, and insubordination.

Thus, queer and trans dissident voices reveal that the problem was never diversity itself, but the theological regime that needed to produce “abnormalities” to sustain itself. Therefore, this theologization seeks not inclusion but transformative disruption; it does not aspire to a seat at the ecclesial, hegemonic, or academic table, but reshapes the table itself, breaking those legs that lift it above the people and bringing it down to the level of the lived realities of majoritarian communities: poor, exiled, oppressed, and dissident. In times of genocide and pinkwashing, this dissident antidote consists in re-enchanting theology through skin and desire, in practicing a spirituality without purities or borders, in imagining—as Mouton would say—new ways of recounting the divine story from the margins.128 The detoxification discovered in dissidence is therefore a political, theological, and spiritual act of imagination that liberates theological thought from its own fear of the flesh and the realities of embodied life.

I wish to pose a series of questions to gauge the level of gender and sexual toxicity that may be permeating our ecclesial and theological communities: Do we continue to read, predominantly, white cisheterosexual authors? Are our engagements with theologies of gender and sexual diversity still limited to the voices of gay men? What specific configurations of gender-diverse theologies are being disseminated within our communities? Furthermore, are the LGBTQ+ individuals we recognize as theological authorities exclusively white, cisgender, and academically privileged? From what socioeconomic realities do these recognized LGBTQ+ theologians speak? Is their work anchored in responsible community-based commitments, or is it merely the dissemination of "armchair" theological ideas? How many LGBTQ+ theologians do you know who are unemployed, impoverished, HIV-positive, sex workers, or survivors of structural violence? Are your references strictly from the Global North? Do you make a conscious effort to recognize the work of non-English speakers? I could extend these inquiries further, but I hope these questions allow us to confront our current methods of theologizing and identify some of its potential “poisonings.” Engaging honestly with these inquiries is a necessary step toward decontaminating our theological practices.