When I arrived at the University of Arizona as a new assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics, I was tasked with building the curriculum on South Asian religions. In fact, the only course that was on-the-books and related to my area of expertise—Hinduism—was an older holdover from the university’s “Department of Oriental Studies.” This course was titled “Hindu Mythology.” While the title seemed a bit outdated (and I worried if the title was “sexy” enough to draw in students), I was thrilled that I would be able to teach this course because it gave me a perfect opportunity to teach through narratives, and the old-fashioned title would serve to set the tone of the course in which we could problematize both the categories of “Hinduism” and “myth.” Indeed, structuring a course entirely around Hindu narratives proved to engage students and introduce them to the variety of traditions under the rubric of Hinduism, and it also helped them understand its history as it is embedded within the texts that we encounter. While the course proved to be successful with high enrollments—I guess the title was sexier than I thought—and I could see students engaging with the narratives in a way that they often don’t with textbooks, in many ways I felt like I was doing the tradition a disservice because, intentional or not, I was reifying a model of studying and teaching religion (largely based on Protestant Christian theology) that privileged textual sources over other sources of religious knowledge.

Christianity did not perish with the election of Donald Trump; it was stillborn upon first arriving to these shores. America was originally made great when Christian Pilgrims embraced their divine right to steal the winter provisions of indigenous people, thanking God for his merciful bounty. Only by stealing the land of others—justifying genocide as fulfilling God’s call to rid the Promised Land of modern-day Canaanites—could America ever have become great. Only by stealing the labor of others by capturing Black bodies—justifying slavery as God’s call to bring civilization and Christianity to lost primitive peoples whose only hope is to be servants to whites in this world and the next—could America ever have become great.

I was in Greece when Donald Trump was elected president on November 8, 2016. I was there on a research trip and had just visited the Acropolis, the Agora, and several magnificent museums several days before that date. The fact that I was in Athens, the cradle of Western democracy, prompted me to think about the relationship between the struggle for democracy and empire. As a postcolonial theologian deeply interested in the relationship between religion, power, and empire, Trump’s election and his administration’s policies on border security—particularly the Muslim ban—and on healthcare, DACA, and tax reform demand serious theological reflection and acts of resistance.