Atheism for lent? Discipleship, praxis, and expanding the canonical masters of suspicion | Ateísmo para a quaresma? Discipulado, práxis, e expansão do cânone dos mestres da suspeita

This article explores how the “Masters of Suspicion” can be used for understanding discipleship. From this, it queries into expanding this canon of masters to include decolonial thinkers. Resultantly, this article explores potential contributions to the life of faith from thinkers such as Achille Mbembe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. To situate its argument, the article engages Merold Westphal, who articulates a form of Christian discipleship through a hermeneutics of suspicion which he calls ‘Atheism for Lent’. This article first explores how Westphal provides religious persons with a structure to engage postmodern critique, which entails a brief exploration of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche’s potential contribution to discipleship. The article will then engage Westphal’s framework within an African context, extending his appropriation of suspicious critique to engage decolonial thought. This article concludes by proposing an expansion of the canonical Masters of Suspicion to include the likes of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Achille Mbembe, amongst others. The upshot of this is threefold: first, it valorizes the notion that a suspicious critique of religion can aid discipleship; second, it provides more pathways for decolonization to enter into religious discourses; finally, it pushes Westphal’s concept of “Atheism for Lent” beyond a Western context and into one that embraces new forms of suspicion.