“How you recognize I ain’t prayed and labored each root my grandmother taught me to maintain you and that loopy brother of yours secure on daily basis because you been gone?”
When Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) speaks these phrases within the Warner Bros movie Sinners, it looks like testimony as an alternative of dialogue. Like a confession handed down from the ladies who carried the load of salvation and survival in the identical weary arms. Most of us had an “Annie.” She was the one who held the tales we couldn’t write down as a result of to jot down our personal truths was unlawful. The one who knew the ability in a pot of greens simmered with prayer, who wiped fevers away with arms anointed in oil, who despatched you again into the world healed, fed, and blessed. She knew scripture by coronary heart, but in addition which herbs to brew for a cussed cough, methods to sweep dangerous power out the door, methods to whisper one thing over you earlier than you walked into bother.
Sinners would possibly appear to be a movie about religious warfare on the floor, however it’s doing one thing deeper. It pulls again the veil on how we’ve at all times lived on the intersection of religion and folks practices, even with out the phrases to call it. It reveals the strain and tenderness of holding onto Jesus whereas nonetheless reaching for the outdated ways in which stored us alive lengthy earlier than we had been stripped of our practices and handed what was deemed a decent substitute.
Annie stood within the sacred area that’s at all times belonged to us, the place the holy and Hoodoo aren’t at odds, however threads of the identical divine tapestry. This isn’t about selecting between them; it’s remembering they’ve at all times been woven collectively, and the way our survival has at all times been a religious observe. However why have African religious practices — instruments of safety, therapeutic, and energy — been demonized so lengthy? And the way are Black of us reclaiming what was by no means absolutely misplaced?
The Demonization of African Religious Practices
From the second our ancestors had been stolen, their religious practices had been a risk. Not as a result of they had been “evil,” however as a result of they had been highly effective and rooted in connection, group, and a cosmology that didn’t want a white savior. Colonial powers couldn’t enable that type of autonomy, so that they labeled what our ancestors carried as witchcraft. As evil. As harmful. That’s why “voodoo” continues to be shorthand in motion pictures for one thing darkish and harmful. It’s why a Black girl burning sage will get side-eyed whereas anointing oil from the pulpit is seen as holy. Over time, these labels caught, handed down from plantation to pulpit, till even we began to consider the lie. We’ve inherited suspicion of our personal energy, at the same time as we unknowingly carry it ahead.
It wasn’t sufficient to enslave Black our bodies, they tried to enslave our spirits, too. Legal guidelines stripped away each software of religious resistance. Drumming, gathering for worship with out white oversight, African rites, all outlawed. It wasn’t about evil; it was about management. As D. Danyelle Thomas writes in The Day God Noticed Me as Black, “Christianity, because it arrived on American plantations, is a contradictory, oppressive faith designed to impress upon the enslaved African that their bondage has been preordained.”
However the roots run deep, and to fight it, we did as we at all times do; alchemists transmute. No drums; we’ll make the pews and floorboards carry the rhythm. We’ll nonetheless name our ancestors’ names. And once they stated there’s just one solution to attain God, we knew higher. We had already met God within the timber, within the water, within the wind.
The Legacy of Spiritual Syncretism and Survival
We had been by no means simply handed Christianity; we negotiated it. Tailored it. Reworked it. Syncretism wasn’t a concession; it was survival. When the outdated methods had been stripped from our names, our our bodies, our languages, we folded them into the brand new faith pressured on us. The consequence was one thing uniquely ours, making area for each Jesus and our ancestors on the identical desk.
That’s why Hoodoo makes use of the Psalms; not simply as sacred scripture, however as spellwork. Psalm 91 or 23 might be each prayer and safety. Anointing oil, drawn from Exodus, was a rootworker’s software. And whereas Catholic missionaries preached saints, enslaved Africans noticed Orishas within the stained-glass home windows. That is the place the strains blurred between “holy” and “heretical,” between the altar and the foundation bag, between the preacher and the prophetess laying arms and whispering prayers. Thomas writes, “The Black Christian custom solely exists due to the African cosmology by means of which it’s each birthed and synchronized.” The shout on Sunday morning is the Ring Shout by one other identify. The spirit in church is similar one our ancestors known as down by firelight, hidden from the enslaver’s eye.
The Fashionable Reclamation of Hoodoo and African Spirituality
The practices they tried to kill at the moment are thriving. Within the final decade, we’ve watched Hoodoo, Ifá, and different African religious methods resurge, with Black of us reclaiming them as residing, reliable religion traditions. Practices as soon as utilized in secrecy at the moment are taught in workshops, written in books, boldly displayed on altars now not hidden in plain sight.
This revival has include a starvation for one thing that sees us absolutely. For spirituality that doesn’t ask us to shrink, erase our ancestry, or select between the divine and our Blackness. And it’s tied to broader actions: Black feminism, Afrofuturism, Black psychological well being. Instagram and TikTok have develop into school rooms and sanctuaries. Younger Black girls submit reels displaying methods to costume a candle, work a jar, learn a dream. Accounts share Yoruba prayers, tutorials, and reflections on ancestor veneration. These academics declare area with out apology: that is ours. That is holy. That is sacred. It at all times has been.
Decolonizing Christianity: What it Means and Appears to be like Like
Decolonizing Christianity doesn’t imply throwing Jesus away. It means stripping away the whiteness wrapped round our theology. It’s reclaiming a God who seems like us, seems like us, strikes by means of our historical past with us. James Cone known as it Black liberation theology. Womanist theologians like Delores Williams and Katie Cannon named how even liberation theology ignored Black girls’s voices. Writers like Thomas ask: Whose picture does it serve? Decolonizing religion isn’t rejecting Christianity. It’s remembering our ancestors by no means acquired it clear. They infused it with their cosmology, their rhythms, their realizing. Jesus didn’t come to uphold an empire; he got here to liberate the oppressed.
We’ve been taught it’s both/or. However for many people, it’s by no means been that easy. Nonetheless, Annie’s phrases in Sinners remind us that prayer and conjure had been by no means in competitors. If you happen to’ve ever cleaned your home earlier than the brand new yr, went to Watch Night time service, counted your cash at midnight, and ate black eyed peas, collard greens, and cornbread on New Yr’s Day, you had been training each! Christianity could also be dwelling, however it doesn’t must be the one room in the home. Ancestral practices dwell right here too, and reclaiming them isn’t betrayal. It’s remembering. Annie made us keep in mind the ladies who raised us realizing the advantages of Jesus and juniper root.
Decolonizing religion isn’t abandoning God. It’s discovering God as Black, with us, and for us. It’s loving Jesus and ourselves sufficient to ask: What did we lose after we allow them to inform us methods to know God? And what would possibly we discover after we return to the realizing our grandmothers by no means forgot? Perhaps that’s the revolution: standing in the course of all of it, arms raised, candles burning, prayers rising, declaring we’re entire. We’re holy. We’re sufficient.