“I am spiritual”: Navigating black women’s complicated relationships with religion, spirituality, and the labeling of our faith

I first heard the term “multiple religious affiliations” as a university student. Iyanla Vanzant was a visiting professor at the University of Bennett School during his senior 12 months of college in 2011. Even though I wasn’t officially registered for the course, I got here and listened to lectures very often.

Multiple religious affiliation refers to when someone participates in the rituals of a couple of spiritual tradition. I do not forget that Vanzant, who’s each a Yoruba priestess and an ordained minister, spoke openly about the duality of her faith.

In her first book, she wrote about the value of bringing ancient traditions to the table of modern beliefs. “Now I know that you can’t separate a nation’s culture from its spirit,” she wrote.

In subsequent books, Vanzant stated that she developed an intimate and personal relationship with God while writing. “While writing the book, I learned that many paths lead to one path. I realized that God doesn’t care whether I am Yoruba or Christian,” she said he wrote. “God wanted me to love myself.”

Her message had enormous interfaith appeal amongst black women. Even my conservative Christian grandmother gave me her books as I entered the milestone of womanhood.

I grew up reading Vanzant’s work, but I never thought of myself as a non secular pluralist. I used to be raised in the church and have a deep respect for the word of God that I used to be taught from the Bible. Christianity is the basis of my faith. However, something deep inside me shifted and woke up after my mother’s sudden death in 2022.

I used to be in search of divine intimacy and needed more in my spiritual toolkit to hold me through this season of mourning. I prayed for guidance daily. The other day I remembered myself as a twenty-something college student. Vanzant stood in front of the class and I remember her saying that all of us have the power to achieve inside and unlock our own spiritual and ancestral roots. It was a flash of light and so began the next step in my spiritual discovery. I allowed myself to hunt, ask questions, and pull things from other spiritual houses that resonated on a soul level, including Khemite spirituality (which I had studied with Queen Afua a few years earlier), Vedic yoga and meditation, and ancestral altar work.

Theologian Candice Marie Benbow describes an identical spiritual search after her mother’s death in 2015. She didn’t go to church for a 12 months and a half.

“I met with the Buddhist prayer community every week,” she says. “I always walked through these prayer labyrinths. I did all these very different things to connect spiritually away from the church because a lot of my relationship with my mom was with the church.”

Benbow, a graduate of Duke Divinity School, said she needed time to grieve without the added pressure and that “the church could make you’re feeling such as you owe something. I didn’t need to feel like I needed to experience that sort of sacredness or righteous grief.”

She adds, “One of the hardest things for me was coming to terms with the undeniable fact that a lot of my faith identity… was rooted in what I used to be taught, reasonably than what I believed, felt, or experienced. And my mother’s death showed me the cracks in all of it.

It was during this era that the idea for her first book was born. She currently describes herself as a Christian and a seeker.

“I like the word seeker. I actually like calling myself that,” he says. “I am a Christian. I follow Christ. I am rooted and grounded on this… and at the same time I call myself a seeker because I am continually on the lookout for ways to feel and connect with the Spirit.”

Religion on the spectrum

Today, it is just not unusual for Black women to construct ancestral altars, practice yoga, sit in mindfulness meditation, read Tarot cards, and still go to church on Sunday.

According to the report “Faith Among Black Americans” published by Pew Research Centermost Black Americans adhere to Christianity, but additionally they adhere to a various range of spiritual practices and beliefs that reach beyond the boundaries of the traditional Christian church.

For example, 40 percent of blacks said they believed in reincarnation, and 30 percent prayed to their ancestors. More than 40 percent of black believers also meditate each day or weekly. Additionally, 20 percent said they pray at their home altar or sanctuary greater than once per week.

Dr. Ericka D. Gault, director of the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, suggests that it could be time for us to develop a brand new language to explain our spiritual identity, attempting to catch up “where black young adults they were of their variety all the time and didn’t really have a box to envision.”

“When we say or hear things like, ‘I’m spiritual,’ we’re really talking about a change that may have occurred,” she says, “then people say, ‘I’ll go to church and I’ll get it from here, off the Internet.’ Gault can be the creator of the book.

However, he emphasizes that borrowing doesn’t at all times mean belonging. “If you talk to people who attribute Ifa, they have a problem with the way people draw on their sacred traditions. Like, we draw from it in the same way that Beyoncé does in her music, but we don’t necessarily attribute it all,” he says. We may borrow meditation from Buddhism, yoga from Hinduism, eating habits from Islam, but we don’t belong to those groups “in the traditional sense in which these communities understand belonging.”

Delving deeper into the concept of multiple religious affiliations, Rev. Dr. Monica Coleman encourages us to think of it as “being on the religious spectrum,” a more nuanced understanding of spirituality.

Finding a brand new path

Data shows that more and more individuals are leaving the church. Pew research reports that Black Americans, who’re demographically the most religious in the country, are turning away from organized religion in droves. In one decade, 11 percent fewer blacks considered themselves Christians and 7 percent more reported having no religious affiliation. Another test found that “young black adults are less religious and less involved in black churches than older generations.”

This does not imply they are not hungry for spiritual connection. Coleman, an ordained AME minister, African-American professor of religion and creator of the book , says people seek spiritual connection outside traditional churches for several reasons. Some have had bad experiences in places of worship; others imagine that the experiences of black women are underrepresented amongst church leaders. Those in search of these spaces for evolution and innovation could also be dissatisfied because “churches are institutions, and institutions change slowly.”

Lyvonne Briggs, an ordained Pentecostal minister, began a virtual church during quarantine because she saw a necessity. “The proverbial experience was intended for Black women who are Christian/Christian neighbors and wish to embrace their African heritage, implement African and African diaspora spiritual practices, and establish or deepen connections with their ancestors.”

Briggs, a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Columbia Theological Seminary, is currently the host of . “My intention is to answer questions you are not allowed to ask in Bible studies or Sunday school.” In short, she says, “I am helping Black women decolonize their Christianity.”

Christianity and black spiritual traditions

Most spiritual practices amongst enslaved people were feared and banned by plantation owners. Dr. Tamura Lomax, a professor of religious studies at Michigan State University, claims that whites were very afraid of African-derived religions” and “their solution was to inform us that our religions were demonic. This is what must be done to oppress people,” he says. “Demonizing and dehumanizing people in their religions is central to the oppression and total control of people.”

This form of religious propaganda is transmitting generational fear over open discussions about practices corresponding to Hoodoo, conjuring and roots practices associated with African spirituality.

Some ancestors found a strategy to erase their spiritual practices, says Lomax, creator of They established secret “silent ports,” isolated areas in the forests where they may communicate and worship as they pleased. They retained their African spiritual guardians, connecting them with Catholic saints and the Christian Holy Spirit.

“The ancestors used everything they could access to survive… so yes, they use the spirit world,” Lomax explains. “The spirit world becomes extremely important to them because it gives them a sense of regained power. This gives them the ability to control their surroundings. It wasn’t even about rejecting Christianity, as many practiced Hoodoo, conjuring and Christianity combined.”

Spiritual release

While the mixing of ritual and faith has existed in every generation, today we see the freedom of Black women to experience this reality in a far more public way.

Benbow argues that this religious fluidity “gives us permission to tap into the fullness of who we are, to unify all of our elements and allow them to synergize spiritually.”

For example, Devi Brown has found inspiration in lots of spiritual homes in her faith journey, including Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. As a wellness educator and podcast host, she says her mission is to be Christ-like and provide service.

“I personally believe that the teachings of Christ are truly the guidelines that I live by at all times, even though I do not consider myself a Christian. I look to the teachings of Christ and His mastery as how I want to move in the world,” he says. “I don’t think the focus should be on what you call yourself.”

He adds, “Rather than always being committed to the organization we belong to, my belief should always be to give God first and then find the system or religion that will best help us access God and meet our spiritual needs.”

Crossing labels

For me, allowing myself to adopt latest practices opened up my connection to my mother in the spirit world. I can commune with her daily at my altar and I even have developed a relationship with her that transcends this earthly plane. And that saved me. I didn’t lose my faith in God – it developed.

Perhaps it is time for us to focus less on labels and appreciate the power of our way of worship. Whether it’s Sunday worship, Baptist at the bedside, or participation in group meditations, we’re privileged to have freedom in our spirituality, and this freedom is a solution to the prayer of our ancestors.