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“How you know I ain’t prayed and worked every root my grandmother taught me to keep you and that crazy brother of yours safe every day since you been gone?”

When Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) speaks those words in the Warner Bros film Sinners, it feels like testimony instead of dialogue. Like a confession passed down from the women who carried the weight of salvation and survival in the same weary hands. Most of us had an “Annie.” She was the one who held the stories we couldn’t write down because to write our own truths was illegal. The one who knew the power in a pot of greens simmered with prayer, who wiped fevers away with hands anointed in oil, who sent you back into the world healed, fed, and blessed. She knew scripture by heart, but also which herbs to brew for a stubborn cough, how to sweep bad energy out the door, how to whisper something over you before you walked into trouble.

Sinners might look like a film about spiritual warfare on the surface, but it’s doing something deeper. It pulls back the veil on how we’ve always lived at the intersection of faith and folk practices, even without the words to name it. It shows the tension and tenderness of holding onto Jesus while still reaching for the old ways that kept us alive long before we were stripped of our practices and handed what was deemed a respectable replacement.

Annie stood in the sacred space that’s always belonged to us, where the holy and Hoodoo aren’t at odds, but threads of the same divine tapestry. This isn’t about choosing between them; it’s remembering they’ve always been woven together, and how our survival has always been a spiritual practice. But why have African spiritual practices — tools of protection, healing, and power — been demonized so long? And how are Black folks reclaiming what was never fully lost?

The Demonization of African Spiritual Practices

From the moment our ancestors were stolen, their spiritual practices were a threat. Not because they were “evil,” but because they were powerful and rooted in connection, community, and a cosmology that didn’t need a white savior. Colonial powers couldn’t allow that kind of autonomy, so they labeled what our ancestors carried as witchcraft. As evil. As dangerous. That’s why “voodoo” is still shorthand in movies for something dark and dangerous. It’s why a Black woman burning sage gets side-eyed while anointing oil from the pulpit is seen as holy. Over time, those labels stuck, passed down from plantation to pulpit, until even we started to believe the lie. We’ve inherited suspicion of our own power, even as we unknowingly carry it forward. 

It wasn’t enough to enslave Black bodies, they tried to enslave our spirits, too. Laws stripped away every tool of spiritual resistance. Drumming, gathering for worship without white oversight, African rites, all outlawed. It wasn’t about evil; it was about control. As D. Danyelle Thomas writes in The Day God Saw Me as Black, “Christianity, as it arrived on American plantations, is a contradictory, oppressive religion designed to impress upon the enslaved African that their bondage has been preordained.” 

But the roots run deep, and to combat it, we did as we always do; alchemists transmute. No drums; we’ll make the pews and floorboards carry the rhythm. We’ll still call our ancestors’ names. And when they said there’s only one way to reach God, we knew better. We had already met God in the trees, in the water, in the wind.

The Legacy of Religious Syncretism and Survival

We were never just handed Christianity; we negotiated it. Adapted it. Transformed it. Syncretism wasn’t a concession; it was survival. When the old ways were stripped from our names, our bodies, our languages, we folded them into the new religion forced on us. The result was something uniquely ours, making space for both Jesus and our ancestors at the same table.

That’s why Hoodoo uses the Psalms; not just as sacred scripture, but as spellwork. Psalm 91 or 23 could be both prayer and protection. Anointing oil, drawn from Exodus, was a rootworker’s tool. And while Catholic missionaries preached saints, enslaved Africans saw Orishas in the stained-glass windows. This is where the lines blurred between “holy” and “heretical,” between the altar and the root bag, between the preacher and the prophetess laying hands and whispering prayers. Thomas writes, “The Black Christian tradition only exists because of the African cosmology through which it is both birthed and synchronized.” The shout on Sunday morning is the Ring Shout by another name. The spirit in church is the same one our ancestors called down by firelight, hidden from the enslaver’s eye.

The Modern Reclamation of Hoodoo and African Spirituality

The practices they tried to kill are now thriving. In the last decade, we’ve watched Hoodoo, Ifá, and other African spiritual systems resurge, with Black folks reclaiming them as living, legitimate faith traditions. Practices once used in secrecy are now taught in workshops, written in books, boldly displayed on altars no longer hidden in plain sight.

This revival has come with a hunger for something that sees us fully. For spirituality that doesn’t ask us to shrink, erase our ancestry, or choose between the divine and our Blackness. And it’s tied to broader movements: Black feminism, Afrofuturism, Black mental health. Instagram and TikTok have become classrooms and sanctuaries. Young Black women post reels showing how to dress a candle, work a jar, read a dream. Accounts share Yoruba prayers, tutorials, and reflections on ancestor veneration. These teachers claim space without apology: this is ours. This is holy. This is sacred. It always has been.

Decolonizing Christianity: What it Means and Looks Like

Decolonizing Christianity doesn’t mean throwing Jesus away. It means stripping away the whiteness wrapped around our theology. It’s reclaiming a God who looks like us, sounds like us, moves through our history with us. James Cone called it Black liberation theology. Womanist theologians like Delores Williams and Katie Cannon named how even liberation theology ignored Black women’s voices. Writers like Thomas ask: Whose image does it serve? Decolonizing faith isn’t rejecting Christianity. It’s remembering our ancestors never received it clean. They infused it with their cosmology, their rhythms, their knowing. Jesus didn’t come to uphold an empire; he came to liberate the oppressed.

We’ve been taught it’s either/or. But for many of us, it’s never been that simple. However, Annie’s words in Sinners remind us that prayer and conjure were never in competition. If you’ve ever cleaned your house before the new year, went to Watch Night service, counted your money at midnight, and ate black eyed peas, collard greens, and cornbread on New Year’s Day, you were practicing both! Christianity may be home, but it doesn’t have to be the only room in the house. Ancestral practices live here too, and reclaiming them isn’t betrayal. It’s remembering. Annie made us remember the women who raised us knowing the benefits of Jesus and juniper root. 

Decolonizing faith isn’t abandoning God. It’s finding God as Black, with us, and for us. It’s loving Jesus and ourselves enough to ask: What did we lose when we let them tell us how to know God? And what might we find when we return to the knowing our grandmothers never forgot? Maybe that’s the revolution: standing in the middle of it all, hands raised, candles burning, prayers rising, declaring we are whole. We are holy. We are enough.

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