It Ain’t Demonic, It’s Demanding

Published On: May 13, 2026

It Ain’t Demonic, It’s Demanding • Conjure & ATRs, Deconstruction

By: D. Danyelle Thomas

From sage and crystals to BGLO denunciations and “Christian first” politics, Black spiritual inheritance is being labeled demonic in a moment shaped by Christian nationalism. But the real threat was never our ancestors, rituals, or Blackness. The threat is a faith that requires us to bury our memory to prove our devotion.

Christian+, Not Captive

For years I’ve identified as Christian+—which is to say my understanding of and access to God is not limited by the western Judeo-Christian faith. I live on the spectrum of interdisciplinary spiritual practices, it’s been vital to my spiritual hygiene and wellbeing over the years. 

My fluidity often makes folks uncomfortable. Especially when I observe something like: if you can participate in the blood ritual of communion, surely you can understand ritual sage cleansing. Part of my work is to demystify and dismantle poor theology that binds us to unfulfilling spiritual practices.

When the Saints Demonize What They Already Practice

As you might imagine, I’ve lived through years of Christian demonology in public discourse. It comes in waves. In the mid 2000s, it was “Burning sage is witchcraft. It’s satanic aromatherapy!” – usually spoken by someone who prays over a bottle of cooking oil and tap water to anoint it. The Saints will demonize burning sage and consecrate bottled olive oil. Whew Chile, the cognitive dissonance never ends it only evolves to meet the moment. 

Denunciation in the Age of Christian Nationalism

And the moment now is Christian nationalism—and Black Christians are especially vulnerable in a unique way. The mass “denunciation” trend is not just personal conviction. It is a political-spiritual climate responding to the rise of Christian nationalism. In a fascist religious atmosphere, anything Black, diasporic, ancestral, embodied, ecstatic, queer, communal, or spiritually plural becomes available for demonization. And that is not accidental.

I ain’t never seen a Flour Ranger get up and denounce Tri-Delta, Kappa Sigma, or the lodge. They feel no need to demonize their conduit of power—coalesced power is in those names. Yet sincerely well-meaning Black Christians can be found in every internet stream making a spectacle of denouncing everything from their alumni institutions to their Greek-letter memberships for their designations as demonic.

We’re living in a time where the white supremacist deity hides inside the label of Christian nationalism/fascism. It’s not an incidental irony that what is inherently Black is examined as demonic. They’ve always worked overtime to hide us from ourselves when what is innate to us is what will ultimately save us. 

Black Survival Was Never Demonic

Black Greek Letter Organizations are living Black history. They’ve produced among their ranks some of the most brilliant Black thinkers, teachers, leaders, and transformers of our time. Before they functioned as bourgeois social clubs in our collective memory, they served as networks of support, protection, and Black civic life.

Nellie M. Quander didn’t just preserve Alpha Kappa Alpha in perpetuity, she made an advocacy network of Black women for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in the time of Jim Crow. 

The 22 beloved founders of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority used sorority infrastructure for political visibility and voting rights from the beginning of their actionable public service.

Omega Psi Phi made Carter G. Woodson who then founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and launched Negro History Week in 1926, which became Black History Month.

Phi Beta Sigma made A. Philip Randolph who gave us Black labor power in the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. A move that helped pressure federal action against discrimination in defense industries and the armed forces. 

Before these organizations became flattened into jackets, strolls, status, and social capital, they were also Black survival infrastructure. And admittedly, these organizations are yet flawed and often do not do their reputations any favors. To call Black Greek Letter Fraternities and Sororities categorically demonic is to throw a whole liberation archive into the fire. 

To demonize Black-founded organizations and Black indigenous spiritual practices wholesale is not discernment. It is historical amnesia dressed as deliverance.

And I will not sit in idle silence as we play right into the hands of Supremacy’s goal of destroying Black liberation from the inside out. What can save us is always reframed as what will condemn our souls instead. I clocked this predictable pattern some moons ago. 

Aesthetic Spirituality Versus Accountable Practice

On August 3, 2021 I said: “Though it seems like everybody is on their whole “sage, chakras, healing, and manifest” tip right now, most will be back to the ol’ time religion soon.” And I wasn’t wrong. Five years later, you’ve seen folks who built entire brands on sage and crystals defect back to organized Abrahamic faiths. 

What I was naming then was the difference between aesthetic spirituality and accountable spiritual practice. People wanted sage, candles, crystals, ancestors, Orishas, manifestation, and divination as tools of acquisition. But the moment those practices demanded discipline, humility, shadow work, repair, study, ethical responsibility, and the reordering of the self, many fled back to the theology that gave them familiar enemies.

I continued that thought more controversially: “The honeymoon of indigenous spiritual working is enticing, but you can only pretend to be someone you are not for so long.

The Requirement Beneath the Ritual

For many, these practices are the first time where they’ve taken creation power into their own hands. It’s given them more results than shouting “Lord, I receive it” ever has. That kind of power is intoxicating but it doesn’t come without its responsibility. 

As Luke 12:48 reminds us, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” In other words, there is a cost to pay for the power we call in and use for our material gain in this realm. 

The attraction of love with that cinnamon, rose, vanilla, & jasmine-dressed candle amplified by the energy of your rose quartz comes with requirement. That shoe spell you used to dominate a situation/person comes with requirement. Jarring folks & calling on your ancestors, lwa, and the Orishas come with REQUIREMENT. 

Evangelical indoctrination would tell us that this cost is the damnation of our eternal soul for working with witchcraft. It’s a digestible explanation for most, but like most Evangelicalism it does nothing more than simplify the complexity of a thing. 

The real cost of calling in this power is deep, transformative enlightenment through new perspective. The Power requires that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds, as Romans 12:2 describes. Renewal can’t happen without disruption of habits and emotional safety nets.

When Shadow Work Sends People Running

You can only live in the Palo Santo smoke & mirrors of curated social feeds for so long. Eventually, you find that the power you borrowed to call in love requires you to unpack the baggage of false narratives + unhealed wounds so you can actually HANDLE the relationship you say you want.

That money rice and van van oil you called that money in with requires that you be delivered from those negative money beliefs you’ve held before the money can stop passing through your hands like water. 

The shadows of light can never be avoided. You’re gonna have to do the dark, painful, HARD work of healing your subconscious narratives, blocks, and fears. THAT is the true cost. Truthfully most aren’t willing to crucify their proverbial flesh to go through the pain of dismantling the truth they know.

So they run back to the safety of hyper religiosity. It requires no questioning and, in fact, it typically condemns it as a defiance against God. It’s the best place to hide from the fears of the deeper work a fully integrated self requires. 

After all, it’s easier to blame the devil for your own shadow.”

Who Taught Us to Fear Ourselves?

And I knew then as I know it now: we needn’t be asking “is this demonic?” but “why are Black spiritual technologies always suspect when white Christian domination is treated as holy?”

Today’s denunciation trend is happening inside a larger Christian nationalist/fascist atmosphere where Black spiritual inheritance is easily labeled demonic while white supremacist Christianity hides under “biblical truth.”

Blackness Is Not Your Idol

The denunciation doesn’t end at BGLO membership either, we see it with the declaration of “Christian first” identity among Black Christians now identifying Blackness itself as idolatry. When any practice demands shadow work, people flee to hyper-religiosity because it offers certainty, enemies, rules, and spiritual outsourcing. And there is no greater shadow that we are called to face in our survival practice than the persistence of Black oppression in the name of Jesus. 

Facts are that they say Blackness has become an idol because it disrupts their fantasy of “Christian unity.” But the deeper truth is that their so-called unity requires them to lie about the conditions under which Black people have had to survive Christianity.

It is impossible, then, to worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:24) while denying the truth of your Black existence in a world operating under the auspices of an unholy spirit.

Because the truth of Blackness destabilizes the mythology of seamless Christian unity with supremacists. It asks too much of a faith built on denial. It demands that we remember who carried the Bible in one hand and the whip in the other. It demands that we tell the truth about the Jesus used to bless our bondage, police our bodies, demonize our rituals, and call our memory witchcraft.

Supremacy Corrupted the Faith

So no, beloved. Blackness is not your idol. The idol is the version of Christianity that requires you to despise your own people to prove your devotion to God.

The idol is the unity that asks the oppressed to forget the violence of the oppressor so everybody can call the room holy.

The idol is the white supremacist Jesus who taught you to fear your ancestors more than you fear empire.

And if we must worship in spirit and in truth, then let the truth be this: any faith that requires the burial of Black memory to preserve Christian belonging is not deliverance. It is captivity with an altar call.

You cannot worship where the truth telling of your own survival is called demonic. Blackness did not corrupt our faith. Supremacy did.