‘I’m Spiritual’: Navigating Black Women’s Complex Relationship With Religion, Spirituality And Labeling Our Faith

The first time I heard the concept of “multiple religious belonging,” I was a college student. Iyanla Vanzant was a visiting professor at Bennett College during my senior year in 2011. While I wasn’t officially registered for the course, I would pop in and listen to the lectures quite often.

Multiple religious belonging refers to situations when someone participates in the rituals of more than one spiritual tradition. I remember Vanzant, who is both a Yoruba priestess and ordained minister, openly talked about the duality of her faith.

In her first book, Tapping the Power Within: A Path to Self-Empowerment for Women, she wrote about the value of bringing ancient traditions to the table of modern beliefs.​​ “What I know now is you cannot separate the culture of a people from the spirit of a people,” she wrote.

In subsequent books, Vanzant has said that through the process of writing, she developed an intimate and personal relationship with God. “It was in the writing process that I learned there are many paths that lead to one road. I realized that God didn’t care if I was a Yoruba or a Christian,” she wrote. “God wanted me to love myself.”

Her message had tremendous cross-religious appeal among Black women. Even my conservative Christian grandmother would give me her books during my milestones into womanhood.

I grew up reading Vanzant’s work, but I had never thought of myself as a religious pluralist. I was raised in church and hold a deep respect for God’s word as I was taught it from the Bible. Christianity is the foundation of my faith. However, something deep within me shifted and awakened after my mother’s sudden passing in 2022.

I was in search of divine intimacy and I needed more in my spiritual toolbox to carry me through that grief season. I prayed every day for guidance. One day, I had a flashback of myself as a 20-something-year-old college student. Vanzant was in front of the classroom, and I remember she said we all have the power to tap within and unlock our own spiritual and ancestral roots. It was a glimmer of light, and thus the next step into my spiritual discovery began. I allowed myself to seek, ask questions and pull things from other spiritual houses that resonated on a soul level, including Khemitic spirituality (which I had studied years prior in Queen Afua’s Sacred Woman), Vedic yoga and meditation, and ancestral altar work.

Theologian Candice Marie Benbow describes a similar spiritual exploration after her mom’s death in 2015. She didn’t go to church for a year and a half.

“I would meet weekly with the Buddhist prayer community,” she says. “I would always walk these prayer labyrinths. I was doing all of these very different things to connect spiritually away from church because so much of my relationship with my mom was connected to church.”

Benbow, a graduate of Duke Divinity School, said she needed time to grieve without the added pressure that “church can make you feel like you owe. I didn’t want to feel like I had to perform this kind of holiness or righteous grief.”

She adds, “One of the hardest things for me was to come to terms with the fact that so much of my faith identity… was grounded and rooted in what I had been taught, and not so much as what I believed, what I felt or experienced. And my mother’s death exposed to me the cracks in all of that.”

It was during that season she birthed the idea for her first book, Red Lip Theology: For Church Girls Who’ve Considered Tithing to the Beauty Supply Store When Sunday Morning Isn’t Enough. She now refers to herself as a Christian and a seeker.

“I love the word seeker. I really love calling myself that,” she says. “I’m a Christian. I follow Christ. I am rooted and grounded in that… and at the same time, I call myself a seeker because I am constantly looking for ways to feel and connect with Spirit.”

Religion on a Spectrum

Today, it is not uncommon for Black women to set up ancestral altars, practice yoga, sit in mindfulness meditation, get a Tarot card reading, and still make it to church on Sunday.

According to the “Faith Among Black Americans” report by the Pew Research Center, the majority of Black Americans align with Christianity, but they also embrace a diverse range of spiritual practices and beliefs extending beyond the confines of the traditional Christian church.

For example, 40 percent of Black people said they believe in reincarnation, and 30 percent pray to their ancestors. More than 40 percent of Black churchgoers also meditate daily or weekly. Additionally, 20 percent said they pray at a home altar or shrine more than once a week.

Ericka D.Gault, Ph.D., the 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 may be time we develop new language to describe our spiritual identities, in an effort to catch up to “where Black young adults have been all along in their variety and not really having a box to check.”

“When we say things or hear things like ‘I’m spiritual,’ we’re really talking about the shift that has been allowed to emerge,” she says, “where folks are like, ‘I’ll go to church, and I’ll grab this from over here on the Internet.’” Gault is also the author of Networking the Black Church: Digital Black Christians and Hip Hop.

However, she points out that borrowing doesn’t always mean belonging. “If you talk to folks who ascribe to Ifa, they have a problem with the way people tap in and out of their sacred traditions. Like, we borrow from it in the same way that Beyoncé does in her music, but don’t necessarily ascribe to all of it,” she says. We may borrow meditation from Buddhism, yoga from Hinduism, dietary habits from Islam but we don’t belong to those groups “in the traditional sense that those communities understand belonging.”

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

Finding a New Path

Data shows that more and more folks are leaving the church. Pew Research reports that Black Americans, who are demographically the most religious in the country, are turning away from organized religion in large numbers. In one decade, 11 percent fewer Black people considered themselves Christians and seven percent more claimed to be unaffiliated with religion. Another study found that “young Black adults are less religious and less engaged in Black churches than older generations.”

That doesn’t mean they aren’t hungry for spiritual connection. Coleman, an ordained AME minister, an African-American religions professor and the author of Bipolar Faith, says people are looking for spiritual connection beyond traditional churches for a few reasons. Some have had bad experiences in places of worship; others feel like Black women’s experiences aren’t represented enough in church leadership. People who are looking for these spaces to evolve and innovate may be dissatisfied because “churches are institutions and institutions are slow to change.”

Lyvonne Briggs, an ordained Pentecostal minister, founded a virtual church during quarantine because she recognized a need. “The Proverbial Experience was for Black women who are Christian/Christian-adjacent and want to embrace their African heritage, implement African and African Diasporic spiritual practices, and begin or deepen their bonds with their ancestors.”

Briggs, a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Columbia Theological Seminary, now hosts the Sensual Faith Podcast. “My intention is to answer the questions you were told not to ask in Bible study or Sunday school.” In short, she says, “I help Black women to decolonize their Christianity.”

Christianity and Black Spiritual Traditions

Most spiritual practices among enslaved people were feared and forbidden by plantation owners. Tamura Lomax, PhD, an associate professor of religious studies at Michigan State University, says “whites were very much afraid of African-derived religions” and “their solution was to tell us that our religions were demonic. That is what you have to do in order to oppress people,” she says. “Demonizing and dehumanizing people in their religions is central to oppressing and completely controlling the people.”

This form of religious propaganda is why generational fear has been passed down in connection to openly discussing practices like hoodoo, conjure, and rootwork – practices associated with African spirituality.

Some ancestors found a way around this erasure of their spiritual practices, says Lomax, author of Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture. They established secret “hush harbors,” secluded areas in the woods where they could commune and worship as they wished. They retained their African spiritual guardians by fusing them with Catholic saints and a Christian Holy Spirit.

“The ancestors utilized everything that they could access in order to survive… so yes, they’re tapping into the spirit world,” Lomax explains. “The spirit world becomes extremely important to them because it gives them a sense of power back. It gives them a way of controlling their environment. It wasn’t even about rejecting Christianity because many practiced hoodoo, conjure, and Christianity all together.”

Spiritually Breaking Free 

While the mixing of rituals and faith has been present in every generation, what we are seeing today is the freedom of Black women to live that reality much more publicly.

Benbow says this religious fluidity “gives us permission to tap into the wholeness of who we are and to bring all of our pieces into alignment and allow them to be in synergy spiritually.”

Devi Brown, for example, has found inspiration in her faith journey from multiple spiritual houses, including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism. A well-being educator and host of the Deeply Well podcast, she says her mission is to be Christ-like and offer service.

“I personally find the teachings of Christ to really be the guidance that I live my life with in all moments, though I don’t consider myself a Christian. I look at Christ’s teachings and Christ’s mastery as the way I wish to move in the world,” she says. “I don’t believe the focus should be on what you call yourself.”

She adds, “Instead of always being devoted to the organization that we belong to, it should always be the devotion of God first, I believe—and then finding the system or finding the religion that best helps us access God and meets our spiritual needs.”

Transcending Labels

For me, allowing myself to adopt new practices opened up my connection to my mother in the spirit world. I am able to commune with her every day at my altar and I’ve developed a relationship with her that transcends this earthly plane. And that saved me. I didn’t lose my faith in God – it expanded.

Perhaps it’s time we focus less on labels and embrace how powerful it is that we get to choose how we worship. Whether that’s Sunday service, bedside Baptist or attending group meditations, we are privileged to have freedom over our spirituality, and that freedom is an answered prayer of our ancestors.

Myeisha Essex is an LA-based journalist and wellness advocate. She shines a spotlight on the spirituality and holistic wellness journeys of Black women through storytelling, events and sharing the practices of mindfulness, meditation, and radical self-care.