The Two Half-Truths

The church wants the Bible without the root. The witch wants the root without the Bible. But some of our ancestors left us both.

There are two versions of Black spiritual history that I keep encountering.

The first is washed so clean that you can barely see the roots. The second is made so “witch” that you can barely see the Bible.

And I have a problem with both.

On one side, we are sometimes given a version of Black Christianity in which our ancestors went to church, prayed, sang, preached, read Scripture, and trusted God — but somehow left their roots, signs, dreams, spiritual baths, protective practices, conjure doctors, charms, sacred objects, and folk understandings of the spiritual world outside the sanctuary.

On the other side, we are sometimes given a version of Hoodoo in which authentic Black spirituality must be separated from Christianity — as though the Bible, Psalms, prayer, Jesus, God, church membership, and Christian language were foreign contaminants that have to be removed before we can uncover the “real” tradition.

I think both stories contain truth. I also think both become dangerous when a half-truth is presented as the whole history.

The church can become too washed. And the witch can become too witch.

Somewhere between those two cleaned-up versions of history are actual Black people whose spiritual lives were far more complicated. That is where I want to look.

I want to look because recovering our spiritual inheritance requires enough courage to let the people in the historical record be complicated.

Sometimes that means allowing the Bible and the root to sit on the same table.

I know this side personally. I went to theology school. I learned theology, biblical studies, church history, doctrine, ministry, and the theological conversations that institutions decided were important enough to put into a curriculum.

There was value in that education. But eventually I discovered something that bothered me.

The library was bigger than the classroom.

The more I read outside the boundaries of the assigned curriculum, the more I encountered another history of Black religious life.

And sometimes those categories occupied the same spiritual world.

That forced me to ask a question I still carry:

I am not arguing that every theology program must teach every religion or every folk tradition. I am asking something more fundamental.

A curriculum does not communicate only through what it includes. It also communicates through what it leaves out.

If students repeatedly encounter European theologians as theologians, ministers as religious authorities, institutional churches as religion, and systematic doctrine as serious thought — but encounter rootworkers, conjure doctors, healers, diviners, and African-derived traditions primarily as superstition, folklore, magic, or not at all — an intellectual hierarchy is being constructed. Even if nobody announces it.

The student learns:

But who created those categories? And why should we assume that the people being studied experienced their spiritual worlds according to the same boundaries?

Those questions became increasingly important to me as I began reading the historical sources for myself.

One of the assumptions I had to reconsider was the idea that Christianity and Conjure must occupy opposite sides of a spiritual line. The historical record is more complicated.

Black communities could contain churches, ministers, healers, rootworkers, conjure practitioners, prayer, Scripture, spiritual materials, and folk understandings of power at the same time.

It means the historical evidence does not always respect the clean boundaries we want to place around these categories.

Scripture could be read. But Scripture could also be spoken, prayed, written, carried, petitioned, or incorporated into spiritual work.

That is a much messier history. And I think the mess is important.

Because sometimes cleaning up the mess means cleaning the people themselves out of their own history.

Then there is the opposite story. I understand why it exists.

Christianity cannot be discussed in Black history without discussing enslavement, colonialism, white supremacy, missionary activity, forced cultural transformation, biblical interpretations used to justify oppression, and institutions that taught Black people to distrust parts of their own African inheritance.

Those histories matter. They should not be sanitized. But acknowledging them does not require us to erase the agency of Black Christians.

There is a difference between saying:

Those are not the same historical claim.

Black people did not merely receive Christianity.

And some brought that biblical world into Conjure.