Before the missionaries, before the master’s religion, our people already knew the sacred. Here’s what we lost — and how to take it back.
I grew up in Mississippi, where God was loud and certain and everywhere.
I loved that God. I want to say that plainly, because this is not a story about resentment. The church gave my people somewhere to put our grief and somewhere to put our hope when the world gave us neither. There is genius in that. There is survival in that.
But survival and freedom are not the same thing. And as I got older, I started to notice the shape of the God I’d been handed — and how strangely it fit the hands of the people who’d handed Him down through slavery, through the plantation, through the careful editing of which scriptures we were allowed to hear.
The God I was given was obsessed with my obedience. He was uneasy about my body. He wanted my suffering to mean something later, somewhere else, so I wouldn’t ask too many questions about it now. And it took me years — and a whole ocean — to understand that this was not the God of my ancestors. This was the God of their captors, taught to them on purpose.
The sacred was here first
Long before anyone arrived to “save” us, our people across the continent already lived inside a relationship with the divine that was sophisticated, embodied, and whole.
We knew a divine that did not live in a far-off heaven but in the river, the ancestors, the drum, the harvest, the body. We knew rituals that honored the dead as present, not gone. We understood the spiritual and the material as one fabric — that to tend the land was holy, that to dance was prayer, that the divine spoke through the everyday. Many of our traditions held the feminine as sacred, the earth as alive, and the human being as a carrier of the divine rather than a beggar outside its door.
This was not “primitive.” This was ancient, intricate knowledge. And it was named devilish, savage, and dark precisely because a people who already know they are sacred are very hard to enslave.
You cannot fully own someone who knows the divine lives inside them. So they taught us it lived everywhere but there.
What they replaced it with
Colonization did not just take land and labor. It performed a spiritual surgery. It cut us off from our cosmologies and stitched in a religion engineered for our compliance — a God who blessed the master, cursed the rebel, and promised the enslaved their reward only after death.
We were taught to fear our own traditions as sin. To call our healers superstition. To distrust the very practices that had carried our ancestors’ spirits across centuries. And the most painful part is how well it worked — how many generations later, some of us still flinch at the word ancestor, still feel a guilt we can’t name when we light a candle or speak to our dead.
That flinch is not yours. It was installed. And it can be uninstalled.
Taking it back
Reclaiming the God of your ancestors does not mean you have to abandon everything you love. For some women it means returning to traditional practices directly. For others it means staying within a faith but stripping away the colonizer’s edits — keeping the love, releasing the shame. There is no single correct door. The work is not about the destination. It’s about the agency: choosing your relationship to the sacred instead of inheriting one chosen for you.
Start by asking, honestly: which parts of what I believe make me smaller, more afraid, more ashamed of my own body and joy? And which parts make me feel held, expansive, connected, alive?
The first set was probably given to you. The second set was probably always yours.
Your ancestors did not pray for you to inherit their captivity. They prayed, in whatever tongue they still had, that one of us would come back and remember. You are allowed to be the one who remembers.
This is the same excavation I mapped in What It Means to Decolonize the Divine — here, we just go further back, to what came before the cage.
I trace this whole history — and the path back — in Decolonizing the Divine. And if you want company on the road home, come inside the community.