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.

If we erase all of that because Christianity does not fit the spiritual identity we prefer today, we have not liberated the ancestors from somebody else’s interpretation. We have simply replaced that interpretation with ours.

This is where I think some contemporary conversations about Hoodoo create another problem. We can become so determined to recover African spirituality that we begin making every historical Black spiritual practitioner sound like a twenty-first-century witch.

And Hoodoo becomes “authentic” only after Christianity has been removed from it.

But what happens when the historical practitioner does not cooperate with that story?

Do we listen? Or do we translate them into the spiritual vocabulary we wish they had used?

That is why I say: sometimes the witch gets too witch.

I am not saying witches are the problem. I am saying historical projection is the problem.

Calling a historical person something they did not call themselves requires evidence. Changing their theology because their theology makes us uncomfortable is not recovery. It is revision.

This is the tension I keep returning to:

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

Not all of them. That qualification matters.

But once we accept that diversity, something becomes possible. We no longer have to force every historical practitioner onto one side of our contemporary argument.

Maybe the person carrying the Bible and the root did not think they were contradicting themselves. Maybe we need them to be contradictory because of categories we inherited later.

That possibility deserves serious investigation.

This may be one of the most important questions for me.

What if the person who went to church on Sunday and consulted a rootworker when trouble came did not experience those actions through our modern categories?

What if the person who prayed a Psalm while preparing spiritual material did not think: Now I am temporarily leaving Christianity and entering magic.

What if those boundaries mattered more to later scholars, ministers, occultists, and institutions than they mattered to the person actually doing the work?

We should at least be willing to investigate that possibility. Because there is a subtle arrogance in looking backward and assuming that whenever historical people fail to fit our categories, they are the confused ones.

Maybe our categories are inadequate.

This becomes especially important when we talk about Scripture. Many Christians are taught to approach the Bible primarily through interpretation:

What does this passage mean?

That is an important question. Christian Conjure introduces another possibility:

What does this Word do?

Scripture speaks of refuge, washing, binding, loosing, opening, shutting, crushing, hiding, fire, protection, and deliverance.

Those words can be interpreted. But within an operative religious framework, they can also become prayed Word, spoken Word, written Word, carried Word, petitioned Word, and worked Word.

That does not mean every contemporary use of every verse is historically documented Hoodoo. It means we need to distinguish two questions:

This distinction has become essential to the way I approach historical sources.

I value Hyatt. I value Hurston. I value Puckett while also believing his work must be read critically within the racial and intellectual environment in which he wrote. I value historical documentation because without it we can easily invent whatever past makes us feel comfortable in the present.

But those sources have a particular job. They tell us what was documented. They can help us investigate what practitioners did, where they did it, what materials they used, what they called things, what they believed, and how collectors represented them.

They do not own Black spiritual possibility.

Historical scholarship governs the claims I make about history. It should not become another priesthood that decides what Black people are spiritually permitted to do. That would simply replace one gatekeeper with another.

There is an equal responsibility on the other side. Spiritual agency does not mean I can make any historical claim I want.

If I use Hebrews 4:12 in severing work because the Word is described as sharper than any twoedged sword, dividing asunder, I can explain my operative reading. I can say:

I do not need an academic to authorize my spiritual interpretation.

But if I say: Black Hoodoo practitioners in 1890 traditionally used Hebrews 4:12 for cord-cutting — I have made a different kind of statement. Now I need evidence.

That distinction does not weaken spiritual power. It strengthens intellectual integrity.

My practice belongs to me. History belongs to evidence.

Those two principles can coexist.

This same problem appears when we discuss Vodou or the traditions historically labeled “Voodoo.” Popular culture has trained generations of Americans to hear that word and imagine dolls, curses, zombies, demonic possession, or frightening occult power.

That caricature has consequences. It allows an actual religious tradition — with history, communities, ritual structures, sacred specialists, spirits, ethics, cosmology, and theology — to disappear behind a fantasy created largely by outsiders.

And then theological education can compound the problem by simply not teaching it. That silence matters.

These are not side questions. They are theological-history questions.

This brings me back to one of the questions that bothers me most. Why does one person get called a theologian while another becomes an informant?

Their methods are different. Their claims may be different. We should not pretend they are identical. But why is only one automatically understood as producing theological knowledge?

That question becomes especially important when race, literacy, institutional access, gender, class, and power determine whose ideas get preserved as “thought” and whose get collected as “folklore.”

This may be where both half-truths finally meet.

Both interpretations may sometimes illuminate part of the historical experience. Neither should be allowed to swallow every practitioner.

What if we stopped demanding that historical Black people validate our present-day identities? What if we asked instead:

And what happens when the answer is not either/or? What happens when the answer is:

Maybe we do not have to make the ancestors choose a side just because we did.

Recovering Black spiritual history cannot simply mean reversing the old hierarchy. If the old hierarchy said:

we have not necessarily liberated ourselves if we simply reverse it:

The names changed. The binary survived.

Recovery requires something harder. It requires investigation.

And sometimes it requires admitting: the source does not give us enough information to know.

That is not weakness. That is scholarship.

This is what I wanted from theological education. And it is what I now want education to provide others. Don’t decide beforehand what I am allowed to discover.

Give me the whole table.

Then teach me how to investigate them. Teach me to ask:

Then give me enough room to discern what I believe.

That is what Education for Elevation means to me. Education should not exchange one dependency for another.

I want people equipped to investigate.

That is a different kind of theological education. It does not say: here is the answer, believe it. It says:

I am no longer interested in a Black spiritual history washed clean enough to make the church comfortable. I am equally uninterested in reconstructing a past made witchy enough to make contemporary spiritual communities comfortable.

I want the people.

And where one person carries both the Bible and the root, I do not need to snatch one out of their hand so their spiritual identity will make sense to me.

Maybe the first act of recovery is simply allowing them to keep holding both.

Because the question is not whether the church can approve the root. The question is not whether the witch can approve the Bible. The deeper question is:

Maybe then we can move beyond the two half-truths.

Maybe then we can start dealing with the whole story.