Christian nationalism hates Black & LGBTQ+ people. The Yoruba religion provides some liberation.

Roughly one-third of Americans now qualify as Christian nationalism “Adherents” or “Sympathizers” (including 67% of white evangelical Protestants). For many Black queer people, that atmosphere has intensified a search for spiritual traditions that do not begin by treating queerness as sinful.

That search has led some toward Yoruba religion, spiritual and cultural traditions rooted in present-day Nigeria and West Africa that predate Christianity, Islam, and European colonization in Africa. Yoruba spirituality focuses on developing Iwa Pele (good character) to live in harmony with the divine and align with one’s destiny and spiritual balance through devotion to the Orishas (divine spirits), ancestor reverence, ritual, and ethical teachings.

Yoruba also offers its believers a spiritual heritage and a sense of racial and cultural belonging that doesn’t exist in other mainstream religions in the U.S. One can find Yoruba spiritual and gathering spaces in people’s homes or even in New York City shops that sell statues, sacred ceramic pots, beads, as well as oils and herbs used in offerings to Orishas.

One of Yoruba’s main practices is Ifá, the divination tradition associated with Orunmila (the Orisha of wisdom and destiny), through which priests interpret the Odu Ifá, a 256-volume of poetic verses that record history, cosmology, and philosophy.

Yoruba does not center on sin or heaven-and-hell judgment, but on consequences and alignment in this life. It is practiced through prayer, offerings, altars, music, and ritual. It also understands death mainly as joining the ancestors rather than a final judgment, and generally does not have a single strict rule on LGBTQ+ identity because teachings vary by tradition; though they’re usually more focused on balance and lived character than fixed sexual categories.

There are an estimated 75 and 100 million adherents of some version of Yoruba worldwide, including Ifá, Santería, and related Orisha traditions across Africa and the diaspora.

The practice surged in the U.S. during the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s. In fact, in Sheldon, South Carolina, you can even find the Oyotunji African Village, a 27-acre intentional community dedicated to preserving Yoruba-African culture, traditions, and spirituality in the U.S.

Yoruba is antithetical to Christian nationalism, which depends heavily upon dividing people into rigid moral categories of acceptable and unacceptable, citizen and outsider, righteous and fallen, pure and corrupt. The existence of openly queer people becomes evidence, within Christian nationalist rhetoric, that society has drifted away from divine order.

But Yoruba spirituality approaches existence from a radically different direction. Rather than centering spiritual life around sin, punishment, and moral condemnation, Yoruba religious traditions historically emphasized balance and nature. Spiritual life is not primarily measured through repression of the self but through alignment, accountability, wisdom, and participation in communal life.

That difference matters politically as much as spiritually because Christian nationalism is not simply a religious movement. It is an attempt to merge conservative Christianity with state power and national identity in ways that position Christianity as the defining authority over public morality, education, law, gender roles, and cultural legitimacy. The movement frequently portrays feminism, religious pluralism, reproductive freedom, and LGBTQ+ visibility as dangers to the nation’s moral stability.

Under Christian nationalism, Christianity is no longer treated as one religion among many — it becomes the presumed foundation of American identity itself. According to a 2024 survey, 55% of Americans believe Christian nationalism has “mostly negatively” affected the country — including majorities of Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, religious minorities, and younger Americans — reflecting growing public concern over the movement’s influence on democracy, education, and civil rights.

For queer Black Americans raised inside traditions shaped by those beliefs, Christian nationalist spirituality can become inseparable from fear, surveillance, shame, and the constant pressure to minimize oneself in order to remain acceptable to family, church, or community. Turning toward Yoruba spirituality can therefore become an explicit refusal of the idea that conservative Christianity should govern every dimension of social life.

That refusal also carries historical weight because Christianity’s relationship to Black communities cannot be separated from the histories of slavery, colonialism, and forced conversion. European missionaries and colonial governments frequently portrayed African spiritual traditions as primitive, demonic, irrational, or uncivilized while presenting Christianity as synonymous with morality and civilization itself.

Colonial administrations imposed anti-sodomy laws throughout many African territories while simultaneously suppressing Indigenous spiritual practices. The same colonial systems that criminalized queerness also worked aggressively to erase African religions.

Yoruba spirituality offers many practitioners a radically different vision of the sacred and the belief, one in which queerness does not need to be erased in order for spiritual life to remain whole.

That history matters because contemporary Christian nationalism often reproduces many of the same assumptions. It continues treating Christianity as inherently civilized and morally authoritative while portraying alternative spiritual systems, especially African ones, as suspect or illegitimate. For some queer Black practitioners, reconnecting with Yoruba spirituality becomes a rejection of that colonial logic altogether.

The appeal of Yoruba religion also comes from the nature of the Orishas themselves. The Orishas are not simplistic moral mascots divided neatly between good and evil. Oya is associated with storms, cemeteries, marketplaces, and transformation. Oshun governs rivers, sensuality, beauty, and fertility. Shango embodies thunder, charisma, and fire. Practitioners often speak about the Orishas less as fixed symbols of purity than as living expressions of contradiction, vulnerability, movement, desire, discipline, and becoming.

For many queer devotees, that spiritual complexity creates room for forms of sacred selfhood that do not depend upon denying the body, rigidly defining with strict gender expression, or suppressing desire in order to achieve legitimacy.

For generations, African spiritual systems were reduced within American culture to caricatures (like voo-doo zombies or “witch doctors”), while Christianity remained culturally normalized and institutionally protected. Yoruba practitioners increasingly challenge those portrayals by emphasizing the philosophical depth, ethical sophistication, and historical endurance of their spiritual traditions despite centuries of racial demonization and colonial suppression.

Thus, some queer Black Americans are turning toward Yoruba religion in dissatisfaction with organized religion. This turning represents a refusal to accept Christian nationalism within the United States.

In a political moment where queer existence is increasingly portrayed as incompatible with “traditional values,” Yoruba spirituality offers many practitioners a radically different vision of the sacred and the belief, one in which queerness does not need to be erased in order for spiritual life to remain whole.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.

Source link