Were African traditional religions simply demonic? Joseph Byamukama, a Ugandan New Testament scholar who grew up around these rituals, gives a more careful answer. Many of these traditions held real knowledge of one Creator. They also kept a memory that closeness with him had been broken. And they contained practices Scripture warns against. Each of those needs a different response from the gospel. This guide helps you recover what the traditions believed, in the order they believed it, and then sort it with a three-part tool Byamukama proposes. You can work through it alone in about an hour. A group can do it in one long session or split it at the timeline practice.
The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Joseph Byamukama. He holds a doctorate in New Testament studies from Ridley College in Melbourne and founded Veracity Found, a ministry that resources the Ugandan church. Lisa invited him after reading his chapter on Christianity and the African traditional gods in Apologetics in Africa. Where this guide reports what he says about history, it is reporting his account. Part of your work is to notice the difference between what he observed, what he draws from other scholars, and what he concludes.
Start with the order of the story
Most blanket verdicts about African religion begin in the middle, with a shrine or a sacrifice. Byamukama begins earlier, with what the traditions said about God before any lesser spirit enters the picture. The sequence matters, because the later practices only make sense as answers to the earlier beliefs.
First, a Creator above all. Byamukama says the common Western picture assumes many rival gods. He argues instead that “traditionally Africans had always held to a supreme being,” known by different names in different peoples. In his own tribe the name is one thing, and in Kampala it is another. This God, he says, “is not at the same level with the other gods of the rivers or mountains.” He describes a ranking: “the Africans did not really believe that there are many gods at the same level.”
Second, a closeness that broke. Drawing on the African theologian John Mbiti’s survey, Byamukama says many cultures remember that God was once near and that “something went wrong that caused his withdrawal.” The stories differ. In some, a woman pounding grain strikes God with the pestle. In others, the first couple disobeys a command. He adds that some cultures came to see God’s nearness as dangerous, and he says Mbiti points to Burundi and Rwanda as examples.
Third, the rise of go-betweens. Byamukama argues that “that relational distance created an avenue where then intermediary gods begin to arise.” Ancestors, spirits of rivers and mountains, and gods of fertility or war filled the gap. His reason is practical. “Most traditional Africans would not go to the supreme creator because he’s removed from their lives.” A barren woman or a farmer watching crops die needed help now. As he puts it, “Africans needed someone or some spiritual entity to relate with on the day-to-day challenges of life.” Lisa Fields drew the comparison plainly. For those who practice these religions, she said, ancestors play the go-between part that Jesus plays for Christians.
Byamukama gives one caution that belongs at the top of any timeline. Asked how many traditional religions there are, he said, “I would assume there would be as many as the cultures there are.” The three stages above are a common thread, not a single creed. Lisa named the problem this way: “it’s all lumped into one when there’s a variety.”
A first observation
Before going on, write the three stages in your own words in one line each. Then mark which parts Byamukama says he saw himself and which parts he takes from Mbiti or summarizes across many cultures. You will use this in the practice below.
Lay the story beside Scripture
The resemblance to Genesis is obvious, and it is easy to make too much of it. Read Genesis 3 first. After the man and woman disobey, the text says “Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8). In Genesis, people hide from God. In several African stories, God withdraws from people. Both remember lost closeness, but they place the movement differently. Notice that difference rather than smoothing it over.
Byamukama’s favorite text points the other way. Jacob, fleeing Esau, sleeps at Bethel and dreams of a ladder between heaven and earth. He wakes and says, “Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not” (Genesis 28:16). Byamukama connects this to Paul. Speaking to a pagan crowd, Paul says God “left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons” (Acts 14:17). In Athens, Paul finds an altar “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” and says, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23).
Read these in their settings. Acts 14 and 17 are narratives of Paul’s preaching, not a full doctrine of other religions. They show Paul starting from what his hearers already sensed about God and then correcting it. They do not say that every belief in the room was true. That is the pattern Byamukama draws out, and it is as far as the text takes us.
Then read 1 Timothy 2:5: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Set it next to stage three of your timeline. The traditions felt a gap and filled it with many go-betweens. Paul names one, and he is both God and man.
A second chronology: what the encounter did
The next turning point is the arrival of missionaries and colonial powers. Byamukama gives no dates here, and this guide adds none. His claim concerns attitude. When missionaries came, “but especially when colonialists came,” he says, “there was this sensibility of everything African is demonic, everything African is evil,” alongside a glorification of the West. He is careful: “I don’t think that every missionary did that.” He also names social Darwinism as part of the cause.
Lisa Fields pointed to a double standard: “we don’t demonize Greek mythology in the way we demonize African spirituality.” Zeus is a literature unit. An African river spirit is treated as a threat before anyone asks what people believed about it.
Byamukama’s main complaint is about method. Missionaries, he says, “might have lumped all that together.” He also offers a question they could have asked first. If God was already active in Africa, then “what has he been doing there?” His evidence is concrete. When the Bible was translated into African languages, “they don’t struggle with the name of God because God has been there. God has been named.”
He links this history to the present. He says the blanket condemnation helps explain why many people of African descent now call Christianity a colonial religion. He rejects that conclusion, and the history supports him. Jude 3 Project’s position is that Christianity took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe.
The sorting tool
Byamukama wishes missionaries had understood “the things that the Gospel confirms about African sensibilities and African spirituality,” and then moved to what it clarifies and what it confronts. Each word asks a different question.
- Confirm: What does this belief get right about God or about human need?
- Clarify: Where is a true longing aimed at the wrong answer?
- Confront: What is opposed to Christ and has to be given up?
The confront category is real, and Byamukama does not soften it. “Africans have always known that witchcraft was real,” he says. He defines witchcraft narrowly, as “an attempt to manipulate the gods or the powers” to harm someone else. He also says not every African practiced it. In his own family, his Roman Catholic grandmother kept a shrine: “she would have a rosary and a Bible on this side, and then she would sacrifice and pray to her gods on the other.” Witchcraft was something the neighbors practiced.
Scripture does not treat offerings to other powers as empty. Paul writes that “the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils” (1 Corinthians 10:20). Jude 3 Project honors the desire to respect heritage and the dead, and it draws a line at veneration and spiritual contact. Memory and honor are welcome. Offerings meant to gain an ancestor’s help are not.
Practice: build the timeline and sort it
This is the center of the guide. Take a large sheet of paper or a whiteboard.
- Draw three horizontal bands. Label them What the traditions remember, The encounter and Now.
- Place every claim from this guide in its band. In the first band, put the supreme Creator, the withdrawal, and the intermediaries. In the second, put the attitude Byamukama describes, the lumping together, and the names for God already in the languages. Leave the third band empty for now.
- Beside each item, write who makes the claim: Byamukama from his own experience, Byamukama summarizing Mbiti, Lisa Fields, or the biblical text.
- Mark each item O for observation or I for interpretation. The claim that African languages already had names for God before the translators came is an observation about language. The claim that God was preparing the way is an interpretation of that observation. Both can be true, but they rest on different evidence.
- Only then, label each first-band item confirm, clarify or confront. Expect some items to need two labels.
For a group, have pairs do steps 2 to 4 before anyone sorts. Disagreements about labels are useful. Ask the pair defending a label to say what evidence would change their mind. If someone in the room has family members who practice a traditional religion, let them choose whether to say so. No one should have to defend a relative or use one as an example.
A third chronology: now
Now fill the last band. Byamukama says the old patterns are not museum pieces. In Uganda, “it’s not unheard of or uncommon for someone to be in church on Sunday and they visit a shrine on Wednesday.”
His explanation reaches back to the first band. “We traditionally related with the Gods transactionally,” he says. “We did not relate with them for their own sake.” That habit can survive conversion: “even when we come to faith, we tend to treat the pastor as we treated the witch doctor traditionally.” The pastor diagnoses the problem and asks for seed money. The vocabulary changes, but the posture stays the same.
He names a second cause: a missing teaching on suffering. Many young Africans, he says, believe “if you suffer, you have fallen out of favor with God.” He points to Paul’s thorn, where the answer Paul received was “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). A believer who has never heard that will read unanswered prayer as abandonment.
Last, he returns to death. In traditional belief as he describes it, you keep your identity after death only while someone living remembers you. Asked whether these religions taught heaven and hell, he said, “Not that I would know.” That is why, for him, “the doctrine of the resurrection is one of the most beautiful teachings that Christianity brought on this continent.” If God keeps the person and raises the body, being forgotten no longer means being lost.
Some readers carry real fear that someone has cursed them. Byamukama points them to Colossians 2:15, where Christ, “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.” If that fear is affecting your sleep, health or ability to function, talk with a pastor you trust and also see a doctor or counselor. Prayer and qualified care work together.
Questions for discussion
- Look at your O and I marks. Which interpretation in the first band rests on the thinnest evidence, and what would you need to know to hold it more firmly?
- Genesis has people hiding from God, while several African stories have God withdrawing. Does that difference matter for how the gospel answers each story?
- Byamukama says the gospel confirms belief in a supreme Creator. What would be lost if a teacher skipped confirming and went straight to confronting?
- Which items needed two labels? What does that tell you about using a single verdict for a whole tradition?
- Where do you see the transactional posture Byamukama describes in churches you know, including traditions with no African roots?
- How would you explain the line between honoring the dead and seeking contact with them to someone who loves a relative who practiced a traditional religion?
Before you put the sheet away
Add one entry to the Now band that belongs to you. Pick a time when prayer felt slow and you went looking for faster help elsewhere. That might have been a person, a habit, or a promise someone sold you. Mark it the way you marked everything else: what happened, and how you interpreted it. Then decide which of the three labels it needs. Byamukama’s timeline does not end with the missionaries. It runs through the present, and part of it may run through you.