If your grandmother poured out a drink for the ancestors or kept a shrine in the house, the verdict that she spent her life worshiping demons is too simple. The opposite verdict, that it was harmless culture, is also too simple. Scripture does not treat offerings made to beings other than God as spiritually empty. A family practice like this usually holds several things at once: knowledge of a Creator, real love for the dead, a deep fear of death, and sometimes real spiritual danger. The gospel answers each of those differently.
Joseph Byamukama knows this from inside a family. He grew up in Kampala, Uganda, and in villages up country, where he says he experienced traditional rituals firsthand. He holds a doctorate in New Testament studies from Ridley College in Melbourne and founded Veracity Found, a ministry that resources the Ugandan church with contextual theology. When Lisa Fields asked him whether everyone in African religions practices witchcraft, he answered with his own grandmother. She was Roman Catholic, and she also kept a shrine. In his words, “she would have a rosary and a Bible on this side, and then she would sacrifice and pray to her gods on the other.”
Byamukama names her as a woman who prayed to her gods. He also separates her from the neighbors he says practiced witchcraft. Those two details, held together, are where this question starts.
What was the shrine for?
Byamukama locates the shrine inside a larger story. Many African peoples, he argues, held to one supreme Creator above the spirits of rivers, mountains and fertility. Many also tell of that God withdrawing after human wrongdoing. In one version a woman pounding grain strikes God with the pestle. In another the first couple disobeys a command. Either way, God became distant, and his nearness came to feel dangerous.
The shrine answered a practical need created by that distance. A barren woman, a farmer watching crops die in a dry rainy season, a pregnant mother afraid of miscarriage: none of them, Byamukama says, would normally go to a Creator who seemed removed from daily life. “Africans needed someone or some spiritual entity to relate with on the day-to-day challenges of life.” So they went to the ancestors and the lesser gods. He gives a Ugandan example of a spirit linked with earthquakes and feared as a cause of miscarriage, and notes that children born during an earthquake were sometimes named Musisi.
He is concrete about what these visits involved. A person needing rain might go to the witch doctor and be told to bring a white goat or a white chicken, or to bury a charm in the field. Lisa Fields summarized the ancestors’ role this way: for those who practice these religions, the ancestors occupy the go-between place that Jesus occupies for Christians.
That is what a sacrifice at a family shrine usually is. It is a request, addressed to a spirit believed to be close enough to help, for something the person cannot secure alone. Seeing the act that way is the first step toward judging it fairly.
Where did the “all demonic” verdict come from?
Byamukama does not pretend the blanket verdict appeared from nowhere. He says that when missionaries came, and especially when colonialists came, “there was this sensibility of everything African is demonic, everything African is evil,” alongside a glorification of everything Western. He calls that tragic. He does not blame every missionary, and he names social Darwinism as one idea behind the attitude. Lisa Fields noted the double standard: Christians discuss Zeus and Hercules as mythology, yet treat African gods as a threat.
The cost, he argues, is still being paid. He links the blanket condemnation to the many people of African descent who now see Christianity as a colonial religion and are returning to traditional spirituality. He says that view is mistaken, and he also says he understands where they are coming from. A faith presented as the enemy of everything your grandmother was will be heard as an attack on her.
His main complaint is about method. Missionaries, he says, “might have lumped all that together.” Once everything sits under one word, the gospel has nowhere specific to land.
Why “it’s just culture” does not hold either
Byamukama does not let his critique of missionaries slide into the opposite verdict. Asked whether people in traditional settings believed witchcraft was real, he said yes: “Africans have always known that witchcraft was real.” He suggests that Western readers shaped by the Enlightenment are tempted to treat such accounts as myth, and he thinks that temptation misses something real.
Scripture also refuses the neutral verdict. Writing to Corinthian Christians, Paul says, “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). He has just said that an idol is nothing in itself. His concern is the worship. Worship directed away from the true God is spiritually real, and believers should not take part in it.
The limits of that text matter here. Paul is addressing sacrifices to pagan gods and the meals connected to them in Corinth, not offerings to a family’s own dead. Applying his words to a libation for the ancestors is an inference, and Christians disagree about how far it reaches. Some apply it to any offering addressed to the dead. Others draw the line at acts that seek spiritual help or protection, and treat simple remembrance as something different. The evidence in this piece also has limits. It rests mainly on one scholar describing many peoples, and Byamukama himself says there may be as many African spiritualities as there are cultures, with differences even between families. A reader’s own family practice may not match his account.
The distinction Jude 3 Project holds gives that inference a working shape. It honors the legitimate desire to respect heritage and the dead, and distinguishes that honor from practices Scripture warns against: memory and honor, yes; veneration and spiritual contact, no. The question for any specific act is what it is addressed to and what it asks for. Telling a grandfather’s story honors him. A sacrifice made so that his spirit will protect a harvest or a pregnancy seeks his help in place of God’s. Many families do both without separating them, and many family members could not say which one a given gesture was meant to be.
Confirm, clarify, confront
Byamukama offers a better tool than a single label. He wishes missionaries had first recognized what the gospel confirms in African spirituality, then what it clarifies, and then what it confronts.
What it confirms starts with a scene he loves in Genesis 28. Jacob, fleeing his brother, sleeps on a stone at Bethel and dreams of a ladder joining heaven and earth. He wakes and says, “Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not” (Genesis 28:16). Byamukama links this to Paul telling a pagan crowd that God “left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons” (Acts 14:17), and to the Athenian altar where Paul says, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23). From these texts he draws his sharpest line: “the missionary is not bringing God to Africa. God is bringing the missionary to Africa.” He adds, “That the place where they are going is not a place where God has not been.” The first missionary question, then, is what God had already been doing there.
What it clarifies is the gap the shrine was built to cross. The withdrawal stories carry a real memory of a broken relationship with God, and Genesis tells of closeness lost through disobedience too. The gospel corrects the next step. Scripture says, “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). The ancestors were asked to bridge a distance that God has crossed himself. A grandmother who went to the shrine was looking for a way to reach help, and Christ is the way the New Testament names.
What it confronts is the posture behind many of these acts. “We traditionally related with the Gods transactionally,” Byamukama says. “We did not relate with them for their own sake.” People went to the gods when they had problems or wanted something. He admits that “we love the gods that we can manipulate,” gods who might give someone an edge over a rival or a neighbor.
Is every traditional practice witchcraft?
No. Byamukama keeps the two apart in his own story. Right after describing his grandmother’s shrine, he notes that “we had neighbors who practiced witchcraft.” He also says plainly that not all Africans practiced it.
His definition is narrow. He describes witchcraft as “an attempt to manipulate the gods or the powers” in order to harm someone else. A witch, in his account, engages otherworldly power, for themselves or for a client, to bring harm to a person. That precision protects families. Calling a grandmother’s sacrifice witchcraft treats a woman seeking protection as someone trying to hurt others. It is inaccurate, and it weakens the word for the cases where it fits. A church that uses one word for everything loses the ability to warn about anything in particular.
Why do Christians still go back to the shrine?
Byamukama’s grandmother is not a relic. He says that in Uganda today, “it’s not unheard of or uncommon for someone to be in church on Sunday and they visit a shrine on Wednesday.” His diagnosis begins with teaching, not demons.
The transactional habit, he argues, often survives conversion. “Even when we come to faith, we tend to treat the pastor as we treated the witch doctor traditionally.” The pastor is assumed to know God on your behalf. He names the cause of your trouble, prescribes the fix, and asks for an offering or seed money. The vocabulary changes while the posture stays the same. When the Christian version does not deliver on schedule, the old one is still available.
The second gap is suffering. Byamukama says many young Africans believe “if you suffer, you have fallen out of favor with God.” He points to Paul’s thorn in the flesh. Paul asked three times for it to be removed and was told, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). A believer never taught that answer will hear unanswered prayer as abandonment and look for gods who seem to answer faster. Byamukama warns that unless the African church teaches what it means to follow a suffering Savior, suffering will keep driving people toward witch doctors or away from faith altogether.
He also speaks to fear of curses: the worry that a neighbor’s visit to a witch doctor explains a lost job or a stalled life. His reply is that Christ has triumphed over the principalities and powers people fear, and that nothing can separate the believer from him. Paul says the same of the cross: “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15).
The fear of being forgotten
Byamukama describes a Ugandan custom. Asked to “walk like a Muganda,” a person recites their ancestry: son of so-and-so, grandson of so-and-so, from such a place. In traditional belief, he explains, you keep your identity after death only as long as someone living remembers you. When the last person who knew you dies, you dissolve into a mass of nameless spirits. He traces several practices to that fear, including polygamy as a way to have many children, and the pressure many still feel today not to die childless.
That fear sits underneath many offerings to the dead. The living are keeping the dead in existence, and someday they hope to be kept the same way. Byamukama’s answer is the resurrection. “The doctrine of the resurrection is one of the most beautiful teachings that Christianity brought on this continent,” he says. In Christ, he argues, human identity does not dissolve at death.
That is why a grandchild can keep the lineage. You can say your grandmother’s name, tell her story and recite where your family comes from. The recitation becomes an act of gratitude, because God holds the people in it, and their existence no longer depends on anyone’s memory.