The question here is narrower than the big debate about African culture. Nobody needs permission to keep a family name, cook a grandmother’s food, or grieve the way your people grieve. The question is about ritual: the libation poured before a meal, the offering left for the dead, the prayer addressed to an ancestor, the candle lit to reach someone. Can a Christian practice those things and remain a Christian?
Justice Okoronkwo, an Anglican priest in Nigeria, says no. He does not think African spirituality is empty. His point is that these rituals were built to reach a God that the tradition itself says cannot be reached directly. The gospel gives that direct access through Jesus. To keep the rituals is to keep using go-betweens the gospel has already made unnecessary. That leaves room for a candle lit in memory. Jude 3 teaches that memory and honor of the dead are right, and that veneration and spiritual contact are not.
The rest of this article explains why that line falls where it does, and why it matters so much for a person who loves both their faith and their family.
What are the rituals actually reaching for?
Okoronkwo begins by correcting a common picture. Many outsiders imagine African spirituality as something a person steps into now and then, during a ceremony, and then steps out of again. He says it works the other way around. Spirituality is the lens the African uses to read the whole world: how knowledge is gained, what a person is, why a flood comes, how a community holds together. “You cannot separate the African from the spirit,” he says. It is the air, not the occasion.
He then lays out the shape of that world. At the top is the supreme God, the creator of heaven and earth. In the middle is a crowded spirit world: lesser deities with specific jobs (farming, fertility, war), nature spirits tied to rivers, rocks and thunder, impersonal forces that rituals and amulets can tap, and the ancestors. At the bottom is the physical world, with human beings in it. He describes the whole thing as a diamond. The point at the top is narrow. The wide part is the middle, because that is where daily religious life happens.
The top matters, though, and Okoronkwo insists on it. He argues that “the concept of the divine was not brought to Africa by the missionaries.” He points to Igbo and Yoruba personal names built around God, names that existed before Christianity arrived. Among the Igbo, he says, everything is understood to come from Chi. Africans knew there was a supreme God long before anyone preached to them.
And yet, in his words, “in African cosmology, the supreme God is not accessible.” This is the hinge of his whole argument. The system knows God is there. It just puts layers between God and you. So every ritual aimed at an ancestor or a deity is, in the end, a way of working through those layers toward favor, protection or guidance from the God you cannot approach yourself.
Why does the middle layer matter so much?
You might expect the problem to be that the spirits are scary or the rituals are strange. Okoronkwo’s concern runs deeper than appearance. It is about what kind of relationship the system creates.
He draws the contrast sharply. In Christianity, God comes down and relates to people. In the traditional system, he says of the worshiper, “He’s not relating with the God, he’s coming to the God for relief, relief from his enemies, relief from hunger, relief from the elements.” The approach is transactional. You bring what is required and you hope to get what you need.
That shapes the emotional life of the person inside it. Okoronkwo lists what he calls the woes of African spirituality: fear of the deities and their retribution, bondage to the ancestors, mediums with unchecked power who make outrageous demands, altars and blood covenants that are hard to leave once entered. He mentions the practice of setting aside a little food or drink for the ancestors before eating, done so as not to anger them. About sacrifices in general he says, “Many of those sacrifices are not driven by a sense of love for the deity. They’re actually driven by fear.”
This changes the question a believer should ask about any ritual. The easy question is whether it hurts anyone. A libation spills a little drink. A candle burns down. Where is the harm? Okoronkwo’s answer is that a ritual is never just a gesture. It carries a claim about who God is and how you get to him. A ritual that addresses the dead in order to secure their goodwill says that the dead stand between you and God, and that you need to keep them satisfied. That claim is the problem, whatever the object involved.
What does the gospel change?
Here Okoronkwo’s argument turns from diagnosis to good news. “In African traditional religion, you cannot access the throne of the supreme being until you go through the deities, until you go through the mediums who grant you access to the ancestors,” he says. Then he turns it around: “So in Christianity there is access directly to the throne of grace.”
He is drawing on Hebrews 4:16, which in the King James Version reads: “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” It helps to read that verse where it sits. Hebrews was written to believers being tempted to drift back toward an older system with its own priests and sacrifices. The letter’s argument is that Jesus is a high priest who has passed into the heavens and who sympathizes with human weakness (Hebrews 4:14-15). The boldness in verse 16 rests on him. The original setting was the Jewish priesthood, not African tradition, so applying it here is an application by analogy. But it is a close analogy. In both cases the question is whether you still need layers of mediation once Jesus has opened the way.
Paul puts the same idea plainly: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Okoronkwo adds another contrast. In the traditional system, he says, priesthood belongs to the mediums and the ordinary person cannot reach God except through them. He points to 1 Peter 2:9, which calls believers “a royal priesthood” and speaks of the God “who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” In Christ, the ordinary person is the priest. Nobody has to broker the meeting.
This is why Okoronkwo sees the gospel as an answer rather than an attack. He argues that “the African already has that compartment that needs to be filled.” The tradition always knew a supreme God existed. What it lacked was a way to come near him. Christianity does not bring Africans a God they never heard of. It tells them that the God at the top of the diamond has come down, in Jesus, to the bottom where they live.
Is a candle for my grandmother the same thing?
Not necessarily, and the difference is worth being careful about.
Jude 3 teaches that the line is intent, not the object. A candle is wax and a wick. The question is what you are doing with it. Lighting a candle on the anniversary of her death, setting out her photo, telling her stories, cooking her food: these are acts of memory. They are directed toward God and toward the living. They say she mattered and still matters to you.
The act changes when it is addressed to her. If the candle is a message to her, if you expect her to hear, protect, guide or bless you, or if you feel that skipping it might bring trouble, then you have moved from remembering to contacting. That is the move Jude 3 says a Christian should not make, and it is the one Okoronkwo is warning against.
A few honest questions can show you which one you are doing. Who is this addressed to? Am I expecting anything back from her? Would I be afraid of what might happen if I stopped? Okoronkwo’s observation about fear is useful here. Memory is free. You can do it or not, and love is the reason. Ritual contact tends to come with a sense of obligation, because the system it belongs to runs on keeping the unseen satisfied.
Scripture does not ask Christians to stop grieving or to forget. Paul writes that believers should not “sorrow not, even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). The point is that Christians grieve differently, with hope, and not that they stop grieving. Okoronkwo also contrasts the traditional idea that pleasing the ancestors can earn a better return to life with Hebrews 9:27: “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” In the Christian picture, the dead are in God’s hands. They are not standing in a middle layer, waiting to be fed or appeased, and they are not your route to God.
Isn’t this just the missionaries’ old verdict?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer. For many Black Christians, especially in the diaspora, the idea that African spirituality is dark and dangerous sounds like something colonizers said to justify taking land and erasing culture. Why trust the same verdict now?
Okoronkwo agrees with much of the premise. He says African spirituality has been misunderstood because it has been described by outsiders, demonized by missionaries who arrived alongside colonial power, and branded primitive by colonizers who wanted to weaken the confidence it gave Africans. He also says the diaspora often sees only one piece of it. People torn from home in the slave trade and fighting to survive reached for the protective and harmful uses of spiritual power. Judging the whole tradition by that piece, he says, is like a stranger judging all of America by the soldiers they once saw in a war zone.
He also names real wealth in the tradition: a strong moral sense in which nothing is morally neutral, deep community, respect for elders, the dignity of hard work, care for families, a life that takes God seriously every day. His rejection is targeted. He is not throwing out African culture. He is drawing one specific line, at the practices that seek favor and power through the spirit world.
So his verdict is not the missionaries’ verdict. It comes from inside Africa, from someone who defends much of what they dismissed. His objection is aimed at the go-betweens, not at being African.
There is a limit to be honest about. Okoronkwo goes further than saying these rituals are unnecessary. He argues that the spirits people contact through them, under whatever names they take, are in fact demons, and that the contact leads to bondage. That is a theological judgment, not something a skeptic can test in a lab. It stands on Scripture’s clear warnings against consulting the dead and seeking out spirits (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) and on the Christian conviction that Christ is over every power. Jude 3 affirms that the spiritual world is real and that Christ has authority over it. On the more speculative details of how that world works, faithful Christians hold a range of views. The core point holds either way. Whatever is on the other end of the ritual, it is not the direct access to God that Christ offers.
Why not keep both, just in case?
Some people will grant all of this and still feel the pull to hedge. Go to church, and keep the old practices too. If one fails, the other might not.
Okoronkwo understands why people go back. He names grief, and he names protest against white supremacy, colonialism and the slave trade. He does not dismiss those wounds. But he says plainly that “it is not an excuse to go out of light into darkness.”
His reasoning about the hedge is simple. The two systems give opposite answers to the same question: how do I reach God? One says through layers. The other says through Jesus, directly. Practicing both is not a neutral middle position. Every ritual of contact tells God, in effect, that you still think you need the go-betweens. “Why would you want to be linking with spirits with demons when you could have access to God directly,” he asks. Keeping a foot in each, he warns, is “setting up yourself for a great fall with demons.”
Look at what the hedge actually protects. It protects a fear: that the ancestors might be offended, that the protection might lapse. The gospel’s offer is to be free of that fear. Hedging keeps the very thing Christ came to remove.
That brings the original question back with a sharper edge. Practicing these rituals is not a matter of whether you are allowed to love your grandmother. You are, and you should. The question is whether you will still treat her as a doorway to God, when God has opened the door himself. A Christian does not lose the grandmother. She loses only the role the old system gave her. You can still say her name, tell her stories, and thank God for her. You simply bring your needs to him and not to her. Okoronkwo ends where Proverbs 18:10 does: “The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.”
Quick answers
- Can a Christian pour libations or pray to ancestors? Okoronkwo argues no, because these rituals work through a spirit world that Christ has made unnecessary, and they tie people to fear and obligation. Jude 3 teaches that memory and honor are right, and that veneration and spiritual contact are not.
- Is lighting a candle for someone who died wrong? Not in itself. A candle lit in memory, with your prayer directed to God, is an act of honor. It becomes a problem when it is meant as contact with the dead or as a way to secure their favor.
- Did missionaries bring God to Africa? Okoronkwo says no. He points to traditional names for God that predate Christianity and argues that Africans already knew of a supreme God.
- Is African spirituality all bad? Okoronkwo names real strengths, including strong morality, community, respect for elders and the dignity of work. His objection is aimed at practices that seek favor and power through spirits, not at African culture as a whole.
- What is the core difference between the two? Access. In the traditional system, the supreme God is reached only through deities, mediums and ancestors. In Christianity, believers come directly to God through Jesus.