A tarot deck and a sage bundle are competing with Sunday morning, and in one respect they are winning: people believe something happens when they use them. That, more than unbelief, is why so many people now call themselves spiritual but not religious. Dr. CJ Rhodes, who pastors Mount Helm Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, and directs spiritual and religious life at Alcorn State University, sums up the movement in one sentence: “They’ll just go where the power is, regardless of the source of that power.” In his reading, the trend is a verdict on congregations more than a rejection of God.
That claim cuts against a common explanation. When young adults leave, many church leaders assume they want permission to live however they please. Rhodes grants that some do. He argues that for a large share of them the departure begins with disappointment. They wanted faith to be real, and they could not see it working.
Who is leaving, and what are they keeping?
Rhodes describes the group carefully. “They’re not atheists. They don’t deny the existence of God or the divine.” Many believe in a higher power, and those who grew up around church often name that higher power as Jesus. What they reject is the institution: the attendance, the business meetings, the Bible studies, the whole Sunday apparatus. In his words, “They just question the efficacy of following Jesus in an institution that they see as powerless and abusive.”
The words powerless and abusive name two different complaints. The first says nothing happens at church. The second says harmful things happen there and get covered up. Rhodes treats both as real and does not let either cancel the other.
Their faith has not vanished. It has moved. Some find Jesus in prayer with friends over brunch or in praying a friend through surgery. Some find it on social media, where clips of older Black preaching and gospel music circulate among people who may never sit in a pew. They understand something about that church culture, Rhodes observes, even while staying outside it.
This is not a portrait of all young Black people, and Rhodes does not offer it as one. He speaks from pastoral and campus experience, not survey data. When he describes a hunger for mentorship among Gen Z, he qualifies it himself: he has seen it at Alcorn and does not claim to know the whole country. His observations carry a pastor’s authority and a pastor’s limits.
What “power” means in this claim
Lisa Fields, founder and president of Jude 3 Project, names the hunger directly. Younger people “want to experience something, some kind of power. They wanna see proof that the power is working in the earth.” They “want a spiritual experience, like you said, they just want one that works.”
Rhodes connects that hunger to the gap between what churches promise and what people see. Congregations tell the next generation that faithful service pays off. Then a young person watches a mother give everything to the church while the family loses housing, or watches a pastor prey on young women in the congregation. Rhodes says the adults of his own childhood did not always have “their audio and video in sync.” Saying one thing and doing another teaches children that the words carry no force.
Then the same young people encounter something that feels like power elsewhere: tarot readings, the zodiac, seances, rituals with sage and crystals. “There are all these other spaces that feel more spiritual than traditional Sunday morning at 11,” Rhodes says. The contrast becomes a spirituality they can feel against a religion they cannot.
Rhodes knows this question from the inside. Growing up Missionary Baptist in central Mississippi, he read his father’s philosophy books and comparative religion texts and began to wonder whether the Bible was simply another myth. His test was blunt: “if I don’t experience particularly the miraculous dimension of what I see recorded in scripture, then I’m calling into question whether or not this is real, or if this is just a myth.” He drifted into what he calls a soft agnosticism. At 16, in a meeting with Pentecostal friends, he says “there was something about the word of knowledge, the prophetic that happened in that meeting that transcended my rational doubts.” His diagnosis of the spiritual but not religious grows partly out of his own road back to faith.
Why calling it witchcraft backfires
The standard church response to sage and tarot is a label: that’s the devil. Rhodes thinks the label exposes the church’s problem instead of solving it. If the experiences people report are real and demonic, then “It begs the question, does the devil have more power than God?” He presses further: “Because if the devil’s doing all this stuff, but God stopped doing all this stuff back when the apostles died, we got a problem.”
His sharper target is a church culture that expects little from God. Churches should ask, he says, “why is so little power being demonstrated in many of our churches?” The question turns away from the people leaving and toward the congregations they left.
Fields grants that some of these practices contain witchcraft, but she insists “that’s not the first place to engage them.” The first task is to understand why someone reached for them. She names people who were sexually abused while attending church and Sunday school, and who now ask where God was. She names children who watched a parent attend faithfully every week and still live without peace or relief from poverty. For someone carrying that history, a ritual promising protection and cleansing is a response to pain, not a hobby.
None of this makes the practices harmless. Jude 3’s position is that the line runs through intent, not the object: using sage or crystals to access spiritual power or cleansing apart from God is incompatible with following Jesus, while a bundle burned for its smell is not a ritual at all. That distinction matters for engagement. A church that cannot tell decoration from spiritual practice will not be trusted to discern anything else.
Is this really about African roots?
Rhodes describes a “Jesus plus” pattern: Jesus plus the ancestors, Jesus plus crystals, Jesus plus sage. Many who blend these practices believe the institutional church suppressed African spiritual practices that they consider more effective. For them, it is a way of reconnecting with what they believe to be African.
Rhodes does not simply accept that self-description, and his counterexamples matter. First, these seekers are often not drawn to Hebrew Israelism or the Nation of Islam either, the movements apologists usually discuss. They are a distinct group. Second, the African label is often loose. “Mind you, there are many folks in Africa who say, y’all ain’t doing it right,” Rhodes notes, pointing out that chakras come from Hindu tradition, not West Africa. What looks like ancestral recovery is often “very American consumerist buffet style spirituality where people are just pulling a little bit here, a little bit there.”
That correction does not dismiss the longing underneath it. Christianity is not a foreign import that Black believers must accept at the cost of their heritage; the faith has ancient African roots, and Jude 3 holds that no one has to choose between the two. On ancestors, the line Jude 3 draws is memory and honor without veneration or spiritual contact. A person who wants to remember the people who came before has a home in the church. A person who wants to consult them has crossed into something else.
Rhodes names a second draw: the tangible. Sage, crystals, ritual baths and jewelry are things people can hold and use at home without a pastor or church mother. He calls them close to sacramental, vehicles for presence and peace. His answer is that Christian practice has never been purely abstract. His mother, a Missionary Baptist, anointed the doors of her home with oil. Some traditions use incense. “I don’t need sage to cleanse evil spirit,” Rhodes says. “I just call upon the name of Jesus.” In his account, the church has hidden or mocked its own tangible practices and left seekers to find substitutes.
The credibility gap is personal as well as social
The trauma behind the search for cleansing, Rhodes says, came from enslavement and white supremacy, but also from “the residual effects of broken homes and broken communities”: absent fathers, toxic mothers, damage young people had to absorb without help. A church that speaks to only one of those wounds will look disconnected to people living with both.
This is why he criticizes what he calls the more liberationist community, whose members he counts as friends. His complaint is that “they think of liberation as simply social.” Young people hear sermons about systems, then look at the preacher’s life, and “younger people are saying, but I don’t see liberation in your life.” Rhodes notes that some voices outside the church, in the Nation of Islam and among Afrocentric influencers online, pair a sharp critique of American society with calls to quit drugs, reject pornography, treat wives with dignity or practice celibacy. He is not endorsing their theology. His point is that young people respect anyone who joins public critique with personal discipline, and too many churches have stopped talking about the second.
He reaches for Isaiah. The prophet who will soon speak to a nation first speaks about himself: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). The order in the chapter matters. Isaiah confesses his own uncleanness before he names his people’s, and he is cleansed before he is sent. Rhodes reads that sequence as a rebuke to any pulpit that indicts society while exempting itself.
The standard is shared. “In the New Testament, there isn’t a separate code of ethics for preachers,” he says. Leaders carry higher costs, but everyone is called to holiness, as Peter writes: “Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16). Rhodes distinguishes stumbling from serial misconduct treated as a leader’s right. Grace covers a fall. A pattern defended as entitlement destroys trust.
The objection: isn’t experience a poor test of truth?
The strongest pushback is obvious. If people follow power regardless of its source, the problem may be the criterion, not the church. Peace can come from many causes. A ritual can calm someone without proving anything about God. Should the church really compete on felt effect?
Rhodes does not deny this. His phrase “regardless of the source” is a warning, not praise. Scripture supplies the rest of the answer. Writing to Corinth, a city that prized polished speakers, Paul says his preaching came “not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4). Two verses earlier he states his subject: “Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). The power Paul claims is tied to the cross, not to results on demand. It remakes people rather than merely making them feel better.
That reading supports Rhodes’s diagnosis and also limits it. A church cannot answer the spiritual but not religious by staging more emotion. It has to show the kind of power the gospel claims: lives changed, victims protected, leaders free from what once bound them.
A second limit concerns spiritual gifts. Rhodes urges the broader Black church to become more open to the expressive and charismatic dimensions of the faith, and he expects colleagues to push back. Faithful Christians disagree about how the gifts of the Spirit operate today, so this is his argument rather than a settled one. Discernment matters too. Christ has authority over the spiritual world, and real medical and psychological needs should not be mislabeled as demonic. For someone whose sage ritual began as a response to trauma, anointing oil and a counselor are not rivals.
What winning them back would require
Rhodes starts with honesty: “we can defend the church without being defensive about the church.” Young people see leaders “trying to protect the tribe as opposed to protect the victims,” and pastors who refuse to name what went wrong confirm the suspicion. He wants churches to expect God to act, to offer mentors who walk alongside Gen Z instead of scolding them, and to learn the digital spaces where many young people first meet Jesus.
For the posture underneath all of this he points to Paul in Athens, who looked closely at a city full of shrines before he spoke: “as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23). Paul even quoted their own poets: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28). Acts records this as one missionary moment, not a script, but the move is clear. Paul read the devotion before he answered it.
Rhodes’s own examples show what that reading looks like for a congregation. One person sages a hotel bed because she does not know who slept there before. Another reaches for crystals so she will not be in a bad mood. A woman wears silver bracelets because their jangling reminds her of her ancestors. Each practice carries a specific request: protection from unseen harm, steadiness, connection to the dead. A church that has studied those requests can answer them by name, with prayer over a home, with the anointing its own grandmothers practiced, with a faith that honors the people who came before. A church that has only learned the word witchcraft has nothing to say to any of them.
The hope in Rhodes’s account comes from the same fact that makes it a judgment. These seekers, he says, “have not written off that there is a God to be made known to them in Jesus.” They are still waiting for someone to show that Christ can do what no other power can. Rhodes even tells doubters not to give up on the church, because it needs them to help reform it. The people standing outside may be the ones best placed to notice when a congregation’s audio and video are finally in sync.
If the harms described here are part of your own story, whether in a church or a home, you deserve safety and a trusted person to walk with you. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.