Yoga is Demonic

On stolen practices, curated scripture, and the Black women dying inside a faith that was never built for them.

A post stopped my scroll on Threads.

Just one line: Yoga is demonic.

Now, I’m a Womanist. I’m a scholar. I’m an ordained minister. I’m a human being created in the image of the divine ~ and when something stops my scroll like that, I don’t just keep scrolling. I investigate. So I clicked on the profile. And beloved, what I found was a wall-to-wall exhibition of Christian elitism, spiritual gatekeeping, and the wholesale demonization of anything that doesn’t fit inside a very narrow, very particular, very constructed theological box.

And I thought: WTH

I’m not here to take your faith. I’m here to expand IT.

Who Built the Table of Your Theology?

Let’s start here, because this is where the whole thing falls apart.

You are thumping a book. A specific collection of 66 books that you have been told ~ and may have never questioned ~ is the complete, unedited, divinely sealed Word of G-d.

Here’s what your preacher may not have told you: those 66 books were selected by a council of men.

In 393 CE, the Synod of Hippo met in North Africa. In 397 CE, the Third Council of Carthage ratified what became the foundational biblical canon for the Western church. These were not twelve apostles receiving a divine download on a mountaintop. These were ecclesiastical men operating within the political, cultural, and theological interests of their moment in history ~ a moment deeply shaped by Roman imperial power, the suppression of competing traditions, and the consolidation of institutional religious authority.

Dozens of texts were left out. The Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Mary. The Shepherd of Hermas. The Didache… Sacred writings circulating among early Christian communities — writings that centered women, the poor, and the spiritually marginalized — were set aside. Deemed non-canonical. And by whom? By gatekeepers.

So before you call someone else’s sacred practice demonic, the book you’re swinging was curated. It is not the totality of sacred witness. It is a selection ~ and every selection reflects the values, the fears, and the power of whoever is doing the selecting.

Now Let’s Talk About the Parallels

Here is where it may get uncomfortable. And I want it to be, because that discomfort? That is the Spirit ~ or the energy, doing its work.

You call these things demonic. Let’s hold them up to the light.

Yoga is demonic ~ but the posture you strike when you kneel at the altar, hands open, body surrendered, breath slowed? That is the same technology. Embodied spiritual practice. The alignment of the physical and the sacred. Yoga comes from ancient Hindu tradition, yes. So does the numerical mysticism embedded in your biblical numerology. The body has always been a site of G-d’s encounter.

Sage and incense are witchcraft ~ but frankincense and myrrh were brought to the manger. They are in your nativity scene. The burning of sacred plants to cleanse space, to mark transition, to invite the holy? That is not a New Age invention. That is an ancient African/human practice that your own scriptures endorse. Leviticus 16. Exodus 30. The priests burned incense before the Lord. What exactly do you think that was?

Meditation is Eastern and suspect ~ but Psalm 46:10 says be still and know. The Desert Beloveds built entire contemplative traditions around the practice of stilling the mind to encounter the divine. You call it prayer. You call it centering. Someone else calls it meditation. Same practice. Different vocabulary.

Manifestation is New Age heresy ~ but you just got done shouting “name it and claim it” at a prosperity gospel revival. You believe that speaking things into existence ~ declaring your healing, declaring your breakthrough, claiming what G-d has for you ~ is anointed. The mechanism is identical. The theology of spoken intention creating reality.

Ancestors are idol worship ~ but you light a candle at your grandmother’s grave. You say, “she’s watching over me.” You invoke the faith of your foremothers in testimony every Sunday. You read Hebrews 11 ~ that great cloud of witnesses — and shout. In African and African diasporic traditions, honoring ancestors is not worship of the dead. It is the acknowledgment that those who came before us remain part of the living community of G-d. Jesus himself, within a Womanist theological framework, functions as an ancestor ~ as one who walked the path, broke through death, and continues to be in relationship with the living.

Zodiac signs are satanic ~ but you read the book of Daniel, full of star interpretations and celestial signs. The Magi ~ the wise men, the astrologers ~ followed a star to find the Christ child. Nobody called them demonic. The Hebrew calendar is lunar. The church calendar is tied to solstices and equinoxes. The seasons of planting and harvest, of Advent and Lent, are cosmological. Your faith has always been in conversation with the heavens. Astrology did not arrive with the devil. It arrived with human beings trying to read the sacred order written in the sky.

Energy is secular and godless ~ but you just told me the Holy Spirit moved through the room and raised the hairs on your arms. You testified that you felt something shift when the choir sang. You described an experience of tangible, felt, invisible power that moved through bodies and changed the atmosphere. What is that, if not energy? The refusal to use that word does not make the experience different. It just makes the theology smaller.

A Word About Bishop Yvette Flunder

While we’re here.

Bishop Yvette Flunder, presiding bishop of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries and senior pastor of City of Refuge United Church of Christ in Oakland, recently said: “I’m of the opinion that we need a third testament because the Bible has become problematic.”

The internet lost its mind.

They called her a heretic. They called her dangerous. They called her everything except what she actually is: a theologian doing the work that faithful scholarship has always done ~ asking hard questions in service of deeper truth.

The “third testament” is not a proposal to add a new book to the shelf. It is a metaphor ~ an invitation to the Church to acknowledge the ways G-d continues to show up in the lives of those whose testimonies have often been dismissed or silenced: LGBTQ+ persons, people of color, and others on the margins.

G-d is still speaking. The question Bishop Flunder is raising ~ and the question I’m raising right here ~ is whether you have the theological courage to listen.

She preaches a message of extravagant welcome. She has ministered to people dying of AIDS when the church locked its doors. She has created beloved community for those the institution cast out. And your response is to call her a heretic?

You are worshiping Jesus. You are not following him.

The Real Demon in the Room

Here is what I need Black women ~ my beloveds, my kin, my people ~ to hear most clearly.

We are dying.

Mind. Body. Soul.

Not because of yoga. Not because of sage. Not because someone burned incense or read their birth chart or called the Holy Spirit “energy.”

We are dying because we have taken the white supremacist theological frameworks that were designed to keep us enslaved, compliant, and silent ~ and we have dressed them in church clothes and called them holy.

The same Bible that was used to justify chattel slavery is the one being wielded today to shame Black women out of their bodies, out of their practices, out of their wisdom traditions, and out of their full humanity. The same canon ratified by councils that did not include a single Black voice is the one being used to police what is sacred and what is demonic.

And beloved ~ some of us are doing the policing ourselves.

That is the cataclysm I need you to feel. Not that someone outside the church is challenging your theology. But that inside the church, Black women are enforcing the very ideologies that were built to destroy us.

The Liberatory Vision

I am not asking you to abandon your faith.

I am asking you to expand it.

I am a woman who was placed on a path of Christianity and later embodied Womanism and spiritual fluidity. I did not leave G-d. I found G-d in a larger house. I found G-d in the wilderness ~ in the tradition of Hagar, who encountered the divine outside the walls of the institution that had cast her out. I found G-d in the sacred texts that councils decided you didn’t need to read. I found G-d in community, in embodied practice, in the living testimony of people whose stories have been written off as demonic because their existence was inconvenient to power. I found G-d in me!

The third testament Bishop Flunder is calling for is already being written. It is written in the body of every Black woman who survived what should have killed her. It is written in every healing circle, every breath prayer, every time someone burned sage in a room that needed cleansing, every time someone said I feel my grandmother with me and meant it as theology.

That is not demonic.

That is divine.

So yes, yoga is demonic.

So is incense. So is meditation. So is ancestor reverence. So is the zodiac. So is manifestation.

According to a framework built by men who never intended for your liberation.

I am a Black woman, created in the image of the divine, and I refuse to let anyone ~ especially another Black woman wielding someone else’s theology as a weapon ~ tell me that my wholeness is a sin.

Come on in to the larger house, beloved.

G-d has been waiting.

Dr. TAD

For more information on Womanist practices and theological frameworks, email tawana@thedrtad.com, for healing happens in community. Come and get some of this healing!

Thedrtad.com

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