“A Person's God Should Look Like Them”: African Traditional Religions Among Black Queer Millennials and Gen Z Americans

ABSTRACT How are young Black Americans practicing spirituality contemporarily? Today younger generations of Black Americans are more likely than older Black Americans to identify as religiously unaffiliated or as practicing a non‐Christian faith. Drawing on 109 interviews with Black Millennial and Gen Z Americans, I examine how some of these younger Black Americans aim to decolonize their relationship with religion by practicing various forms of African Traditional Religions (ATRs). Using the frameworks of lived religion and multiple religious belonging, I outline how Black ATR practitioners incorporate their reclaimed spiritual beliefs into their everyday lives. Specifically, the findings illuminate the ways that the COVID‐19 pandemic created conditions for Black queer women and nonbinary Americans to situate their practice of ATRs as a rejection of the overarching power of Christianity and to frame their transition to ATRs as a liberatory and reconciliatory process to reclaim a spirituality that includes them in its makeup.