Performative Spirituality Produces Bastardized Children of the Church

This paper examines the crisis of performative spirituality within Black diasporic spiritual communities, arguing that consumer capitalism has replaced colonial prohibition as the primary mechanism severing Black people from their spiritual inheritance. Through the framework of my Pipeline Theory, this paper traces how aesthetic-driven entry into Hoodoo, Conjure, and related traditions produces rootless practitioners vulnerable to a self-perpetuating cycle of spiritual collapse, return to Christianity, and the demonization of ancestral practice. The paper further addresses the role of social media spectacle, spiritual bypassing, and class-based gatekeeping in fragmenting communities and displacing the prophetic, protective, and political functions these traditions were built to carry.