Monica Jeffries, a 28-year-old teacher who had playfully donned a pointed witch hat for the convention, grew up in the Apostolic Church, but she broke ties with it four years ago. She said her mother had “forced” Christianity on her. Jeffries sometimes calls home trying to figure out why. “I’m asking her questions about Christianity, and I’m like, ‘Why would you do this to us?’ She still can’t give me answers.”

Courtesy of Black Witch Convention

While some Millennials enter the black-witch community seeking answers, others are simply hungry for a place where they can belong. Mambo Yansa, a witch who grew up in Panama, told me witchcraft serves as a “safe haven” for some LGBT youth who don’t feel welcome in the Church. The number of online posts by and about LGBT witches attests to the overlap between queer and witch communities.

Empowerment was an unmistakable aspect of the Black Witch Convention. Replete with talk of sexual trauma, suppression, and self-acceptance, it felt like group therapy. Women cried or spoke in trembling voices as they described experiences of abuse.

“While the #MeToo movement is out there, there are still African American women out there who don’t have a voice. We are not represented,” Omitola said in her keynote. “One thing I know from studying African religions is, I have never seen one subservient goddess. So why are we sitting here thinking we have to be subservient?”

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Omitola went on to differentiate between African witchcraft and “New Age shit,” like the witches who gather to hex President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But some of the black witches’ practices—astrology, say—are what the Pew Research Center considers New Age. In fact, a recent Pew study found that the rate of belief in New Age ideas is especially high among the communities that many convention attendees came from: historically black Christian denominations.

The study’s finding that New Age and Christian traditions often coexist in the same person was on full view at the convention. While some witches told me they were finished with Christianity, others said they still attend church, and argued that Christianity and African witchcraft are complementary, not mutually exclusive. As Omitola put it, “The Bible ain’t nothing but a big old spell book.”

For all the black-witch community’s openness to other religious traditions, they’re still deeply ambivalent about whether some people should be kept out. On the one hand, there’s a sense that they now have an easier time embracing their ancestors’ traditions because white Millennials have rebranded witchcraft as “cool.”

There is, however, a concern that white witches are appropriating African rituals they may not properly understand. “White women these days are making witches’ covens as something ‘fun’—it’s just fun for them,” Yansa said. “But in our tradition, witches have to be totally initiated to be considered a witch.” Initiation typically involves receiving oral instruction and hands-on training from an elder—the sort of embodied learning that, Yansa said, young witches don’t get when they rely too much on digital religion.