When One Practice Is Called Faith And Another Is Called Witchcraft, Who Sets The Standard?
A recent episode of The Bridge | Hosted by Dr. DAP, brought twenty Christian women face-to-face with Jasmine Garden for a conversation about spirituality, belief, and the practices that divide their worlds.
Watch 1 New Ager vs. 20 Christians | The Bridge on YouTube
Jasmine Garden is a spiritual practitioner and creator of The Jasmine Garden, a platform centered on spirituality, metaphysical practices, and personal exploration. In The Bridge, she represents a worldview rooted in a different understanding of spirituality than the Christian women sitting across from her.
What makes the conversation so compelling is not simply that the two sides disagree. It is that they are often looking at the same ideas and arriving at completely different conclusions about what they mean.
For one side, certain practices can represent spirituality, healing, manifestation, ancestral connection, or a way of understanding the unseen. For the other, those same practices can be viewed as incompatible with Christianity, spiritually dangerous, or something that should be avoided altogether.
Both sides are speaking from beliefs they consider meaningful. Both believe they understand what they are seeing. And both are drawing their conclusions from very different traditions.
But there is something deeper happening in this conversation. Jasmine is speaking from a spiritual tradition she considers legitimate and meaningful, while the women across from her are viewing that spirituality through the lens of their own faith. What Jasmine understands as spiritual practice can therefore be interpreted by them as witchcraft, deception, or demonic influence—while Christianity is understood within their worldview as holy, protected by God, and fundamentally different from the practices they reject.
And that is where the conversation becomes bigger than one debate.
And when two groups can look at the same practice and see something completely different, who decided which interpretation would become the standard?
🜁 Older Than the Label
Both sides are speaking from beliefs they consider meaningful. Both believe they understand what they are seeing. And both are drawing their conclusions from very different traditions.
But those traditions did not develop in isolation.
Long before Christianity spread across continents, people already had spiritual systems that explained where they came from, where they would go after death, how to communicate with the unseen, how to heal, how to protect themselves, how to honor their ancestors, and how to understand forces they believed moved through the world around them. Spiritual practice was not something separate from everyday life. It was woven into medicine, family, death, birth, nature, community, ceremony, and the understanding of existence itself.
This is where the term “New Age” becomes interesting. The phrase is relatively recent, but many of the practices now placed beneath that label are ancient. The modern New Age movement developed primarily in the twentieth century, drawing from a mixture of older religious, esoteric, metaphysical, and cultural traditions. Meditation, astrology, divination, herbal practices, energy work, ritual, ancestor traditions, and the use of objects or symbols for spiritual purposes did not begin with the New Age movement. Human beings were engaging with these ideas thousands of years before anyone had a name for the movement.
The label is new.
The practices are not.
And perhaps that is part of the problem. Once an ancient practice is given a modern name, it can become easy to forget just how far back its story goes. Something that has existed across generations can suddenly be treated as a contemporary trend—as though our ancestors were waiting for modern spirituality to invent the very things they had already been practicing.
They weren't.
People were already asking questions about the unseen. They were already communicating with ancestors, seeking visions, interpreting dreams, using plants, observing the heavens, performing ceremonies, creating protective objects, marking the seasons, healing through ritual, and trying to understand experiences that could not be explained through the physical world alone.
These were not isolated curiosities. They were systems of knowledge.
And that brings us to an uncomfortable part of the story.
When Christianity encountered societies that already possessed these systems, it was not introducing spirituality to people who had none. It was entering worlds that already had their own explanations of creation, death, healing, ancestors, spirits, sacred places, ceremony, divination, and protection.
The encounter therefore wasn't simply, “Here is Christianity, and here is another religion.” In many places, the balance of power changed the conversation entirely.
As Christianity expanded through missionary activity, conquest, slavery, and colonization, existing spiritual practices were increasingly viewed through a Christian framework. A ceremony could be called pagan. A healer could be called a witch. An ancestral practice could become superstition. A diviner could be associated with the devil. A spiritual object could be dismissed as an idol. A ritual could be condemned as demonic.
The people practicing these traditions did not necessarily understand themselves in any of those terms. They were continuing knowledge that had been carried through their families and communities long before another religious framework arrived to interpret it.
But once one worldview has the power to name another, the name can become more powerful than the practice itself.
There is a profound difference between saying, “That is not what I believe,” and saying, “What you believe is evil.”
One is a boundary.
The other is a judgment.
And when that judgment is backed by political power, religious institutions, laws, punishment, forced conversion, or the destruction of cultural practices, it becomes something much larger than a theological disagreement.
It becomes a question of power.
That history matters because many of the categories we still use today did not develop in a vacuum. They were shaped by centuries of encounters between cultures, religions, governments, missionaries, and communities with very different understandings of the spiritual world.
So when someone today hears the word “witchcraft,” “occult,” “superstition,” or “demonic,” there may be centuries of meaning sitting behind that reaction. And when someone else hears “ancestor work,” “ritual,” “divination,” or “spiritual cleansing,” they may be hearing something entirely different—perhaps a practice connected to family, culture, healing, protection, or a relationship with the unseen.
The same word can carry one history to one person and an entirely different history to another.
That is what makes the current debate so much more interesting than twenty Christians arguing with one New Ager.
We are not simply watching two groups disagree about spirituality.
We are watching two inherited ways of understanding the unseen collide.
And before we decide which one gets to define the other, we have to ask what existed before anyone established the standard at all.
🜃 When Belief Became the Standard
Before Christianity became the dominant religious framework across large parts of the world, there were already spiritual worlds.
Across Africa, Indigenous nations of the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, people developed traditions that gave meaning to experiences we might now place into separate categories: religion, medicine, ritual, philosophy, astronomy, mythology, and spirituality. A healer might understand plants as both medicine and part of a spiritual practice. A seer might be consulted for guidance. An ancestor might remain part of the family's spiritual world after death. A sacred mountain could be understood as a place of power. Dreams could carry messages. Certain rivers, forests, animals, stones, or celestial events could hold spiritual significance. Ceremony could mark birth, death, harvest, marriage, healing, war, or the changing seasons. These were not isolated superstitions scattered across primitive societies. They were systems of knowledge, and the people who practiced them did not need Christianity to tell them that the spiritual world existed. They already believed it did.
That matters because Christianity did not enter a world without religion. It entered a world filled with religions, spiritual traditions, sacred histories, and people who already believed they understood their relationship to the unseen. When Christianity spread into these societies, it therefore encountered existing systems of belief rather than simply replacing an absence. And sometimes the encounter was peaceful. Sometimes traditions influenced one another. Sometimes they blended. But in the history of missionary expansion, conquest, slavery, and colonization, there were also countless situations in which the existing spiritual system was not treated as another legitimate way of understanding the world. It was treated as something that needed to be changed.
A sacred ceremony could be condemned. An ancestral practice could be prohibited. A healer could be labeled a witch. A diviner could be accused of communicating with evil. A sacred object could be destroyed as an idol. A spiritual tradition could be classified as pagan, primitive, superstitious, or demonic.
The people practicing these traditions had not necessarily changed their understanding of themselves. The classification came from outside.
And once a new religious authority had the power to determine what was acceptable, the consequences extended far beyond theology.
Colonization could take land, but it could also take authority over meaning.
It could tell a people which history mattered, which traditions were civilized, which ceremonies were acceptable, which spiritual beings were real, which practices were dangerous, and which beliefs children should be taught to abandon.
This is why the history of colonization cannot be separated entirely from the history of spirituality.
When a community is told that its ancestors were wrong about the spiritual world, that its ceremonies are evil, that its healers are dangerous, or that its relationship with the unseen is inferior to another religion, something deeper than religious conversion is taking place. A hierarchy is being established. One worldview is placed above another, one becomes the standard, and the other becomes the thing that must be explained, corrected, controlled, or erased.
And yet, spiritual traditions have an extraordinary ability to survive.
People adapt. They hide what they cannot practice openly, blend traditions, change names, carry knowledge through families instead of institutions, preserve ceremonies in places where outsiders cannot see them, and teach children what their grandparents taught them, sometimes without explaining where the practice originally came from. A tradition can lose its public name and still survive in the home. It can lose its official status and still survive in ceremony. It can be condemned by an institution and still remain sacred to the people who carry it. That survival is important because the beliefs we inherit today did not all arrive to us untouched. Some were preserved, some were suppressed, some were renamed, some were demonized, some were absorbed into other traditions, and some disappeared so completely that we may never know exactly what they once meant.
But the classifications survived too.
A child can be taught that prophecy is holy but divination is evil, that prayer is spiritual but ritual is dangerous, that one form of healing is a gift from God while another is occult, that one sacred object represents faith while another represents superstition. And if that child grows up hearing those distinctions from parents, grandparents, churches, schools, books, and communities, eventually those ideas may no longer feel like interpretations.
They feel like facts.
That is the power of inherited belief.
We don't just inherit what our ancestors practiced. We inherit what they were taught to fear. We inherit what they were taught to respect. We inherit the names they were given for things they understood—and sometimes the names that were given to things they did not.
This is part of what makes the modern debate so fascinating.
When someone today calls a spiritual practice “witchcraft” or “demonic,” they may believe they are simply stating what they know to be true. They may have no intention of thinking about colonial history, missionary expansion, or the centuries of conflict between religious systems.
But the language did not appear from nowhere.
There is a history behind it.
And there is another side to that history: the traditions that survived despite being told they were wrong. Perhaps some of the things we now instinctively classify as spiritual, religious, primitive, superstitious, or dangerous are not categories that humanity arrived at naturally. Perhaps they are categories we inherited from the people and institutions that had the power to define them.
And if that is true, then the question we began with becomes much harder to avoid:
Who gets to decide what is spiritual—and what is dangerous.
🜄 Who Gets to Decide?
Perhaps the clearest example from the conversation is the argument over sage sticks.
At one point, the discussion turns to the belief that burning a sage stick can open a portal and invite demons into a person's space. This is where the argument becomes particularly revealing, because the object itself has suddenly been given an intention that belongs to the belief system of the person interpreting it.
A sage stick is a tool. It is made from an herb that has been bundled and prepared for burning. What the practitioner believes they are doing with that tool is a matter of their spiritual practice, intention, and tradition. One person may use a sage stick as part of a cleansing ritual. Another may use it to mark the beginning or ending of a ceremony. Someone else may simply burn it because they enjoy the scent. The tool does not independently announce what it is being used for.
And this is where the claim that a sage stick automatically opens a portal becomes difficult to separate from the belief system behind the claim. Lighting a sage stick does not inherently create a doorway into another world. The person holding it brings the intention, the ceremony, and the meaning.
That distinction matters.
Because if we accept that an object automatically possesses the spiritual meaning assigned to it by someone else's religion, then we have already accepted that one belief system has the authority to define another person's practice.
And that brings us back to the question at the center of this entire conversation. Who gets to decide which spiritual practices are legitimate? Who gets to determine that one person's ritual is faith while another person's ritual is witchcraft? Who gets to declare one tradition holy and another dangerous simply because it does not belong to their own belief system?
No one.
People have the right to believe deeply in their religion. They have the right to practice it, teach it within their communities, and understand the world through its teachings. But that does not give them ownership over someone else's spirituality.
Your faith can be sacred to you without becoming the standard by which everyone else must live.
And perhaps that is what this debate ultimately reveals. The conflict is not simply between Christianity and New Age spirituality. It is about what happens when one belief system assumes that its understanding of the spiritual world gives it the authority to define everyone else's.
No one gets to decide for another person what they are permitted to believe.
No one gets to decide what is spiritual—and what is dangerous.
At Haus Of Alchemy, we embrace the many traditions and practices through which people connect with the spiritual world. For those whose practices incorporate sage sticks, we offer a variety of blends created for different rituals, intentions, and personal practices.
