What Is Santeria? A Christian Perspective

Many people first meet Santeria through someone they love. A grandmother who tends a small altar. A friend who sat with a Santero for a reading and came home changed. Others meet it through an experience they cannot explain, something that brushed past them and left a mark.

This is written for all of them, with respect and without fear. It covers what Santeria is, where it came from, why it cannot be braided together with following Jesus, and how a person gets free. No mocking. No scare tactics. Just the truth, and the way a cord like this gets cut.

Santeria is an Afro-Cuban religion that took shape in the 1800s among enslaved Yoruba people in Cuba. Cut off from their West African homeland, they kept their worship alive by hiding it behind the Catholic images their captors allowed. The two blended: African spirits were matched with Catholic saints, and the old worship carried on under new faces.

That blending is why it came to be called Santeria, "the way of the saints." It also goes by the older names Lucumi and Regla de Ocha. After Cuba's 1959 revolution, practitioners carried it into the United States and across Latin America. Today millions follow it, mostly in Caribbean and Latin American communities.

The center of Santeria is connecting with unseen spirits for guidance, protection, healing, and power.

At the top is a distant creator called Olodumare, believed too far above human affairs to reach directly. So daily life runs through the orishas instead.

The orishas are spirit beings, each said to govern a part of life: the ocean, iron, storms, love, childbirth. Practitioners honor them, feed them, and ask their help. From its history, each orisha is also paired with a Catholic saint, so the same figure may be honored under two names.

Two more ideas hold it together. Ashe is a life force believed to flow through all things, which the rituals try to direct. And destiny: each person is thought to arrive with a path already set, and the orishas help them walk it. The dead, honored as ancestors, are consulted too.

Santeria lives through its ceremonies. The main practices:

• Divination. A priest reads cowrie shells or the Ifa oracle for messages believed to come from the orishas.
• Initiation. A multi-day ceremony, sometimes called "making the saint," that ties a person to a specific orisha for life.
• Offerings and sacrifice. Food, drink, and objects are left for the orishas, and in some rites animals are sacrificed.
• Sacred objects. Beaded necklaces, cloth, herbs, and small vessels are prepared and blessed, then treated as points of contact with the spirits.
• Possession. During certain ceremonies, drumming and dance invite an orisha to briefly take over, or "mount," a person.

Its leaders, the Santeros and Santeras, are also sought out to place or remove curses.

For someone drawn to Santeria, or raised around it, the honest question is whether it can sit alongside faith in Jesus. Scripture's answer is direct. It names the very things Santeria is built on:

Divination, spells, consulting spirits, calling on the dead: every one is on that list. Scripture does not forbid these things because they are fake. It treats their power as genuine. The problem is the source. God tells His people to come to Him, not to spirits or the dead: "Should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?" (Isaiah 8:19, NKJV).

Daniel Duval, founder of Bride Ministries, does not know this world from a library. He has shared publicly that Santeria and espiritismo ran in his own family, and that he saw spirits as a child. He places religions like this inside a much larger family of occult practices. In his book Pummel the Devil (Chapter 7), he writes:

Santeria is not named on that list, and some of those words may be unfamiliar. The thread runs the same: each system reaches for spiritual power God never handed out, and Scripture puts that reach off-limits. Bride Ministries treats other occult systems like Kabbalah the same way.

Bride Ministries goes further here than most explanations online. Santeria is not empty superstition. The spirits it reaches are real, and so are the ties it leaves in a life.

Start with the person, not the practice. Scripture does not treat a practitioner as an enemy, but as someone kept from seeing clearly, whose mind "the god of this age has blinded" (2 Corinthians 4:4, NKJV). The right response is compassion, not contempt.

Now the mechanics. A prayer resource from Bride Ministries, written by Dr. Preston Bailey, teaches that a Santeria curse creates a spiritual bond, a soul tie, running like a cord to the person it is meant to harm. That cord becomes a channel, which is why someone who was cursed, but never set foot in a ceremony, can still feel weighed down or stuck. One caution: Bride Ministries is not saying Santeria removes soul ties. It is saying its ceremonies and curses can knot a cord a person never agreed to. You can read more about what soul ties are and how they form.

Some wonder how a curse could touch them if God is in control. Bride Ministries teaches that God gave people a will of their own, including the freedom to turn spiritual power against someone else, so a curse can land. Even so, what Jesus offers is more than enough to free them.

Ceremonies, oaths, and blessed objects open a second problem. Bride Ministries calls them open doors: each hands the enemy a legal right to stay, so quitting the practice is often not enough. The habit stops, but the door stands open. Someone has to shut it on purpose.

Yes, and it is good news. Whatever Santeria has built in a person's life, the cross of Jesus already broke its hold at the root. Paul writes of Jesus, "Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it" (Colossians 2:15, NKJV). The spirits behind Santeria are not equals of God. They were defeated at the cross. Freedom is not about fighting them off. It is about standing in what Jesus already did.

Bride Ministries teaches a clear, gentle path, drawn from Daniel Duval's work on deliverance. It is not a magic formula. It is turning to Jesus and cutting the cords one at a time:

• Confess the involvement and turn away from it, without shame.
• Renounce it out loud, which means to reject and let go of what was agreed to.
• Break the ties one by one: to the objects, to the priest or priestess, to the ceremonies, to anyone tied to a curse, and to the orishas themselves.
• Standing in the authority Jesus gives, command any spirit that came through those doors to leave.

Objects matter too. The beads, cloths, statues, and prepared items are not just decoration; they can anchor a spiritual attachment. When new believers in Ephesus left the occult, "many of those who had practiced magic brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all" (Acts 19:19, NKJV). They did not keep the tools.

Bride Ministries has published a prayer for this moment, the Prayer Against Santeria and Voodoo by Dr. Preston Bailey, with a plain guide to how to renounce a spiritual agreement. When someone has been in it for years, it helps to walk it out with trained support, which Bride Ministries describes in what a deliverance session looks like.

They are related but not the same. Santeria has Yoruba and Cuban roots. Voodoo, more properly Vodou, comes from West African peoples by way of Haiti. Both call on spirits, make offerings, and use divination, and from a biblical view both reach for the same forbidden thing: spirit power apart from God.

Not in the way scary movies suggest. The danger is spiritual. Its ceremonies, objects, and curses can open doors that bring bondage, fear, and cords a person never chose into a life. It is not something to play with.

Do not panic, and do not attack them. They are loved, not the enemy. The strongest thing you can do is pray, for the blindfold to slip off and the love of Jesus to reach them. Quietly refuse to take part, keep your home covered in prayer, and ask God to open a way to talk. Change usually comes through steady love, not argument.

If reading this stirred something, for yourself or someone you love, you do not have to sort it out alone. A cord you never tied can still be cut. A short, private assessment can help you see how deep a pattern goes and point you to the right next step.