Introduction: Questioning the Holiness of All Names

“Holy are all the names that your children call you” is a phrase often repeated in contemporary Afrikan spiritual spaces, usually offered as a gesture of inclusivity and reconciliation. While such an idea is commonly framed as spiritually mature or expansive, it raises serious philosophical, cultural, and political questions that cannot be ignored (Ani 1994).

From the first time I encountered this phrase, I felt compelled not to accept it reflexively, but to interrogate its implications. Most often, I’ve seen this phrase invoked defensively, especially when individuals, like myself, question the holiness or appropriateness of the theonym “God” within Afrikan spiritual discourse. The claim that all names used to refer to the Supreme Being are equally holy functions as a rhetorical shield that discourages deeper examination of where names originate, what worldviews they encode, and whose interests they ultimately serve.

This claim reflects the very form of universalism that Dr. Marimba Ani identifies and critiques in Yurugu (Ani 1994). Universalism is a European cultural strategy that erases ancestral power relations and presents itself as beneficial while quietly normalizing foreign domination (Ani 1994). Universalism, Dr. Ani warns, is not an innocent spiritual posture; it is a mechanism through which European cultural logic presents itself as appropriate “for everyone,” despite the specific historical context of conquest, conversion, and control from which it emerged.

Saying all divine names are holy without examining their etymology, cultural location, and political function is to oversimplify history. It assumes that a theonym imposed through enslavement, colonization, and missionary violence carries the same spiritual weight as names that emerged organically from Afrikan cosmology, language, land, and ancestral experience (Ani 1994). This essay challenges that assumption directly. It contends that names for the Supreme Being are not interchangeable labels; they are containers of worldview, and that uncritical acceptance of the theonym “God” under the banner of universal holiness perpetuates the very spiritual and psychological colonization Afrikan thinkers have long warned against (Wilson 1993; Ani 1994).

What follows our critique of the name “God” is not a rejection of the sacred, nor an argument against reverence itself, but a call for discernment. If holiness is to hold significance in an Afrikan-centered framework, it must be grounded in truth, history, and cultural integrity, not in abstractions that ask the colonized to forget how language has been used to reorganize their reality (Ani 1994).