Paid in Full: Sex and the Ancient Exchange

There's a currency almost as old as Eden, and every generation spends it the same way. I'm talking about sex, and about what people try to buy with it: power, identity, belonging, a kind of freedom that was never actually free. This has nothing to do with a corner or a transaction. It's a lot closer to home than that.

The Report Out of Baltimore

I opened this episode with a news story, not a rumor and not a hot take. WJZ, the CBS station in Baltimore, aired a segment in 2019 on a growing number of Black women leaving traditional churches. They weren't leaving for atheism or for another denomination. They were going back to the worship of deities their ancestors knew before slavery ever reached these shores.

One woman in that report, High Priestess Iyanifa Oyadele Ogunsina, was asked plainly whether she considers herself a witch. She said, "That depends on how you look at it." Her temple directs its worship to Osun, whom the station's own report calls the deity, or the Orisha, "of aesthetics, beauty, sex, and sensuality."

Sex is not incidental to this trade. It is named as the point of it.

That's the pitch, and I'm not reading it into the story. A reporter asked a direct question on camera and got a direct answer. Reclaim your body. Reclaim your pleasure. Call it worship. It lands hard with women who spent years hearing from a pew that their bodies were something to manage or apologize for. I understand the wound behind that reaction. I do not accept the cure being offered for it.

A Real Wound, a Counterfeit Cure

This is not a fringe internet rumor. It's a documented, growing movement, and it hasn't slowed down since that report aired. Religion News Service covered it again in 2024. Vice covered it in 2024. Outlets tracking Black Gen Z's relationship with the church are still covering it this year. The women in those reports are not describing a hunger for sexual power. They are describing church scandal, feeling unheard, and generations of pain nobody in a pulpit ever addressed.

One woman, quoted in a Vice profile of this exact shift, put her reason plainly: "Jesus hasn't done it in over four hundred years. He hasn't saved us." That sentence lands somewhere real. Generations of unanswered prayers, unaddressed abuse, and unkept promises from a pulpit are not manufactured pain.

"A real wound does not make a counterfeit cure work." (Marc Little, Episode 73)

Redirecting that pain into worship of another god is still not a small pivot, whatever name gets put on what replaces it. Scripture does not call it a lifestyle change or a cultural homecoming.

"The sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons." (1 Corinthians 10:20, NIV)

That's not my language. That's the text. Some older traditions gave this appetite its own name, Asmodeus, out of the book of Tobit. That book is not in the Bible I preach from, and I don't need its name to make my point. Scripture just calls this what it is. An exchange.

Hiding Is the Strategy

This didn't start with a television segment in Baltimore. In Cuban Santería, enslaved Yoruba men and women, forbidden from practicing their own faith openly, mapped their orishas onto Catholic saints so the worship could continue in plain sight. Osun became Our Lady of Charity, Cuba's patron saint, on the outside, while what was worshiped underneath never changed. Paul described that kind of move two thousand years before Cuba existed.

"And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light." (2 Corinthians 11:14, NIV)

Hiding is not a side effect of this trade. Hiding is the strategy.

The Stage and the Shop

It isn't confined to one temple in Baltimore. Beyoncé has done a version of this on the largest stages in the world. In the video for Hold Up, she appeared as the Orisha Oshun, walking through golden doors with water rushing behind her. She did it again at the 2017 Grammys, with dancers bowing before her. She posted a poem on her own website, beside her pregnancy photos, naming Oshun and another deity, Yemoja. In the single Black Parade, released in 2020, she named Oshun and Yemaya in the lyrics themselves.

That is not speculation about her. That is her own public choice, repeated, on the largest platforms available to her. Kameelah Martin, who directs the African American Studies program at the College of Charleston, described the scale of it this way: Beyoncé has normalized orisha worship in a way we have not seen a pop culture icon of her stature ever do. That is not a critic's complaint. That is a scholar's description of how far this has traveled into the mainstream.

And it costs real dollars. A shop operating in New Orleans right now sells what it calls Sexual Passion Voodoo Love Spells, performed by "initiated Vodou Practitioners." The exchange has a price list. The lawyer in me notices that taking money for a promised result puts you very close to selling a product. Whether consumer protection law reaches that is still unsettled, but somebody is collecting.

Paul wrote about this exact trade two thousand years ago.

"They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator, who is forever praised. Amen." (Romans 1:25, NIV)

That is not a verse about ancient paganism. That is a receipt, and it is being written today.

A King Paid This Price

This trade is not something other people do. Look at David. Second Samuel 11 doesn't start on the roof. It starts with the king staying home while his army goes to war, and comfort is a dangerous place for a man with that much power to stand at sunset. He is not a pagan and not an outsider to the faith. Scripture calls him a man after God's own heart. He sees a woman bathing, sends for her name, then sends for her.

When Bathsheba became pregnant, David tried to cover it. He called her husband, Uriah, home from the front so the child would pass as his. Uriah slept at the palace door instead, and told the king he would not go home to his wife while the ark and the army were camped in open country. The most honorable man in that chapter is not the king. It is the soldier the king is lying to. When the cover-up failed, David sent Uriah back to the front carrying his own death order.

"But each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death." (James 1:14-15, NIV)

"David's desire conceived on a rooftop. It gave birth to adultery. Adultery gave birth to a murder plot." (Marc Little, Episode 73)

That is the anatomy of the exchange, and it doesn't require witchcraft, or an Orisha, or a shop in New Orleans. It only requires a human heart looking at something it wants more than it wants obedience. The chapter closes with one sentence.

"After the time of mourning was over, David had her brought to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing David had done displeased the LORD." (2 Samuel 11:27, NIV)

Everything was handled, and God saw every bit of it. Private sin always feels paid off the moment it is committed. It never is. The bill comes later, and it comes to the one who made the purchase.

A Nation Paid It First

The largest version of this is in Numbers 25, and it nearly ended an entire nation. Israel is camped at Shittim, closer to the promised land than they had ever been.

"While Israel was staying in Shittim, the men began to indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women, who invited them to the sacrifices to their gods. The people ate the sacrificial meal and bowed down before these gods. So Israel yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor, and the LORD's anger burned against them." (Numbers 25:1-3, NIV)

Several chapters later, in Numbers 31, we find out this was not seduction that happened to occur. It was strategy. Balaam could not curse Israel directly because God would not allow it, so he found another door in. Sex was not the goal. Sex was the door. The goal was to get the nation to trade its covenant with God for allegiance to Baal, and thousands died before it was over.

More than a thousand years later, Jesus brings Balaam up again, and not to a pagan city. He brings him up to a church, in the letter to Pergamum.

"Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: There are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality." (Revelation 2:14, NIV)

Among you. One verse earlier, Jesus commends this church for staying true to His name in a city He calls the place where Satan has his throne, and the old door was still open. Idol feasts and sexual immorality, bundled together, just like at Peor. The door has not changed since Shittim. Only the address has.

The Invitation Back

If you recognize any part of yourself in this, whether it's an ache to be heard that church never satisfied or a desire you've let drive further than it should have, that ache is not fake. God did not design you to be numb. But you have been offered a substitute for a real hunger, and a substitute cannot pay what it promises. It never has. Not at Shittim. Not on David's roof. Not in a temple, not on a stage, not in a shop.

Jesus sits at a well in Samaria at about noon, and a woman comes out alone to draw water in the heat of the day. He asks her for a drink, then tells her He has water she knows nothing about.

"Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." (John 4:13-14, NIV)

Then He goes straight to it. Go, call your husband. She says she has none, and Jesus tells her she has had five, and the man she has now is not her husband. Five times she went looking for what she needed, and five times the well ran dry. She did not want too much. She kept drinking from the wrong source. He doesn't read her record back to shame her, and He doesn't send her off to clean up first. He tells her the truth and offers her the real thing in the same conversation.

"Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 'Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?'" (John 4:28-29, NIV)

She left the jar and ran back into town. The woman who came out alone at noon became the woman telling everybody. When a real thirst meets real water, you stop needing the substitute. You stop needing to hide.

Conclusion

Romans 1:25 reads like a receipt because the exchange never changes, only the address does. The invitation back is still open. Not to shame, but to the real thing your heart was asking for the whole time. If you want the full conversation, listen to the complete episode of The Marc Little Show.