West African Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity has made Mami Wata one of its most frequently named adversaries, and the resulting conflict is itself a well documented feature of contemporary religious life in Nigeria, Ghana and neighbouring countries. Deliverance ministries, a prominent strand of the Pentecostal movement that expanded rapidly across the region from the later twentieth century onward, routinely identify Mami Wata as a demonic spirit responsible for infertility, failed marriages, financial ruin and sexual temptation, and deliverance services often include prayers, testimonies and sometimes dramatized confrontations explicitly aimed at breaking a person's supposed covenant with her.
Anthropologists studying these churches have observed that the very energy devoted to denouncing Mami Wata testifies to her continuing cultural weight rather than her disappearance, since a spirit no longer believed in would not require regular, organised exorcism, and her image, the mirror, the snake, the alluring wealth, recurs constantly in gospel films, sermons and testimony literature as the recognisable shape evil is given. Traditional devotees, meanwhile, continue to serve her in shrines and private practice largely unmoved by this opposition, so that Mami Wata now occupies two simultaneous, actively maintained religious positions in the same societies, honoured water spirit to one community and named demon to another, often within the same extended family.