Her personal critique of religion, especially of Christianity, does not prevent Zollar from recognizing the significance of cultural forms that develop around such institutions. While a personal search for spirituality may be at the center of her work, the energies of black faith, particularly the expressional forms of the African-American church, often inspire the organization of her work. This is not about religion for her as much as it is about integrating into her work a prominent part of African-American life-experience and aesthetics. "The church as form runs through a lot of our work," Zollar has said. "The call and response, the peaks that constantly happen throughout a church service, may happen throughout a dance. You may see something come to this point and come back down, come to this point, and come back down...It's that drive from the church" (In Osumare and Lewis-Ferguson, 1991, pp. 74-75).
However, even in Nyabinghi Dreamtime, which is inspired by the Rastafarian tradition, itself a culture of protest, Zollar does not dramatize Rastafarian ceremony. Instead, based on the ideas of protest and of creating an alternative channel of communion and community-based spiritual experiences, she creates an abstraction of the themes celebrated in that tradition and her personal beliefs. It is not institutionalized or structured religion we see in her work, but a personalized, improvised channel for communication with the spiritual world. In Nyabinghi Dreamtime we see the cultural expression of spiritual power. This is reminiscent of Cornel West's notion of "combative spirituality" and is often seen in Zollar's work: the patient, persistent belief in the value of a spiritual quest carried on outside of institutionalized forms of religion. Zollar integrates the various cultural-artistic forms that have developed around religious ceremony, not just to inspire content but to contribute elements of form and organizational principle, and to bring to the work a sense of renewal and happiness valued by the community.