L | A
By Rod Dreher
Our cultural guardians do not allow us to consider the role that voodoo plays in shaping how Haitians see the world and their place in it.
Back in 2018, President Donald Trump referred to Haiti as a “s**thole,” and was roundly denounced for being a racist. While watching a clip of a “cannibal gang” member eating a piece of roasted human leg on the streets of Port-au-Prince the other night (it’s revolting; you have been warned), it struck me that Trump’s judgment has held up pretty well.
Why is Haiti the way it is? Everybody has an explanation.
The most popular one is that Haiti was horribly exploited by its former colonial master France, which imposed reparations on it that weren’t paid off until 1947. That’s true, and morally obscene. But the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola, was just as poor as Haiti in 1947, and today is six to seven times richer.
Almost one hundred years ago, Haiti was invaded and occupied for a time by the United States. Yes, but so was the Dominican Republic.
Haiti is subject to hurricanes and earthquakes … but, sorry, so is the Dominican Republic. In 1950, half of Haiti was covered by forest, but now, Haitians have deforested their part of the island, leading to economic disaster. In sharp contrast to the green Dominican Republic, today less than 2% of Haiti is forested. This is surely a factor in Haiti’s misery, but it is hardly a complete explanation.
Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic were led by dictators in the 20th century. It has been argued that Haiti’s Duvalier family used its monopoly on power to do nothing but exploit the country, while the D.I.’s Rafael Trujillo, though a strongman, nevertheless modernized his country. This seems plausible—but again, only as a contributing factor.
What about religion? It cannot be denied that religious belief, which infuses culture (after all, you can’t have culture without cult) has tremendous effects on political, social, and economic life.
Max Weber famously credited Protestant values with building capitalism and liberal democracy. Samuel P. Huntington argued that the reason the United States and Canada developed wealthier and more stable countries than other New World nations is because they were settled by Anglo Protestants, not Latin Catholics. His point, of course, was not that Latin Catholics are worse people than Anglo Protestants, but that ideas have consequences.
More recently, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in his provocative 2020 book The WEIRDest People In The World, explained how Western culture became a far outlier on global cultures, become educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic while the rest of the world did not—or only did under Western influence.
The key factor, he found, is the way the Latin church organized western European cultures in the wake of the Roman Empire’s 5th century collapse. A secondary factor is the rise of literacy after the Reformation.
The lesson is that religion matters for the prosperity and stability of any society. Not just ‘religion,’ but the content and form of religion, because it provides to its adherents a model of how the world works and gives them a model of how to conduct oneself in it.
In Haiti, there is a famous saying: “Haiti is 90% Catholic, 10% Protestant, and 100% Vodou.” Vodou, or voodoo, is the Creolized form of indigenous West African religion preserved by Haitian slaves. It is a polytheistic religion in which worshipers make sacrifices to various deities, called lwa, to propitiate them, to serve them, and to get the lwa to do their bidding.
Both Haitians and Dominicans practice voodoo. But it is far stronger and more prevalent in Haiti. This, perhaps, makes the difference. It is at least worth investigating, right?
It should be. In the part of the world where the root religion of the Haitians comes from, a government minister once told journalist Robert D. Kaplan that religion had a lot to do with the anarchy there.
Voodoo is a folk religion derived from traditional West African animism. It has no central authority or institutional structure. There is no formal ethical teaching, which is not to say there is no ethic in the religion. Its followers generally devote themselves to a particular lwa, a spirit who has particular characteristics, and judge themselves good or bad by how faithfully they mimic the character of the lwa. Good and evil are contextual.
In voodoo rituals, worshipers seek to become “mounted,” or possessed, by a lwa. This intimate intercourse between spirits and people is a key part of the voodoo faith. The point here is that a vodouist believes his fate is determined by these interactions with capricious spirits; the fate of human communities is bound to the passions of the hundreds of lwa, who are the means of mediation between humans and the distant creator god.
This is what the African minister meant by his country’s people being governed by “irrational spirit power.” If people within a social order believe that they have no real moral agency, and that their fate lies in the hands not of a God of reason and justice, but of an irrational spirit with a mercurial will, then it will be hard to build ordered social structures and ways of life. Whether or not the voodoo creator god and the lwa actually exist, this is a psychological and social fact.
For Haitian Protestants, whose opinions we rarely if ever encounter in the media, this is the central fact explaining their country’s chronic misery. They say the country’s founders brought a curse on Haiti by consecrating it to demons in the slave revolt that sparked the Haitian Revolution.
The rebellion that eventually overturned despotic French colonial rule began on the night of August 14, 1791. A group of voodoo adherents gathered at Bwa Kayiman, a forested area, and carried out a ceremony invoking the lwa to aid them as they rose against their European enslavers. A voodoo priest named Dutty Boukman sacrificed an animal and chanted this prayer:
Days later, Boukman gave the signal for a slave uprising that slaughtered every white man, woman, and child on the Turpin plantation. The revolution had begun, and eventually ended with Haiti under the control of the Africans who had been enslaved and abused by the French.
Yet according to many Haitian Protestants, the pact with the lwa was the Faustian bargain their ancestors made, a contract more punishing and long-lasting than the cruel reparations imposed by France. U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson drew mockery and criticism in 2010, when he blamed demon-worship for the Haitian earthquake. But Robertson didn’t come up with this thesis. It originated with black Haitian Protestants themselves.
Bertin M. Louis, a University of Kentucky anthropologist, has written that Haitians who embrace Protestantism typically do so to be protected from the lwas, and in search of a form of faith that will build karactè, or character, defined by Louis as “the moral and ethical strength that conversion to Protestant Christianity provides an individual.” Louis wrote in a 2010 paper:
Louis quotes one Haitian Protestant pastor saying:
If this pastor and his religious community are correct about the contrast between Protestantism and voodoo, then it’s not difficult to see how different societies would emerge from peoples who carried one or the other cosmology and set of ethics in their heads.
After all, in his influential 1994 article, Robert D. Kaplan said that the social order he observed in the slums of Turkey revealed to him the power of Islam to provide its adherents with a worldview that allowed them to live in peace, order, and dignity despite their poverty.
Haitian Protestants certainly believe in the power of spirits—the Holy Spirit and evil spirits—at work among humans. But one doesn’t have to share that belief to recognize the determinative connection between cult and culture.
Alas, this is not something we can’t speak honestly about with regard to Haiti. One is only allowed to comment on Afro-Caribbean religion with respect, even awe. To do otherwise is to be guilty of racism, of colonialism, and all the other Very Bad Things.
It seems that the way Western people see voodoo depends on their politics, cultural and otherwise. Thus, we only see media reports that characterize voodoo as a kind of vibrant nature religion despised and slandered by whites (The Atlantic), or as a fun, pro-LGBT, progressive faith hated by Christians (The Guardian).
Even anthropologist Louis condemns his Protestant subject, calling their view
Louis goes on to blame “Eurocentric colonization and globalized capitalist structural inequality” for the suffering of Haitians today.
The anthropologist presents a false choice. Though he would have to explain why the next-door Dominican Republic is thriving, despite having the same factors at work, in principle Louis could be right about Haiti. Yet the Haitian Protestants could also be right about the negative social and political effects of voodoo religion on their country—even though modern Westerners don’t want to hear it.
Nobody seriously disputes that religion—which entails a model of reality espoused by believers—has real-world effects, for better or for worse. India would be a very different place if all its Hindus took up Lutheranism. An Islamic Brazil would be scarcely recognizable, as would a Pentecostal Saudi Arabia.
Yet we are not allowed by our cultural guardians to consider the role the animistic beliefs of voodoo plays in shaping how Haitians see the world and their place in it. We can only regard voodoo as sacrosanct because it is a native African religion, and because it is consecrated by its role in the successful slave rebellion. Black Haitians who refuse this narrative are either ignored or deemed self-hating bigots.
There’s a word for this: paternalism. There’s an even uglier word for it: racism. It’s the kind of racist paternalism that condemns Haitians to more suffering, while outsiders who do not have to live within the chaos of voodoo culture admire from afar its picturesque folk qualities, and how consonant it is with their own political prejudices.
It is of a piece with the recent Church of England report calling on the Anglicans to apologize for “seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems”—while African Anglicans chastise the liberal white mother church for abandoning orthodox Christianity.
Whites in the West are only permitted to value what black people say if their words make us feel good about what we already believe. The Anglicans of Africa probably know exactly how the Protestants of Haiti feel.
By Rod Dreher
Our cultural guardians do not allow us to consider the role that voodoo plays in shaping how Haitians see the world and their place in it.
Back in 2018, President Donald Trump referred to Haiti as a “s**thole,” and was roundly denounced for being a racist. While watching a clip of a “cannibal gang” member eating a piece of roasted human leg on the streets of Port-au-Prince the other night (it’s revolting; you have been warned), it struck me that Trump’s judgment has held up pretty well.
Why is Haiti the way it is? Everybody has an explanation.
The most popular one is that Haiti was horribly exploited by its former colonial master France, which imposed reparations on it that weren’t paid off until 1947. That’s true, and morally obscene. But the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola, was just as poor as Haiti in 1947, and today is six to seven times richer.
Almost one hundred years ago, Haiti was invaded and occupied for a time by the United States. Yes, but so was the Dominican Republic.
Haiti is subject to hurricanes and earthquakes … but, sorry, so is the Dominican Republic. In 1950, half of Haiti was covered by forest, but now, Haitians have deforested their part of the island, leading to economic disaster. In sharp contrast to the green Dominican Republic, today less than 2% of Haiti is forested. This is surely a factor in Haiti’s misery, but it is hardly a complete explanation.
Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic were led by dictators in the 20th century. It has been argued that Haiti’s Duvalier family used its monopoly on power to do nothing but exploit the country, while the D.I.’s Rafael Trujillo, though a strongman, nevertheless modernized his country. This seems plausible—but again, only as a contributing factor.
What about religion? It cannot be denied that religious belief, which infuses culture (after all, you can’t have culture without cult) has tremendous effects on political, social, and economic life.
Max Weber famously credited Protestant values with building capitalism and liberal democracy. Samuel P. Huntington argued that the reason the United States and Canada developed wealthier and more stable countries than other New World nations is because they were settled by Anglo Protestants, not Latin Catholics. His point, of course, was not that Latin Catholics are worse people than Anglo Protestants, but that ideas have consequences.
More recently, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in his provocative 2020 book The WEIRDest People In The World, explained how Western culture became a far outlier on global cultures, become educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic while the rest of the world did not—or only did under Western influence.
The key factor, he found, is the way the Latin church organized western European cultures in the wake of the Roman Empire’s 5th century collapse. A secondary factor is the rise of literacy after the Reformation.
The lesson is that religion matters for the prosperity and stability of any society. Not just ‘religion,’ but the content and form of religion, because it provides to its adherents a model of how the world works and gives them a model of how to conduct oneself in it.
In Haiti, there is a famous saying: “Haiti is 90% Catholic, 10% Protestant, and 100% Vodou.” Vodou, or voodoo, is the Creolized form of indigenous West African religion preserved by Haitian slaves. It is a polytheistic religion in which worshipers make sacrifices to various deities, called lwa, to propitiate them, to serve them, and to get the lwa to do their bidding.
Both Haitians and Dominicans practice voodoo. But it is far stronger and more prevalent in Haiti. This, perhaps, makes the difference. It is at least worth investigating, right?
It should be. In the part of the world where the root religion of the Haitians comes from, a government minister once told journalist Robert D. Kaplan that religion had a lot to do with the anarchy there.
Voodoo is a folk religion derived from traditional West African animism. It has no central authority or institutional structure. There is no formal ethical teaching, which is not to say there is no ethic in the religion. Its followers generally devote themselves to a particular lwa, a spirit who has particular characteristics, and judge themselves good or bad by how faithfully they mimic the character of the lwa. Good and evil are contextual.
In voodoo rituals, worshipers seek to become “mounted,” or possessed, by a lwa. This intimate intercourse between spirits and people is a key part of the voodoo faith. The point here is that a vodouist believes his fate is determined by these interactions with capricious spirits; the fate of human communities is bound to the passions of the hundreds of lwa, who are the means of mediation between humans and the distant creator god.
This is what the African minister meant by his country’s people being governed by “irrational spirit power.” If people within a social order believe that they have no real moral agency, and that their fate lies in the hands not of a God of reason and justice, but of an irrational spirit with a mercurial will, then it will be hard to build ordered social structures and ways of life. Whether or not the voodoo creator god and the lwa actually exist, this is a psychological and social fact.
For Haitian Protestants, whose opinions we rarely if ever encounter in the media, this is the central fact explaining their country’s chronic misery. They say the country’s founders brought a curse on Haiti by consecrating it to demons in the slave revolt that sparked the Haitian Revolution.
The rebellion that eventually overturned despotic French colonial rule began on the night of August 14, 1791. A group of voodoo adherents gathered at Bwa Kayiman, a forested area, and carried out a ceremony invoking the lwa to aid them as they rose against their European enslavers. A voodoo priest named Dutty Boukman sacrificed an animal and chanted this prayer:
Days later, Boukman gave the signal for a slave uprising that slaughtered every white man, woman, and child on the Turpin plantation. The revolution had begun, and eventually ended with Haiti under the control of the Africans who had been enslaved and abused by the French.
Yet according to many Haitian Protestants, the pact with the lwa was the Faustian bargain their ancestors made, a contract more punishing and long-lasting than the cruel reparations imposed by France. U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson drew mockery and criticism in 2010, when he blamed demon-worship for the Haitian earthquake. But Robertson didn’t come up with this thesis. It originated with black Haitian Protestants themselves.
Bertin M. Louis, a University of Kentucky anthropologist, has written that Haitians who embrace Protestantism typically do so to be protected from the lwas, and in search of a form of faith that will build karactè, or character, defined by Louis as “the moral and ethical strength that conversion to Protestant Christianity provides an individual.” Louis wrote in a 2010 paper:
Louis quotes one Haitian Protestant pastor saying:
If this pastor and his religious community are correct about the contrast between Protestantism and voodoo, then it’s not difficult to see how different societies would emerge from peoples who carried one or the other cosmology and set of ethics in their heads.
After all, in his influential 1994 article, Robert D. Kaplan said that the social order he observed in the slums of Turkey revealed to him the power of Islam to provide its adherents with a worldview that allowed them to live in peace, order, and dignity despite their poverty.
Haitian Protestants certainly believe in the power of spirits—the Holy Spirit and evil spirits—at work among humans. But one doesn’t have to share that belief to recognize the determinative connection between cult and culture.
Alas, this is not something we can’t speak honestly about with regard to Haiti. One is only allowed to comment on Afro-Caribbean religion with respect, even awe. To do otherwise is to be guilty of racism, of colonialism, and all the other Very Bad Things.
It seems that the way Western people see voodoo depends on their politics, cultural and otherwise. Thus, we only see media reports that characterize voodoo as a kind of vibrant nature religion despised and slandered by whites (The Atlantic), or as a fun, pro-LGBT, progressive faith hated by Christians (The Guardian).
Even anthropologist Louis condemns his Protestant subject, calling their view
Louis goes on to blame “Eurocentric colonization and globalized capitalist structural inequality” for the suffering of Haitians today.
The anthropologist presents a false choice. Though he would have to explain why the next-door Dominican Republic is thriving, despite having the same factors at work, in principle Louis could be right about Haiti. Yet the Haitian Protestants could also be right about the negative social and political effects of voodoo religion on their country—even though modern Westerners don’t want to hear it.
Nobody seriously disputes that religion—which entails a model of reality espoused by believers—has real-world effects, for better or for worse. India would be a very different place if all its Hindus took up Lutheranism. An Islamic Brazil would be scarcely recognizable, as would a Pentecostal Saudi Arabia.
Yet we are not allowed by our cultural guardians to consider the role the animistic beliefs of voodoo plays in shaping how Haitians see the world and their place in it. We can only regard voodoo as sacrosanct because it is a native African religion, and because it is consecrated by its role in the successful slave rebellion. Black Haitians who refuse this narrative are either ignored or deemed self-hating bigots.
There’s a word for this: paternalism. There’s an even uglier word for it: racism. It’s the kind of racist paternalism that condemns Haitians to more suffering, while outsiders who do not have to live within the chaos of voodoo culture admire from afar its picturesque folk qualities, and how consonant it is with their own political prejudices.
It is of a piece with the recent Church of England report calling on the Anglicans to apologize for “seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems”—while African Anglicans chastise the liberal white mother church for abandoning orthodox Christianity.
Whites in the West are only permitted to value what black people say if their words make us feel good about what we already believe. The Anglicans of Africa probably know exactly how the Protestants of Haiti feel.
