Did you hear about the Protestant minister who said that Haiti “has been in bondage to the devil for four generations”? No, it wasn’t Pat Robertson but Chavannes Jeune, a popular Evangelical pastor in Haiti who has long crusaded to cleanse his nation of what he believes is an ancestral voodoo curse. It turns out that more than a few Haitians agree with Jeune and Robertson that their nation’s crushing problems are caused by, yes, voodoo.
I know this not because I read it in a newspaper or saw it on TV, but because of a blog. University of Tennessee-Knoxville cultural anthropologist Bertin M. Louis Jr., an expert on Haitian Protestantism, posted an essay exploring this viewpoint on The Immanent Frame, a social scientist group blog devoted to religion, secularism and the public sphere.
Elsewhere on The Immanent Frame, there’s a fascinating piece by Wesleyan University religion professor Elizabeth McAlister touching on how the voodoo worldview affects Haiti’s cultural and political economy. She writes that the widespread belief that events happen because of secret pacts with gods and spirits perpetuates “the idea that real, causal power operates in a hidden realm, and that invisible powers explain material conditions and events.” Though McAlister is largely sympathetic to voodoo practitioners, she acknowledges that any effective attempt to relieve and rebuild Haiti will contend with that social reality.
Several years ago I read a book called Their Blood Cries Out. It was about the matyrs of our time and why the press does notice this. The author believes that the press sees religion as part of the culture and not the shaper of culture. Look no further than voodoo.
I spent 1982-1993 in Americus, GA, working in one way or another with the HFH homeowners, most of whom were African American.
The local “voodoo” practice was referred to “root working”, and while it was practiced by only a small minority of the people, it had tremendous negative effect on the lives of those people. One dear elderly lady sat on newspapers in the middle of the floor of her new house because “someone had put a curse on her”; it was only after a rootworker was engaged to remove the curse that she was able to live a “normal” life in her new HFH house. My co-worker and I went to visit a young single mother who generally had great pride in keeping up her new HFH house because we had observed that she had not cut the grass in a couple of weeks signalling that all was not well. We found her wild eyed from lack of sleep, all the beds moved into the living room and all the lights on in the house. She had stayed awake night after night to keep her children safe. Her father had been a rootworker, her mother a Christian, and she and her sister both Christians. She told us that she and her sister had been sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table just visiting when they each saw something very evil coming from the other’s eyes. We explained more fully to her the power that she had through Jesus to overcome any evil influence in her life and we prayed with her for deliverance and increase of faith. She returned to the joy and confidence she had known before and was able to help her sister renew her faith and work through that bad experience.
Frances Scott
Having been to Haiti, I can say emphatically that yes, this is truly the case. Voodoo and the occult are gateways to the demonic, not only in the individual, but to the nation.
What is unfortunately missed in the media’s rendering of these headlines is that God loves and works in these countries still. Haiti is a place where the angels fight against demons. Miracles are constant. I myself saw the multiplication of food supplies from the very bag I was holding.
Thanks for posting this article, this story needs to break through the immediate impression.
I just discovered this blog this weekend, led there by Mirror of Justice – it’s wonderful:
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/