Who Owns the Religion of Haiti?
In 1804, the slaves of Saint-Domingue stunned the world economic order by liberating their labor from French colonial planters and their souls from the French Catholic Church. In the aftermath of independence, their descendants exploited the emergent nation-state’s external isolation and internal political disarray to defy efforts to reinstitute the draconian plantation order and its severe limitations on workers’ economic freedom. They established a holistic system of small, independent farms; an efficient female-run internal market structure; a social structure based on bilateral descent groups; and a fluid, decentralized, syncretic system of vernacular European and African cosmological beliefs and ritual practices. This relatively autonomous religious system soon became the target of predatory world religions and complicit, despotic national leaders. Since 1860, the Vatican and the French Catholic Church have waged crusades to conquer the cultural life of the nation and retake control of Haitian Catholicism. In the mid-twentieth century, Protestant missionaries from the United States embarked on their own campaigns to accumulate converts in the Haitian countryside. Since then, the two religions have been locked in an epic “war of position” (Gramsci 1971) to possess the religious territory of Haiti and reestablish separate boundaries. When the apocalyptic earthquake of January 12, 2010, laid bare the relative strength of each competitor’s spiritual and material weapons, it appeared that Protestant evangelicals had temporarily acquired the upper hand.
In this chapter, I use historical sources and ethnographic evidence that I have collected over the past three decades in Léogâne (Richman 2005) to demonstrate how this futile religious war has been waged in pursuit of control over elusive boundaries and dubious fidelity to doctrine in a persistently fluid and plural religious landscape. I argue that Haitians’ pragmatic, instrumental approach to alleviating suffering and dodging misfortune has long guided individual religious choices between Catholicism and Protestantism, inevitably degrading the triumph of either crusade into Pyrrhic victory.
The Establishment of Religion in Haiti
Roman Catholicism was the official religion of the colony of Saint-Domingue, which was established in 1697, and after Haiti achieved independence, it was declared the state religion. The Catholic Church was indigenized after independence in 1804, when French colonists and their priests fled the country. Haitians controlled their own church during the six decades of political isolation that served as punishment for Haitian slaves’ successful challenge to colonialism and slavery. In 1860, however, as Haiti’s Francophile, mulatto elite was inviting recolonization by France and Germany and, ultimately, the United States, authority over the church was returned to the Vatican. That authority remained unchallenged for a century. As President Fabre Geffrard, Haiti’s tenth president, signed an 1860 concordat with the Vatican, he declared, “Let us hasten to remove from our land these last vestiges of barbarism and slavery, superstition and its scandalous practices” (Nicholls 1979, 84). As a result of the accord, French priests regained control not only of the church but also of the principal schools, which were run by religious orders.
The rise of the United States as the new regional colonial power in the early twentieth century and the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 limited the authority of the French Catholic Church in Haiti. When the U.S. administrators and soldiers finally departed, the Catholic Church stepped into the power void. In 1941, it launched an all-out crusade against “superstition” in Haiti. La campagne anti-superstitieuse (the anti-superstition campaign) formally began with a pastoral letter published on January 26, 1942, in the Catholic daily La Phalange decrying “the irreconcilable opposition” between Christianity and “the collection of religious beliefs and practices which came from Africa” (quoted in Nicholls 1979, 182). Many of the elements of this “collection” actually came from Europe, but identifying them all as African served the Church’s purpose better (Rey and Richman 2010). The Catholic Church’s decision to launch the campaign received enthusiastic endorsement from the new pro-American president and former ambassador to the United States, Èlie Lescot. President Lescot’s support for the anti-superstition campaign was inseparable from his “mulatrification” project, a clumsy effort to return political and economic hegemony to the mulatto elite and their U.S. allies (Nicholls 1979, 183; Ramsey 2002). Lescot took office one week after the publication of the pastoral letter that decried superstition and vowed a return to Catholic government (Plummer 1992, 148). When the “spiritual blitzkrieg” (a term La Phalange used) began harassing Protestants too, President Lescot was forced to intervene. He attended worship at a Protestant church to demonstrate his disapproval of the attacks.
Ti Rivyè, Léogâne, the site where I have been conducting ethnographic research since 1983, was a site of the “rejection,” or larejèt, as the hapless anti-superstition program was locally known. Eyewitness accounts by a few of the local elders reported details of the conduct of the absurd religious and political crusade. For example, Archange Calixte, who was born in 1932, recalled a confrontation between his father, a ritual leader (gangan ason), and the local police and parish priest. The purportedly iniquitous contents of the two shrines he oversaw were targets of the rejection. Archange and I were standing in the same courtyard where the encounter took place when he recalled what had happened there six decades before:
I remember during “the rejection,” a priest from [the town of] Léogâne came into the compound along with two policemen. I remember it well. They had been destroying the spirits’ things [in the area]. They called for my father. They said to my father, “Go into the house, get the things, bring them to us.” My father said, “There is nothing I’m going to bring to you. If you want to take them, go inside and take them. I am not bringing anything to you.” After that, they went across the street to the other yard at Mizdor’s house [of worship] and they said the same thing. “Go into the temple and bring the things to us.” He said, “I’m not going to do it. If there is something you are looking for, go inside and take what you need.” They didn’t do anything. As they were leaving, they said to him, “Bring the things to town for us. Come to town with the things.” He said, “I’m not hauling anything to town. I don’t have anything to sell.” We fell out laughing. I remember that well. I was young. Everyone fell out laughing.
The cowardice underlying the authorities’ blustering, inept performance of anti-superstition regulations endures in Archange’s memory. The priest and the police “team” were not only incapable of carrying out their mission, they also failed to intimidate the confident ritual leader to do their work for them. The ritual leader seized control of the situation and ridiculed the bumbling crusaders. The novelists Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin (1970) featured similarly absurd skirmishes in their novel about the anti-superstition campaign, All Men Are Mad. Ironically, contemporaneous North American literary critics dismissed the novel as wildly unbelievable exaggeration (Daut and Richman 2008).
Nationalism, the Vodou State, and Protestant Evangelism
As in the case of the 1860 Concordat ceding control of Haiti’s state church to the Vatican, the resurgence eighty-one years later in 1941 of the Catholic Church’s colonialist policies again provoked a nationalist response. And as in the late nineteenth century, the nationalist movement was allied with North American and European Protestantism. For example, Louis-Joseph Janvier, a prominent writer and diplomat, believed that Haiti should embrace the establishment of a religion that would respect the sovereignty of the state and whose clergy would defer to the state (Nicholls 1979, 118). Janvier advocated the civilizing influence of Protestantism. In his 1883 treatise on Haiti’s foreign affairs, he wrote: “The Protestant is thrifty and self-reliant, he does not waste his money on carnivals and other frivolities. Protestantism permits free discussion and encourages private initiative.… The Protestant is almost always a more practical worker and a better citizen than the Catholic” (quoted in Nicholls 1979, 118). Janvier argued that conversion to Protestantism would provide the religious basis for capitalist economic development of the archaic peasant economy, echoing the bourgeois discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that disparaged the indolence of European peasants and blamed the saints’ days and festivals of the Catholic ritual calendar for decreasing available labor (Thompson 1967).
Yet Janvier also recommended that Haiti emulate Africa rather than Europe. He went so far as to claim that Protestantism was more suited to the African temperament than Catholicism was. He offered evidence that Protestantism could be used to introduce “primitive” populations of Africa to Western culture. However, Janvier admitted that his vision of a Protestant Haitian society was unlikely to be realized: “Protestantism will never be a danger for Haiti and Haiti would win the affection of Protestant nations” (Janvier 1883, 371). Janvier’s prediction was prescient. Protestant religion eventually bolstered the Haitian secular state, in part by threatening the other Haitian state: the Catholic Church. In this discussion we will see how over the next century, Protestant evangelization increased to the point that precisely 100 years after Janvier published his 1883 tract, the pope himself was compelled to intervene to staunch the flow of Catholics into the Protestant fold.
The excesses of the U.S. occupation of 1915–1934, the Lescot presidency of 1941–1946, and the Church’s anti-superstition campaigns of the 1940s provided ample reason for Janvier’s nationalist followers to embrace an alternative narrative of religious authenticity and identity. The new discipline of Haitian ethnology answered the call. Studies of the peasants’ religion and folklore provided the material for promotion of an authentic Haitian identity located in peasant life and rooted in African culture (Ramsey 2005). The ethnological approach was part of a counterhegemonic, nationalist discourse and recapitulated a misleading “modern” view of Haitian peasants as tradition-bound primitives (Richman 2007). Ethnologists such as Milo Rigaud and Odette Mennesson-Rigaud, writing in the 1940s and 1950s, portrayed vernacular beliefs and practices as a coherent set of essentially African legacies, ignoring the substantial European and Catholic bases of much of Haitian popular religion.
In this context, the name they chose for the religion being studied and promoted as a national heritage was significant: Vodou. It was not the indigenous name of the vernacular religion; there was no term that assimilated such diffuse, heterogeneous, localized beliefs and practices. In Creole, the term Vodou refers to a genre of ritual music and dance performed in honor of a particular category of spirit. The term derives from the Fongbe word for spirit; many slaves who came to Saint-Domingue from Dahomey spoke this language. There was (and still is) no way in Creole to say, “I do Vodou,” or “I practice Vodou.” The nationalistic ethnologists’ use of the term to refer to the religion as a whole soon became widely accepted, though it remains foreign to many who are thought to do or practice Vodou. Similarly, their portrayal of a standardized religion based on the worship of universalistic nature spirits set a formula for subsequent knowledge of the religion which, as will be shown below, continues to play important roles in the contest over Haitians’ religious sovereignty today.
Vodou thus could become a symbol of the Haitian nation and state with the election of François Duvalier to the presidency in 1957. Duvalier, who claimed Louis-Joseph Janvier as his ideological mentor, was a central member of a famed ethnological group. He wrote or co-wrote several studies of the folk religion, some of the data of which were based on his observations of rehearsed performances staged in Port-au-Prince hotels (Wilken 1992). The self-declared president for life fostered the development of a reputation not only for practicing Vodou but also for incorporating Vodou practices and the Vodou priesthood in his ruthless politics. The dictator’s image as a sinister “Vodou president” only bolstered outsiders’ stereotypes of the religion as exotic and mysterious (Johnson 2006).
Paradoxically, Duvalier, Haiti’s first pro-Vodou, pro-peasant, black nationalist president, was at the same time the country’s foremost champion of Protestantism, even though Protestants opposed Vodou far more strongly than the Catholic Church did.1 Courlander and Bastien have observed that “the relationship between Duvalier and religion should be viewed not as one of an individual to a faith, but rather it should be approached from the standpoint of the relations between church and state” (Courlander and Bastien 1966, 56). Duvalier used Protestant evangelists to undermine the main challenge to his power, the Catholic Church. In 1966, in exchange for a promise to stop persecuting and expelling foreign Catholic priests, the Vatican capitulated to Duvalier’s demand that it abrogate the 1860 Concordat and grant Haiti (or the president-for-life himself) the right to name its own priests (Abbott 1988, 381).
Fred Conway captures the paradox of the ethnologist-president’s promotion of Protestantism:
For all his identification with Vodoun, François Duvalier might well be called the “Father of Protestantism” in Haiti. Duvalier’s main potential opposition in the religious sphere was a Catholic Church dominated by foreigners. In his struggle with this adversary, he enlisted both Vodoun and Protestantism in spite of the fact that the Protestants were more inimical to Vodoun than were Catholics. At a time when Duvalier was deliberately alienating foreign governments and foreign aid organizations, he welcomed Protestant missionaries, especially from the U.S. The Protestants drew people away from an allegiance to the Catholic Church without themselves presenting a monolithic front to the government. Because the missionaries were competing with each other, fiercely at times, they were not in a position to oppose the government as a group. (Conway 1978, 166–167)
Duvalier assumed that evangelical Protestants could be depended upon to avoid engagement with affairs of the state. The “second tenet of the Baptist faith,” according to Edner Jeanty, a leading Haitian Baptist theologian, is that “the church and the state are separate” (Jeanty 1991, 62). Nonetheless, in the conclusion of his history of Protestant movement into the country, Le Christianisme en Haïti, Jeanty rejoiced over the fact that a Protestant had become acting head of state in 1990. “The Bible has entered the National Palace through the front door,” he wrote (106). The theologian thus provided an illustration of Laënnec Hurbon’s observation that while Haitian Protestants may profess that they reject the idea of participating in politics, they “express a willingness to mount the political stage to defend their churches’ interests” (Hurbon 2001, 136).
The strategic union between Duvalier and North American Protestant missionaries was just one example of several such alliances between a repressive Latin American state (including Chile and Guatemala) and an apparently apolitical Protestant presence during the second half of the twentieth century. Perhaps Duvalier did not anticipate the extent to which his religious marriage of convenience would eventually contribute to the emasculation of the Haitian state. After he was overthrown, organizations implementing neoliberal policies routinely bypassed the allegedly corrupt and inept state to channel international development aid to seemingly moral, honest, and efficient private sector organizations (Gunewardena and Schuller 2007). The credibility of these organizations rested in large part on their discourse of Christian morality, even if they were not explicitly religious organizations (McAllister 2012, 187–215). Hence, the dictator who claimed he was the very state (Duvalier famously pronounced that he was the Haitian flag) contributed to the transfer of the nation’s administrative capacity to a “republic of NGOs” (Heinl and Heinl 1997, 585).
By 1965, more than a third of the schools in Haiti were run by Protestant missionaries. A sign of the welcome Protestant missionaries enjoyed during the period was Oral Roberts’ official welcome to the presidential palace in 1969 (Nicholls 1979, 412). Seventy percent of the Protestant missions in Haiti were established in the period 1950–1970, and by the latter year an estimated 20 percent of the population was Protestant (Conway 1978, 165). Starting in the 1970s, the expansion of Protestant missionization in Haiti involved the growth of Pentecostal groups, which systematically covered the geography of the country and targeted the poorest segments of the population. Echoing the findings of many observers of Pentecostal missionization in Latin America, Charles-Poisset Romain asserts that le ‘take off’ pentecôtiste (the Pentecostals’ take-off) in Haiti was the result of their use of the Creole vernacular spoken by the masses rather than the colonial language of French that was spoken and written by the elite few (Romain 1986, 190; see also Lehmann 1996; Martin 1993; Stoll 1991). In addition, the Pentecostals harnessed their valorization of the Creole vernacular to literacy. Literacy was seen throughout the colonized world as a primary means of self-improvement, and mainline Protestants had already presented their “religion of the book” as one of “sociability and civilization” (Romain 1986, 145).
In his recounting of the history of Baptist missionization in Haiti during the mid-twentieth century, Jeanty praised North American missionaries for their skillful deployment of capitalist marketing techniques. He described the accomplishments of one proselytizer with a special knack for selling a new religion to reluctant native consumers, in the process inadvertently admitting that Christian missionization amounted to creating consumer desire for a nonessential product. Jeanty wrote that Mme. Ruben Clarke, who accompanied her husband to Pignon to spread the gospel, was une dynamique femme capable de ‘vendre un réfrigerateur même à un Eskimo’ (a dynamic woman who can even sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo) (Jeanty 1991, 91).
Conway’s (1978) ethnographic research, which was conducted in the southern peninsula of Haiti in the 1970s, is an apt demonstration that Protestantism is a moral narrative of modernity (Keane 2007). Conway argues convincingly that “missionary Protestantism in Haiti gives rise less to a Protestant ethic of self-help than to the idea that the way to worldly success is identified with direct dependence on the foreign—North American—missionary” (Conway 1978, 193). He cites interviewees’ statements (no doubt mediated by their perception or hope that their North American interlocutor was a missionary and thus a source of jobs or visas) that the Protestant mission churches symbolized progress and modernity. As they pointed to Protestant missions, people told Conway that “the country is becoming more and more civilized” in contrast to the backwardness blamed on peasant Vodou. Several converts said that their conversion was a contribution to development (Conway 1978, 172).
According to Conway, villagers understood that Americans needed quantities of converts and were willing to pay for them. No one benefited more than Haitian pastors from the Americans’ need to build missions and count disciples. The clergy has long been one of the few jobs for men in rural areas, and the field of candidates is vast. Romain observed in the mid-1980s that “every Protestant is a pastor and a missionary at the same time” (Romain 1986, 144). The speech practice of addressing any male evangelical as pastè (pastor) reinforces this conflation.
Vying to Possess Vodou and Haiti: Catholics versus Protestants
In 1804, the leaders of the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue created a Catholic nation-state. For 181 years of its existence as a sovereign state, Haiti endorsed and protected this one religion despite a continued struggle for autonomy with the Vatican. Key events in this bitter history were the Concordat of 1860, which returned control of the church and thereby much of Haiti’s sovereignty in state affairs to France and Rome, and the ludicrous anti-superstition campaign of 1941–1942. Another historic moment in the Vatican’s intervention in Haiti occurred in 1983, when the country received its first (and so far only) papal visit. The head of the Catholic Church, John Paul II, came to Haiti to announce a new campaign to stem the advance of a religion “lacking the true message of the Gospel and with methods that do not respect real religious liberty.” Surprisingly, the charlatans in the Catholic leader’s sights were not practitioners of Vodou. They were Protestants.
Thus, precisely 100 years after Joseph Janvier wrote that Protestantism was unlikely to ever amount to a danger in Haiti, the Catholic Church was compelled to formally recognize the looming sectarian threat. The pope attended a conference of sixty-one Latin American bishops in Port-au-Prince, where the top item on the agenda was “preparing actions to stem the rapid growth of Protestant fundamentalist sects in the region” (Simons 1983a). Pope John Paul said that “the advance of religious groups which at times are lacking the true message of the Gospel and with methods that do not respect real religious liberty, pose serious obstacles to the mission of the Catholic Church and to other Christian confessions” (Greene 1993). Archbishop François-Wolff Ligondé, the host of the conference, announced the start of a national campaign to defend Catholicism in Haiti against “the blind proselytizing of Protestants” (Greene 1993). Two years later, the Haitian state’s official recognition of Protestantism as a national religion revealed the failure of the campaign. And within two more decades, a presidential decree made Vodou the third religion of the nation-state of Haiti.
Significantly, the Haitian nationalist narrative has attributed a very different political meaning to the unprecedented visit. Rather than taking account of the pope’s conspicuous counterattack on the Protestant danger in Haiti and in the Latin American region, the nationalist account emphasizes the political import of the papal intervention. It diverts attention away from the strategic alliance of the strange bedfellows, pro-Vodou Duvalier and anti-Vodou North American Protestant evangelicals. The Pope’s declaration that “things must change,” which actually was a call to halt “the advance of [Protestant evangelical] religious groups” (Simons 1983a) has been widely misinterpreted as a demand for political regime change and thus as the event that set in motion the popular mobilization to uproot the government of Jean-Claude Duvalier.
This version of history ignores processes that had weakened Duvalier prior to the pope’s visit. These events emboldened the pope to reverse concessions the Church had made to Jean-Claude’s father: He retook control of which priests were assigned to Haiti and essentially reinstated the terms of the 1860 Concordat. Resistance to the Concordat’s religious colonialism, it will be recalled, is what inspired the founder of Haitian black nationalism, Louis-Joseph Janvier. His twentieth-century ethnological followers, chief among whom was François Duvalier, located the authenticity of the anticolonial nation-state in the Vodou religion and in romanticized folklore. To this day, the Haitian state ornaments official events with Vodou symbolism and folkloric performances. Ironically, children typically perform the mock Vodou rites and dances, even though children would hardly be appropriate agents for carrying out rituals or ritual dances in actual worship. But as stand-ins for the modern ideals of innocence and authenticity, the children reinforce the authenticity of the Vodou performance. At the same time, the state remains virtually silent about the Protestant turn within the nation. The Catholic Church, however, could not afford to ignore the trend.
After 1983, the year 2007 was likely the next significant strategic moment in the Catholic Church’s war for control over religion in Haiti, even though that moment attracted little scholarly or media attention. In that year, Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot traveled to the countryside to reach out to professional ritual leaders (gangan ason/manbo ason). The head of the Haitian Catholic Church thus took the extraordinary step of signaling that the religious pluralism of Haitians could be a route to the Church’s salvation from the Protestant danger. The archbishop selected Léogâne to launch what we might call the church’s first “pro-superstition campaign.” “Why Léogâne?” I asked Father Thomas, who is associated with the local Catholic parish and who attended the inaugural meeting.2 “Because, as you know yourself, Karen, Léogâne is the center of Vodou in Haiti,” he responded with a smile. His statement was doubly ironic. In reality, the decentralized, heterogeneous, practical system of popular belief and worship lacks a single, dominant geographical anchor. Léogâne’s undeserved reputation as the premier Vodou center emerged as a product of the nationalist narrative of folk authenticity. Ethnological research conducted in Léogâne in the middle of the twentieth century played a small but significant part in the production of this special status (Richman 2007, 1–43, 2008a).
At the meeting in Léogâne, Archbishop Miot entreated the assembled Vodou leaders to remind their followers that they were “still Catholics.” The archbishop thus removed the divide between Catholicism and Vodou, a separation the Church had protected for the last two centuries. The pro-superstition campaign was a complete reversal of the Church’s 1941–1942 anti-Vodou crusade, whose rationale had been to uphold “the irreconcilable opposition” between Catholicism and the collection of religious beliefs and practices that are alleged to have come from Africa. It was a necessary and inevitable reconciliation given the Protestant danger. The archbishop was not able to complete the project of rapprochement with the Vodouists he began in Léogâne; he was tragically killed when the Cathedral of Port-au-Prince collapsed during the earthquake of January 12, 2010. His successors have not resumed his boundary-blurring strategy designed to save Haitian Catholicism from the Protestants by incorporating Vodou.
The Earthquake and Spiritual Reconquest
The devastating earthquake of 2010 provided impetus for renewed Protestant rhetorical offenses against Haitian devil worship. Within just twenty-four hours of the cataclysm, television evangelist Pat Robertson issued a widely circulated explanation of the apocalyptic disaster: It was divine punishment because the slaves had sworn “a pact with the devil” to free themselves and found an independent republic. He said:
It happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. [The slaves] were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.” True story. And so, the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. (CNN 2010)
At a time of incalculable Haitian suffering, Robertson’s provocative remark elicited widespread indignation. As the people of Ti Rivyè were struggling to survive the aftershocks, I called several of my friends in the Ti Rivyè Diaspora. Among them was Ti Mafi, a 42-year-old woman who grew up worshipping spirits and was initiated as a servitor (ounsi) before leaving Haiti for Montréal. My friend offered a swift retort that exposed the imperialism of the statements of North American Protestants that they were taming the “Haitian Other.” “People [in the United States] who need/want to know if the worship of the devil caused the earthquake—tell them they should buy a ticket to go to Haiti so they can ask the devil [there] if he is the one who caused the earthquake!”
Robertson’s claim was neither new nor original. He was repeating a dominant narrative in Haitian evangelical discourse. That evangelical narrative is itself a form of appropriation. The story is a reformulation of the official origin myth of the nation-state, which placed the beginning of the slave revolution of 1791 at a Vodou ceremony in Bois Caïman. Like all national-origin myths, this one combined fact and legend. It was promoted during the mid-twentieth century when state-sponsored folklorists and ethnographers participated in the production of a counterhegemonic narrative of authentic folk and their Vodou (Richman 2007, 1–27). For example, in 1958, Odette Mennesson-Rigaud published a journal article that sought to demonstrate that Haitian “independence was born out of Vodou,” lending substantial ethnographic support to the development of the nation-state’s origin myth (Mennesson-Rigaud 1958, 43–67).
Evangelical Protestants reformulated this national narrative to claim that the nation was born out of a satanic ceremony in which the insurrectionists swore allegiance to the devil. In this narrative, Haiti’s subsequent problems were punishment for the oath taken at Bois Caïman. It is not surprising, then, that Robertson understood the earthquake of January 12, 2010, as an apocalyptic punishment for the 1791 curse. His statement on January 13 condensed the evangelical version of Haiti’s origin myth into two sentences: “The Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”
Ironically, Protestant evangelicals’ representation of the devil in Haiti is alien to Haitian constructions of the devil. The Protestant use of the word devil conflates anthropomorphic spirits inherited through descent groups (lwa) with illicit powers (dyab) that are manipulated and sold by sorcerers. The Creole term dyab, which derives from the French diable, retains meanings from the old European, pre-capitalist moral economy. People confronting the collapse of their moral economy and the incursion of capitalist wage labor used their existing construct of the devil to make sense of—and critique—their “proletarianization” (Thompson 1967, 56–97). Michael Taussig (1980) has described the “proletarian devil contracts” that contemporary miners and plantation workers in the Cauca Valley, Colombia, imagined. These workers imagined the devil as wealth that reproduced itself through unnatural means by stealing life from humans and using it to vitalize money and material assets.
Haitians still imagine dyab as an exchange of human life for the acquisition of money for a certain period of profit, but at the end of this period, the money inexorably kills its “owner” and/or the owner’s children. Representations of “pursuing” (chache) and purchasing (achte) these immoral private contracts are the opposite of the moral, social, and communal symbolism of worshipping or “serving” (sèvi) lwa. Haitian Protestants intentionally disregard this crucial distinction by branding any non-Christian worship dyab. They use the terms “Satan” and “the devil” as misleadingly diffuse, catchall categories to connote and objectify the Other—the Other religion and the Others who practice it.
Elizabeth McAllister (2012) has documented how North American evangelical theologians and missionaries contributed to the production of the myth that Haitians are dominated by the devil. In addition, in the 1990s, North American evangelists introduced the aggressive symbolic methodology known as “spiritual mapping” that Haitian missionaries and pastors used to recolonize the nation “for Jesus.” Wielding a rich vocabulary of military metaphors and images of organized, collective violence, Protestant Pentecostal denominations battled Catholics and Vodouists and engaged in a struggle to determine Haitian national identity (Butler 2008, 23–64). In 1997, for example, Joel Jeune, a prominent American-trained pastor, led fellow Christians, including Haitian Americans, on a widely publicized crusade to Bois Caïman, where he conducted a service to exorcize the site (McAllister 2012, 204–205). Six years later, his cousin, Pastor Chavannes Jeune, directed a year-long program to “take back Haiti from Satan.” Participants included leaders from major evangelical organizations such as Promise Keepers, World Vision International, World Help, and Campus Crusade for Christ. The following year Chavannes Jeune mounted a candidacy for the presidency of Haiti (McAllister 2012).
The belief that the earthquake was the quintessential manifestation of the 1791 curse circulated between the evangelical North American core and its Haitian periphery and, as Bertin Louis has found, migrated to the periphery of the periphery: Haitian Protestants in the Bahamas (Bertin 2014). Soon after the cataclysm, members of the Haitian Protestant clergy charged that Vodou was “a demonic infestation on the land,” that “death was God’s response to the sinner,” and that “if many survived, it was God’s blessing” on those who were sinless (Desmangles 2010).
As the monuments of imperial Catholic authority in Haiti lay in ruin and the religious leadership were killed, stunned, and adrift, the more nimble entrepreneurial evangelicals quickly rushed in to assist in the rescue and recovery. The surge of North American evangelical armies flowing to Haiti after the earthquake was perhaps most striking at the Port-au-Prince airport, where seemingly endless brigades of mostly young white North American volunteers arrived. Each optimistic group was attired in brightly colored custom-made T-shirts advertising their “brand,” such as www.jesusinhaiti.com, HelpHealHaiti.org, Northwest Iowa Church of God Haiti Relief Team, or St. John’s Episcopal—Restore, Repair, Redeem.
The Earthquake, Conversion, and the End of Vodou?
Soon after the cataclysm, media reports emerged that vast numbers of Haitians were converting to Protestant Christianity. The dominant conjecture was that the earthquake had tested Haitians’ faith in their Vodou gods because the gods had failed to prevent the disaster. Multitudes of disappointed former “Vodouists” were allegedly turning away from their traditional religion, simultaneously repelled by the gods’ betrayal and drawn to the compelling messages and aid the already ubiquitous and implicitly moral Christian NGOs offered.
Several misleading assumptions underlay the claim of mass conversions to evangelical Christianity that ultimately concern notions of sovereignty and sectarianism in Haiti. First was the premise that Haitians believe in gods who are capable of preventing such natural disasters as earthquakes. Contrary to most outsiders’ representations of their religion, Haitians worship spirits (lwa), not nature gods (Murray 1984a, 188–231; Richman 2014, 207–233). Lwa can be thought of as super (in the sense of all-too-human) and hypersensitive anthropomorphic beings that are inherited through family lines among landholding descent groups. They are said to be from Ginen (Africa) and to dwell there still; many bear African names.
Ritual discourse, mainly in song texts and in visual imagery on flour paintings, painted murals, and cloth banners, often compare spirits to aspects or forces of nature. Examples include comparisons of Danbala Wedo’s energy with that of a water snake and Ogoun’s anger with thunder. It does not follow, however, that Danbala is an actual water snake or that Ogoun in fact controls storms. The equation of Danbala Wedo and Ogoun with natural forces follows from a simplistic interpretation of symbolic representation. It is, to invoke Claude Lévi-Strauss’s terminology, a reductive, “primitive” reading of analogical classification (Lévi-Strauss 1996). In addition, this reading reproduces the modern representation of the tradition-bound, scientific thought of “others” who occupy a different (read: backward) intellectual “time” and place and hold the childish belief that their fickle gods control nature (Fabian 1983). By contrast, the “great” religions of modernity have allegedly graduated from the nature-bound beliefs of their primitive antecedents.
When I informed various people who “serve their lwa” of the media claims that Haitians were giving up on their lwa because they had failed to prevent the cataclysm, they offered indignant retorts. Ti Mafi, for instance, declared, “It was God! The lwa had nothing to do with it. The lwa did not cause the earthquake.” Haitians did not reject their spirits for failing to prevent a natural disaster over which they had no control. Bondye, the Supreme Being, is thought to control nature in an otiose, random, impersonal way. Lwa are not believed to have powers to control air, land, or water; the powers of lwa are far more circumscribed and are limited to involvement and interference in discrete humans’ personal affairs. Their command is primarily confined to protecting or undermining the health and labor power of particular members of specific descent groups to whom they belong. The lwa are also distinct from ancestors, who are called mò and are respected in their own right and whose primary role, by virtue of their proximity to the other world, is to mediate relations between members of cognatic descent groups and their inherited lwa.
As Karen Brown (2001) and Gerald Murray (1984b) have shown, the lwa are primarily the protagonists of a “cult of affliction.” These afflictions are fundamentally relational. The primary work of religious leaders such as Mama Lola (who is represented in Brown’s work) is to help heal; that is, to help heal the ruptured relations whose concrete symbolic manifestation is bodily illness and misfortune. Mama Lola does not treat passive patients; instead, through pragmatic, instrumentalist discourse and performance, she empowers the afflicted to actively influence the threatening spirit. The primary purpose of rituals is to persuade spirits to “let go of” a member or members in the lwa’s “grasp” and to prevent recurrence of the “dis-ease” by placating the lwa. The spirits’ ability to afflict members of descent groups, no matter where they reside, is a primary factor in the continued vitality of the religion for the many Haitian migrants living abroad. And the belief that the only appropriate site for a healing ritual is on the family land in Haiti is a powerful factor that keeps migrants tethered to their spiritual anchors in Haiti.
Conclusion: Who Owns Haitian Religion?
The founders of the independent Republic of Haiti perpetuated the colonial religion by establishing Catholicism as the official faith. In the aftermath of 1804, the ostracized country hosted an autonomous church and developed a fluid, syncretic, decentralized system of popular belief and practice. A half-century later, in 1860, and again in 1941, Catholic imperialists, abetted by Haitian heads of state, maneuvered to stamp out superstition and reclaim the nation on behalf of the Vatican and France. The “Catholic state’s” hold over Haitian sovereignty did not begin to loosen until the middle of the twentieth century, when the arch-nationalist Duvalier forged a strategic pact with the Catholic Church’s primary territorial rival: a growing evangelical Protestant movement. The pact between the pro-Vodou champion and the allegedly apolitical North American evangelicals set the stage for the expansion of the mission to win Haiti from Satan, which evangelicals are still conducting. They see North America and Haiti as one node in a well-coordinated global nationalist crusade.
In the 1980s, the precarious status of Haiti’s religious sovereignty so preoccupied the Vatican that the pope called on the country in person. The pope’s visit did little to slow the exponential increase of Protestant missions on the island and in the region, and in 1985 Protestantism became Haiti’s second official state religion. While the Haitian state continues its official nationalistic celebrations of Haiti’s alleged Vodou essence, the state narrative is virtually silent about the growth of Protestantism and Protestants’ role in the development and expansion of “a Republic of NGOs” in a country where, as many are wont to say, pa gen leta (there is no state) (see Kivland, this volume).
In thinking, finally, about competition for religious dominion over Haiti in relation to broader, secular challenges to Haiti’s sovereignty, it is instructive to ponder the secondary meanings of the word sovereign. One definition of sovereign is “very good or effective [as in] a sovereign remedy for all ills” (New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd ed.). This sense of sovereign fits well with Haitian religious actors’ preference for effectiveness over doctrine. My long-term ethnographic research has shown how ordinary agents, regardless of their religious identification, use an instrumental, pragmatic approach to religious belief and practice (Richman 2008b, 2012). As Paul Brodwin (1996) demonstrated in his study over religious contests for healing power in southern Haiti, they strategically transgress doctrinal boundaries to remedy ills. The religious system in Haiti lacks a conquerable national organization or physical structure. Its diffuse, localized, and family-based features provide a measure of immunity to the colonizing designs of religious crusaders. International campaigns in a “war of position” to stamp out superstition, to convert Haitians, and to exorcize the devil from the nation’s supposed birthplace will doubtlessly continue, with or without the complicity of the Haitian state. And Haitians’ fluid and sovereign spectrum of belief and practice will also persist, regardless of momentary changes in the religious allegiances and costumes of its members.
Notes
1. Duvalier was not the first to embrace this paradox. Jean Price-Mars, who in 1928 wrote the first important text on Haitian peasants’ folklore and religion, Ainsi parla l’oncle, was an Episcopalian who supported the expansion of his religion in Haitian society (Price-Mars 1979).
2. Author’s interview with Father Thomas Streit, 2008, Notre Dame, Indiana.
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