Finally someone is talking about voodoo in a real life manner. I have said all along the country will not change until belief in voodoo is changed.

It is such an important part of the culture but that has begun to be investigated and reversed. This year the holiday of rara was canceled due to the earthquake. That is a voodoo based holiday similar to "carnival".

Where there is light there cannot be darkness. Darkness is the absence of light.

USA TODAY 15 March 2010

Studying voodoo isn't a judgment

Journalists should deal with religion respectfully, of course. But that doesn’t mean dismissing the tough questions.

By Rod Dreher
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.
In a recent New York Times column, religion reporter Samuel G. Freedman rightly lamented the way the American news media have largely ignored voodoo in their Haiti earthquake reporting. But he also chided media commentators (including me) for speculating about voodoo as a harmful cultural force. Freedman quoted academics who praised the Haitian folk religion, and who complained about the ignorance and supposed racism of voodoo skeptics.
This, alas, is all too typical of American media's religion coverage. We journalists ignore or downplay the role religion plays in the everyday life, or we take a naive viewpoint toward exotic religions practiced by people unlike us.
Trending positive
For years, I've watched this instinct show itself in the way most in the mainstream media cover Islam in America. Reporters are eager to find positive stories and often allergic to stories that might, in their minds, give aid and comfort to rednecks, right-wingers and other so-called undesirables. Once I attended a news meeting in which an editor angrily declined to look into substantive evidence that local Muslim institutions were teaching Islamic radicalism to youth by barking, "What about Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?! We never write about their radicalism!"
As if the Christian televangelists were comparable to Osama bin Laden. As if they were even relevant. The story — an important one — never was written. In that case, an editor who knew little about religion interpreted religious data through a partisan culture-war lens. He chose by omission not to give the newspaper's readers a picture of the world as it is, but rather of the world as he wishes it were.
Years of survey data show that U.S. journalists lean strongly to the left, particularly on social issues — a stance often associated with a secular outlook. As a religious believer and professional journalist for 20 years, time and time again I've seen journalists who fail to get the dictum set down by the indispensable media criticism blog GetReligion.org: "It's impossible for journalists to understand how things work in the real world if they do not take religion seriously."
Here's why. In his influential 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver identified a person's "metaphysical dream of the world" — that is, the way the world works at its most basic level — as the foundation of one's thoughts and conduct. This is the realm of religion — or of no religion at all, because scientific materialism offers its own particular view of the structure of reality.
Faith meets reality
A culture's metaphysical dream tells us a lot about its strengths and weaknesses. One is not required to make a theological judgment about voodoo — or any other religion — to explore the connection between its metaphysical tenets and the world it has made among its believers.
A world in which most people believe that reality is governed by the occult caprice of the gods will be a very different place than a world in which people believe events can be explained according to either a Christian or a scientific materialist metaphysic. It's as legitimate to ask what role voodoo plays in Haiti's fathomless social troubles as it is to ask the same question about fundamentalist Islam in the Middle East, conservative Christianity in the Bible Belt, or militant atheism in the land of academia. And it's as necessary.
Ironically, intelligent critics of voodoo show more respect for the religion than do its would-be media protectors, simply by taking voodoo seriously enough to fault it.
Rod Dreher is director of publications at the John Templeton Foundation and blogs at Beliefnet.com.
(In Haiti: Half of its 9 million people are Catholic and a third Protestant; voodoo is pervasive./Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images.)