Has American Voodoo Spirituality Replaced Haitian Voodoo?

Has American Voodoo Spirituality Replaced Haitian Voodoo?

Many American Christians/missionaries believe that a pact made with the devil (Haitian voodoo) is responsible for the curse of pervasive poverty plaguing Haiti. According to Jean Thomas, this is questionable history; it conveniently ignores the brutal historical truth of 500 years of oppression first by the Spanish, then by the French, and recently by the U.S.

Some well meaning Americans are trying to 'help Haiti', but replacing Haitian voodoo with American voodoo spirituality may do more harm than good. What does American voodoo spirituality look like: a spirituality without justice, addressing only poverty but not oppression, building orphanages, but not rebuilding poor communities, charity without justice, love without justice, faith without works of justice. (Read Isaiah 1, and 58; also James 2).

To avoid making stupid mistakes, mistakes made again and again in the past in Haiti by Americans, I recommend reading the following four books: When Helping Hurts, Killing With Kindness, Blaming the Victim and Equality. Of these four books, only Killing with Kindness has a Haitian context. But if you can recognize pseudo spirituality in the U.S., it will help you avoid the same mistakes in Haiti.

William Ryan, author of both Blaming the Victim and Equality, is both a scholar (psychologist) and an activist; he participated in the civil rights movement so he was sensitized to oppression and justice issues and understood the enormous damage that oppression did to individuals, families and communities. Ryan is familiar with the Old Testament Jubilee and I suspect Catholic social teaching. So he is keenly aware of the half truths behind the American ideology of inequality and what a just, sharing society might look like.

In his book, Equality, Ryan notes that this is a nation that highlights individual responsibility and individual effort, but minimizes social evil/oppression and the need for social justice. To correct this imbalance, Ryan emphasizes that whole human beings "are the consequence of collective [social], rather than [just] individual effort." His first chapter which is entitled "The Equality Dilemma: Fair Play or Fair Shares," sets the tone for the whole book.

Fair Play is characterized by: freedom, opportunity, individual rights, individual ownership; if a person works hard, she/he can succeed. This American ideology is aggressively expressed by the atheistic and materialistic Ayn Rand; strangely this Rand ideology has been blended with some of white, evangelical Christianity and has produced the Religious Right. This combination has legitimated and fueled the enormous income and wealth gap. Alone, Fair Play is a half truth posing as the whole truth.

Fair Share would add to freedom, justice; it would recognize that opportunity is far too often thwarted by systems of oppression, that rights need to be balanced by responsibilities, that ownership must be combined with sharing.