Consider a few facts. Voodoo is one of the official religions of Haiti, and its designation in 2003 merely granted official acknowledgment to a longstanding reality. The slave revolt that brought Haiti independence indeed relied on voodoo, the New World version of ancestral African faiths. To this day, by various scholarly estimates, 50 percent to 95 percent of Haitians practice at least elements of voodoo, often in conjunction with Catholicism.

Yet in searching the LexisNexis database of news coverage and doing a Google search this week, I found that Catholicism figured into three times as many accounts of the quake as did voodoo. A substantial share of the reports that did mention voodoo were recounting Mr. Robertson’s canard or adopting it in articles asking Haitian survivors if they felt their country was cursed.

At a putatively more informed level, articles, broadcasts and blogs depicted voodoo as the source of Haiti’s poverty and political instability — not because of divine punishment, mind you, but because voodoo supposedly is fatalistic and primitive by nature.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Caribbean • Haiti • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths

1. John A. wrote: The amazing thing about articles on religion these days is how they can write so much with out saying anything about actual beliefs and practices. February 20, 12:59 pm | [comment link]

2. evan miller wrote: Voodoo is satanic.  Haiti will never emerge from its misery as long as its people are in thrall to this evil. February 22, 12:41 pm | [comment link]

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