Times Online -- Haiti is facing a spiritual as well as a physical crisis with the collapse of many of its most potent religious symbols in the earthquake, according to a leading Labour peer and Methodist minister.
Even those who have retained their faith in the face of the overwhelming crisis will struggle to find somewhere to worship on Sunday, with so many churches including both the Catholic and Anglican cathedrals destroyed, and many others severely damaged.
Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach, superintendent minister of Wesley’s chapel in the City of London, who was ordained in Haiti and wrote a biography of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country’s first democratically-elected President, said he feared the fatalism inspired by the voodoo religion would militate against recovery.
The death of the Catholic archbishop along with the destruction of the cathedrals will be seen as potent symbols of the failure of those religions to withstand an act of God, he warned.
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Voodoo is fundamentally a home-based cult where each family has their own collection of household gods, many of them Catholic saints. In many households, it sits comfortably alongside a family’s Catholic observance.
The Catholic church officially backs the right of families to practise voodoo. Protestant missionaries have been less sympathetic, classifying family spirits as demons.
More than eight in ten Haitians are officially Catholic, with about one in ten Protestants. But an unknown number also practise some voodoo rituals as well.
The dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier exploited voodoo as a method of social control, using sorcery and superstition as covers for his corrupt destruction of the nation.
Lord Griffiths, who wrote a history of Protestantism in Haiti and has had a 40-year love affair with the country, including living and working there for ten years and setting up the Haiti support group in the UK, said: “The interesting thing for sociologists and anthropologists is the considerable overlap between voodoo and Catholicism.”
Voodoo grew out of the animist religions brought to the country by slaves, and was then overlaid by the Catholicism of the plantation owners. This led in many places to syncretism, or fusing, of the two belief systems.
Lord Griffiths told The Times: “I would say that 90 per cent of the time, the voodoo is non-malign. It is not just sticking pins into dolls, although there is a bit of that.”
The tragic religious “fault line” which could now impact recovery from the earthquake was the “fatalism” of the voodoo belief system.
Lord Griffiths said: “The Haiti people have had so many batterings that when something terrible happens, they just say, “Bon dieu bon", or “God is good”, whatever happens. In other words, it is God’s will, we must accept it, there is nothing we can do about it.
“The task for Christian evangelism is not to make voodoo worshippers into Christians but to help deal with the fatalism that does not allow voodoo worshippers to see themselves as agents of their own improvement.
"The problem is the competition between these two mindsets, the fatalism that says they can do nothing and the right perception that they can do a lot. That is the spiritual struggle.”
He said the Catholic Archbishop’s death would confirm in the minds of many Haitians that the Church could not withstand the raw force of nature and the loss of the Catholic cathedral was an even more potent symbol of the same thing.
“It will certainly feed into the minds of some. But it is the cathedral that is the thing. It is knocked down, that great high place of religion.
"If an Archbishop goes under a pile of rubble, you can regret it. But if you see the ruin of the cathedral where all the Archbishops since 1860 have officiated, it is a more powerful image.
"They will see this every day for years to come. Haitians will say, this is the state-approved religion and look what has happened to it.”
Tyler Cowen, a commentator in the US, said in his blog Marginal Revolution that religion might explain why Haiti is so poor. He cited the philosopher Hegel who argued that “voodoo, with its intransitive power relations among the gods, was prone to producing political intransitivity as well.”
Albert Mohler, a baptist in the US, wrote: “In truth, it is hard not to describe the earthquake as a disaster of biblical proportions. It certainly looks as if the wrath of God has fallen upon the Caribbean nation.
"Add to this the fact that Haiti is well known for its history of religious syncretism — mixing elements of various faiths, including occult practices. The nation is known for voodoo, sorcery, and a Catholic tradition that has been greatly influenced by the occult.”
Mr Mohler refuted the suggestion from Pat Robertson, the American preacher, that Haiti was cursed by the devil.
“Why did no earthquake shake Nazi Germany? Why did no tsunami swallow up the killing fields of Cambodia? Why did Hurricane Katrina destroy far more evangelical churches than casinos? Why do so many murderous dictators live to old age while many missionaries die young?”
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