Pat Robertson's Haiti Comments Spark Controversy, Discussion of Country's Religion

Jan. 14, 2010 — -- Where once they gathered in ornate cathedrals and vibrant voodoo temples, Port-au-Prince residents gathered Wednesday night in the streets to pray, their mournful supplications punctuated by the cries of survivors still trapped under the rubble of Tuesday's earthquake.

The hymns they sang were Christian, but religion in Haiti has long been a fluid mix of Catholic and Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, which for centuries have made the island country a battleground for Western missionaries who view voodoo as devil worship.

When American televangelist Pat Robertson on Wednesday attributed the earthquake to the Haitian people's "pact to the devil," it shined a light on the hostility some foreign Christians have aimed at the country's religious traditions.

Some 80 percent of Haitians are practicing Roman Catholics. But despite their Christian faith, half the country's population practices voodoo, an Afro-Caribbean faith in which practitioners cast spells, conduct sacrifices, worship spirits and believe in zombies, according to statistics compiled by the CIA World Factbook.

Increasingly, evangelical Protestant faiths, like Pentecostalism, which stress a locally popular belief in an "unseen spirit world," have taken hold.

The earthquake killed Joseph Mio, archbishop of Port-au-Prince as well as some 100 Catholic priests, or about one in eight, and left an unknown number of priests, nuns and seminarians homeless. Catholic institutions, including the archbishop's palace and the city's primary cathedral in Port-au-Prince, were destroyed, as were countless voodoo temples, which served as important social-service institutions.

With many centerpieces of religious life destroyed, the effects the earthquake will have on the spiritual landscape remain to be seen, according to Elizabeth McAlister, a professor at Wesleyan University who studies religion in Haiti.

"We know that once night falls, the response of the population, which is camping out on the streets, is to sing hymns and pray. That tells us right away the response has been an intense reaching out to the spiritual," said McAlister.