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#1827: RE: A response to Sean HarveyÕs request for thoughts on Protestant movement and Vodou (fwd)
From:Ninaclara@aol.com
Sean Harvey posted a request for information on the growing Evangelical
Protestant movement in Haiti, and several articles on the list have recently
focused attention on Protestants and their churches. I?d like to respond to
some of the questions raised by Harvey and to the article which sparked his
inquiry. Anybody who has been to Haiti in the fairly recent past has had to
notice the explosive growth of Protestantism in Haiti and wonder. I did,
which is how I?ve come to be in Haiti conducting research on the subject.
I?ve also noticed how polemical the issue has tended to become on this list
in the past, with some list members portraying the Protestant movement as
Haiti?s only hope for redemption, while other?s view it as a nefarious plot
concocted by the CIA to destroy Vodou and Haitian national sovereignty. It
would be nice to see a more informative and slightly more nuanced debate. It
is curious to me that the discourse on Evangelical Protestantism tends to so
closely imitate the discourse of the movement itself ? Manichian in the
extreme. At any rate, in his posting, Sean Harvey asks: "To what extent has
Haitian religious culture been already destroyed by Pentecostalism and
related Protestant movements?" He goes on to wonder if Vodou is in danger of
extinction and about the possibility of a ?new syncretism.?
My short response is that while Pentecostalism and other Evangelical groups
are growing, Vodou does not seem to be diminishing, let alone in danger of
extinction. In fact, if anything, Vodou seems to be flourishing (clearly, an
opinion; I would be interested to hear others). I think the more disturbing
reality is that Evangelical Protestantism tends to produce a greater
demonization of Vodou among Haiti?s popular classes and new forms of
?cultural marronage?: that is, intense disavowal by both Vodouisants and
Protestants of their religious and cultural heritage. I also think that the
actual number of clearly definable ?Protestants? is open to question. Below
I?ve attempted a longer response to Harvey?s posting for those interested in
slugging through one ?blan?s? thoughts on the subject. I should warn
potential readers, however: The thoughts of graduate students in the field
are notoriously irritating ? full of unanswerable questions, myriad
ethnographic details and hesitant conclusions. Read at your own risk! I
also would be interested in hearing from others, especially Haitian
?Christians?, whom I don?t recall ever hearing from on this list.
I promise to actually try to answer Harvey?s questions below but I?m
compelled to just make some brief caveats concerning the phrasing of Harvey?s
question about whether ?Vodou is in danger of extinction.? I try to answer
the question according to the logic of my training in cultural
anthropology?i.e. by talking about people and practices. but the question is
open to multiple (mis) interpretations. What would it mean for a religion to
become extinct? From the standpoint of a practicing Vodouisant, the question
is somewhat odd: Do you mean: are the people who practice Vodou in danger of
extinction? In which case you must mean there is a danger that all
Vodouisant will convert to Protestantism, in which case Vodou would still not
be extinct because the lwa/zange/mystere are real and do not disappear
because the serviteurs of the religion do. Or, on the other hand, do you
mean that the actual lwa/zange/mystere could in fact be made to disappear?
In which case you would have to believe, as Protestants do, that when they
?exorcise? an area of ?demons? and so forth (as they often do) they actually
chase those spirits away. Being neither a Vodouisant nor a Protestant, but an
anthropologist-in-training, I am unable to answer those types of metaphysical
questions, but Harvey?s question does beg them.
Concerning the actual number of Protestants as quoted in Michael Norton?s
recent article at 30% the reality is that they are growing, but percentages
like those quoted by Norton are problematic. I think it is important to ask:
What does it mean for someone in Haiti to identify themselves as Protestant?
Equally, what does it mean for others to identify someone as Protestant?
Since when do the majority of people who serve the spirits claim openly that
they are ?Vodouisant?? It used to be that most people claimed they were
Catholic and the reality was that they also served the spirits in some way
(recall the standard joke about religious identity in Haiti "90% are
Catholic, 10% Protestant and 100% Vodouisant"). What census or statistic
could capture this? Keep in mind that these kinds of statistics are or would
be developed by various ?authorities? who are generally perceived by most
Haitian people to be anti-Vodou. It is especially unrealistic to base
anything on the statistics/diagnostics of various Protestant churches and
organizations (the only people really interested in developing such things).
Their figures are lacking in objectivity for obvious reasons (indeed, the
very claim, "such and such number of Haitians are now Protestant," coming
from a Protestant, is in itself often a form of proselytizing. Granted: you
could do some kind of mythical, objective census, but you would have to keep
in mind that:
Protestants, even life-long members of a particular church, very often
continue to depend on Vodou, particularly on services provided by local
Oungan and Manbo. It is difficult to say exactly how many, since Vodouisant
will exaggerate the numbers and most Protestants will deny this activity
altogether. However, this begs the question: Is a member of a Protestant
church who depends on the services of a Vodou specialist a Protestant
strictly speaking? A Vodouisant? Or something in between?
There are Protestants who really are simply "sou bluff" or more nicely put
perhaps, strategically Protestant. Missionaries sometimes call them "rice
Christians." These are the Christians who convert long enough to help them
attain whatever it is they are after?i.e. rice, but also education for their
children in a Christian school, a few gourdes, whatever. This may sound
cynical; I suppose it is, though not nearly so cynical as requiring
conversion for access to these various services and resources (and this does
go on, whatever missionaries may say and however subtle the coercion). I saw
a rather startling example of this last summer during a visit to Bwa Kayiman.
The short version is something like this: I was standing with some friends
under the tree that sits on the national site when I noticed several Haitian
tourists talking to a local, asking questions about the site, about the
history of Bwa Kayiman, etc. After a few moments it became apparent that the
visitors were not simple tourists but evangelists, and they quickly cornered
the local man into admitting that he practiced Vodou. He even admitted to
doing mystical work for pay. He said he?d converted before and walked in the
Adventist church but had fallen back on old ways after falling on hard times.
The evangelists asked if he wouldn?t like to repent before the final judgment
looming ahead. He said he would, but things had been so difficult? After a
few minutes of this type of exchange the evangelists convinced the man to let
them come pray with him in his home. We walked to the man?s home, a short
distance away. The evangelists quickly canvassed the lakou, proselytizing to
some, obtaining testimony to their prospective convert?s honesty from others.
Some people were even asked to provide their signature testifying that X was
an honest person, was not doing this ?en jouet? and would not simply go back
to his old ways once the evangelists left. Everyone politely complied with
the visitor?s requests. The evangelists then turned to X and asked him if he
didn?t have any ritual objects he wanted to get rid of. He said no. They
persisted. Finally, they accepted that he had nothing and began praying with
their arms on X. On their way out they stuffed a 50 gourdes note into the
pocket of one of the other men they had been evangelizing to in the lakou,
handed out smaller bills to all the children and drove away in their 4X4. I
breathed a heavy sigh of relief and slumped down in a chair, exhausted and
pulled out a cigarette. X asked me for one. I asked him, a bit surprised,
if Christian converts generally smoke? He responded slowly, while the people
in the lakou listened quietly. He said he hadn?t had anything but some bitter
coffee early in the morning and he wasn?t sure how he was going to put food
on the table for his children in the evening (quoting from memory, his exact
words are on one of many still untranscribed tapes). He said maybe one day he
would convert for real, but no one was going to tell him when or how. The
people in the lakou seemed to find this very funny and fell into fits of
laughter. When I went to rejoin my friends who I had left under the tree,
they asked me if X had converted again. It turns out this man is a kind of
repeating convert. He?s made a small business out of it ever since Christians
have started coming to Bwa Kayiman, drawn by the controversy over the
crusade. In fact, I stayed long enough in the area to find out that this man
is not a Bokor or Oungan. So the whole thing had been set up from the start,
that is, this man had presented himself this way in order to lure evangelists
to his lakou, where he most likely knew from experience they would behave in
much the same fashion as I witnessed.
At any rate, even given that there are many, many new heartfelt Haitian
Christians, I don?t think, as Harvey seems to fear, that the number of
Vodouisants is inversely proportional to the number of Protestants. Okay, so
maybe this claim denies some fundamental law of physics, but if you got
through what I wrote above, you get what I?m saying. Furthermore, religious
identity in Haiti is about as stable as an earthquake. Do a life history of
somebody living in P-au-P?s bidonville and quartier populaire and you will
get an amazing laundry list of churches, denominations and faiths. The
typical way Protestants themselves have of talking about their religious
practice is indicative; people will commonly say: ?M?ap mache nan Legliz de
Dieu, Kafou? (literally: I walk in the church of God in Kafou). Many people
walk just as easily in as out of a particular church or denomination. In
other words, in thinking about religious identity in Haiti, you also have to
think about the person?s life history and possible trajectory and ask whether
or not the person who now claims to be a Pentecostal Christian will do so in
two months time, let alone two years. I have talked to many practicing
Vodouisant who at some point were ?konveti?. Even people born and raised in
Protestantism may one day ?convert back? to Vodou. The problem is you won?t
hear much about these people because Vodou is not an evangelistic religion.
Newly converted Vodouisants, unlike Protestants, do not tend to broadcast
their ?rebirth? all over the radio and in churches.
I tend to think that the ?extinction? of Vodou is basically an Evangelical
fantasy. In a sense, talking about the disappearance of Vodou reiterates
Protestant evangelizing efforts. I am always hearing from Protestants that
Vodou is disappearing. They will tell you that after the crusade on Bwa
Kayiman the site is ?demon free?, that Soukri no longer functions because a
group of Protestants went and prayed there, that there are almost no more
Guedes walking around Port-au-Prince during the festival of the dead because
everyone has converted and so on. If you live in Haiti and regularly attend
Vodou ceremonies or are in contact with Oungan and Manbo it is hard to lend
much credence to these claims. If anything, I would tend to say the opposite
is true: Vodou seems to be flourishing, though certainly changing as
anthropologists like Serge Larose, Karen Richman, Karen Brown and Liza
MaCalister have shown. And it seems to be flourishing precisely because it is
changing. For instance, as many recent scholars have taken pains to show, as
Haitians have become increasingly ?transnational? so has Vodou. For me, the
most visible aspect of this in Haiti is the regular entrance of both
foreigners and diaspora Haitians for initiation ceremonies. In April I
attended a dans for Ti Jean Petro at the most extravagant Vodou temple I have
ever seen. Over the enormous Peristyle filled with beautiful paintings and
sculptures of the lwa, a dozen hounfor and a bar, were rooms built for
receiving foreign initiates. The Manbo spends most of her time in Paris,
returning to Haiti for important ceremonies, including of course Kanzo. Some
may worry about the growing commercialization of Vodou, but there seems
little doubt that this changing structure of Vodou across national borders is
contributing to its continuing vitality. Paradoxically, perhaps, I also think
that the continuing insecurity, poverty and fragmentation in Haitian social
life produces more Vodouisants just as it produces more Protestants; not
because Vodou is a form of escapism, but because it is a form of resistance,
and most majority class Haitians need now, as much as they ever have,
powerful tools of resistance.
The question of Protestant/Vodou syncretism is an important one and difficult
to respond to in brief (the confused graduate student in the middle of
fieldwork that I am). To start with, I think that the dependency of
Protestants on Vodou is already a form of syncretism, though this may not be
the best term to use. In a sense, Vodou and Evangelical Protestantism seem to
be forming a new system, standing in dynamic tension and opposition, and
therefore closely linked. For Protestants relating to Vodou, this dependency
is both practical and ideological. On a practical level, it is clear to me
that many Protestants continue to rely on Manbo and Oungan for services, the
most common being healing, but includes magic, both for protection and
attack. Ideologically I mean that the anti-Vodou rhetoric of Protestants
often leads you to wonder if Protestant churches could keep functioning if
they didn?t have Vodou to identify themselves against. Rhetorically, a
Protestant is often someone who is not Vodouisant. Without ?Vodouisant?
there would be no ?Protestant.?
As for the question of Protestant incorporation of Vodou or a ?new
syncretism?, if you go to Protestant churches, especially Pentecostal ones
or ?indigenous? ones (by which I mean churches founded by Haitians, fully
functioning with NO missionary funding, and there are now many of these) you
will see a lot of stuff that resembles Vodou. So much so that the mainline
denominations in Haiti, as well as many leaders of the more conservative
Evangelical churches, find these churches frightening, if not heretical. One
predicateur said to me recently that they were "Vodou en Francais." At any
rate, this Vodou in French often includes: 1) possession, though now it is
possession by the holy spirit, even angels, but not lwa (Vodouisants like to
say that these possession experiences are simply misrecognized "lwa bossal");
2) prophecy, which could be seen as similar to divination in Vodou; 3)
drumming, singing and dancing in religious services. None of these are the
same as they appear in Vodou, but they do seem to come out of Vodou ritual.
In the ?Celestial Armies?, a runaway group functioning within the Pentecostal
denomination, some of the drumming rhythms sound distinctly like they are
drawn from the Makanda rite, while others from Haitian Rara. The singing is
also in the form of call and response, and the dancing, well, isn?t nearly as
beautiful as yanvalou, but it is an essential aspect of their rites; 4) A
general emphasis on ?heating up? rather than ?cooling down? as the path to
connection with supernatural power; 5) The central role of healing in both
cults (something Paul Brodwin discusses carefully in his book); 6) In the
supernatural realm, these groups also resemble Vodou the most closely: for
instance, the angels these Protestants believe protect them from mystical
attack and evil spirits clearly resemble Haitian lwa. However, they cannot be
appealed to directly, as is the case with lwa, but are sent by Jesus in
response to Christian prayers. Usually these angels are protective but I
have also heard of ?terminator angels? who will attack a Christian?s enemy,
even to the death. This is a partial list, totally lacking in analysis, but
it will have to do.
Oh, I almost forgot. Harvey asked about what the religious landscape might
look like in fifty years. Unfortunately, being neither a practicing Manbo nor
a Pentecostal Christian, my prophesizing abilities are a bit rusty?Then
again, I think Amy Wilentz once quoted Aristide saying something to the
effect that prophecy is just careful analysis of historical and present
realties... Another famous Haitian, Max Blanchet, said once on this list
something to the effect that Haitians might become increasingly Protestant,
but they would do so in a way distinctively Haitian (sorry Max, if I?m
distorting your words). But whether Max said this or not, I think this idea
is to the point. It is already clearly visible in existing Protestant
churches in Haiti and a reality everywhere Christianity has spread. You need
only look at the Spiritual Baptists, the Zion churches, or Pentecostal
practice in many other parts of the world. I already stated above that I
don?t think Vodou is in danger of disappearing. Perhaps the more intriguing
question is whether Protestantism will transform Vodou. I don?t see this
yet, but maybe some other list members have thoughts on this possibility.
Okay, if you?ve gotten all the way through this, I look forward to hearing
you?re thoughts and observations. And please feel free to email me off the
list if you have comments 900+ people don?t necessarily need to read.