Voodoo in Haiti

From an op-ed by David Brooks last week:

...Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.

....

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others...

From Christopher Hitchens' post on Slate.com last week:

And if any single thing explains the abject misery of Haiti in the years between independence and today, it is the prevalence of religious cultism in its various aspects. Voodoo keeps people afraid and makes them cowed into apathy by the nearness of the spirit world. It was exploited by the horrible Tonton Macoute regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his gruesome son, who for decades kept the country as their own rack-rented fief.

Then I went to The World Factbook to see Haiti's religious statistics. Turns out that 80% of the population is Roman Catholic and 16% is Protestant, but "roughly half of the population practices voodoo." So it's a hell of a lot more than I expected.

Of course, the comments of these two gentlemen have gotten much criticism. (See Brooks' reader comments for that article, most of which don't deal with the issue of Haiti's religious practices. The ones that do, dismiss it as a sort of bagatelle.) I thought that the last line I quoted from Brooks was so great that, dammit, I just had to put it on my Clipmarks.

Keep in mind that I'm only discussing voodoo in Haiti. I in no way am trying to frame this vis-a-vis the tragedy that recently occurred.