An AP story dated 2/23 reports that a group of vodouists gathered in Cite Soleil last Tuesday to conduct a ritual to “guide lost souls.”   They drew veves and prepared offerings.  They prayed and sang.  Then they were attacked.  According to the article, “…a crowd of Evangelicals started shouting. Some threw rocks while others urinated on Voodoo symbols. When police left, the crowd destroyed the altars and Voodoo offerings of food and rum.”

Who do you blame for a natural disaster that kills hundreds of thousands and leaves a million people homeless?  You can’t blame God, who everyone knows would never do such a thing.  Must be Satan, or those like him – like vodouists.  They’re the ones Pat Robertson meant in his “pact with the devil” remarks.  Right?

“Much of this has to do with the aid coming in,” said Max Beauvoir, a Voodoo priest and head of a Voodoo association. “Many missionaries oppose Voodoo. I hope this does not start a war of religions because many of our practitioners are being harassed now unlike any other time that I remember.”

Apparently some christianists see the earthquake as an opportunity to wipe out vodou: 

“There's absolutely a heightened spiritual conflict between Christianity and Voodoo since the quake,” said Pastor Frank Amedia of the Miami-based Touch Heaven Ministries who has been distributing food in Haiti and proselytizing.

“We would give food to the needy in the short-term but if they refused to give up Voodoo, I'm not sure we would continue to support them in the long term because we wouldn't want to perpetuate that practice. We equate it witchcraft, which is contrary to the Gospel.”

I gather from this that withholding aid from people when they are most in need is not contrary to the gospel.

However, if centuries of oppression couldn’t eradicate African religion in the Americas, the stone-hearted christianists don’t stand a chance.