The Religion That’s Been Maligned for Centuries

Though Alain Pierre-Louis grew up in a Haitian family that attended Catholic church services most Sundays, he always felt a spiritual pull toward something else. Vodou, a Haitian religion rooted in ancestral remembrance, nature, healing, and justice, was embedded everywhere in his Boston childhood—in the traditional rasin, or “roots,” music blaring from the living-room speakers, and in the Haitian-folkloric-dance performances he would go to with his relatives. But though the art influenced by Vodou was celebrated, the religion itself was considered taboo and a nonstarter at home. “There was no explanation; it was just, ‘No, you don’t need to learn that,’” Pierre-Louis, a 31-year-old environmental educator, told me. “[My parents] wanted me to embrace my culture except that part, our spirituality.”

The anti-Vodou sentiment Pierre-Louis encountered from his parents is part of a long tradition of misinformation and discomfort about the religion. Tracing back to the 1600s, Vodou was founded as a unifying religion among enslaved Africans who had previously practiced different spiritual systems in their respective ethnic groups on the, “In a word, nothing is more dangerous, according to all the accounts, than this cult of Vaudoux. It is founded on the extravagant idea, which can be made into a terrible weapon, that the ministers of the said being know and can do anything.” That characterization has endured for centuries, with modern-day popular culture depicting the religion’s followers as people who engage in black magic or demon worship. (One of the most common portrayals of Vodou in American film, for instance, is that of evil spells cast by practitioners using needle-poked dolls, a falsified representation of Vodou rituals.)