Evangelical preacher Pat Robertson blames a pact with the devil by Haitians for their recent earthquake. I personally think Pat Robertson is a demented old man trying to take advantage of this calamity to spread his brand of religious psychobabble.

I don’t have anything against religions or the religious. Yet Robertson’s comments say a lot about the divisive nature of modern religious thought.

The so-called pact with the devil charged against Haiti is based on a famous Afro-Creole religious service, said to have sparked the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804. Yet underlining these insensitive statements is a racist misreading of the history of Haiti. Robertson is using the plight of others to sell his puritanical views of African religiosity as Satanic. Sadly, these claims aren’t new when it comes to Haiti and Voodoo.

Voodoo has captured the popular imagination, and has been used as source material for movies like Wes Craven’s “The Serpent and The Rainbow.” In Craven’s movie, Haiti is portrayed as a society caught up in a culture of corruption, witchcraft and primitivism. Craven’s movie is full of images with a historical basis in age-old ideas about Africans and African culture.

On Feb. 20, 1991, Bill O’Reilly’s “Inside Edition” ran a show talking about Voodoo. He painted the picture of this island nation as held hostage by Voodoo priests, capable of turning people into zombies. O’Reilly even claimed Voodoo is used to keep people in economic slavery. A Haitian intellectual once complained, “Voodoo is certainly the most publicized, the most misunderstood, and most misrepresented aspect of Caribbean cultures. Too many people equate Voodoo with superstitions and all degrees of witchcraft and sorcery.”

These sentiments show an attitude of indifference and ignorance toward old age African culture. When missionaries came to Africa, one of their missions was to save the Africans from what they considered pagan ways. They branded African ancestral worship as Satanic. African religions and religions of African slaves were viewed as systems of thought inextricably linked to evil. Voodoo evokes thoughts of the living dead, secret rituals, cannibalism, wild and drunken orgies and odious doings by incomprehensible black people.

Voodoo beliefs and rites come from Africa and contain hints of Catholicism. Like any other, the religion has things it considers malicious; yet to associate the religion itself with evil is disheartening. It’s dehumanizing and insensitive to think a people can evolve a culture and form of religious thought which is fundamentally evil. The Judeo-Christian world has often used such claims to gain converts and marginalize followers of eastern and African religions. The early French colonizers of Haiti often described the religion as dangerous and began the history of bad press associated with Haiti. Early anthropologists used their studies of Voodoo to reinforce racist notions of black inferiority.

I’m not endorsing any religious idea as superior to another, but I find it disgusting that in this day and age, old manifestations of backward racist thought still reverberate. To say a culture or a people are cursed because of some strange religious edict should show people how divisive religion can be.

One major challenge has always been each religion’s claim to moral superiority over others. These claims spill over and manifest themselves in statements like Robertson’s.

People need to realize how they approach and view the people of Haiti says more about them than whether or not they donate anything.

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