This didn't take long....Pat Robertson

http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/122171.html

.....

The slave revolts informed by voudoun, however, were only one of a number of rebellions in the 1790s. An influence was felt among intellectuals of French Deism and anticlericalism and the privileges of the Catholic Church were abolished. In the north of the country, mass stopped being said.

But revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture restored the privileges of the Church in in 1800. Subsequent cultural and political struggles after independence in 1804 (which was accompanied by a massacre or expulsion of French whites after Napoleon's invasion force was defeated, causing an exodus of Catholic priests) again constrained the Church, though a concordat was reached in 1860.

So Robertson's account sees the assertion of African religion in 1791 against slaving Christianity as a 'pact with the devil' that then led Haiti to be cursed ever after. But even in his own terms, how does he account for the multiple steps by subsequent Haitian states reinstating privileges for Christianity? Even if he does not count Catholicism as Christianity, what about the fact that about a quarter of Haitians are now evangelical Protestants? Didn't the earthquake hit them? And, why is West Africa where the initial African version of voudoun originated and is still practiced by a minority, among the least earthquake-prone regions in the world?

Ultimately, Robertson's version of Haitian history as cursed replicates the old racist anti-Black 'curse of Ham' theme in White American popular religion. Is he saying that Haitians had less right to revolt against European colonialism than did white Americans? (Only about 16% of colonial-era Americans belonged to a church, so it isn't as if they were more pious). And, ultimately, his account fails to deal with the sins of slavery and racism in which Southern US Christian traditions-- Baptism, evangelicalism, etc., were deeply implicated. There is a Southern Baptist church to this day, almost all-white, precisely because it split from the national organization to protect the enslavement of African-Americans.

Evil and the devil are tricky. Robertson projected them on a revolt of African slaves asserting their African traditions against oppressive white colonial society. But they lurk in the traditions of his 700 Club, in the exaltation of irrationality, in blaming the victim, in a subtext of racism, and in a failure to repent for White Christian enslavement of Africans for centuries.