N.Y. Times Laments Media Mistreatment of Voodoo, Including 'Voodoo Economics'

February 22nd, 2010 5:46 PM

The New York Times is pro-voodoo, or perhaps they are just an informal Voodoo Anti-Defamation League. On Saturday, religion writer Samuel G. Freedman wrote a story headlined "Voodoo, a Source of Comfort in Haiti, Remains Misunderstood." For political junkies, this passage was the most indulgent:

In American political rhetoric, "voodoo" functions as a synonym for "fraudulent," going back to George Bush’s description of supply-side economics. Would any public figure dare use "Baptist" or "Hindu" or "Hasidic" in the same way?

Freedman also lamented this religion’s mistreatment at the hands of Hollywood movie executives (not a normal complaint from the Times if the movies are raucously caricaturing Christianity). The intolerance emerged from a 1929 book titled Magic Island:

The resulting image of voodoo as sinister sorcery has, amazingly enough, survived into the present multicultural age. A sensitive book about voodoo in modern Haiti, "The Serpent and the Rainbow" by the ethnobotanist Wade Davis, was transformed by Hollywood into a fright movie that recycled every intolerant cliché about the religion.

In the past year, the animated film "The Frog and the Princess" featured a voodoo magician as its villain. The movie was produced by Disney, which if anything has been relativistic to a fault. But voodoo, apparently, does not even merit the condescending sort of exoticization that Disney afforded American Indian polytheism in "Pocahontas."

Freedman began by deriding Pat Robertson’s commentary about Haiti being cursed by the devil, and included Beliefnet columnist Rod Dreher suggesting that it’s arguable "Haitians would be better off at the Church of Christopher Hitchens rather than as followers of voodoo."

Freedman then lines up a cast of voodoo-sympathetic college professors to rebut the Dreher dismissal: Diane Winston of USC, Leslie Desmanges of Trinity College in Hartford, and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who is an "expert in voodoo as well as a voodoo priest."

Their complaint: "For scholars whose expertise runs somewhat deeper, such words have understandably provoked indignation. Worse still, the dismissive attitude about voodoo follows a tawdry history of misrepresentation in American journalism and popular culture."

Freedman ended with leftist author Amy Wilentz for a cherry on top of the Voodoo Sundae:

"I’d tell reporters to go into the shanties and find the local voodoo priest," said Amy Wilentz, the author of an acclaimed book on contemporary Haiti, "The Rainy Season." "Voodoo is very close to the ground. It’s a neighborhood to neighborhood, courtyard kind of religion. And one where you support each other in time of need."