Haiti

Haiti is majority Christian, chiefly Catholic at around 55 percent alongside a large and rapidly growing Protestant, especially evangelical, population now approaching 30 to 35 percent, per estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, and the great majority of Haitians additionally practice or draw upon Haitian Vodou, a religion syncretizing West African, chiefly Fon and Yoruba, spiritual traditions carried by enslaved Africans with Catholic saints and imagery, reflecting Haiti's status as the product of the only successful slave-led revolution in history, achieved in 1804 against French colonial rule.

Vodou served as a genuine organizing force in that revolution, with the 1791 Bois Caiman ceremony, a Vodou ritual gathering that helped launch the uprising, remaining a foundational moment in Haitian national memory, and the religion's structure of loa spirits, each associated with particular Catholic saints, natural forces and human concerns, operates through houngan and mambo priests who lead ceremonies involving drumming, dance and spirit possession. Haiti's government formally recognized Vodou as an official religion only in 2003, a milestone in a long history of the religion's suppression and stigmatization, both by the Catholic Church and by successive states seeking international legitimacy that regarded Vodou as an embarrassment.

Sources Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center with The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in HaitiLeslie G. Desmangles

Haiti's Catholic Church and, more recently, growing evangelical Protestant movements have both historically campaigned against Vodou, most severely during the 1940s anti-superstition campaigns backed by the Catholic Church that destroyed Vodou temples and ritual objects, and more recently through evangelical rhetoric characterizing Vodou practice as demonic, rhetoric some observers link to periodic mob violence against suspected Vodou practitioners, particularly during public health crises such as cholera outbreaks when accusations of sorcery have occasionally triggered lynchings in rural areas. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's 2003 decree formally recognizing Vodou as a legitimate religion, allowing Vodou priests to perform legally recognized marriages and other civil functions on comparable footing with Christian clergy, marked a significant symbolic reversal of centuries of official disparagement, though implementation and social acceptance have remained uneven, and international media coverage following Haiti's 2010 earthquake, including remarks by an American evangelical broadcaster attributing the disaster to a supposed pact with the devil referencing the Bois Caiman ceremony, illustrated how deeply contested Vodou's place in both domestic and international perception remains.