Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Did you hear about the Protestant minister who said that Haiti "has been in bondage to the devil for four generations"? No, it wasn't Pat Robertson but Chavannes Jeune, a popular Evangelical pastor in Haiti who has long crusaded to cleanse his nation of what he believes is an ancestral voodoo curse. It turns out that more than a few Haitians agree with Jeune and Robertson that their nation's crushing problems are caused by, yes, voodoo.

I know this not because I read it in a newspaper or saw it on TV, but because of a blog. University of Tennessee-Knoxville cultural anthropologist Bertin M. Louis Jr., an expert on Haitian Protestantism, posted an essay exploring this viewpoint on The Immanent Frame, a social scientist group blog devoted to religion, secularism and the public sphere.

Elsewhere on The Immanent Frame, there's a fascinating piece by Wesleyan University religion professor Elizabeth McAlister touching on how the voodoo worldview affects Haiti's cultural and political economy. She writes that the widespread belief that events happen because of secret pacts with gods and spirits perpetuates "the idea that real, causal power operates in a hidden realm, and that invisible powers explain material conditions and events." Though McAlister is largely sympathetic to voodoo practitioners, she acknowledges that any effective attempt to relieve and rebuild Haiti will contend with that social reality.

In a recent New York Times column, religion reporter Samuel G. Freedman rightly lamented the way the American news media have largely ignored voodoo in their Haiti earthquake reporting. But he also chided media commentators (including me) for speculating about voodoo as a harmful cultural force. Freedman quoted academics who praised the Haitian folk religion, and who complained about the ignorance and supposed racism of voodoo skeptics.

Many people think of the scientist as a disinterested observer of the world, an abstracted intellectual who deals with empirical facts, his mind unclouded by subjective passions and dogmas. That's a myth. Scientists are not machines, but human beings, and as such cannot help being influenced by the culture in which they live and work.

Take Charles Darwin. In 1859, the publication of his On the Origin of Species was an event so earth-shaking that 150 years later, the trembling still reverberates. In their recent book Darwin's Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore argue that the Darwin family's deep roots in the British anti-slavery movement caused young Charles to start asking questions about the common origins of humanity. "It is the key to explain why such a gentleman of wealth and standing should risk all to develop his bestial 'monkey-man' image of our ancestry in the first place," they write.

The authors make a case that Darwin, who was never himself a social activist, undermined racial prejudice with his discoveries. That is true – to a point.It is also true that Darwin's work on evolution and natural selection, as it became popularized, inspired scientists and laymen to take more interest in racial differences, an intellectual passion that would have sinister consequences in the science of eugenics – founded in the late 19th century by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.

Eugenics attempted to discern genetic characteristics particular to races and classes, with the idea of "improving" humanity through what one might call unnatural selection. Eugenics was considered cutting-edge science, and the Progressive Era policies of "racial hygiene" developed from its research were widely endorsed. The Nazi legacy ended that.

So, can Darwin be justly credited for having a role in freeing the slaves? Can he be blamed to some degree for Bergen-Belsen? The problem, says Cambridge University literary critic Gillian Beer, is that you can find support in Darwin's research and writing for both abolitionism and eugenics.