Sightings: True Stories

Sightings 1/18/10

True Stories

-- Martin E. Marty

You know the old joke: When someone absolutely diabolical died, the rabbi asked if anyone wanted to say anything about him at the funeral. No one dared, as there was nothing nice to say. Eventually one stood up and said, "His brother was even worse." Was anyone worse than Pat Robertson, who credited the earthquake in Haiti to "true story" of the Haitians having "made a pact with the devil"? Say something nice about Robertson now?

As of this writing, Google turns up 363,000 links to "Pat Robertson" and "pact with the devil." Mr. Robertson seems to occasion such an outpouring of responses every time there is a natural disaster, for his words about what God had in mind in selecting subjects for destruction. So many commentators had something bad to say that Sightings might well have skipped comment. Still, saying nothing evokes so much curiosity - "Come on, Sightings, don't you keep up on the news?" - that we will comment.

Some of the 363,000 references were from Bible-believers who defended Robertson, not noticing that the "pact with the devil" phrase and charge did not come from the Bible. Most commentators simply heaped on poor Mr. Robertson. The only relative refuge he could find was, indeed, "his brother is even worse." Many did charge that Robertson's brother-on-the-right Rush Limbaugh was "even worse." Robertson at least raised funds for the suffering, accursed Haitians, while Limbaugh spoke against giving them aid in their hour of suffering.

Still, the idea that someone was "even worse" than he was amounted to praising with faint damns. More should be said by anyone who wants to put in a positive word, and here is mine: The incident shows development and expansiveness in Robertson, who has been one of the most consistent critics of secular humanism in all its forms. Yet for this - his televised revelation of the meaning of the catastrophe - the evangelist drew not on the Bible but on secular humanist sources.

You won't find "pact with the devil" in your biblical concordance, as the phrase did not enter our culture from the Bible. Mention a "pact with the devil" and you will immediately be dredging up the explicit language of the Faust legend, whether from Marlowe or Goethe or Thomas Mann, who told classic versions of Dr. Faust's famed contract. Search the literature and you will find secular humanists touting the greatest, Goethe's Faust, as a "secular humanist manifesto." Something good to say about Robertson, then? Yes: We like to document popular evangelicalism's enlarging scope; here is an instance. Could Robertson have been courting secular humanists with this turn to non-Biblical sources?

Goethe's Faust is big in college curricula and Great Books clubs and among opera goers; but the story of a pact with the devil also shows up in less elite circles, including one most explicit source. Guy Endore's Babouk (1934) is a fictionalized version of the incident Robertson used to explain the curse on the Haitian people, who, in his estimation, deserved the earthquake because of an ancestral pact with the devil. Stalinist Endore did his research in Haiti, and came back to tell the story of Babouk, his version of Duffy Boukman, believed to have been the agent of the Haitian revolution against the French. Could Endore's bad Communist novel have been Robertson's source? If so, then we see the scope of sources that Robertson takes to be "true stories."

Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, publications, and contact information.

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Sightings 1/21/10

Is the Devil a Black Man?

-- Spencer Dew

In what has now become a much-circulated clip, Pat Robertson makes sense of the catastrophic Haitian earthquake as the latest in a string of curses delivered by God to Haiti's people. Robertson's interpretation of this catastrophe, whether we find it repellent or compelling, offers an excellent example of one of the ways religion functions: Robertson reiterates a reassuring framework of meaning in the face of experiences which call such frameworks into question. The earthquake, rather than evidence of the random and senseless nature of human existence, provides for Robertson evidence of God's existence and ongoing, partisan involvement in human history. Robertson's theology provides comfort, too, in its categorization of the victims of this tragedy as deserving of their fate, insulating Robertson from the agony of identifying too closely with these wounded, mourning, homeless, and hungry fellow humans. Robertson may be moved by this suffering - his remarks were delivered as the Christian Broadcasting Network raised money for earthquake relief - but his religious anthropology renders this suffering, in his words, "unimaginable," a stark contrast to anthropologies that urge empathetic relations.

For Robertson, the Haitian people are markedly other, a tone that carries through his version of the nation's history: "They were under the heels of the French," he says, "You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so the devil said, OK, it's a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other." This story is, of course, far from true. Robertson offers here a typical demonization of the Voodoo religion and a Christian distortion of the legend of the 1791 Bois Caiman ritual. Yet Robertson, one imagines, finds animal sacrifice and blood vows repellent, and he has no reason to be accepting of any religion other than his own, ruling them all false and therefore damnable. In the clearly defined narrative Robertson insists upon, the followers of God can expect rewards while to the followers of the devil come destruction, blood, and wailing. The troubling aspect of Robertson's remarks, however, is not the myths he offers to make sense of the world, but what he leaves out of his thumbnail history of Haiti: Unmentioned in his summary is the word "slavery." The "true story" that Robertson occludes is that Haiti, the first country to be founded by former African slaves, owes its origin to armed uprising. What began as raids on plantations became full scale revolutionary war, with people who had been regarded as chattel claiming their liberty via the blood of their former "masters."

From Nat Turner to Fred Hampton, the armed, independent black person has remained a nightmare image to those who benefit from white privilege in America, an image, indeed, not unlike Cotton Mather's description of Satan incarnate in New England, that "Black Man" with the power to destroy the social order. Haitian Independence was an event interpreted by much of the white, slave-owning world of the time as catastrophic. That "they" would dare - and be able - to seize power called into question preexisting systems of meaning-making as surely as any earthquake.

The image of black slaves shedding their chains and taking up arms contributes far more than any hobgoblins of the evangelical imagination to the historical "curses" that have kept Haiti poor and troubled. The history of American relations with Haiti has been indelibly tainted by America's true devil - the lingering effects of our own schizophrenic founding as a nation insistent on liberty yet practicing slavery. Just as racist terror helped shape the stereotype of Voodoo as devil worship, so too racist attitudes have dominated the history of American relations with Haiti, from the fearful to the patronizing, from clandestine political machinations to occupation by military force. Hopefully, the current attention on Haiti (for those of us who reject dismissive metaphysical explanations such as Robertson's) will prompt Americans to examine the racism embedded not just in foreign and domestic political history but, indeed, in our own minds. Without honest confrontation of the legacies of our past as a slave society, some "they" will always be demonized and some "devil" will always be imagined as a mask for our earthly hatreds and fears.

References:

Pat Robertson's clip

Previous Sightings columns on the 1791 Bois Caiman ritual here and here.

Spencer Dew is an instructor in the department of theology at Loyola University, Chicago.

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In 2010's first edition of the Religion and Culture Web Forum ("The Uses and Misuses of Polytheism and Monotheism in Hinduism"), Wendy Doniger explores the complex nature of Hindu theology and its relationship to historical and political issues by focusing on a simple question: "Is Hinduism monotheistic or polytheistic?" Her answer offers intriguing implications for the distinction between theological identities of "one" and "many" in Hinduism and--as respondents with expertise in other theological traditions reflect--beyond. With invited responses from Martin Marty, Willemien Otten, Katherine E. Ulrich, and Ananya Vajpeyi.
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Submissions policy

Sightings welcomes submissions of 500 to 750 words in length that seek to illuminate and interpret the forces of faith in a pluralist society. Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for acceptable essays. The editor also encourages new approaches to issues related to religion and public life.

Attribution

Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author of the column, Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.