The Catholic Church distorted (and still distorts) Vodou practices in much the same way that it has distorted other indigenous religious practices, by demonizing them as malevolent and as servants of the devil.  The historic link between the church and the military in colonialism was tight the military functioned as an arm of the church and the church as an arm of the military except in individual cases where, on either side, there were people of conscience and compassion who attempted to resist. The majority didn’t resist, however, and both colonial and religious officers worked hard to shape the public’s view on Vodou as a way to isolate Haiti and the religion, and many of those beliefs they generated live on today. The Haitian Catholic Church accepts Vodou, and has so for over thirty years, and estimates are that between 50 percent to 95 percent of Haitians either practice or affiliate with Vodou. Nonetheless today, if you are a non-Haitian and have heard of Vodou, you probably think of all the supposedly negative things so commonly associated with the religion: witchcraft, hexes, sacrifices, and the like. The reason for these thoughts, most of which are in fact not true, lies mostly with the Catholic Church and U.S. Military. From the beginning of Colonial Haiti, Catholicism was the Island’s official religion. It didn’t matter that there were around half a million enslaved Africans working and living in the French colony with the majority practicing Vodou, it was still banned. The church viewed the spreading of Catholicism to Haitian slaves as equivalent with assimilation and as God’s work, so they maligned Vodou as much as possible to try to gain little Frenchman.What they didn’t realize was that the more they oppressed Vodou, the more steam Vodou picked up, with priests encouraging rebellions until eventually the Haitians came together and overthrew the French, becoming the first free black nation in the Western Hemisphere. Haitian independence is widely credited to Vodou and the support it was able to get in times of such suppression. Unfortunately the slave revolt in Haiti also played into a later heavy-handed demonization of Afro-Caribbean religious practices by the Church and the U.S. military. This demonization of their religious practices legitimated in part the wholesale removals and systematic assaults on language, religion, healing practices. “Haiti’s self-deliverance from slavery and ultimate overthrow of French colonialism made it a pariah among the powerful states whose economies still depended on those institutions,”1 wrote Ramsey in Sprits and the Law. Specifically, slave-holding countri