Haiti's 1987 Constitution Ends Vodou's Legal Suppression

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Haiti's 1987 constitution, adopted after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship the year before, ended more than a century and a half of legal suppression bearing down on Vodou. The document stripped Roman Catholicism of its status as Haiti's constitutionally established religion and established freedom of religion generally, closing out the anti-superstition provisions that Haitian law had carried against Vodou since 1835 and had sharpened further under an 1864 amendment targeting ritual practice directly.

Recognition, once it arrived, did not arrive complete. Vodou is described today as a registered religion in Haiti, a formal status the 1987 constitution made possible. But the government has continued to withhold recognition from marriages performed by Vodou practitioners, leaving unions solemnized within the religion without the legal standing a civil or Catholic marriage carries. An older concordat between Haiti and the Holy See, predating the 1987 constitution and never renegotiated alongside it, still confers preferential treatment on the Roman Catholic Church that Vodou has never been extended.

What the 1987 constitution changed for Vodou's spread was legal existence after a century and a half without it: a religion practiced continuously through generations of criminalization gained standing in Haitian law for the first time, even as full equality with the church that had displaced it in 1804 remained, and remains, unfinished.