Is Voodoo Really a Religion?

You bet. It's one of the oldest and one of the most durable. There are an estimated 60 million followers of the religion with a proud history, though they haven't yet adopted the habit of going around bragging about being the "one true faith."

Despite the best efforts of the Catholic church, several Protestant missionary groups and "Christian" slave masters to stamp it out, the religion prospers on this continent. Its hub is Haiti, where it was able to preserve this African legacy largely because the country became an independent black nation in 1804, though not without a major effort by Catholicism to crush it. As it this were not enough, voodoo has had to endure lame-brained depictions from Hollywood which has never seen a zombie it didn't like.

Voodoo or Vodun, from the root word spirit, can be traced back to the west coast of Africa to what is now Benin and parts of Togo and Ghana. Some scholars believe its practices go back 10,000 years. Slaves brought the religion to North America. The ghastly slave trade actually unwittingly broadened voodoo's scope by forcing Africans from a wide variety of ethnic and religious groups to share the same terrible fate. Seeking means of survival, many found voodoo who might never otherwise have encountered it.

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