Religion

Though Africans landed with few possessions, they carried their cultures, skills, and spiritual worldviews into the Americas. Wherever African religions took root in the New World, Africans and their descendants changed and adapted their belief systems to local circumstances and influences. Individual circumstances created variations in the way people practiced their faiths, what they believed, and what significance it held for their lives.

Throughout the Americas, religious beliefs emerged in distinct local forms: for example, Santería in Cuba, obeah and myalism in Jamaica, and voodoo in Saint-domingue (Haiti)

Religious wars and crusades of the past are being reincarnated in these times by maniacal minds executing actions that reduce human lives to commodities of death, messes of portage and collateral damage, occupational hazards in so-called “holy-water” that uses politics and people as cannon fodder. The most extreme of extremists find all sorts of appropriate religious texts to justify their actions, regardless of and insensitive to the impact in areas selected for death and destruction – and the families they leave behind.

The majority of Christian Caribbean, like the rest of the world is slowly coming to realization that you can be killed for choosing the religion of your choice, in this case for choosing Christianity.

Religion can be a central part of one’s identity. The word religion comes from a Latin word that means “to tie or bind together.” Modern dictionaries define religion as “an organized system of beliefs and rituals centering on a supernatural being or beings.” To belong to a religion often means more than sharing its beliefs and participating in its rituals; it also means being part of a community and, sometimes, a culture.

What is interesting about religion in the Caribbean context is that over time and as a result of colonization, many Caribbean people have constructed new religious traditions that use the more traditional and conservative Roman Catholic and Protestant theology as a cover for their traditional African religious practices. There is a substantial amount of Caribbean immigrants that have joined the American Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant Church communities once they arrived to the United States. However, most Caribbean immigrants tend to establish their own church communities be it through the establishment of a new church based on a syncretic religion or by establishing a uniformly Caribbean community within an already established church. Doing this helps ease their assimilation to American society.

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