Richman follows Haitian migrants in South Florida who arrived Catholic and have since joined evangelical Protestant congregations, and asks what conversion does for them. It supplies, she argues, both a usable script for individual advancement in the United States and an exit from the thick obligations — to kin, to the lwa, to ritual work back home — that transnational life would otherwise enforce. Pastors give converts the means to shrug off the unseen penalties that make those obligations stick.

The break is less clean than separatist Protestantism claims. Under the ascetic style, Richman finds the imagery of sudden money and private ambition that properly belongs to sorcery, and some Haitians say so openly, naming the pastors as sorcerers themselves and unusually effective ones. Catholicism, Vodou and Protestantism, on this account, define and reproduce one another across one religious field that runs from Léogâne to the diaspora.