Louis works among Haitian migrants in the Bahamas, where Protestant churches have displaced the Catholic parish at the centre of religious life. His hinge is a distinction his interlocutors draw between Pwotestan and Kretyen, the second naming a stricter, baptized, morally serious believer. It lets them criticize their own compatriots while describing the kind of citizen they think Haiti needs.

He sets this beside figures charting Protestant growth from a sliver of Haiti's population in 1930 to roughly a third, with the same movement visible in New York and elsewhere in the diaspora, and against a scholarship still largely occupied with Catholicism and Vodou. For his consultants, being genuinely Christian is the route to personal salvation and to repairing the country. Pat Robertson's claim that the earthquake settled a bargain struck at Bois Caïman did not startle them, because it matched a reading of the Haitian past they already held.