Laguerre treats Vodou less as a fixed body of belief than as an institution that keeps changing the social unit it binds. Under slavery, missionaries failed to reach the plantations, and ceremonies performed in huts and at clandestine gatherings drew separate ethnic cults into a single syncretic practice; among maroons it took its most organized form and supplied both a rallying point and a training ground for leaders of the independence struggle.

After 1804 it lost official standing but not adherents. Tied to the lakou, with its extended families and undivided land, it served as a family cult; as the lakou broke up into nuclear households and fragmented plots, it became the religion of the village — unofficial, sporadically harassed, tolerated in practice. Persecution came with the Concordat and the campaigns of the occupation years, while Duvalier reversed course, naming himself the nation's spiritual chief and routing ceremonies through the Tontons Macoutes.