A Ugandan MP has proposed creating an offence of “aggravated homosexuality” to be punishable by death.
—BBC News, 15 October
A new report released today details the role that US-based renewal church movements have played in mobilizing homophobic sentiment in at least three African countries. “Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches & Homophobia,” written by Rev. Kapya Kaoma for the progressive think tank Political Research Associates, was the result of a yearlong investigation into the relationship between conservative clergy on two continents, which has hastened divisions within denominations and has “restrict[ed] the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.”
Renewal groups and their neoconservative ally, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, have long sought to conservatize or split mainline American churches—frequently over gender or sexuality issues—and liberal scholars have traced many of the mainline schisms that have dominated headlines over the past several years to groundwork laid by the IRD and others.*
Increasingly, though, renewal movements have begun looking abroad for allies. Focusing on three mainline denominations under assault by these renewal movements (the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church USA) in three African countries (Uganda, Nigeria, and Kenya), Kaoma has documented a clear trend of the US Christian right exporting its battles over social and sexuality issues to Africa. There, churches have been pressured to sever ties with mainline funders in exchange for conservative support, and have become recipients of a more fiercely anti-gay message than the US Christian right delivers at home.
As a result, Kaoma reports, a culture of vicious repression of gay rights has emerged, shaped by US evangelicals ranging from more “respectable” figures like Rick Warren, to fringe activists like Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively (author of anti-gay book The Pink Swastika, which suggests that Nazism was a gay plot).
In Africa, Kaoma finds, both types are freer with anti-gay statements, and both are considered equally representative of US evangelicaldom. Additionally, conservative evangelicals have been immensely successful in depicting the movement for gay equality as the neocolonialist agenda of an arrogant, imperial West that seeks to undermine African values. According to this equation, advances for gay rights in the United States are proof of a mounting gay threat to African culture, resulting in increased repression in countries like Uganda and Kenya. The consequences of these teachings and appeals to African sensitivity to colonialism are painfully clear today, just weeks after Uganda proposed legislation making homosexuality a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death.
One of the report’s more surprising findings is the reciprocity of this influence. Kaoma links the growing conservatism of African evangelical leaders with their increased influence over domestic church politics in the United States. The involvement of African clergy in US church schisms over the ordination of gay or female clerics, or the recognition of gay marriage, has become an impediment to the progress of LGBT rights in progressive, mainline denominations.
The shift in Christianity’s center of gravity to the global South has rendered African religious leaders a heavyweight voting bloc in mainline matters; supporting and legitimizing the conservative position of renewal groups, which would otherwise be a minority in US denominations. Social issues like gay rights may just be fodder for renewal groups seeking allies in Africa, suggests Kaoma, but the manipulation of that issue is stalling progress on LGBT civil rights at home while working to deadly effect in Africa.
Kaoma, an Anglican priest and doctoral candidate at Boston University, spoke with RD today, upon the report’s release:
This report describes growing anti-gay movements in African churches as a “proxy war” for US culture battles. Can you explain?
Since the ’90s, we’ve seen this shift from the American conservatives who are going to Africa, and they started spreading this anti-gay rhetoric across sub-Saharan Africa. We started getting a lot of statements from US evangelicals that homosexuality is wrong and that there is this Western agenda among gays to take over world. So it is coming from the West. Why is it a proxy war? In America, these politics have been going on for a long time—since the ’80s they have been used as a political tool to gain support in American churches.
But we saw a shift in the [tactics] to allow that war to be fought outside American soil: They’ve allowed Africans to get involved and fight on behalf of conservatives. You see [US evangelicals] going to Africa and making statements and having political access to leadership there, asking them to criminalize same-sex orientation. And now, when they do that, the Africans are benefiting the religious conservatives, because they’re helping them fight in America. But American conservatives are also benefiting African leaders in terms of giving them not just an ideological framework—the anti-LGBT arguments that have been used in America—but also providing them with legitimacy.
The second aspect is very interesting in a sense, because in addition to the ideological framework, they’re getting the religious leaders in Africa involved by telling them to misrepresent the progressive or mainline churches as evil—part and parcel of a gay agenda to take over the world—so you cannot deal with them. They say they’re going to partner with [African leaders and churches], if they can disassociate from mainline churches [in the United States], which are part of the gay agenda. So [the African churches] cut the relationship, and then the American conservatives take over financially.
That’s how the war is being fought. Thus, when the Africans come [to the United States] they have nothing to do with mainline churches; instead they side with American conservatives against mainline churches. And the mainline church in Africa is bigger and stronger than in America. So the conservatives are relying on the numbers of African leaders; they start fighting mainline church leadership using Africans to win the American battle, and come across as though they care about Africa.
Do these renewal church conservatives in America actually care about Africa?
They have some explaining to do: here conservatives came to fame because one of the governments, in a broadcast program, accused mainline churches of supporting terrorists in South Africa—in the struggle in Zimbabwe against the white minority, and against the apartheid government of South Africa. The mainline churches supported the people trying to overthrow these immoral regimes. The IRD said that they were supporting terrorists in Africa, so they didn’t have an interest in Africa then. [The mainline churches] managed to help Africans get their independence, but now the Christian right appears to have taken an interest in Africa because they want Africans to fight their wars.
Tags: africa, anti-gay, evangelicals, homophobia, institute for religion and democracy, ird, lgbt, martin ssempa, public research associates, rick warren, uganda
...if only the Christian churches would get their minds off sex and on to social justice and peace, the world would be so much better. I find it scandalous that these men are so aggressive in persecuting a minority of people, while condoning actions that are so contrary to the Good News of Jesus, such as companies profiting from violence and war, or the profiteering that deprives many of the necessities of life.
The world should not surprised at the behavior(s) of these African antigay clergy, particularly those from these countries mentioned in the article. As in the US, the faith-based money grab moved a number of clergy to promote hate speech under the guise of religious doctrine. Their mindset that all that is white is right is evident in their actions. I do not consider these men to have values of worth--it's a money grab and I see them no different from prostitutes for the US dollar. We are talking about similar groups in these countries that kill each other for no other reason than tribal differences, e.g., in Kenya where they destroyed a billion dollar a year tourism industry over tribal differences--where are they now--unemployed and suffering due to false pride and who is better than the other? Though this may appear simplistic, their history is replete with these examples. As a black American who has in the past lived and visited these countries, and have worked with some of their countrymen in other parts of the world, the love for money surly outweighs the harm and destruction they promote to harm their countrymen--there is no other way to disguise it--it's blood on their hands and we as Westerners need to see it exactly for what it is--death for dollars. Our Creator will have the final word and no one can bear an ounce of their burden on judgment day. Make it illegal for US churches sending them dollars.
Christians, whether in the US, Africa or anywhere else, are not any more anti-homosexualism, than they are anti-adultery, anti-cannibalism, or anti-polygamy.
Christendom, since its founding, unequivocally teaches that homosexualism is part of the Cult of Death. Along with the crime of abortion, euthanasia, suicide, contraception, and extremist feminism... homosexualism is the extermination of the Future; the suicide of Humanity. Furthermore, as every learned person knows, "homophobia" is the irrational fear of human beings, not of homosexuals.
Christians love and desire the possession of God by all persons, be they homosexuals, bisexuals, adulterers, cannibals, or whatever. What no loving and caring person can condone, much less accept, is the deceit, defamation, degeneracy, and corruption spread by the haters that operate the well-financed, pornography-industry-backed homosexualist special interest groups operating in America advancing a warped ideology. Being Christian implies being PRO everything that homosexualism attacks. Therefore, it is superfluous, and betrays the ideological bent of the article, to use the term "anti-homosexual" as an adjective for Christian.
As a gay Christian, I can say that your entire response is categorically false and downright offensive.
There is no "Cult of Death". I know several LGBT people who have kids--healthy, well-adjusted, normal kids. And the ones who don't have children are about the same as straight people who don't have children.
I have to tell you, I would *rejoice* if you were right about having a "well-financed, pornography-industry-backed homosexualist special interest group". Then maybe we'd be able to get past the lies spread by the conservative church funded anti-gay crowd that has taught you to demonize people.
"Homosexualism" (I love how you de-personify gay people) attacks nothing but the nonsense that we are lesser human beings than straight people. That's all. Nothing more.
Case in point, patrianews' incessant association of homosexuality with adultery, cannibalism and polygamy should not be overlooked without the lens of cautionary vigilant. Equating homosexuality with the "cult of death" is the newest low Christo-fascists have been promulgating in recent decades. When someone brands homosexuals with the "suicide of humanity," it becomes clear that their next logical step would be to devise a nefarious plan to exterminate the "threat" to humanity which presumably follows by construction of gas chambers to put humanity back on the track of righteousness.
Interesting enough, patrianews and his ilk do not realize a conspicuous hole in their argument. When he refers to "suicide of humanity," he is implying that the tendency of state to allow homosexuals freely coexist in society would surely stymie the population growth hence the "cult of death." First and foremost, the population has exploded exponentially since the mid century and with it, a gradual departure of stigmata attributed to homosexuality although in certain societies. So if there is a correlation with causation, it veritably plays in partianews' head and has no base in reality. However, the mere existence of a homosexual individual proves to be a "threat" to society according to the radicals like him because even if they suppress their behavior (homosexuality), their mere inability to conceive "naturally," clearly matches their proverbial definition of "cult of death" and "suicide of humanity." So by nature, they are deemed for extermination.
Albeit, such display of low cognitive complexity ignores the fact vis-a-vis advances made in the medical and science which provides ample of opportunity for the homosexual partners, gays or lesbians, to engage in procreation. The same techniques that are wildly being employed for the heterosexual couples can surely be utilized for homosexuals and they have indeed which destroys any nonsense with regard to the death of humanity if homosexuality is meant to go unchallenged.
Another apparent flawed in the argument is that allowing homosexuality in society somehow tilts the sexual orientation of whole population toward homosexuality when it comes to "numbers." In other word, if you allow homosexuality to be accepted, with no rational in hypothesis, the entire population would go gay. That's a tantamount to an analogy that asserts, if we allow garbage-men in our community, all the lawyers, factory workers, doctors, politicians, professionals, etc. will gravitate toward waste management careers and the entire world will cease to exist. Just because certain number of citizens have different sexual orientation, it does not constitute to draw absurd conclusions that the rest of the society would somehow disregard their heterosexual tendencies and go gay on you.
"Christians love and desire the possession of God by all persons, be they homosexuals, bisexuals, adulterers, cannibals, or whatever."
This statement not only equates a gay individual with an act of murdering and consuming a human flash but plays a sanctimonious self-righteousness to psychologically excuse one from the horrors of his own barbaric ideology. If that wasn't enough, partianews engages in all the pillars that he explicitly abhors, namely "deceit, defamation, degeneracy" etc, when he labels the pornography industry as a seed cultivated by the "homosexuals" when in reality 90% of the industry is geared toward heterosexual and operated by heterosexuals.
Indeed, a mind reels.
As a (now expatriate) African, this leaves my heart bleeding. In my Catholic school in South Africa, I was clearly taught that the Gospels were about love, inclusion and justice for all. As a university student and later, I was encouraged by the work of the churches to counter the evil of apartheid, and the inspiring examples of so many African churchmen - Desmond Tutu, Frank Chikane, Beyers Naude, Denis Hurley - the list continues endlessly. In Zimbabwe, the churches had helped to bring democracy, but continued with integrity to criticize injustice even when it originated in the new black led government.
With the introduction of the new democratic constitution, South Africa became the first country anywhere to incorporate a bill of rights that explicitly included protection from discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. This protection was initiated and promoted not by the white liberals, but by the African National Congress.
At one end of the continent, Africa briefly led the world in legal protection for gay men and lesbians. Now, 25 years later, African church leaders, of all people, are promoting hatred.
It's despicable.
What a great article. Thanks. I would also add it is not just mainline groups like Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc. who share mutual power and political influence betweeen said African countries and western countries -- particularly the U.S.A. There is similar shared influence of and by Pentecostal/charismatic groups as well. One of the most homophobic and hate-filled sermons I ever heard or saw on U.S. soil came from a Nigerian Pentecostal pastor / evangelist with a large following around the world. It was broadcast on TBN and receved accolades from major leaders in the Foursquare and Assemblies of God denominations as well as Paul and Jan Crouch of TBN. The latter likewise carry enormous influence in African countries like Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda. Their TV stations broadcast 24 hours a day throughout much of Africa. The Foursquare Church leadership and the Assemblies of God leadership also have shared access to many of the same African leadership that you mention. And it is mutual, they come to the U.S. and get easy access to leaders of these denominations, related Christian TV programming and related educational institutions to further their "mutual interests". I would be curious and ask for a possible response from the author of this study whether they have seen similar relationships in the Pentecostal denominations. I also know a number of televangelists like Benny Hinn and Joyce Meyer have large constituencies in these countries. Is there any insights on their shared mutual influence as well?
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