The U.S. Christian Right and the Attack on Gays in Africa
By Kapya Kaoma (photo at left) November 18, 2009
Kapya Kaoma is an Anglican priest from Zambia and project director of Political Research Associates. He is the author
of PRA’s October 2009 report, Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches and Homophobia.
The Uganda Story
For two days in early March 2009, Ugandans flocked to the Kampala Triangle Hotel for the Family Life Network's
"Seminar on Exposing the Homosexuals' Agenda." The seminar's very title revealed its claim: LGBT people and activists
are engaged in a well thought-out plan to take over the world. The U.S. culture wars had come to Africa with a
vengeance.
To put on the conference, the Uganda-based Family Life Network – led by Stephen Langa with the goal of "restoring"
traditional family values and morals in Uganda – teamed with two U.S. hatemongers from the Christian Right, Holocaust
revisionist Scott Lively and Dan Schmierer of the ex-gay group Exodus International.[1] Vocal opposition in international
circles did not stop the country's high profile religious leaders, parliamentarians, police officers, teachers, and
concerned parents from attending. Indeed, parliamentary action to wage war on gays was on the conference agenda. It
was not enough that homosexuality is illegal in Uganda. As someone stated from the podium,
[The parliament] feels it is necessary to draft a new law that deals comprehensively with the issue of homosexuality and
…takes into account the international gay agenda….Right now there is a proposal that a new law be drafted.[2]
The unsuspecting audience heard Lively promote his book, The Pink Swastika, and his argument that not only are gays
seeking to take over the world, but they also threaten society by causing higher rates of divorce, child abuse, and
HIV/AIDS. Legalizing homosexuality is on par with accepting "molestation of children or having sex with animals," he said.
As Lively puts it, LGBT issues cannot be considered human rights issues. "The people coming to Africa now and
advancing the idea that human rights serves the homosexual interests are absolutely wrong," he said. "Many of them
are outright liars and they are manipulating history; they are manipulating facts in order to push their political agenda."
Lively even tarred abortion rights as "a product of the gay philosophy" meant to promote sexual promiscuity in order to
"destroy the family." In sum, he warned, U.S. homosexuals are out to recruit young people into homosexual lifestyles so
they must be stopped.
Lively had a receptive audience. Harry Mwebesa of Family Life Network told the crowd,
Dr. Scott told us about Brazil where 10 years ago, homosexuality was unheard of….Today it is the capital….There are
people that have been against homosexuality that are having to leave because of the pressure and the threats that they
are putting on them. That is how serious it is.
Another participant who called himself Elijah said,
The man of God [Scott Lively] told us about…a movement behind the promotion of homosexuality and it is called gay
movement. Me, I had never heard of that. But I got to know that there is a force behind homosexuality which we need to
tackle with force. He also told us that these people who are behind this…evil, they have all resources that they need…to
spread this evil. [In] Africa, Uganda in particular...it is more easy for the young generation to get attracted into the evil.
Since that day…we need to stand firm to fight homosexuality.
If only Lively's influence ended there. But a few days later, he met with Ugandan lawmakers and government officials,
some of whom would draft parliament's Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009 the next month. This act would ban LGBT
organizing and give the death penalty for gays, though not heterosexuals, who have sex with someone underage or
while infected with the HIV/AIDS virus.[3] Lively and the "traditional family values" language of U.S. antigay campaigners
echoes through the draft legislation:
Research indicates that the homosexuality has a variety of negative consequences including higher incidences of
violence, sexually transmitted diseases, and use of drugs. The higher incidence of separation and break-up in
homosexual relationships also creates a highly unstable environment for children raised by homosexuals through
adoption or otherwise, and can have profound psychological consequences on those children. In addition, the
promotion of homosexual behavior undermines our traditional family values.
Family Life Network's Langa pushed people at a follow up meeting to stand up for the tougher law against homosexuality
for their children's sake, echoing Lively in charging that Ugandan gays and activists were being paid by U.S. gays to
recruit schoolchildren into homosexuality.
Amid the utter hysteria, any sense that homosexuality has been in Africa from time immemorial was lost. While hardly
embraced, and indeed illegal in many countries, at least LGBT people were not hounded by churches and police alike –
until American culture warriors came to Africa. Bishop Christopher Ssenjonyo, one of the most progressive voices on
LGBT issues in Uganda, expressed his own concerns about the Americans' role to me in March, "I am sure that these
lies will incite public hatred against gays."
How Did We Get Here?
How did we get to this point? Scott Lively and Don Schmierer are just two among a parade of right-leaning American
Christians who have brought the U.S. culture wars to Africa. But unlike the United States, in Africa sexual minorities are
only thinly organized and have few allies who will stand up with them. Those who do are tarred as neocolonialist and
racist, because of the effectiveness of U.S. Right organizing in Africa. The result is tragedy.
Thankfully, because of Kenya's democratic past and stronger civil society, citizens managed to challenge and slow down
efforts for broad criminalization of homosexuality. But in more authoritarian countries, like Uganda and Nigeria, where
some counties punish homosexuality with death, U.S. religious conservatives are better able to promote their anti-LGBT
agenda, building on decades of missionary work.
U.S. evangelicals like California's Rick Warren have turned their attention to Africa as its role in global Christianity has
grown. As Warren recently told Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, "If you want to know the future of evangelicalism,
it is in [Africa, Asia and Latin America.] To give you an example, in 1900 there were only 10 million Christians in all of
Africa – 10% of the population. Today there are 360 million Christians in Africa, over half the population."[4] Warren's
numbers are wrong and fewer than half of Africans are Christian. Still, 30 million of the Anglican Communion's 77 million
members live in Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya.
Warren is especially influential on the continent, enjoying close ties to African religious and political leaders. They quote
him to justify discrimination against LGBT people, and to support their challenge to U.S. mainline Protestants liberalizing
their policies around gay ordination. "Homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right," Warren said
during a March-April 2008 visit with African religious and political leaders in Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya. That quote
has reverberated ever since.[5]
Warren's bestselling book, A Purpose Driven Life is studied across sub-Saharan Africa and his Saddleback Church in
Lake Forest, California has close ties with leaders across Africa, including, until recently, Martin Ssempa of Uganda's
Makerere Community Church. Ssempa is one of the key architects of the antigay bill and persecution of LGBT people in
Uganda. He made global news when he published the names of LGBT people in the local press and destroyed condoms
to promote abstinence-only programs in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Uganda. Ssempa was a regular visitor to
Saddleback until Warren distanced himself from him in 2008.
Within Africa, Warren seems to be progressive when it comes to fighting poverty, illiteracy and HIV/AIDS. These efforts
have painted him as a real partner in development. However, his antipoverty and education strategies also promote
conservative institutional power and ideologies in Africa, including homophobia.
As Warren's "purpose-driven" projects in Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda have grown, so too have levels of active
homophobia and proposed laws against LGBT people. And Warren's allies – particularly Anglican Archbishops Henry
Orombi of Uganda, Peter Akinola of Nigeria, Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda and Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya – are in the
forefront of advocating for stiffer laws against LGBT persons in their countries.[6]
Archbishop Orombi argues that U.S. homosexuals should be kept out of Uganda because they are "taking advantage of
the abject poverty in Africa to lure people into their club [homosexuality]."[7] In neighboring Nigeria, Archbishop Akinola
wrote, "We are especially concerned about those who are using large sums of money to lure our youth to see
homosexuality and lesbianism as normative. We must consistently and faithfully teach about God's commands on this
ungodly practice and help those with such orientation to seek deliverance and pastoral counsel."[8]
History of U.S. Conservatives in Africa
If they had faced strong opposition, U.S. conservatives might not have been so successful in promoting their
homophobic politics. Traditionally, evangelical African churches have been biblically and doctrinally orthodox but socially
progressive on such issues as national liberation and poverty, making them natural partners of the politically liberal
western churches. But their religious orthodoxy also provides the U.S. Right with an opportunity. Africans resonate with
the denunciation of homosexuality as a postcolonial plot; their homophobia is as much an expression of resistance to
the West as it is a statement about human sexuality. Similarly campaigns for "family values" in Africa rest on rich
indigenous notions of the importance of family and procreation. In Africa, "family" expresses the idea that to be human is
to be embedded in community, a concept called ubuntu. African traditional values also value procreation, making those
hindering this virtue an enemy of life (see box 2).
Although Rick Warren's involvement in Africa is the most celebrated, and Lively's perhaps the most notorious, they are
not the first U.S. conservative evangelicals to influence African policies. Pat Robertson's television show The 700 Club is
watched across sub-Saharan Africa. Yet most Africans are not aware that Robertson supported the civil war in Angola
and the oppressive White governments of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. He was one of many U.S.
conservative evangelicals, some of whom came to Africa as missionaries in the 1980s, who sided with those White
minority governments in their effort to stop the spread of liberation theology. Allied with them was – and is – the Institute
on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a U.S. neoconservative group that also supported the White regimes and challenged
the National Council of Churches as a group of dangerous Marxists supporting subversion. The group formed in 1981
with the goal of weakening and splitting U.S. mainline denominations in order to block their powerful progressive social
witness promoting social and economic justice.[9]
During this same period, the U.S. mainline churches sided with oppressed Africans living in White regimes. Along with
exposing the crimes committed in the name of fighting communism, these churches provided financial and social support
to displaced families in Africa, Asia, and South America.
But today the mainline churches are labeled as neocolonialists and this history is forgotten. You can still hear snippets
of the old right-wing scripts in today's attacks on the mainline churches. James V. Heidinger II, the president of Good
News, the United Methodist Church's renewal movement which opposes gay ordination and supports conservative
theology, tarred official Methodist churches as lacking "a theology of mission but has bought into liberation theology.
Mission for them involves bringing about social and political change in third world countries. They favor social ministry at
the expense of evangelism."[10]
Similarly, IRD's executive director, Mark Tooley, recently sought an apology from the NCC and World Council of
Churches for supporting "Marxist" revolutionaries in Africa. His organization is a lead force in mobilizing renewal
movements like Heidinger's to use African leaders and the debate about gay ordination and marriage as a wedge in U.S.
mainline conflicts – IRD's latest but perhaps most effective tactic in diminishing the social witness of its mainline church
opponents (for more on the U.S. conflict, see box 3 and my recent report, Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S.
Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia).[11]
The torrential flow of conservative Christian resources to Africa helps wash away the memory of their alliances with
White regimes. Through their extensive communication networks in Africa, social welfare projects, Bible schools, and
educational materials, U.S. religious conservatives warn of the dangers of homosexuals and present themselves as the
true representatives of U.S. evangelicalism, effectively marginalizing mainline U.S. churches that once had strong
relationships on the continent. Right-wing groups have enticed African religious leaders to reject funding from mainline
denominations – which require documentation of how the money is spent – and instead to accept funds from
conservatives, further empowering the U.S. evangelical viewpoint while giving local bishops the opportunity to line their
pockets.
To reach Africans, U.S. evangelicals now broadcast their Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and Trinity
Broadcasting Network (TBN) throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Although generally disinterested in helping poor Blacks in
their own backyard, in Africa U.S. White conservatives driven to convert the continent dominate social services, run
orphanages, schools and universities, and provide loans.[12] These conservatives and evangelical charities like World
Vision, Solar Light for Africa, and the IRD-founded Five Talents use their presence in Africa to address the question of
homosexuality from a conservative albeit misleading position. In this way, almost all U.S. conservative Christians working
in Africa are responsible for exporting homophobia to Africa.
Indeed, Africans do not distinguish between moderate evangelicals in World Vision and Hard Right figures like Scott
Lively. For them, the term "evangelical" conveys the notion of Protestant Christianity as a whole, without the substantive
distinctions made by U.S. religious groups. And U.S. conservative evangelicals support diverse Anglican, Presbyterian
and Pentecostal church leadership in Africa with which they share no denominational tie. For instance, the Providence
Christian Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan is not an Episcopal congregation yet it provides funding to the Anglican
Church of Uganda.[13] Some U.S. support goes directly to salaries, and has since 1998, as Reverend Aaron Mwesigyi
of the Ugandan archibishop's office explained.[14]
Opposing Mainline Witness
While U.S. evangelicals are actively disseminating their antigay views through their mission work, American mainline
renewal movements reach out to African churches for support in fights against gay ordination and marriage, helping to
further crystallize this as an African issue. At their behest, Anglican churches in Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria rejected
funding from The Episcopal Church USA in 2004 over disagreements about gay ordination and other culture war issues.
While these attacks have resulted in schisms within the Episcopal Church USA and the Presbyterian Church USA and
continue to threaten the unity of the United Methodist Church, they offer African churches financial and ideological
benefits, including a voice in international circles. As Kenya's Rosemary Mbongo told me, "Africans, Asians, and Latin
American evangelical Christians have the voice today; they owe it to American conservatives."
Although conservative circles celebrate this rejection of aid as a sign of Africans' moral purity, Africans simply
responded to U.S. conservatives' demands. A Kenyan professor noted, "American conservatives have been in my office
several times requesting that we cut ties with The Episcopal Church USA and other progressive funders in exchange for
their funds. They have succeeded in getting small colleges into their camp but we have refused."[15]
The apparent plan is to encourage African church leaders to swap their relationships with mainline churches for U.S.
conservative organizations and individuals.
While it is largely U.S. evangelical money displacing mainline funds supporting African churches, renewal movements
within mainline U.S. churches reap the rewards by securing the alliance of Africans in fighting their battles over gay
ordination and other issues at home and in international venues. This effort started as early as 1999, when members of
the IRD-affiliated renewal movement in The Episcopal Church USA went to Africa to ask African bishops to support
suspending the American church from the worldwide Anglican Communion for being too gay friendly and socially liberal.
More recently, IRD and United Methodist Church renewal groups organized African delegates to prevent the United
Methodist Church from lifting its ban on the ordination of LGBT clergy during its global General Conference in 2008.
Jerald Walz of IRD put it this way, "Wherever there is theological agreement, Americans are making ways of helping their
brothers and sisters both financially and theologically…In the UMC, Americans reached out to the African delegates by
helping them navigate the system... Americans are also reaching out to their African friends by giving them a voice at
international gatherings."[16]
Africa's attacks on U.S. mainline churches intensified when The Episcopal Church USA consecrated an openly gay
person, Gene Robinson, as a bishop in 2004. On the surface, Bishop Robinson's consecration was an Episcopal issue.
However, renewal movements in the Episcopal, United Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, and other U.S.
conservatives used it as an organizing tool to preach hatred against LGBT people. In addition to citing Robinson as an
example of Western corruption, they partnered with African religious leaders to demand that the Episcopal Church USA
be excommunicated from the worldwide Anglican Communion and replaced with conservative leadership.
The churches then used their "principled" rejection of mainline money as a fundraising opportunity. In appeals to U.S.
conservatives, Canon Allison Barfoot said the Anglican church of Uganda in Kampala lacked working phones because it
had rejected money from the Episcopal Church USA.[17] Two years after the Anglican Church of Kenya cut ties with the
Episcopal Church USA in 2004, the Reverend Canon Rosemary Mbogo, its Provincial Mission coordinator, appealed for
tithing from U.S. evangelical churches "to help the Kenyan province."[18] Their requests to U.S. conservatives appear to
have been answered, since both churches confirmed that U.S. conservatives provide regular funding to churches in
both countries.
U.S. evangelical money is attractive because it does not come with the demands for strict accountability made by
mainline churches.[19] Bishops can spend it as they like. Ironically, U.S. conservatives have always campaigned against
"unrestricted" giving in U.S. mainline churches. But in Africa, they prefer unrestricted giving as another way of
undermining progressives.
Local fears that this lack of accountability breeds corruption appear well grounded. Canon Alison Barfoot, an American
conservative, administers American funding at the Anglican Church of Uganda headquarters without giving African
accountants any access to U.S.-related financial information or books, we learned.[20] Furthermore, dissident U.S.
Episcopal Bishop John Guernsey of Woodbridge, Virginia, vets all U.S. donations and mission partnerships with Uganda
to ensure they come from "friendly" churches, and other U.S. conservatives play that role for other countries, bypassing
usual safeguards.[21] Their safeguards are loose enough that Bishop Samuel Sekadde, the retired Bishop of
Namirembe, is under suspicion for alleged misuse of church funds.[22] The independent Uganda Monitor observed that
the bishop's estates and private home suggest that "the good bishop was either living beyond his means or helping
himself to church property."[23]
Neocolonial relationship
Despite historical evidence of homosexuality in Africa long before the Europeans arrived, most conservative African
religious and political leaders now view homosexuality as a Western export, and a form of imperialism and
neocolonialism. And of course, U.S. conservatives exploit and encourage this belief.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, whose wife is a close ally of Rick Warren, warned, "It is a danger not only to the
believers but to the whole of Africa. It is bad if our children become complacent and think that people who are not in
order are alright… These foreigners should go and practice their nonsense elsewhere."[24]
Because Africans are sensitive to neocolonialism, the conservative claim that homosexuality is part of a "Western
agenda" gives African church leaders ammunition to demand greater influence and power in the affairs of the church.
[25] Denouncing homosexuality is Africa's way of claiming power over the western world. In this regard, when Africans
claim that homosexuality is un-African, they are pointing to a politics of postcolonial identity.[26]
This history gives the struggle greater depth and tenacity, and for that reason, African involvement in U.S. church issues
will continue. Moreover, rejecting what is claimed to be an imposition from the West gives them power both within the
African context and with American conservatives of all persuasions.
Ironically enough, although American conservatives repeatedly accuse progressives of being imperialist, it is their
dealings with Africa that are extremely imperialistic. Their flow of funds creates a form of clientelism, with the expectation
that the recipients toe an ideological line. They put words into the mouths of their African church allies, even writing or
rewriting their anticolonial statements to reflect U.S. conservative concerns. In one of many examples, IRD reworked a
statement Rev. Jerry Kulah of Liberia wrote in preparation for a 2008 Methodist conference to use as a general African
statement, adding in its anti-Islamic politics,
Cognizant of the massive silent invasion of Islam upon global community with its excessively and liberal use of Arab-oil
funds to propagate its faith, we are afraid that the current unrestricted embrace of liberalism within the United Methodist
Church is endangering the chances of our children of not considering Christianity as a possibility. It creates a breeding
ground for the rapid expansion of Islam among our future posterity." [italics indicate IRD changes][27]
In contrast, U.S. mainline churches repeatedly demonstrate their opposition to neocolonialism of all sorts, not least by
supporting the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to fight poverty in postcolonial Africa. Yet American
conservatives succeed in dismissing such efforts as neocolonial attempts to bribe Africans into accepting homosexuality,
which they characterize as a purely Western phenomenon.
Sadly, the sensitivity of mainline church leaders in the United States to charges of colonialism can silence them from
speaking out on LGBT issues. The African attacks create a dilemma for them: How can they be relevant to their own
global North context, while remaining connected to global mainline Christianity? Unfortunately, the fear of isolation leads
many social and theological progressives in the church to ignore social justice issues in their daily proclamations. While
Episcopalians risked schism to support gay bishops, U.S. Presbyterian and Methodist churches do not openly ordain
LGBT clergy. African clergy directly threatened to cut links with Presbyterians in 2004 if they did. Despite the active role
American progressives played and continue to play in Africa, they were out-organized.
The Attack on Islam
Another U.S. conservative ploy is to suggest that mainline churches' acceptance of homosexuality puts African Christian
witness at a competitive disadvantage with Islam in winning converts. Thus U.S. conservatives whip up concerns about
Muslims and homosexuals simultaneously in their attacks on mainline churches' social witness. Alan Wisdom, the
Director of Presbyterian renewal group Action for Faith and Freedom, observed that the U.S. mainline churches' "desire
to dialogue with Islam ignores the plights of the Christian minorities in Islamic nations."[28]
In November 2008, Jim Tonkowich, then IRD president, announced that his group was "beginning a project to research
how the actions of the Episcopal Church promoting homosexuality is negatively impacting Christians in Africa who live
within and alongside Muslim cultures."[29] In a February 2009 telephone interview, Faith McDonnell, the Director of
IRD's Religious Liberty Programs and of the Church Alliance for a New Sudan, explained,
Islam prohibits homosexuality…Radical Muslims would use it as another reason for attacking Christians who would be
viewed as infidels… We are competing with Islam in Africa. Muslims are going to use the argument that Africans are part
of the wider communion which accepts homosexuality.
It has happened in the Sudan where one Bishop has already formed the Reformed Episcopal Church by appealing to
the argument that he is not part of the Church of homosexuals. Homosexuality hampers the witness of the Christian
witness in Africa.
When asked whether IRD and its allied renewal movements had evidence for such claims, McDonnell replied, "We do
not have any empirical evidence yet. This is solely what Christians are thinking and it is damaging the witness among
Christians."
However, even African religious conservatives discount this idea and there is no evidence for it in Uganda, Kenya, or
Nigeria. One senior clergyman in Kenya told me, "Such an argument does not make sense… Islam has been part of the
African heritage in Kenya. My grandfather was Muslim and on his death bed he was baptized by his son who was the
Bishop." Similarly Paul Ssembiro, the Mission Coordinator in Archbishop Orombi's office observed, "Uganda's opposition
to homosexuality has nothing to do with Islam. I don't think it is has anything to do with the Islamic faith." The Kenyan
Anglican priest Michael Kimindu noted that this argument is intended to "elicit support from U.S. conservatives
concerned about radical Islam."
Indeed, Archbishop Orombi has cooperated with Muslims in attacking LGBT people in Uganda. But in 2007 he told his
American allies what they wanted to hear: Muslims are attempting to conquer "not so much by the sword but by the
dollar. Muslims also are offering vocal opposition to laws that protect women's rights because… ‘these are not in the
Koran.'"[30]
Conclusion
The relationship between U.S. conservatives and African religious leaders is inhibiting the right of LGBT people to live
freely and without persecution both in the United States and Africa. In Africa, people's lives are threatened not only by
vigilantism but by government action. If we agree that African churches should be allowed to map their own agenda in
the global church, then the conservatives should let go of Africa. Unfortunately, they will not, at least not without a fight.
It is important that progressive activists in mainline churches are now taking the fight to conservatives and putting them
on the defensive at home. In the United Methodist Church, progressives managed to expose IRD and renewal
movements' attempt to influence African delegates to the 2008 international church gathering by giving out cellphones.
In the Episcopal Church, progressives exposed the presence of conservative lobbyists at international Anglican
conferences. They are also making new inroads with African religious leaders. It is a positive sign that the Archbishop of
the Episcopal Church of the Sudan and the Congo as well as bishops from West Africa traveled to the United States to
attend the 2009 General Convention of Episcopal Church USA. Not only did American progressives represent their
positions in their own words, the African leaders were able to explore the American church's intentions in Africa. Most of
the African bishops pointed to poverty as one of the biggest challenges Africa faces and sought the church's support in
antipoverty struggles – even though the Episcopal Church lifted the moratorium on blessing of same sex marriages and
ordination of gays and lesbians to the office of the bishop. Although not all agreed with the position taken by the
Episcopal Church on LGBT issues, African bishops were generally sympathetic with their U.S. colleagues on the matter.
The campaign challenging Rick Warren to denounce the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda – which he still has not done
-- is another example of taking the fight to America. Because the U.S. Right is so skillful at twisting the mainline church
statements in Africa as colonial interference, these challenges on conservatives' home territory provide vital support for
LGBT Africans under attack. We must make sure that they are not collateral damage in the U.S. culture wars.
Box 1
Rick Warren and the Episcopalians
Pastor Rick Warren's partnership with African religious leaders also extends to supporting breakaway Episcopal
churches in the United States that join African diocese rather than remain in American ones that support gay ordination.
[31] As early as 2005, he spoke at a conference for conservative Anglicans in Pittsburgh.[32] On the same day Warren
claimed that homosexuality is not a human rights issue, he also supported African Bishops for boycotting the Anglicans'
2008 Lambeth Conference where gay ordination was a key agenda item. "The Church of England is wrong [on
supporting LGBT clergy] and I support the Church of Uganda on the boycott… We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,"
he said.[33]
Box 2
Gays and Single Women
The question of homosexuality sells in Africa, where sexuality is linked to procreation. John C. Caldwell, Pat Caldwell and
Pat Quiggin argue that many Africans believe a virtuous person is one who has more children. How one gets these
children is of little importance in African morality.[34]
The largest difference in African and Western notions of "traditional values" relates to extramarital affairs. In the United
States, "family values" means one man-one wife. In "traditional African family values," a man can take pride in fathering
children outside of marriage. African politicians and religious leaders are likely to condemn homosexuality as immoral
while accepting a "celibate" priest fathering children among parishioners.[35]
In valuing procreation, Africans tend to be suspicious of both homosexuality and childlessness in Africa. An infertile
person is a skeleton to be kept in the family closet, while siblings secretly bear or conceive a child for a barren relative.
In fact, women who insist on limiting their families are sometimes considered as behaving in a "monstrous fashion."[36] It
is this fear that U.S. conservatives have capitalized on in their presentation of homosexuality in Africa.
Box 3
How it Works: The Case of the Methodist General Conference
The renewal movements and the right-wing Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) mobilize their African allies to
support anti-LGBT actions within the international conferences of their denominations. Before the United Methodist
Church's General Conference in 2008, for instance, the IRD prepared the voting materials for African delegates. Joe
Wesley Kilpatrick, the former vice president of a Georgia renewal group, and Paul Law, the president of the ministry
Appointment Congo, traveled across Africa training delegates to take the "right" side at the conference.[37]
Unfortunately, the campaign materials misrepresented the UMC mainline leadership as ignoring the alleged threat of
Islam, the persecution of Christian minorities in Africa and rejecting the authority of the Bible.[38] The materials also told
Africans who to vote for during the General Conference.
Rev. Dr. Eunice Musa Iliya, the director of Directorate of Evangelism and Stewardship of the United Methodist Church in
Nigeria remembered, "I was under extreme pressure from conservatives to vote for conservative candidates. U.S
conservatives told us to vote for certain names as a way of saving the Church. We were told to use our "power" to
influence the outcome of the General Conference. …the UMC leadership was said to be "practicing occultism, ignoring
the expansion of Islam in Africa, rejecting the authority of the Bible and Jesus as well as promoting the homosexual
agenda… I voted differently from other African delegates because I knew those claims to be false."[39]
Dr. Iliya further pointed out that this misrepresentation did not end with the 2008 General Convention. U.S. conservative'
smear campaign for the next General Conference in 2010 has already begun. "In 2009, Steve Wood of the Confessing
Movement came to West Africa to conduct leadership training sessions in different countries including Nigeria…. I was
surprised with how much the U.S. church was demonized by Steve. When I tried to ask a question, my Bishop (Jerry
Kulah) told me to sit down. I was broken…These guys went to an extent of telling Africans to have nothing to with
American liberals and promised Africans scholarships."
End Notes
1.The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Scott Lively’s “Abiding Truth Ministries” as a hate group.
2.Family Life Network seminar, March 2009.
3.For full text of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009.
4.“A Conversation with Pastor Rick Warren, Saddleback Church’s Signature Issues,” Pew Forum on Religion & Public
Life, November 23, 2009.
5.Evelyn Lirri, “Uganda: Gay Row - U.S. Pastor Supports Country on Boycott,” AllAfrica.com, March 29, 2008.
6.More than A Name: State Sponsored Homophobia and Its Consequences in Southern Africa (New York: Human
Rights Watch and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, 2001). Voices from Nigeria: Gays,
Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgender speak out About the Same-Sex Bill, (New York: International Gay and Lesbian
Human Rights Commission, November, 2006); Off the Map: How HIV/AIDS programming is Falling Same-Sex Practicing
People in Africa, (New York: International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, November, 2007).
7.Paul Aruho,”Archbishop Orombi Re-affirms anti-gay Stand,” The Daily Monitor, Kampala, Uganda. Accessed,
11/24/2008.
8.Peter Akinola, “Lent Pastoral letter,” Church of Nigeria. (Accessed 05/13/2009).
9.For more on IRD in the United States, see Frederick Clarkson, “The Battle for the Mainline Churches,” Public Eye,
Spring 2006; John Dorhauer, “Churches Under Seige: Exposing the Right’s Attacks on Mainline Protestantism,” Public
Eye, Summer 2007.
10.Telephone interview, February 13, 2009. Also see Miranda K.. Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How
Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press),
2007.
11.Kapya Kaoma, Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia (Somerville,
MA: Political Research Associates, 2009).
12.Julie Hearn, “The Invisible NGO: U.S. Evangelical Mission in Kenya,” Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 32. (February
2002), pp. 32-60. Pp. 54-55
13.The Providence Christian Reformed Church gave $115,000 to the Anglican Diocese of Mukono’s Mukono House,
which is a three-story commercial building. Karen Gorter, “Church Tithes Building Fund,” The Banner, May 2006.
14.Interview, March 2009.
15.Esther Mombo interview, Limulu, Kenya, March, 2009.
16.Phone interview with Jerald Walz, February 12, 2009.
17.“African bishops reject aid,” Washington Times, June 7, 2005.
18.David W. Virtue, “KENYA: Anglican Province Pays Heavy Price for rejection of TEC Money over Sodomy,” Virtue
Online, August 4, 2006.
19.The Presbyterian Lay Committee (PLC) campaigns against general giving by the PCUSA General Assembly. In a
2008 appeal, PLC wrote: “In the Aftermath of the 218th Presbyterian Church U.S.A General Assembly this June [when
the issue of homosexuality was debated)] the Presbyterian Lay Committee recommends that Church sessions of faithful
congregations restrict all mission and per-capita gifts to ministries that are trusted by your congregation and do not
send undesignated money in any form to denominational entities, boards or agencies.” The Presbyterian Lay
Committee, “Do you know where your tithes and offerings are going?” September/October 2008.
20.Interview with sources in Archbishop Orombi’s account office. March 2009.
21.Interview with the Priest in Charge, Boston, May 2009; Bishop J, Interview, March 2009; Interviews with Canon X
Kenya; Bishop X and Bishop John Charles Odurkami in Uganda, March 2009.
22.“Leave Ssekadde Alone-Katikiro,” Red Pepper.. (Accessed, September 7, 2009).
23.Karoli Ssemogerere “Bishop Sekadde’s Final Triumph” Uganda Monitor; Arthur George Kamya “Sekadde Saga
Exemplifies Anglican Communion Woes” Uganda Monitor. (Accessed May 5, 2009).
24.Milton Olupot and Daniel Edyegu, “Museveni backs church against gays,” Sunday Vision, August 17, 2008.
25.Miranda K. Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are
Reshaping Anglicanism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 13.
26.Rt. Rev. James Jones, “Making Space for Truth and Grace,” A Seeking Spirit, December 2007.
27.IRD. A Message from the Church in Africa: Declaration to the 2008 General Conference. Accessed June 12, 2009.
For the original, visit, Jerry P. Kulah “Declaration of the African U. Methodist Church to the American U. Methodist
Church.” A Conference For General And Jurisdictional Conference Delegates And All United Methodist Committed To
The Renewal And Unity Of The Church Date: 26 -27 October, 2007 Accessed June 12, 2009.
28.Alan Wisdom, telephone interview, February 12, 2009.
29.Jim Tonkowich, “1.2 Million Reasons for the IRD,” Institute of Religion and Democracy, 2008.
30.Gregory Tomlin, “Ugandan Archbishop: Militant Islam is Century’s Key Challenge,” Baptist Press, January 31, 2007
31.Nicholas Knisely, “Rick Warren offers a home to conservative Anglicans,” The Lead, January 9, 2009.
32.Daniel Burke, “Rick Warren offers shelter for breakaway Anglicans,” Religion News Service, January 13, 2009.
33.Evelyn Lirri “Gay Row - U.S. Pastor Supports Country On Boycott” AllAfrica, March 29, 2008.
34.“The Social Context of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.” Population and Development Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jun.,
1989), pp. 185-234, p.189.
35.Dominique Zahan, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa, (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1970), p.10.
36.Caldwell and Caldwell, p.414.
37.“Conversation avec Joe. K en Afrique Accroitre Participation de L’Afriqueau Sein Du Methodisme – uni,” Institute for
Religion and Democracy, November, 2007. When contacted for an interview on these materials, Kirkpatrick declined an
interview.
38.Tipton, 2007.
39.Interview, September 6, 2009.
By Kapya Kaoma (photo at left) November 18, 2009
Kapya Kaoma is an Anglican priest from Zambia and project director of Political Research Associates. He is the author
of PRA’s October 2009 report, Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches and Homophobia.
The Uganda Story
For two days in early March 2009, Ugandans flocked to the Kampala Triangle Hotel for the Family Life Network's
"Seminar on Exposing the Homosexuals' Agenda." The seminar's very title revealed its claim: LGBT people and activists
are engaged in a well thought-out plan to take over the world. The U.S. culture wars had come to Africa with a
vengeance.
To put on the conference, the Uganda-based Family Life Network – led by Stephen Langa with the goal of "restoring"
traditional family values and morals in Uganda – teamed with two U.S. hatemongers from the Christian Right, Holocaust
revisionist Scott Lively and Dan Schmierer of the ex-gay group Exodus International.[1] Vocal opposition in international
circles did not stop the country's high profile religious leaders, parliamentarians, police officers, teachers, and
concerned parents from attending. Indeed, parliamentary action to wage war on gays was on the conference agenda. It
was not enough that homosexuality is illegal in Uganda. As someone stated from the podium,
[The parliament] feels it is necessary to draft a new law that deals comprehensively with the issue of homosexuality and
…takes into account the international gay agenda….Right now there is a proposal that a new law be drafted.[2]
The unsuspecting audience heard Lively promote his book, The Pink Swastika, and his argument that not only are gays
seeking to take over the world, but they also threaten society by causing higher rates of divorce, child abuse, and
HIV/AIDS. Legalizing homosexuality is on par with accepting "molestation of children or having sex with animals," he said.
As Lively puts it, LGBT issues cannot be considered human rights issues. "The people coming to Africa now and
advancing the idea that human rights serves the homosexual interests are absolutely wrong," he said. "Many of them
are outright liars and they are manipulating history; they are manipulating facts in order to push their political agenda."
Lively even tarred abortion rights as "a product of the gay philosophy" meant to promote sexual promiscuity in order to
"destroy the family." In sum, he warned, U.S. homosexuals are out to recruit young people into homosexual lifestyles so
they must be stopped.
Lively had a receptive audience. Harry Mwebesa of Family Life Network told the crowd,
Dr. Scott told us about Brazil where 10 years ago, homosexuality was unheard of….Today it is the capital….There are
people that have been against homosexuality that are having to leave because of the pressure and the threats that they
are putting on them. That is how serious it is.
Another participant who called himself Elijah said,
The man of God [Scott Lively] told us about…a movement behind the promotion of homosexuality and it is called gay
movement. Me, I had never heard of that. But I got to know that there is a force behind homosexuality which we need to
tackle with force. He also told us that these people who are behind this…evil, they have all resources that they need…to
spread this evil. [In] Africa, Uganda in particular...it is more easy for the young generation to get attracted into the evil.
Since that day…we need to stand firm to fight homosexuality.
If only Lively's influence ended there. But a few days later, he met with Ugandan lawmakers and government officials,
some of whom would draft parliament's Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009 the next month. This act would ban LGBT
organizing and give the death penalty for gays, though not heterosexuals, who have sex with someone underage or
while infected with the HIV/AIDS virus.[3] Lively and the "traditional family values" language of U.S. antigay campaigners
echoes through the draft legislation:
Research indicates that the homosexuality has a variety of negative consequences including higher incidences of
violence, sexually transmitted diseases, and use of drugs. The higher incidence of separation and break-up in
homosexual relationships also creates a highly unstable environment for children raised by homosexuals through
adoption or otherwise, and can have profound psychological consequences on those children. In addition, the
promotion of homosexual behavior undermines our traditional family values.
Family Life Network's Langa pushed people at a follow up meeting to stand up for the tougher law against homosexuality
for their children's sake, echoing Lively in charging that Ugandan gays and activists were being paid by U.S. gays to
recruit schoolchildren into homosexuality.
Amid the utter hysteria, any sense that homosexuality has been in Africa from time immemorial was lost. While hardly
embraced, and indeed illegal in many countries, at least LGBT people were not hounded by churches and police alike –
until American culture warriors came to Africa. Bishop Christopher Ssenjonyo, one of the most progressive voices on
LGBT issues in Uganda, expressed his own concerns about the Americans' role to me in March, "I am sure that these
lies will incite public hatred against gays."
How Did We Get Here?
How did we get to this point? Scott Lively and Don Schmierer are just two among a parade of right-leaning American
Christians who have brought the U.S. culture wars to Africa. But unlike the United States, in Africa sexual minorities are
only thinly organized and have few allies who will stand up with them. Those who do are tarred as neocolonialist and
racist, because of the effectiveness of U.S. Right organizing in Africa. The result is tragedy.
Thankfully, because of Kenya's democratic past and stronger civil society, citizens managed to challenge and slow down
efforts for broad criminalization of homosexuality. But in more authoritarian countries, like Uganda and Nigeria, where
some counties punish homosexuality with death, U.S. religious conservatives are better able to promote their anti-LGBT
agenda, building on decades of missionary work.
U.S. evangelicals like California's Rick Warren have turned their attention to Africa as its role in global Christianity has
grown. As Warren recently told Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, "If you want to know the future of evangelicalism,
it is in [Africa, Asia and Latin America.] To give you an example, in 1900 there were only 10 million Christians in all of
Africa – 10% of the population. Today there are 360 million Christians in Africa, over half the population."[4] Warren's
numbers are wrong and fewer than half of Africans are Christian. Still, 30 million of the Anglican Communion's 77 million
members live in Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya.
Warren is especially influential on the continent, enjoying close ties to African religious and political leaders. They quote
him to justify discrimination against LGBT people, and to support their challenge to U.S. mainline Protestants liberalizing
their policies around gay ordination. "Homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right," Warren said
during a March-April 2008 visit with African religious and political leaders in Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya. That quote
has reverberated ever since.[5]
Warren's bestselling book, A Purpose Driven Life is studied across sub-Saharan Africa and his Saddleback Church in
Lake Forest, California has close ties with leaders across Africa, including, until recently, Martin Ssempa of Uganda's
Makerere Community Church. Ssempa is one of the key architects of the antigay bill and persecution of LGBT people in
Uganda. He made global news when he published the names of LGBT people in the local press and destroyed condoms
to promote abstinence-only programs in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Uganda. Ssempa was a regular visitor to
Saddleback until Warren distanced himself from him in 2008.
Within Africa, Warren seems to be progressive when it comes to fighting poverty, illiteracy and HIV/AIDS. These efforts
have painted him as a real partner in development. However, his antipoverty and education strategies also promote
conservative institutional power and ideologies in Africa, including homophobia.
As Warren's "purpose-driven" projects in Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda have grown, so too have levels of active
homophobia and proposed laws against LGBT people. And Warren's allies – particularly Anglican Archbishops Henry
Orombi of Uganda, Peter Akinola of Nigeria, Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda and Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya – are in the
forefront of advocating for stiffer laws against LGBT persons in their countries.[6]
Archbishop Orombi argues that U.S. homosexuals should be kept out of Uganda because they are "taking advantage of
the abject poverty in Africa to lure people into their club [homosexuality]."[7] In neighboring Nigeria, Archbishop Akinola
wrote, "We are especially concerned about those who are using large sums of money to lure our youth to see
homosexuality and lesbianism as normative. We must consistently and faithfully teach about God's commands on this
ungodly practice and help those with such orientation to seek deliverance and pastoral counsel."[8]
History of U.S. Conservatives in Africa
If they had faced strong opposition, U.S. conservatives might not have been so successful in promoting their
homophobic politics. Traditionally, evangelical African churches have been biblically and doctrinally orthodox but socially
progressive on such issues as national liberation and poverty, making them natural partners of the politically liberal
western churches. But their religious orthodoxy also provides the U.S. Right with an opportunity. Africans resonate with
the denunciation of homosexuality as a postcolonial plot; their homophobia is as much an expression of resistance to
the West as it is a statement about human sexuality. Similarly campaigns for "family values" in Africa rest on rich
indigenous notions of the importance of family and procreation. In Africa, "family" expresses the idea that to be human is
to be embedded in community, a concept called ubuntu. African traditional values also value procreation, making those
hindering this virtue an enemy of life (see box 2).
Although Rick Warren's involvement in Africa is the most celebrated, and Lively's perhaps the most notorious, they are
not the first U.S. conservative evangelicals to influence African policies. Pat Robertson's television show The 700 Club is
watched across sub-Saharan Africa. Yet most Africans are not aware that Robertson supported the civil war in Angola
and the oppressive White governments of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. He was one of many U.S.
conservative evangelicals, some of whom came to Africa as missionaries in the 1980s, who sided with those White
minority governments in their effort to stop the spread of liberation theology. Allied with them was – and is – the Institute
on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a U.S. neoconservative group that also supported the White regimes and challenged
the National Council of Churches as a group of dangerous Marxists supporting subversion. The group formed in 1981
with the goal of weakening and splitting U.S. mainline denominations in order to block their powerful progressive social
witness promoting social and economic justice.[9]
During this same period, the U.S. mainline churches sided with oppressed Africans living in White regimes. Along with
exposing the crimes committed in the name of fighting communism, these churches provided financial and social support
to displaced families in Africa, Asia, and South America.
But today the mainline churches are labeled as neocolonialists and this history is forgotten. You can still hear snippets
of the old right-wing scripts in today's attacks on the mainline churches. James V. Heidinger II, the president of Good
News, the United Methodist Church's renewal movement which opposes gay ordination and supports conservative
theology, tarred official Methodist churches as lacking "a theology of mission but has bought into liberation theology.
Mission for them involves bringing about social and political change in third world countries. They favor social ministry at
the expense of evangelism."[10]
Similarly, IRD's executive director, Mark Tooley, recently sought an apology from the NCC and World Council of
Churches for supporting "Marxist" revolutionaries in Africa. His organization is a lead force in mobilizing renewal
movements like Heidinger's to use African leaders and the debate about gay ordination and marriage as a wedge in U.S.
mainline conflicts – IRD's latest but perhaps most effective tactic in diminishing the social witness of its mainline church
opponents (for more on the U.S. conflict, see box 3 and my recent report, Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S.
Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia).[11]
The torrential flow of conservative Christian resources to Africa helps wash away the memory of their alliances with
White regimes. Through their extensive communication networks in Africa, social welfare projects, Bible schools, and
educational materials, U.S. religious conservatives warn of the dangers of homosexuals and present themselves as the
true representatives of U.S. evangelicalism, effectively marginalizing mainline U.S. churches that once had strong
relationships on the continent. Right-wing groups have enticed African religious leaders to reject funding from mainline
denominations – which require documentation of how the money is spent – and instead to accept funds from
conservatives, further empowering the U.S. evangelical viewpoint while giving local bishops the opportunity to line their
pockets.
To reach Africans, U.S. evangelicals now broadcast their Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and Trinity
Broadcasting Network (TBN) throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Although generally disinterested in helping poor Blacks in
their own backyard, in Africa U.S. White conservatives driven to convert the continent dominate social services, run
orphanages, schools and universities, and provide loans.[12] These conservatives and evangelical charities like World
Vision, Solar Light for Africa, and the IRD-founded Five Talents use their presence in Africa to address the question of
homosexuality from a conservative albeit misleading position. In this way, almost all U.S. conservative Christians working
in Africa are responsible for exporting homophobia to Africa.
Indeed, Africans do not distinguish between moderate evangelicals in World Vision and Hard Right figures like Scott
Lively. For them, the term "evangelical" conveys the notion of Protestant Christianity as a whole, without the substantive
distinctions made by U.S. religious groups. And U.S. conservative evangelicals support diverse Anglican, Presbyterian
and Pentecostal church leadership in Africa with which they share no denominational tie. For instance, the Providence
Christian Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan is not an Episcopal congregation yet it provides funding to the Anglican
Church of Uganda.[13] Some U.S. support goes directly to salaries, and has since 1998, as Reverend Aaron Mwesigyi
of the Ugandan archibishop's office explained.[14]
Opposing Mainline Witness
While U.S. evangelicals are actively disseminating their antigay views through their mission work, American mainline
renewal movements reach out to African churches for support in fights against gay ordination and marriage, helping to
further crystallize this as an African issue. At their behest, Anglican churches in Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria rejected
funding from The Episcopal Church USA in 2004 over disagreements about gay ordination and other culture war issues.
While these attacks have resulted in schisms within the Episcopal Church USA and the Presbyterian Church USA and
continue to threaten the unity of the United Methodist Church, they offer African churches financial and ideological
benefits, including a voice in international circles. As Kenya's Rosemary Mbongo told me, "Africans, Asians, and Latin
American evangelical Christians have the voice today; they owe it to American conservatives."
Although conservative circles celebrate this rejection of aid as a sign of Africans' moral purity, Africans simply
responded to U.S. conservatives' demands. A Kenyan professor noted, "American conservatives have been in my office
several times requesting that we cut ties with The Episcopal Church USA and other progressive funders in exchange for
their funds. They have succeeded in getting small colleges into their camp but we have refused."[15]
The apparent plan is to encourage African church leaders to swap their relationships with mainline churches for U.S.
conservative organizations and individuals.
While it is largely U.S. evangelical money displacing mainline funds supporting African churches, renewal movements
within mainline U.S. churches reap the rewards by securing the alliance of Africans in fighting their battles over gay
ordination and other issues at home and in international venues. This effort started as early as 1999, when members of
the IRD-affiliated renewal movement in The Episcopal Church USA went to Africa to ask African bishops to support
suspending the American church from the worldwide Anglican Communion for being too gay friendly and socially liberal.
More recently, IRD and United Methodist Church renewal groups organized African delegates to prevent the United
Methodist Church from lifting its ban on the ordination of LGBT clergy during its global General Conference in 2008.
Jerald Walz of IRD put it this way, "Wherever there is theological agreement, Americans are making ways of helping their
brothers and sisters both financially and theologically…In the UMC, Americans reached out to the African delegates by
helping them navigate the system... Americans are also reaching out to their African friends by giving them a voice at
international gatherings."[16]
Africa's attacks on U.S. mainline churches intensified when The Episcopal Church USA consecrated an openly gay
person, Gene Robinson, as a bishop in 2004. On the surface, Bishop Robinson's consecration was an Episcopal issue.
However, renewal movements in the Episcopal, United Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, and other U.S.
conservatives used it as an organizing tool to preach hatred against LGBT people. In addition to citing Robinson as an
example of Western corruption, they partnered with African religious leaders to demand that the Episcopal Church USA
be excommunicated from the worldwide Anglican Communion and replaced with conservative leadership.
The churches then used their "principled" rejection of mainline money as a fundraising opportunity. In appeals to U.S.
conservatives, Canon Allison Barfoot said the Anglican church of Uganda in Kampala lacked working phones because it
had rejected money from the Episcopal Church USA.[17] Two years after the Anglican Church of Kenya cut ties with the
Episcopal Church USA in 2004, the Reverend Canon Rosemary Mbogo, its Provincial Mission coordinator, appealed for
tithing from U.S. evangelical churches "to help the Kenyan province."[18] Their requests to U.S. conservatives appear to
have been answered, since both churches confirmed that U.S. conservatives provide regular funding to churches in
both countries.
U.S. evangelical money is attractive because it does not come with the demands for strict accountability made by
mainline churches.[19] Bishops can spend it as they like. Ironically, U.S. conservatives have always campaigned against
"unrestricted" giving in U.S. mainline churches. But in Africa, they prefer unrestricted giving as another way of
undermining progressives.
Local fears that this lack of accountability breeds corruption appear well grounded. Canon Alison Barfoot, an American
conservative, administers American funding at the Anglican Church of Uganda headquarters without giving African
accountants any access to U.S.-related financial information or books, we learned.[20] Furthermore, dissident U.S.
Episcopal Bishop John Guernsey of Woodbridge, Virginia, vets all U.S. donations and mission partnerships with Uganda
to ensure they come from "friendly" churches, and other U.S. conservatives play that role for other countries, bypassing
usual safeguards.[21] Their safeguards are loose enough that Bishop Samuel Sekadde, the retired Bishop of
Namirembe, is under suspicion for alleged misuse of church funds.[22] The independent Uganda Monitor observed that
the bishop's estates and private home suggest that "the good bishop was either living beyond his means or helping
himself to church property."[23]
Neocolonial relationship
Despite historical evidence of homosexuality in Africa long before the Europeans arrived, most conservative African
religious and political leaders now view homosexuality as a Western export, and a form of imperialism and
neocolonialism. And of course, U.S. conservatives exploit and encourage this belief.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, whose wife is a close ally of Rick Warren, warned, "It is a danger not only to the
believers but to the whole of Africa. It is bad if our children become complacent and think that people who are not in
order are alright… These foreigners should go and practice their nonsense elsewhere."[24]
Because Africans are sensitive to neocolonialism, the conservative claim that homosexuality is part of a "Western
agenda" gives African church leaders ammunition to demand greater influence and power in the affairs of the church.
[25] Denouncing homosexuality is Africa's way of claiming power over the western world. In this regard, when Africans
claim that homosexuality is un-African, they are pointing to a politics of postcolonial identity.[26]
This history gives the struggle greater depth and tenacity, and for that reason, African involvement in U.S. church issues
will continue. Moreover, rejecting what is claimed to be an imposition from the West gives them power both within the
African context and with American conservatives of all persuasions.
Ironically enough, although American conservatives repeatedly accuse progressives of being imperialist, it is their
dealings with Africa that are extremely imperialistic. Their flow of funds creates a form of clientelism, with the expectation
that the recipients toe an ideological line. They put words into the mouths of their African church allies, even writing or
rewriting their anticolonial statements to reflect U.S. conservative concerns. In one of many examples, IRD reworked a
statement Rev. Jerry Kulah of Liberia wrote in preparation for a 2008 Methodist conference to use as a general African
statement, adding in its anti-Islamic politics,
Cognizant of the massive silent invasion of Islam upon global community with its excessively and liberal use of Arab-oil
funds to propagate its faith, we are afraid that the current unrestricted embrace of liberalism within the United Methodist
Church is endangering the chances of our children of not considering Christianity as a possibility. It creates a breeding
ground for the rapid expansion of Islam among our future posterity." [italics indicate IRD changes][27]
In contrast, U.S. mainline churches repeatedly demonstrate their opposition to neocolonialism of all sorts, not least by
supporting the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to fight poverty in postcolonial Africa. Yet American
conservatives succeed in dismissing such efforts as neocolonial attempts to bribe Africans into accepting homosexuality,
which they characterize as a purely Western phenomenon.
Sadly, the sensitivity of mainline church leaders in the United States to charges of colonialism can silence them from
speaking out on LGBT issues. The African attacks create a dilemma for them: How can they be relevant to their own
global North context, while remaining connected to global mainline Christianity? Unfortunately, the fear of isolation leads
many social and theological progressives in the church to ignore social justice issues in their daily proclamations. While
Episcopalians risked schism to support gay bishops, U.S. Presbyterian and Methodist churches do not openly ordain
LGBT clergy. African clergy directly threatened to cut links with Presbyterians in 2004 if they did. Despite the active role
American progressives played and continue to play in Africa, they were out-organized.
The Attack on Islam
Another U.S. conservative ploy is to suggest that mainline churches' acceptance of homosexuality puts African Christian
witness at a competitive disadvantage with Islam in winning converts. Thus U.S. conservatives whip up concerns about
Muslims and homosexuals simultaneously in their attacks on mainline churches' social witness. Alan Wisdom, the
Director of Presbyterian renewal group Action for Faith and Freedom, observed that the U.S. mainline churches' "desire
to dialogue with Islam ignores the plights of the Christian minorities in Islamic nations."[28]
In November 2008, Jim Tonkowich, then IRD president, announced that his group was "beginning a project to research
how the actions of the Episcopal Church promoting homosexuality is negatively impacting Christians in Africa who live
within and alongside Muslim cultures."[29] In a February 2009 telephone interview, Faith McDonnell, the Director of
IRD's Religious Liberty Programs and of the Church Alliance for a New Sudan, explained,
Islam prohibits homosexuality…Radical Muslims would use it as another reason for attacking Christians who would be
viewed as infidels… We are competing with Islam in Africa. Muslims are going to use the argument that Africans are part
of the wider communion which accepts homosexuality.
It has happened in the Sudan where one Bishop has already formed the Reformed Episcopal Church by appealing to
the argument that he is not part of the Church of homosexuals. Homosexuality hampers the witness of the Christian
witness in Africa.
When asked whether IRD and its allied renewal movements had evidence for such claims, McDonnell replied, "We do
not have any empirical evidence yet. This is solely what Christians are thinking and it is damaging the witness among
Christians."
However, even African religious conservatives discount this idea and there is no evidence for it in Uganda, Kenya, or
Nigeria. One senior clergyman in Kenya told me, "Such an argument does not make sense… Islam has been part of the
African heritage in Kenya. My grandfather was Muslim and on his death bed he was baptized by his son who was the
Bishop." Similarly Paul Ssembiro, the Mission Coordinator in Archbishop Orombi's office observed, "Uganda's opposition
to homosexuality has nothing to do with Islam. I don't think it is has anything to do with the Islamic faith." The Kenyan
Anglican priest Michael Kimindu noted that this argument is intended to "elicit support from U.S. conservatives
concerned about radical Islam."
Indeed, Archbishop Orombi has cooperated with Muslims in attacking LGBT people in Uganda. But in 2007 he told his
American allies what they wanted to hear: Muslims are attempting to conquer "not so much by the sword but by the
dollar. Muslims also are offering vocal opposition to laws that protect women's rights because… ‘these are not in the
Koran.'"[30]
Conclusion
The relationship between U.S. conservatives and African religious leaders is inhibiting the right of LGBT people to live
freely and without persecution both in the United States and Africa. In Africa, people's lives are threatened not only by
vigilantism but by government action. If we agree that African churches should be allowed to map their own agenda in
the global church, then the conservatives should let go of Africa. Unfortunately, they will not, at least not without a fight.
It is important that progressive activists in mainline churches are now taking the fight to conservatives and putting them
on the defensive at home. In the United Methodist Church, progressives managed to expose IRD and renewal
movements' attempt to influence African delegates to the 2008 international church gathering by giving out cellphones.
In the Episcopal Church, progressives exposed the presence of conservative lobbyists at international Anglican
conferences. They are also making new inroads with African religious leaders. It is a positive sign that the Archbishop of
the Episcopal Church of the Sudan and the Congo as well as bishops from West Africa traveled to the United States to
attend the 2009 General Convention of Episcopal Church USA. Not only did American progressives represent their
positions in their own words, the African leaders were able to explore the American church's intentions in Africa. Most of
the African bishops pointed to poverty as one of the biggest challenges Africa faces and sought the church's support in
antipoverty struggles – even though the Episcopal Church lifted the moratorium on blessing of same sex marriages and
ordination of gays and lesbians to the office of the bishop. Although not all agreed with the position taken by the
Episcopal Church on LGBT issues, African bishops were generally sympathetic with their U.S. colleagues on the matter.
The campaign challenging Rick Warren to denounce the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda – which he still has not done
-- is another example of taking the fight to America. Because the U.S. Right is so skillful at twisting the mainline church
statements in Africa as colonial interference, these challenges on conservatives' home territory provide vital support for
LGBT Africans under attack. We must make sure that they are not collateral damage in the U.S. culture wars.
Box 1
Rick Warren and the Episcopalians
Pastor Rick Warren's partnership with African religious leaders also extends to supporting breakaway Episcopal
churches in the United States that join African diocese rather than remain in American ones that support gay ordination.
[31] As early as 2005, he spoke at a conference for conservative Anglicans in Pittsburgh.[32] On the same day Warren
claimed that homosexuality is not a human rights issue, he also supported African Bishops for boycotting the Anglicans'
2008 Lambeth Conference where gay ordination was a key agenda item. "The Church of England is wrong [on
supporting LGBT clergy] and I support the Church of Uganda on the boycott… We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,"
he said.[33]
Box 2
Gays and Single Women
The question of homosexuality sells in Africa, where sexuality is linked to procreation. John C. Caldwell, Pat Caldwell and
Pat Quiggin argue that many Africans believe a virtuous person is one who has more children. How one gets these
children is of little importance in African morality.[34]
The largest difference in African and Western notions of "traditional values" relates to extramarital affairs. In the United
States, "family values" means one man-one wife. In "traditional African family values," a man can take pride in fathering
children outside of marriage. African politicians and religious leaders are likely to condemn homosexuality as immoral
while accepting a "celibate" priest fathering children among parishioners.[35]
In valuing procreation, Africans tend to be suspicious of both homosexuality and childlessness in Africa. An infertile
person is a skeleton to be kept in the family closet, while siblings secretly bear or conceive a child for a barren relative.
In fact, women who insist on limiting their families are sometimes considered as behaving in a "monstrous fashion."[36] It
is this fear that U.S. conservatives have capitalized on in their presentation of homosexuality in Africa.
Box 3
How it Works: The Case of the Methodist General Conference
The renewal movements and the right-wing Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) mobilize their African allies to
support anti-LGBT actions within the international conferences of their denominations. Before the United Methodist
Church's General Conference in 2008, for instance, the IRD prepared the voting materials for African delegates. Joe
Wesley Kilpatrick, the former vice president of a Georgia renewal group, and Paul Law, the president of the ministry
Appointment Congo, traveled across Africa training delegates to take the "right" side at the conference.[37]
Unfortunately, the campaign materials misrepresented the UMC mainline leadership as ignoring the alleged threat of
Islam, the persecution of Christian minorities in Africa and rejecting the authority of the Bible.[38] The materials also told
Africans who to vote for during the General Conference.
Rev. Dr. Eunice Musa Iliya, the director of Directorate of Evangelism and Stewardship of the United Methodist Church in
Nigeria remembered, "I was under extreme pressure from conservatives to vote for conservative candidates. U.S
conservatives told us to vote for certain names as a way of saving the Church. We were told to use our "power" to
influence the outcome of the General Conference. …the UMC leadership was said to be "practicing occultism, ignoring
the expansion of Islam in Africa, rejecting the authority of the Bible and Jesus as well as promoting the homosexual
agenda… I voted differently from other African delegates because I knew those claims to be false."[39]
Dr. Iliya further pointed out that this misrepresentation did not end with the 2008 General Convention. U.S. conservative'
smear campaign for the next General Conference in 2010 has already begun. "In 2009, Steve Wood of the Confessing
Movement came to West Africa to conduct leadership training sessions in different countries including Nigeria…. I was
surprised with how much the U.S. church was demonized by Steve. When I tried to ask a question, my Bishop (Jerry
Kulah) told me to sit down. I was broken…These guys went to an extent of telling Africans to have nothing to with
American liberals and promised Africans scholarships."
End Notes
1.The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Scott Lively’s “Abiding Truth Ministries” as a hate group.
2.Family Life Network seminar, March 2009.
3.For full text of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009.
4.“A Conversation with Pastor Rick Warren, Saddleback Church’s Signature Issues,” Pew Forum on Religion & Public
Life, November 23, 2009.
5.Evelyn Lirri, “Uganda: Gay Row - U.S. Pastor Supports Country on Boycott,” AllAfrica.com, March 29, 2008.
6.More than A Name: State Sponsored Homophobia and Its Consequences in Southern Africa (New York: Human
Rights Watch and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, 2001). Voices from Nigeria: Gays,
Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgender speak out About the Same-Sex Bill, (New York: International Gay and Lesbian
Human Rights Commission, November, 2006); Off the Map: How HIV/AIDS programming is Falling Same-Sex Practicing
People in Africa, (New York: International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, November, 2007).
7.Paul Aruho,”Archbishop Orombi Re-affirms anti-gay Stand,” The Daily Monitor, Kampala, Uganda. Accessed,
11/24/2008.
8.Peter Akinola, “Lent Pastoral letter,” Church of Nigeria. (Accessed 05/13/2009).
9.For more on IRD in the United States, see Frederick Clarkson, “The Battle for the Mainline Churches,” Public Eye,
Spring 2006; John Dorhauer, “Churches Under Seige: Exposing the Right’s Attacks on Mainline Protestantism,” Public
Eye, Summer 2007.
10.Telephone interview, February 13, 2009. Also see Miranda K.. Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How
Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press),
2007.
11.Kapya Kaoma, Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia (Somerville,
MA: Political Research Associates, 2009).
12.Julie Hearn, “The Invisible NGO: U.S. Evangelical Mission in Kenya,” Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 32. (February
2002), pp. 32-60. Pp. 54-55
13.The Providence Christian Reformed Church gave $115,000 to the Anglican Diocese of Mukono’s Mukono House,
which is a three-story commercial building. Karen Gorter, “Church Tithes Building Fund,” The Banner, May 2006.
14.Interview, March 2009.
15.Esther Mombo interview, Limulu, Kenya, March, 2009.
16.Phone interview with Jerald Walz, February 12, 2009.
17.“African bishops reject aid,” Washington Times, June 7, 2005.
18.David W. Virtue, “KENYA: Anglican Province Pays Heavy Price for rejection of TEC Money over Sodomy,” Virtue
Online, August 4, 2006.
19.The Presbyterian Lay Committee (PLC) campaigns against general giving by the PCUSA General Assembly. In a
2008 appeal, PLC wrote: “In the Aftermath of the 218th Presbyterian Church U.S.A General Assembly this June [when
the issue of homosexuality was debated)] the Presbyterian Lay Committee recommends that Church sessions of faithful
congregations restrict all mission and per-capita gifts to ministries that are trusted by your congregation and do not
send undesignated money in any form to denominational entities, boards or agencies.” The Presbyterian Lay
Committee, “Do you know where your tithes and offerings are going?” September/October 2008.
20.Interview with sources in Archbishop Orombi’s account office. March 2009.
21.Interview with the Priest in Charge, Boston, May 2009; Bishop J, Interview, March 2009; Interviews with Canon X
Kenya; Bishop X and Bishop John Charles Odurkami in Uganda, March 2009.
22.“Leave Ssekadde Alone-Katikiro,” Red Pepper.. (Accessed, September 7, 2009).
23.Karoli Ssemogerere “Bishop Sekadde’s Final Triumph” Uganda Monitor; Arthur George Kamya “Sekadde Saga
Exemplifies Anglican Communion Woes” Uganda Monitor. (Accessed May 5, 2009).
24.Milton Olupot and Daniel Edyegu, “Museveni backs church against gays,” Sunday Vision, August 17, 2008.
25.Miranda K. Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are
Reshaping Anglicanism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 13.
26.Rt. Rev. James Jones, “Making Space for Truth and Grace,” A Seeking Spirit, December 2007.
27.IRD. A Message from the Church in Africa: Declaration to the 2008 General Conference. Accessed June 12, 2009.
For the original, visit, Jerry P. Kulah “Declaration of the African U. Methodist Church to the American U. Methodist
Church.” A Conference For General And Jurisdictional Conference Delegates And All United Methodist Committed To
The Renewal And Unity Of The Church Date: 26 -27 October, 2007 Accessed June 12, 2009.
28.Alan Wisdom, telephone interview, February 12, 2009.
29.Jim Tonkowich, “1.2 Million Reasons for the IRD,” Institute of Religion and Democracy, 2008.
30.Gregory Tomlin, “Ugandan Archbishop: Militant Islam is Century’s Key Challenge,” Baptist Press, January 31, 2007
31.Nicholas Knisely, “Rick Warren offers a home to conservative Anglicans,” The Lead, January 9, 2009.
32.Daniel Burke, “Rick Warren offers shelter for breakaway Anglicans,” Religion News Service, January 13, 2009.
33.Evelyn Lirri “Gay Row - U.S. Pastor Supports Country On Boycott” AllAfrica, March 29, 2008.
34.“The Social Context of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.” Population and Development Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jun.,
1989), pp. 185-234, p.189.
35.Dominique Zahan, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa, (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1970), p.10.
36.Caldwell and Caldwell, p.414.
37.“Conversation avec Joe. K en Afrique Accroitre Participation de L’Afriqueau Sein Du Methodisme – uni,” Institute for
Religion and Democracy, November, 2007. When contacted for an interview on these materials, Kirkpatrick declined an
interview.
38.Tipton, 2007.
39.Interview, September 6, 2009.
| From PblicEye.org The Website of Political Research Associates |
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