Are Republicans defending nations that want to kill gays?

While anti-gay legislation is promoted as a response to the spread of Western ideas, discriminatory laws were originally the product of Western colonization in Africa. Now colonial-era laws banning “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” are being expanded to prohibit lesbian relationships, to outlaw same-sex marriages, to prevent the adoption of children by same-sex couples, and to outlaw LGBT organizations. It is homophobia, not homosexuality, that is being imported to the continent by neocolonialists with an agenda: to spread U.S. culture wars worldwide.

 

How did African sexual minorities become collateral damage in the U.S. culture wars? The story of American religious conservatives’ involvement on the continent is long and complicated. While American mainline churches, with their more liberal views on social issues, supported the fight against South African apartheid and other colonial regimes, many conservative U.S. evangelicals insisted that anti-colonial leaders were godless communists and terrorists. Despite this ignoble history, American conservatives have reinvented themselves as Africa’s best allies and the true representatives of Western Christianity. This dramatic makeover has involved heavy investment in communications networks with continental reach; both Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and the evangelical Trinity Broadcasting Network are seen across sub-Saharan Africa, and Christian-right radio networks abound. Evangelical churches and groups provide scholarships for African clerics to receive conservative theological training at U.S. institutions. They sponsor orphanages, Bible schools, universities, and social-welfare projects. 

African evangelical churches have traditionally been doctrinally orthodox but socially progressive on such issues as national liberation and poverty, making them natural partners of liberal Western churches. The African churches long depended on financial aid from mainline U.S. churches for most of their operations. However, right-wing groups have enticed numerous African religious leaders to reject funding from mainline denominations and to accept replacement funds from the American Christian right. 

A turning point came in the late 1990s, when the Christian right was beginning to lose the fight over gay ordination in mainline churches, including the global Anglican Communion. American religious conservatives responded by mobilizing their African clerical allies to oppose equal rights for LGBT people in the church. At the 1998 Lambeth Conference, a worldwide gathering of Anglican and Episcopal bishops that takes place every ten years, the Anglican Communion discussed human sexuality and gay and lesbian ordination at length for the first time. Following the conference, right-wing American evangelicals encouraged African bishops to support a suspension of the Episcopal Church USA from the worldwide Anglican Communion because it was too gay-friendly and socially liberal—threatening a global schism. The campaign took on new urgency in 2003 when American Episcopalians consecrated openly gay Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire. Conservative “renewal” movements in the Episcopal, United Methodist, and Presbyterian churches capitalized on Robinson’s ordination to mobilize against the “gay agenda” creeping into Christianity. Anglican churches in Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria rejected funding from the Episcopal Church USA, replacing it with money from Christian-right groups. 

 

The financial ties between U.S. conservatives and African political and religious leaders are often clandestine, with both parties typically denying any funding relationship. Tax documents show that two African leaders—Stephen Langa, whose Family Life Network hosted the Kampala anti-gay conference in 2009, and Martin Ssempa, pastor of the Makerere Community Church in Kampala and a leading promoter of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill—have both received funding from conservative U.S. groups. David Bahati, who introduced Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, has deep ties to the secretive U.S. Christian political group known as the Family, or the Fellowship. According to investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet, Bahati “appears to be a core member of the Family. … He organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees an African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which the Family has poured millions of dollars.”