Three years ago, in an essay in The Public Eye magazine, I outlined how the neoconservative and Religious Right campaign to divide and conquer the historic mainline Protstant denominations has been underway for more than a quarter century. (Much has been written about this campaign, before and since, but the article was my best effort to summarize the sprawlingly complex story in one place.) The rightist campaign, led and organized by the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy and conservative "renewal" groups, have pitted mainline Protestants against one another, while promoting schism, and ultimately neutralization of the progressive social witness of the churches. Neoconservative Catholics and evangelicals, and conservative foundations -- outsiders with no history of membership in, or any legitimate interest in the internal functions of the churches -- have taken a disproportionate role in underwriting and coordinating these attacks.
Now the progressive think tank Political Research Associates (which publishes The Public Eye) has issued a major study that advances our understanding of this campaign by detailing the African connection. Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches and Homophobia documents the role of IRD and related renewal groups in seeking to mobilize African Christians against the mainline denominations of which they are members.
The PRA press release states, in part:
Sexual minorities in Africa have become collateral damage to our domestic conflicts and culture wars as U.S. conservative evangelicals and those opposing gay pastors and bishops within mainline Protestant denominations woo Africans in their American fight, a groundbreaking investigation by Political Research Associates (PRA) discovered.
Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia, a new report by... Reverend Kapya Kaoma, exposes the U.S. Right's promotion of an agenda in Africa that aims to criminalize homosexuality and otherwise infringe upon the human rights of LGBT people while also mobilizing African clerics in U.S. culture war battles.
U.S. social conservatives who are in the minority in mainline churches depend on African religious leaders to legitimize their positions as their growing numbers makes African Christians more influential globally. These partnerships have succeeded in slowing, if not stopping altogether, the mainline Protestant churches' recognition of the full equality of LGBT people.
In the United States, Kaoma focuses on "renewal" groups in The Episcopal Church, United Methodist Church USA, and Presbyterian Church USA; U.S conservative evangelicals; and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a neoconservative think tank that has sought to undermine Protestant denominations' tradition of progressive social justice work for decades.
In Africa, Kaoma investigates ties U.S. conservatives have established with religious leaders in Nigeria, Uganda, and Kenya and the impact of homophobia exported from the United States to these Anglophone countries.
As Kaoma argues, the U.S. Right - once isolated in Africa for supporting pro-apartheid, White supremacist regimes - has successfully reinvented itself as the mainstream of U.S. evangelicalism. Through their extensive communications 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, so helping to marginalize Africans' relationships with mainline Protestant churches.
The investigation's release could not be timelier, as the Ugandan parliament considers the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. Language in that bill echoes the false and malicious charges made in Uganda by U.S antigay activist and Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively that western gays are conspiring to take over Uganda and even the world.
"We need to stand up against the U.S. Christian Right peddling homophobia in Africa," said Kaoma, who in recent weeks asked U.S. evangelist Rick Warren to denounce the bill and distance himself from its supporters. "I heard church people in Uganda say they would go door to door to root out LGBT people and now our brothers and sisters are being further targeted by proposed legislation criminalizing them and threatening them with death. The scapegoating must stop."...
For his 16-month investigation, Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, traveled in the United States and Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria, attended the notorious antigay conference of Uganda's Family Life Network in March, and documented concerns among the region's clergy that U.S. conservatives are contributing to corruption among bishops with their lax requirements for donated funds.
In journalist Kathryn Joyce's interview with Rev. Kaoma, at Religion Dispatches Kaoma further details the American conservative movement's African "proxy war" against the mainline churches, a critical target in the ongoing culture war.
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.