Political Research Associates has published a major report entitled Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia.
The report is written by The Revd Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia.
From the press release:
Groundbreaking PRA Investigation Exposes Influence of U.S. Religious Conservatives in Promoting Homophobia in Africa
U.S. Christian Right also mobilizes African clerics in U.S. “culture war” over ordination of LGBT clergy
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 PRA Project Director 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 the mainline Protestant churches’ recognition of the full equality of LGBT people. It’s working despite the real movement toward full equality within deonominations because of the sensitivity of liberals to the question of colonialism. Are we being insensitive to the realities of Africa? But, Kaoma argues, although U.S. conservatives have organized African religious leaders as a visible force opposing LGBT equality, it is not true that all of Africa takes this stand…
Why am I not surprised. Sniff hard enough and you’ll find something rotting…and it’s on our backstep.
What the American evangelical Christians are doing is colonialism in another form. They are exploiting Africans for the Americans’ own domestic purposes. In doing so, they are creating the seeds for potential catostrophe. It also continues a tradition: In the USA during the civil rights struggles by black people and others in the 1950s and 1960s, many conservative or evangelical protestant Christian churches not only stayed on the sidelines, some denounced the movement as anti-American, anti-biblical, and Communist. As one example, there’s an infamous Virginia court decision upholding Virginia’s ban on inter-racial marriage where the judge opined, among other arguments,… Read more »
Well, this simply cannot be. We have +Abuja’s assurance that what we call homophobia is simply good old fashioned African family values, and something shared by all the Anglican Churches of the Global South™ share*. Why, if this report were true, it would mean that Peter Jasper Akinola is a liar!
*except, of course, for those of New Zealand. And Brazil. Oh, and South Africa. But they don’t count. Somehow.
“As ‘Globalizing the Culture Wars’ reveals, it is U.S. conservatives – including those associated with the neoconservative ‘Institute of Religion and Deomocracy – who have organized African Protestant leaders to protest against any movement towards LGBT equality in U.S. mainline churches. THEIR RELATIVE SILENCE ON SIMILAR DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLAND speaks volumes.” – extract from Foreword to the PRA Report – In his excellent report on ‘U.S Conservatives, African Churches, & Homophobia’, Zambian cleric Kapya Kaoma, highlights the importance of the influence of conservative U.S. churches, in the current tide of homophobia being stirred up among certain Archbishops in African Anglican… Read more »
It is documented that Belgian missionaries in Rwanda fomented the racist distinctions between Tutsi and Hutu that led to the genocide in which Christians were massively involved.
These nauseating anti-gay campaigns are an example of similar evil.
Fr. Ron is right that this report from the PRA should be esssential reading for action to all the provinces of the Anglican Communion. I myself have e mailed my own Scottish Province to ask if they will be supporting the Canadian resolution. It makes you wonder if the Anglican Communion should in fact have a Primate who was not equal but senior to all other Primates and be able to discipline these anti Christian so called Bishops who have no idea of the inclusive Gospel of Love proclaimed in Our Lord Jesus Christ. Again the fundamentalists use money, and… Read more »
What, I wonder, are the real connections between conservative American money and anti-progressive organisations in the UK? And do financial contributions come with an ideological agenda which they expect to see forwarded? I see in the report that the IRD is part funded by Howard Ahmanson Jr’s Fielstead and Co to the tune of $500,000. On the Fieldstead site they acknowledge funding the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies whose Registrar used to be Chris Sugden of Anglican Mainstream. Did Ahmanson fund GAFCON, or does he currently fund AM? We know that a large number of delegates to GAFCON came paid… Read more »
The GAFCON/ FCA matter cannot be properly understood, I think, unless as a Western phenomenon by which other Anglicans in the world are providing ballast. In other words, the extreme Protestant evangelical wing is now but a minority of the Western Churches – and what are they to do? They’ve cottoned on to the idea of strengthening their hand by internationalising, by inventing a World Anglican Church and via their Leninist entryist methods have set up a conference with a pre-arranged outcome to have a new Primates Council and oversight crossing the boundaries. They have done this at a time… Read more »
I would add only Stephen Noll’s co-drafting of the alleged CAPA “Road to Lambeth” to this well-documented essay. The difficulty is that it appears to be open to the same criticism as those it references: funding from an outside source (this time liberal Americans), “assistance” to its African author (U.S. based research team) etc. For these reasons, the truth of its content is likely to be overlooked by those it is most designed to inform.
“It is also a dead give away that the growth of the Anglican Communion in Africa is in direct relationship with gospel proclamation, while the slow but accelerating death of Western pan-Anglicanism is in direct relationship to its failure to articulate the gospel and Mrs. Jefferts Schori’s public repudiation of the need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. – Mr. David Virtue (virtueonline) – This latest diatribe from a former Baptist, now professing to be the voice of ‘Orthodox Anglicans’ in North America (aggrandised by his oxymoronic-titled web-site ‘Virtue-on-Line’) shows something of the panic on the part of ACNA… Read more »
The conclusions of the report “Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia” are at odds with the only serious, academic look at this issue found in “Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism” by Miranda K. Hassett. One review of the book states “Based on wide research, interviews with key participants and observers, and months Hassett spent in a southern U.S. parish of the Episcopal Church of Rwanda and in Anglican communities in Uganda, Anglican Communion in Crisis is the first anthropological examination of the coalition between American Episcopalians and… Read more »