Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "In Our Christian Heritage We Received from the Missionaries, There Is Nothing of That Inclusive Language"

David Gibson writing for Religion News Service today:

"In our Christian heritage we received from the missionaries, there is nothing of that inclusive language," Archbishop Thomas Msusa of the East African nation of Malawi told National Catholic Reporter.

Kapya Kaoma on How Vatican Hypocrisy Endangers LGBTQ People

Yesterday, I wrote that I wonder what Pope Francis will say at the World Meeting of Families this September, given that the Catholic archdiocese hosting this event is headed by an archbishop, Charles Chaput, who is an anti-gay culture warrior with a deplorable track record vis-a-vis the rights of LGBT human beings. Here's Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian-born Anglican priest who's with Political Research Associates, who has blown the whistle on the U.S. religious right's involvement in movements spreading anti-gay hatred in Africa, writing recently about the same topic:

Yes, I Did Remove a Comment Here about "Ethnocentric Racists" Promoting "Sodomy" in Western Nations — Here's Why

A quick note to let you know about this situation, in case it explodes in some way in threads here: those who have followed postings here for some time may know that I posted a number of pieces back in September 2013 about comments (ugly ones) left here by a gentleman living in Nairobi, Mr. Njonjo Ndehi (see here, here, and here).

Contributor to NCR Thread: Russia and Uganda Are Targeting Gays Because Rich Gay Men Want to Molest Russian and African Children

I just wrote,

Roger Ross Williams's Documentary on Exporting of American Homophobic Hatred to Africa: "Gospel of Intolerance"

Diana Butler Bass on Continued Attempt of U.S. Religious Right to Use African Christians in American Culture Wars

Huffington Post recently carried a fine article by Diana Butler Bass, author of A People's History of Christianity (NY: Harper, 2009).  It's about a topic re: which I've blogged repeatedly in the past: the misreading of African versions of Christianity by Western Christians intent on using Africans and the churches of Africa as pawns in lethal culture-war games in the West.

Why Catholics Are Silent: John Allen on Ugandan Situation (2)

In my posting summarizing John Allen’s reflections on Catholic silence about the situation in Uganda, I argued that Allen’s commentary masks the real problem that must be confronted by apologists for Catholic church leaders: this is not, as Allen implies, the question of why Ugandan bishops have failed to follow the Vatican’s lead (the “cover” Allen insists the Vatican has given them) in condemning legislation that would impose the death penalty on gay people. It is, instead, the ongoing silence of the Vatican, and, in particular, of Pope Benedict, about draconian legislation that much of the rest of the world has come to see as morally unjustifiable. As evil . . . .

Neoconservative Political Background to Allen’s Reporting on the African Church

As I noted, Allen’s journalism suffers from his unacknowledged entanglement in the presuppositions and commitments of the American religious right and of Catholic church leaders who have made common cause with the religious right around sexual ethical issues. These include the presupposition that African culture has held onto “traditional family values” (a religious right buzz-phrase that Allen uses in his work) at a point in history at which many Western believers are abdicating those values for an ethic open to homosexuality (and to women’s rights).

The American religious right and Catholic church leaders not only presuppose that African Christianity offers a valuable corrective to the purported abandonment of “traditional family values” by many Western Christians. They go further and involve themselves actively in African religious and political discussions, to bolster those “traditional family values”—as well as hostility to and fear of those who are gay—in order to use African culture and religion as a weapon to invalidate gay-affirming or gay-welcoming stances in churches of the West.

This has been a highly effective political and media strategy of powerful neoconservative anti-gay activist groups in the U.S., including the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), which was founded by Catholic neoconservatives to divide mainline Protestant churches over issues like homosexuality in order to mute the economic critique of these churches in American politics. Central to the tactic of marginalizing the social witness of mainline Protestant churches in order to mute their voices in socioeconomic debates has been an ongoing, deliberate attempt to use the churches of Africa as tools to divide Western churches.

This use of the gay issue and the African churches to divide mainline Protestant churches and block their social witness is evident from the moment one logs into the IRD website and sees its welcome statement announcing that IRD is “an ecumenical alliance of Christians working to reform their churches’ social witness.” As Andrew J. Weaver and Nicole Seibert demonstrate in a 2004 article entitled “Church and Scaife” (and see here), what “reform” really means here is “attack.” Weaver and Seibert note that IRD is a “pseudo-religious think-tank that carries out the goals of its secular funders that are opposed to the churches’ historic social witness.”

They also note that two of the three founders of the organization were key Catholic leaders of the radical right wing of the neoconservative movement, Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel. Both were influential in the Bush administration, and both were overtly involved in the American government’s attempt to discredit and destroy the Catholic liberation theology movement in developing nations.

IRD’s current president, Mark Tooley, is a former CIA employee. The thick connections between IRD and right-wing political groups are extensively documented in Stephen Swecker’s Hard Ball on Holy Ground (2005), which concludes that the bottom line of IRD and its funders is to promote neoconservative economic policy, and to shred governmental regulation of business and of social safety nets (and see here).

As these and other scholars tracking the IRD’s activities, political connections, and funders note, one of the primary ways that this political organization seeks to undercut the social teaching of mainline churches is by inducing schism in those churches over issues like gay rights. Again, visit IRD’s website and click on the link to “Issues” of primary concern to IRD as it tries to “reform” the churches’ social witness, and the very first link you’ll find—it’s at the top of the list, indicating its importance to IRD’s political agenda—is “Marriage.”

And what do you find when you click that link? You immediately discover yourself launched into a discussion of an African Christian statement about marriage presented to the UMC General Conference in 2008, which announces that the only thinkable pattern for marriage is a lifelong union of one man and one woman. This statement is followed immediately with a slighting reference to Bishop Gene Robinson’s “marriage” (IRD uses the quotation marks), which, IRD suggests, is celebrated by decadent Western Christians who have departed from an orthodoxy that African Christianity maintains in the face of Western imperialism.

There you have it in a nutshell: African Christianity traditional and good; progressive currents in Western Christianity heretical and bad. The use of African people and African churches to further a right-wing political agenda in the West, which is intent to divide the churches in order to “reform” their social witness, could not be more evident.

And so the serious threat posed to groups like IRD by the growing worldwide abhorrence of the Ugandan legislation, and by voices like Rev. Kapya Kaoma’s in his whistle-blowing report about the activities of right-wing Western politico-religious groups stirring anti-gay hatred in Africa. On 24 November, Jeff Walton, IRD’s communications director, filed an IRD report about Rev. Kaoma’s Globalizing the Culture Wars, whose publisher Political Research Associates clearly identifies it as written by Kapya Kaoma.

But if you were relying on IRD for information about this report, you wouldn’t know, without careful digging and tortured exegesis, that an African Anglican priest, Kapya Kaoma, authored the report. Walton begins his analysis (second paragraph) by stating that Globalizing the Culture Wars was “authored by Political Research Associates.” We’re then treated to seven paragraphs of vituperation against PRA before we read that Kapya Kaoma is actually the report’s author—and then we get several more paragraphs of personal attack on Kaoma, which seek to portray him as a bogus African who has, IRD suggests, practically destroyed the parish he pastors in the U.S.

Nor would you know, as you read this report, that IRD’s reporter Jeff Walton has political-religious baggage and telling commitments of his own. Go to his biography on the IRD website, though, and you find that he’s actively involved in the movement to split the worldwide Anglican communion over gay issues, and that he has been systems administrator for Virginia Republican Congressman Frank Wolf and legislative correspondent for the Republican Representative from North Carolina Virginia Foxx, who disgraced herself (and, in my view, her fellow Catholics) on the House floor this past April by maintaining that Matthew Shepard was not murdered because he was gay, while Shepard’s mother sat across from her.

Groups like the IRD have been highly effective at planting in mainstream media discourse a forceful narrative suggesting that churches that welcome and affirm gay people are abandoning the gospel and Christian tradition, and that only those churches which hold the line against gays are thriving today. A corollary of this narrative is the claim that only a minority of Western Christians welcome and affirm gay people, while the vast majority of Christians in the developing nations—who stoutly hold “traditional family values” in the face of strong pressures from the West to abandon those values—remain committed to tradition and to the gospel.

John Allen’s Reporting on the African Church: Reinforcing the Neocon Narrative

John Allen’s reporting about the African church stands against a backdrop of these neoconservative presuppositions and commitments, and it has consistently sought to further the dominant narrative I have just described, and to strengthen its power in the mainstream media, where Allen is considered a premier spokesperson on matters Catholic in the U.S. What is happening in Uganda now—and, in particular, the deafening silence of Benedict about this situation—represents a serious challenge to those neoconservative thinkers and groups that have developed the meme of African church = fidelity to the gospel, Western progressive churches = abandonment of the gospel.

As I noted Friday, in my view, Allen’s attempt to explain the silence of Catholic leaders about the Ugandan situation is unconvincing in the extreme, because it fails to grapple with the central problem confronting Catholic apologists. This is Benedict’s ongoing silence. It is clear that one of Allen’s key underlying intents is to deflect attention from Benedict’s silence about Uganda—to explain it away; to justify it—though he never mentions the pope at all in his article (and that in itself is interesting for what it suggests about Allen’s wish to shield the pope from criticism). In fact, he mentions the Vatican only three times.

The burden of the article’s argument is that Ugandan Catholics have been strangely silent—though Allen himself cites evidence that, far from being silent about the impending legislation to make gay people susceptible to capital punishment, Ugandan Catholics are actually happy about the legislation, on the whole.

Ugandan Catholics are silent, Allen implies, because the “colonial experience” sensitizes them to the imperialistic efforts of Western progressives to push against homophobia in African cultures. They are silent because they are committed to “traditional positions on sexual ethics” that they are loath to give up, even when those positions are now implicated in legislation that would make merely being gay or lesbian cause for capital punishment.

Note how this argument lets Benedict and the Vatican off the hook. It implies that, in a highly top-down hierarchical church which the present pope has sought to make even more top-down, those with the chief responsibility to speak out are Ugandan Catholics themselves! And they can’t do so because they’re being pressed by Western progressives who act like colonizers.

This argument totally overlooks—it shields by silence—the responsibility of leaders of Christian churches to point the way, when such moral threats arise anywhere in the world. It totally overlooks the responsibility of Christian leaders to make unambiguous, strong, public statements in the face of impending evil like a nation’s decision to adopt legislation that makes a minority group susceptible to capital punishment.

Allen is employing the kind of argument that corporate leaders or apologists for those leaders always use when they want to deflect attention from leaders’ responsibility for bad decisions or inaction at times of crisis. He is shifting the burden to those at the bottom, who have nowhere near the power Benedict has to make a dent in the mind of the Ugandan legislature as this legislation is under consideration. He is permitting the Vatican to slough off any responsibility for its silence by his argument that a single ambiguous statement by a low-level Vatican official, which did not even mention Uganda, was an attempt of the Vatican to provide “cover” for Ugandan Catholics to speak out.

As if the Vatican dearly wishes to make a public statement, but finds itself compelled to be silent, for fear of placing Ugandan Catholics in a tight spot, for fear of making them susceptible to reprisal for bucking the social trend. If this bogus argument about the Vatican’s silence re: the Ugandan situation sounds familiar, that’s because it is familiar.

It is precisely the same argument that has been advanced to justify the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust. Though Benedict has just declared Pius XII venerable (the first step to sainthood), there remains strong criticism from many quarters, including the Jewish community, of Pius’s silence as the Holocaust took place. Apologists for Pius argue that he personally intervened to save the lives of several Jews during the Holocaust, that he was unable to speak out without endangering more lives, and that he worked quietly and diplomatically behind the scenes to oppose the Holocaust.

Critics—including many Catholics—argue that nothing can excuse the silence of the premier moral voice of the church at a time when targeted minorities were being murdered in “Christian” nations. Those who find Pius’s silence abhorrent argue that the pope’s unambiguous, decisive voice urging Catholics everywhere to combat mass murder would have galvanized resistance in Nazi-occupied nations whose Catholic population was either mostly silent during the Holocaust, or actively in support of it.

The critical assessment of Pius’s role during the Nazi years points to the undeniable and strong anti-Semitism in many Catholic nations, and suggests that one of the shameful reasons that Pius found it impossible to speak unambiguously and decisively against the Holocaust was that the church itself is deeply implicated in anti-Jewish prejudice from which it was unwilling to extricate itself as Christian nations executed Jews during the Nazi period.

Obviously, the historical context of Pius XII’s silence during the Holocaust makes Benedict’s silence about Uganda now all the more perplexing—and exceptionally dangerous to him and others who wish to defend the Catholic church’s teachings about LGBT persons or on human rights. When one remembers that Benedict grew up in the Nazi period in Germany and was a Hitler Youth, one sees immediately that, in remaining silent as Uganda debates putting gay people to death, Benedict courts strong criticism that may undermine his effectiveness as a moral leader even more decisively than the silence of Catholic leaders about clerical molestation of children has already done.

Benedict’s Silence: A Serious Problem for the Neocon Narrative

And so the problem with which John Allen is grappling in his reporting on the Ugandan situation: in what is now occurring in Uganda, we see the practical consequences of years of involvement of the American religious right (with strong, overt support from Catholic leaders including Benedict) in the churches in Africa. The homophobia that these religious leaders have deliberately seeded in African churches, with the intent of bolstering the homophobia of Western churches combating the move to affirmation and welcome of gay believers, is expressing itself in the most extreme way possible, through the demand for capital punishment of gay folks. Extreme, but logical: this demand is the ultimate logical outcome of the rhetoric and action of those Christian groups promoting homophobia within the African context in order to strengthen resistance to gay folks in Western churches.

Now that the ultimate goal—the logical goal—of the anti-gay movement in Western churches, which is all about silencing and removing gay people from church and society, has become apparent in Uganda’s extreme proposal for capital punishment, many of those Western Christians who have promoted homophobia in the African context have no choice except to dissociate themselves from what is happening in Uganda. The Ugandan situation exposes the malice at the heart of the anti-gay movement in Western churches—its intent to dehumanize gay persons and make them invisible in church and society.

But it does so in a horrific absolutist way that undercuts the claim to moral validity of the anti-gay movement in Western churches. The Ugandan legislation serves as a salient reminder that you can’t have a modicum of prejudice and discrimination—a modicum of working to dehumanize a minority group and make that group invisible—without setting into motion a chain of events whose ultimate logic will be to try to make the targeted group really invisible, absolutely and completely so. You can’t have a modicum of attempts to dehumanize a group and make it disappear without setting into motion events that will finally seek to imprison and execute the targeted minority group . . . .

The Ugandan development thus forces Western Christians—including Catholic leaders—who have helped set the stage for what is happening in Uganda to make a painful decision. On the one hand, not to repudiate the Ugandan legislation outright, vocally and unambiguously, makes one a party to sheer, obvious evil. It makes one a party to sheer, obvious evil every bit as much as those who remained silent in the face of the rise of the Nazi party in Germany are now considered to have been silent partners in the Nazis’ murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, gypsies, mentally and physically challenged people, homosexuals, and others.

On the other hand, for those Western Christian groups that have played a significant role in creating the situation in Uganda, to speak out is also to admit that the way “traditional family values” are being promoted by many Western Christians has an undeniable diabolical edge, a diabolical potential exposed by the Ugandan legislation. What is happening in Uganda is part and parcel of the rhetoric of “traditional family values” so strongly defended by many Western Christians. It is not an aberration of that rhetoric. It is its logical, ultimate extension.

To speak out strongly, publicly, and unambiguously in condemnation of what is under consideration in Uganda requires those Christian leaders—Benedict included, Benedict notably—who have had a hand in creating the Ugandan situation to admit responsibility for this situation, and to reconsider the rhetoric and ethical teachings that have brought Uganda to this precipice. And that’s the dilemma—the rock and the hard place—with which John Allen’s article about Catholic silence vis-à-vis Uganda seeks to help Catholic leaders deal.

Allen’s Reporting on African Synod as Replication of Neocon Narrative

The dilemma John Allen is now facing is built into his reporting on the African church. Not only does this reporting uncritically incorporate (and therefore replicate, with a leading American Catholic reporter’s stamp of approval) the neocon and religious right narrative about the church in Africa. It also provides abundant evidence of Catholic involvement in and responsibility for developing and spreading that narrative in Africa—and thus, for creating the situation in Uganda, which now demands an outspoken Catholic response.

Allen’s journalistic style consistently embeds prescription within what purports to be value-free description. It is prescriptive in the guise of being descriptive, objective, disinterested. One of Allen’s favorite journalistic ploys is to wear a mask of detached innocence as he “describes” battles between right and left from which he himself is presumably aloof.

But read his narratives carefully, and it becomes immediately apparent that—as with other centrist mainstream political and religious commentators who use a similar journalistic technique—John Allen’s real commitments and unacknowledged interests lean to the center-right. To the center-right (which always discredits the left altogether while finding large room even for extreme positions of the right) that journalists of his ilk like to remind us is normative, the place in which moderation and reason reside as the extreme left and right battle things out. Allen’s right-leaning description of how things supposedly are, when we take off our ideological blinders, is loaded with prescription about how they should be, even as he poses as a disinterested centrist who is merely telling us what he sees.

And, interestingly enough, what Allen sees when he looks at the African church with supposedly unvarnished eyes is very much what the IRD and the American religious right see: a corrective to the Western church, particularly in the area of “traditional family values.” This neocon prescription of African Christianity as a corrective to decadent Western values runs—under the guise of descriptive reporting—all through John Allen’s reporting on the African synod this past fall.

For instance, turn to Allen’s midpoint summary of the synod on 16 October, and you’ll find him declaring (prescription embedded in purported description),

If the first point [i.e., African Christianity is driving Christians in the West to greater social engagement] seems to cut in what Americans might consider a “liberal” direction, the approach of the African bishops to issues of gender, the family, and sexual morality moves decisively in the opposite direction. On that cluster of concerns, forming what Americans know as the “culture wars,” the growing influence of Africa seems likely to steer Catholicism toward a more conservative posture.

Allen follows that observation—which completely ignores any American involvement in exporting Western culture wars to Africa, a theme about which John Allen is always silent when he reports on the African church—with statements by Archbishop Joseph Tlhagale of South Africa and Archbishop Charles Palmer-Buckle of Ghana which claim that there is a “second wave of colonization” coming from the West, which represents a “deliberate campaign” to force African Christians to accept abortion and homosexuality. On the basis of these reports, Allen concludes that “the synod will issue a defense of traditional family values.”

Set these seemingly disinterested reports from Africa side by side with the religious right and neocon narrative about the African church developed by groups like IRD, and what’s striking is how uncannily close they are to each other: what John Allen is “reporting” about the church in Africa, a purportedly disinterested description of what Africans believe and think, is precisely what neocon political activists and the American religious right have been prescribing for some time now for the African church. It is precisely what these groups have been working for some decades now, according to Rev. Kapya Kaoma, to effect in the African church.

Again, what is totally lacking in these “disinterested” reports is any recognition at all—any admission at all—that what Allen is reporting about the African church as a prescription for the Western church is something being disseminated to African Christians by strong, well-funded political and religious groups in the West. There’s no recognition at all that a phrase he uses as if it is merely a statement of disinterested reporting—“traditional family values”—was, in fact, invented by the American religious right as a political tool to bash gay folks.

Or that the American religious right has worked for decades now to induce among African Christians the sense that they are being “re-colonized” by Western progressives who want to impose decadent Western sexual values on African Christians. While those Western groups maintaining that such neocolonialism is taking place are themselves spending countless dollars to beam their message of fear and loathing of LGBT people to African churches . . . .

Furthermore, though Allen’s article about the perplexing silence of Ugandan Catholics re: the legislation now under consideration in their country seeks to imply that Catholics would condemn this legislation if they could, if they could only find a voice, his reporting on the African synod demonstrates that not merely highly placed African Catholic officials, but the Vatican itself, has worked very hard to plant the anti-gay narrative of the American religious right in Africa.

Read Allen’s article on the synod entitled “A Consistent Ethic of Life,” for instance, and you’ll find him reporting that at the synod, the conservative half of the African soul “found its voice” when representatives such as Archbishop Robert Sarah of Guinea, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, informed his brother bishops that pernicious Western progressive groups were promoting a “theory of gender” in Africa that would call for acceptance of gay and lesbian people.

As Allen notes, though, the most forceful statement made at the synod about these themes was made by a non-African Vatican official, Italian Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, who joined Sarah in blasting Western “gender theory,” which, he said, “is starting to infiltrate associations, governments and even some ecclesial environments in the African continent,” often “heavily disguised.” Antonielli stated,

For example, equality of people no longer just means equal dignity and access to fundamental human rights, but also the irrelevance of the natural differences between men and women, the uniformity of all individuals, as though they were sexually undifferentiated, and therefore the equality of all sexual orientations and behavior: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, polymorphous.

This ideology is spread by reproductive health centers, local educational meetings and international TV programs broadcast via satellite. Collaboration of African governments and local groups, including ecclesial groups, is sought, and these groups usually don’t realize the ethically unacceptable anthropological implications of this.

And Benedict himself? Has he remained aloof from this clear, obtrusive attempt of Western Catholic church officials to stir up among African Christians the sense that they are under attack by insidious Western forces trying to re-colonize the continent, infiltrate it, and alter “traditional” African culture by inserting “heavily disguised” messages antithetical to the culture in educational materials, health pamphlets, and so forth?

Unfortunately not. In fact, Cardinal Antonelli appears to be echoing the pope directly in these inflammatory statements that so closely toe the line of American religious right and neocon activist groups. At his opening liturgy for the African synod three days before Antonelli delivered the preceding remarks at the synod, Benedict informed the liturgy’s participants, most of them African bishops, that

The so-called “first world” has exported and is still exporting its toxic spiritual refuse, which infect the populations of other continents, especially in Africa. Colonialism is finished in a political sense, but it’s not completely gone away.

Toxic spiritual refuse, social infection by insidious hidden groups infiltrating the culture, and re-colonization of Africa by such groups: this is dangerous rhetoric. It’s inflammatory rhetoric. It has strong overtones of the very similar Nazi rhetoric about the Jews—a people who “infect” Christian civilization by inserting sneaky “heavily disguised” messages into ordinary-seeming discourse, infectious messages that sap the moral and spiritual vitality of those infected. This is the kind of rhetoric that led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust, and has justified repeated atrocious acts for centuries in which Christian people have rounded up, imprisoned, and then expelled or killed Jews.

There is a direct line between such rhetoric, with its Naziesque overtomes, and what is now taking place in Uganda. The American religious right and its neoconservative political allies have worked for some decades now to induce fear and loathing of gay people in African societies, using language eerily reminiscent of that used to justify the murder of millions of Jews by Christians during the Holocaust. And, to its discredit, rather than challenge that rhetoric, or a political alliance that undercuts the claims of the church to defend human rights and resist destructive forms of capitalism, leading Catholic officials have done all they can to promote the rhetoric. To fan the flames of anti-gay hatred among their co-religionists in Africa.

And Benedict himself is implicated, with his talk about Western groups “infecting” African Christianity, with his counter-factual statement that condom use does not prevent but fosters the spread of AIDS in Africa, and above all, with his designation of gay and lesbian persons as “objectively disordered” in their very nature and personhood, in his 1986 pastoral document on the care of homosexual persons in the church. A document whose very first effect was to produce the expulsion (the disappearance) of gay and lesbian Catholic groups like Dignity from church premises, and thus the disappearance of many gay and lesbian Catholics from parishes in which they suddenly found themselves told they were unwelcome . . . .

You cannot designate a group of human beings as “objectively disordered” without dehumanizing that group of human beings. You cannot suggest that a group of human beings is subhuman without inviting violence against them. As the example of Nazi Germany demonstrates, you cannot then speak of a minority group whom you have defined as subhuman as an “infection” without inviting the permanent removal of that group from society, through acts of unspeakable violence.

It is not to Benedict’s credit that he continues refusing to speak out about Uganda. On 17 December—last Thursday—Benedict met with Francis K. Butagira, the new Ugandan ambassador to the Holy See. And what did the pope, the moral voice of an influential and vast religious group, say to this dignitary on this occasion that cried out for a statement about a situation in which that ambassador’s nation is mulling over the death penalty for gay citizens?

Not a word. Not a word about the pending legislation that may make being gay susceptible to the death penalty. Not a word about human rights.

Instead, Benedict used the occasion to praise Uganda for the “respect” it shows the church. He stated, “Diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Republic of Uganda continue to offer many opportunities for mutual assistance and cooperation for the spiritual good and welfare of the people of your nation.”

Not a single word about, not even an allusion to, legislation that may set into motion capital punishment for people who happen to be gay. Benedict’s continued silence is scandalous in the extreme.

John Allen knows this. And that’s why he seeks to give Benedict cover, as he puzzles over the strange Catholic silence about Uganda. The longer the silence goes on, the more strongly it calls into question the religious right and neocon narrative that Allen and others have promoted about the African church. And the more it points to the role that Catholic leaders, including the pope himself, have played in creating and reinforcing that narrative. And to the connections between the indefensible magisterial teaching that gay human beings are objectively disordered and acts of violence against LGBT people . . . .

Benedict’s continued silence points to connections between a destructive narrative he has helped design, to justify the disappearance of LGBT persons from church and society, and similar narratives about the Jews through Christian history that also eventually pointed to extermination of a despised minority group. A narrative regarding which a previous pope was also silent as millions of Jews were murdered . . . .

Why Catholics Are Silent: John Allen on Catholic Response to Ugandan Situation

In this week’s issue of National Catholic Reporter, John Allen tackles the question of Catholic silence (institutional Catholic silence) about what’s taking place in Uganda. And, as he does so, he unfortunately deepens rather than resolves critical questions about why Catholic officials are unable to address the Ugandan situation forthrightly and unambiguously—indeed, about why leading Catholic officials have been unable to say anything at all about Uganda, when even Rick Warren, some Manhattan Declaration signatories, members of the Family, and the Archbishop of Canterbury have found words to critique the legislation pending before the Ugandan parliament.

Rome’s silence is problematic. It is clearly problematic for Allen, who is, in general, a Vatican apologist—and an ally of neoconservative political and religious movements in the U.S. that have a vested interest in polishing up the Vatican’s image when they need more overt Catholic support in their culture-war battles to keep women in their place and punish gays.

It’s important to keep in mind this overweening objective of Allen’s article about Catholic silence re: the Ugandan situation: it’s first and foremost an apologetic article designed to let the Vatican—and the Ugandan bishops and African Catholics in general—off the hook. As one world leader after another—both political and religious—speaks out against legislation that is absolutely indefensible on any Christian moral ground, legislation that seeks to impose the death penalty on human beings simply because they are born gay, the silence of Benedict appears more perplexing each day.

More than that: it appears downright evil—silent complicity with what many people of good will can see as an unambiguous evil that deserves unambiguous moral condemnation by people of faith. John Allen needs desperately to find ways to let Benedict off the hook, as the mainstream media in Western nations sound the alarm about Uganda and dissect the incontrovertible role that various religious groups in Western nations—including Catholics—have played in setting the stage for what is now taking place in Uganda.

Allen on “Anti-Gay Bill in Uganda Challenges Catholics to Take a Stand”

These concerns—the concern to find ways to justify a Catholic silence that cannot be justified, as well as the concern to deflect attention from the role that neocon politics and the religious right (including Catholics) have played in creating conditions for anti-gay violence in Africa—were already apparent in an article Allen wrote for NCR at the end of November on the Ugandan situation.

In this article, entitled “Anti-Gay Bill in Uganda Challenges Catholics to Take a Stand,” Allen employs a tactic that is characteristic of his musings on the Catholic church in Africa—he seeks to shift the blame for the surging anti-gay sentiment in Africa from Africans themselves and onto the shoulders of progressives in the West who are, he maintains, seeking to impose Western cultural values antithetical to traditional African values on the people of that continent:

Today, however, there is an increasingly punitive mood on the continent, which many analysts regard as an equal-and-opposite reaction to the culture wars in the West: the more Europe and the States insist on gay rights, the more African societies push back.

What is remarkable about this argument is that it totally ignores the abundant and rapidly increasing body of evidence that the West has been actively promoting not tolerant attitudes towards LGBT human beings in Africa, but virulently hateful ones. By the end of November, when Allen wrote the preceding statement, Public Eye had published the whistle-blowing report of Zambian Anglican priest Kapya Kaoma (and here and here), which exposes the longstanding attempts of right-wing Christian groups in the West—including the Institute on Religion and Democracy, founded largely by American Catholic neocon activists—to stir resentment in Africa about the purported push of Western progressives to challenge homophobia and misogyny in African culture.

Kaoma notes,

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.

The “utter hysteria” to which Kaoma is referring here is what happened in March 2009 when Scott Lively, right-wing evangelist and president of an anti-gay hate group in the U.S., visited Uganda, warning that gays posed a threat to Ugandan children and families. The current capital-punishment-for-gays bill was introduced shortly after Lively’s inflammatory visit to Uganda. Those introducing the bill met with Lively before they drafted the legislation. Lively is, by the way, a recent signer of the Manhattan Declaration.

Not a peep of any of this in John Allen’s musings on Catholic silence in Uganda at the end of November—though by this time, Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, had begun making the rounds of mainstream media circuits to discuss the involvement of the powerful right-wing evangelical-political group the Family in Uganda; evangelical activist Warren Throckmorton had written a powerful article for Crosswalk.com calling on American Christians to speak out; and Rachel Maddow was doughtily pursuing the story of American religious groups’ responsibility for the Ugandan situation in nightly broadcasts at MSNBC.com. (For documentation of the preceding claims, I refer readers once again to the stellar work of Box Turtle Bulletin on the Ugandan story, summarized here).

Though a compelling body of evidence had begun to prove that the Ugandan anti-gay legislation was, to a great degree, a product of anti-gay Western religious groups intent on exporting a Western culture war to Africa, at the end of November, as he tried to parse the puzzling Catholic silence about Uganda, John Allen wanted to convince his readers that the Ugandan situation was a response, instead, to the efforts of progressive groups in the West to push against homophobia in African nations!

Allen’s end of November statement is noteworthy, too, because it indicates Allen’s primary (and growing) concern in his coverage of the Ugandan-and-Catholic-silence story. As he notes,

As time goes on, Catholic silence will be increasingly unsustainable, especially if the bill comes up for a vote.

Indeed. As it turns out, Allen was absolutely correct in his intuition here. The more the mainstream media have pursued this story in the final months of the year, and the more world leaders have spoken out, the more indefensible Catholic silence—particularly the silence of Pope Benedict—has come to appear. And so Allen’s latest article, “Why Catholics Aren’t Speaking Up in Uganda about Anti-Gay Bill” (link provided above), which seeks implicitly to defend and excuse that silence with a set of arguments that compound the problem of Catholic silence rather than solve it.

Allen on “Why Catholics Aren’t Speaking Up in Uganda about Anti-Gay Bill”

Allen begins by acknowledging that even “fairly conservative” Christian leaders like Rick Warren and some Manhattan Declaration signers have spoken out to condemn the Ugandan anti-gay legislation. Obviously, these developments raise serious questions about the continued Catholic silence.

And there’s more:

The latest development is that in mid-December, the Interreligious Council of Uganda, the country’s major inter-faith body – one which includes the Catholic Church – came out in support of the bill.

Got that? This article’s title suggests that the problem we need to address is why Catholics aren’t speaking up about legislation that would apply the death penalty to gays in Uganda. But the reality is that “the Interreligious Council of Uganda, the country’s major inter-faith body—one which includes the Catholic Church—[just] came out in support of the bill.”

The reality is that Ugandan Catholics support this legislation. The problem to be explained is not the silence of Catholics supposedly critical of use of the death penalty against homosexuals. The problem is to explain Catholic support for capital punishment of a minority group, use of the death penalty to eradicate a whole group of human beings from society solely because of who they were born to be. The problem is to explain the silence of the leader of the Catholic church, Benedict, when strong evidence suggests that his flock in a country seeking to impose the death penalty on a sexual minority widely support such a move.

As Allen goes on to note, Uganda is over 40% Catholic, and it appears that among that significant segment of the population, there is “some grassroots Catholic support” for the Ugandan legislation. As a matter of fact, Catholic support for the Ugandan kill-the-gays bill is considerably more widespread than Allen suggests with that offhand phrase about “some” grassroots Catholic support.

Allen goes on to report that he had recently spoken with Deo Rubumba Nkunzingoma, a Catholic attorney who chairs the Uganda Law Society’s Legislation Committee and the Catholic Association of Professionals of Uganda. Nkunzingoma told Allen that the anti-gay bill “is being received very well, with a lot of support from the cross section of people I have talked to.” Homosexuality, he said, “is largely considered an abnormality in our setting.”

And so we get to the real heart of the problem facing Allen, despite what the misleading title of the article wants us to assume—the problem of understanding why Catholics are not merely silent about, but appear actively to be supporting, this legislation:

From the outside, the lack of any critical Catholic reaction to the most punitive elements of the bill can seem almost inexplicable. At least the death penalty provision, and the prospect of criminalizing even routine pastoral contact with homosexuals, would seem like no-brainers for Catholic protest.

Since this problem clearly implicates the Vatican—tacere, consentire—and since Allen is a Vatican insider whose work consistently spins indefensible Vatican actions or teachings as thinkable and explicable, his next step is to address the Vatican’s silence. He does so by implying—without a scrap of credible evidence—that the Vatican would dearly love to help Ugandan Catholics take a bold stand about this legislation, but has found itself in a predicament.

As I’ve noted in a previous posting, the sole Vatican statement that has been made thus far about the Ugandan situation is a weak and ambiguous, if welcome, condemnation of violence against LGBT persons and the use of the death penalty. This statement, which was made by webcast to a U.N. committee, did not even mention Uganda, and came from a low-level Vatican official.

Here’s John Allen’s take on it:

The Vatican has even offered a bit of “cover” for Catholics in Uganda to speak up.

On Dec. 10, a Vatican diplomat addressed a United Nations panel on anti-gay violence, saying that “the Holy See continues to oppose all grave violations of human rights against homosexual persons, such as the use of the death penalty … [and] discriminatory penal legislation.” Though there was no direct reference to Uganda, the context seemed clear enough, especially since the Ugandan legislation was a major focus of the panel’s deliberations.

The poor vexed Vatican, which will be damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t speak out, has tried to offer “cover” for Ugandan Catholics who find themselves tongue-tied as they confront legislation that would apply the death penalty to their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters—though Ugandans are the major religious group in the nation, and a powerful presence in Ugandan government and society.

And so, Allen is now compelled to ask: “Why the reticence of Ugandan Catholic leaders?” And here, we get the same tired—and inexplicably ill-informed—argument that African Christians have no choice except to push back against Western intrusion. Here, Allen offers us once again the “colonial experience” argument—the claim that progressive groups promoting Western sexual ideas are interfering in African culture like 18th- and 19th-century colonists, trampling on “traditional” African values and seeking to remake the continent in the image of the West.

What’s absolutely baffling about this argument is the way in which it totally ignores—as with Allen’s late-November article, it’s completely silent on this point—the abundant, incontrovertible evidence that the colonizing and meddling which have been taking place in Uganda and elsewhere are taking place at the hands of right-wing politico-religious groups rather than progressive ones—groups in the U.S. and elsewhere intent on exporting America’s culture wars to Africa, so that these political and religious groups can then turn around and tell progressive Christians in the West that advocating for humane treatment of gays and lesbians in the West will divide the global church. And that such advocacy is imperialistic, racist, and not respectful of cultural diversity.

It is, in fact, precisely these American right-wing political and religious groups that have developed the argument Allen is using here, and who have successfully seeded it in the mainstream media for some time now—the argument that tolerance and acceptance of gays and lesbians is peculiar to the West, and that Western progressives are blindly seeking to impose their peculiar cultural norms on the “traditional” cultures of developing nations, which are impervious to such tolerance and acceptance. In continuing to promote this rhetoric to excuse African Catholic (and Vatican) silence about Uganda, Allen is carrying water for the American religious right—and for the Vatican.

And it gets stranger: as have apologists for Pius XII’s twisted, inexplicable silence while the death penalty was being imposed on Jews, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, and others in Nazi Germany, Allen seeks to argue, in conclusion, that the Vatican is holding its tongue because making a statement about the Ugandan situation might “backfire”:

My hunch is that the Vatican and national bishops’ conferences around the world would be eager to lend their support should the Ugandan bishops say something, but they also realize that any effort to compel a statement could easily backfire.

How might a statement by the world’s Catholic leaders about what is happening in Uganda “backfire”? Well, there’s that culture-war thing again:

Africa’s Catholic leaders have an opportunity to carve out a distinctive approach to what the West knows as the “culture wars,” one that blends traditional positions on sexual ethics with a holistic embrace of the church’s broader social justice concerns. That may indeed require bucking conventional wisdom in the West – but it may also require challenging some social conventions at home, too.

In short, we in the West—we who are faithful Catholics—need the homophobia of African nations. It’s “traditional.” It’s consonant with “traditional family values”—a religious-right buzz-phrase Allen actually uses in reporting on the African church and its much-needed contributions to the West.

We want and need the homophobia, because it’s part and parcel of our defense of “traditional family values” in the culture wars of the West. But we don’t want and need the violence, the hatred, the capital punishment and imprisonment of gays and lesbians. Though we’ve incited precisely all of this by encouraging “traditional family values” in Africa, in order to score points in our Western culture wars. And though the violence and hatred are part and parcel of the rhetoric about “traditional family values” and how gays are a threat to those values.

Quite a pickle, isn’t it? But it’s precisely where the Catholic church has worked hard to place itself for some decades now, and it does little good to pretend that the bitter fruits being borne now in Uganda aren’t, to a certain extent (to a large extent, if we’re honest), Catholic fruits.

It does little good to pretend . . . . That’s what the preceding argument is: it’s pretense. It asks us to go down the rabbit hole with Alice and enter wonderland, as we scratch our heads and try to figure out the perplexing silence of Pope Benedict, of other leading Catholic figures, and of Ugandan Catholics, as the death penalty is debated for gays in Uganda.

And that, readers, will be my starting point in a subsequent posting about Allen’s NCR essay—one that pays attention to his previous articles about African Catholicism, which will document more extensively my claim that John Allen has, for some time now, been developing the religious right argument that it is Western progressives and not conservatives who are inciting homophobia in Africa. And that Catholics in the West need the “traditional family values” of Africa—an argument Benedict himself has made forcefully, and which is deeply interwoven with the homophobia now manifesting itself in places like Uganda. Hence Benedict’s inability to condemn that homophobia even when it is moving in the direction of capital punishment . . . .

It Takes a Village: Abby Scheer on Keeping the Media Honest re: American Churches and Anti-Gay Movements in Africa

The Ugandan story continues to simmer. I recommend Gwen Thompkins’ summary of what’s taking place in that nation, vis-à-vis gay citizens, on NPR’s “Morning Edition” today. Thompkins concludes unambiguously that the ultimate objective of the Ugandan legislation is “to remove gay people from society.”

She also notes the close ties of American conservative evangelicals, including Rick Warren and Scott Lively, to Ugandan leaders. As I’ve noted previously, Lively is president of a group, Abiding Truth Ministries, classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay hate group (and see here and here).

I welcome the mainstream media’s attempt to deal with a story to which it has paid insufficient attention in the past—the connection of American churches to anti-gay extremism in African nations. I also welcome the spotlight now focused in these media reports on extremists like Scott Lively.

At the same time, I think what may be lost sight of, now that the media have finally recognized the significance of the African anti-gay story (and its religious roots in the United States), is the following: it’s not merely extreme right-wing evangelical religious groups that have fanned the flames of anti-gay hatred in Africa. It’s “moderate” and mainline churches that are implicated in the outbreak of homophobic hate in Africa, as well.

Abby Scheer alluded to this important backstory in a powerful statement at Religion Dispatches earlier this week. Scheer argues that it has taken a village to get the story of what’s occurring in Uganda into the mainstream media. As she observes this, she also suggests the odds against which those trying to get the story into the media have had to work:

U.S. conservative evangelicals operating in Africa have seemed untouchable–and now they are not because of credible research establishing Rick Warren’s role in fomenting homophobia in Africa, and the strong and brave work of human rights groups in publicizing the threat.

The credible research to which Abby Scheer is pointing in the preceding statement is the recent Public Eye report, Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia by Zambian Anglican priest Kapya Kaoma (and here), about which I blogged in October. Rev. Kaoma presents a compelling, well-documented case for the thick involvement of American evangelicals in African anti-gay movements.

The primary reason that U.S. religious leaders working to foment hostility of gays in Africa have been “untouchable” in the mainstream media until recently is that those religious leaders have been not only extremist figures like Lively, but are, in many cases, “moderate” leaders of mainline churches. Who are acting with strong support from leading Catholic neoconservative activists . . . .

I’ve told my own pieces of this backstory on this blog. As I’ve noted, I became aware of how influential leaders of mainline churches in the U.S. were promoting homophobia in African churches in order to block inclusion of gays in American churches through my work in two United Methodist colleges from the mid-1990s up to 2007. Both were United Methodist HBCUs.

Through my close contact with Methodist bishops and clergy in these two institutions, as well as with African-American academic leaders who had been trained in the governing structures of the UMC, I became aware that there are exceptionally strong movements in the UMC—a mainline, “moderate” church—that are actively working to promote homophobia in African churches, in order to justify the continued exclusion and denigration of gays within the UMC in the United States.

The game that these religious groups play is as follows: they export and grow homophobia in the churches of Africa by encouraging African Christians to think that homosexuality is a decadent Western import to Africa, and that Methodists advocating for full inclusion of gay people in the church are imperialists seeking to impose Western cultural norms in developing nations. Then they turn around and tell their religious confreres in the United States that they are wounding the global church by campaigning for full inclusion of gays, because the Christians of the developing world are culturally predisposed against tolerance of gay people.

As my previous postings about this process within the United Methodist Church (which has parallels in other mainline Protestant denominations including the Episcopal Church/Anglican communion) have noted, this anti-gay movement spearheaded by religious leaders in the U.S. who are using African Christians in a Western political battle is extremely well-funded. It has strong political ties, and is more than a religious movement.

It is actively promoted by groups like the well-heeled and politically powerful Institute on Religion and Democracy, which has, for some time now, deliberately sought to divide mainline Protestant churches by stirring up the gay issue (and other political hot-button issues). The ultimate agenda of the IRD appears to be to induce enervating battles in mainline Protestant churches over such hot-button issues in order to diminish their potentially powerful social witness.

At recent UMC General Conferences, the IRD has gone so far as to provide African members of General Conference with cell phones to which IRD representatives text messages that instruct African delegates about how to vote on key legislation. For documentation of this claim, and citations of extensive research on the connection between the IRD and the UMC, see the links provided below.

One other point deserves attention here. As the links below will also demonstrate, there is strong Catholic influence in the IRD and, through this and other neoconservative political groups seeking to diminish the social witness of mainline Protestant churches. To sum up the story of American church involvement in anti-gay movements in Africa by pointing only to right-wing Protestant groups is to miss a significant part of the story.

The script being promoted by groups like the IRD and its cronies in mainline Protestant churches—a script that seeks to block greater inclusion of LGBT persons within American churches on the ground that such inclusion divides the global church—is also powerfully at work in the commentary of influential American Catholic journalists such as John Allen. This script is, in my view, all about seeding an irresistible, dominant meme in the mainstream media which views movements for full inclusion of gays in the churches as insensitive to the wishes of Christians of the developing nations, and as divisive of the global church.

And that’s to say that the objective of those working to plant this meme in the mainstream media is every bit as political as, if not more political than, a religious objective. The goal of American religious groups fomenting anti-gay prejudice in the churches of the developing world is to halt the progress of gay rights movements in the United States and other Western countries. And it is, as well, to further the enervating battles within the churches over such issues, in order to weaken the social witness of churches in sociopolitical discussions.

Abby Scheer is absolutely correct: Rick Warren and other American religious figures working to promote homophobia in African churches have been untouchable, and it has taken considerable work—it has taken a village—to get the mainstream media to touch this story. The reason these religious figures have been untouchable is that they are the religious expression of powerful political movements that are all about thwarting progressive political and social change in the West. And those powerful political movements have considerable influence not only in the far-right of American religion. Their influence is considerable within mainline Protestant churches and the Catholic church as well.

The media know this, and have been unwilling to name the cynical game that these groups are playing until now for that reason. For my previous discussions of these points, which provide documentation to substantiate them, please see the following preceding Bilgrimage posts:

Week’s End News Roundup: Religious Right and Anti-Gay Hate

Dirty Money: The United Methodist Church and the IRD

Further Digging: The UMC and the IRD

The IRD and Its Connections to the UMC: Research Conclusions

Rick Warren and Ugandan Legislation to Criminalize Homosexuality: Bitter Fruit

Pastor Rick Warren is back in the news again—in a way that I don’t imagine will please him, as he tries to craft a kinder and gentler, a non-homophobic, public image for himself. Today, Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank that publishes The Public Eye, has issued a press release calling on Rev. Warren to renounce the savagely anti-gay legislation now before the Ugandan legislature.

This legislation seeks to criminalize gay sex with a penalty of life imprisonment for those who engage in gay sex. It would also provide capital punishment for those having same-sex relations if they are HIV+ or having sex with someone under 18. No such penalties are envisaged for straight people engaging in the same activities. The law also seeks to outlaw all human rights groups advocating for LGBT rights.

Why call on Rick Warren to involve himself in Ugandan politics? Well, it appears he has a certain history with that nation. He’s already involved. Quite a few commentators on the Ugandan situation are suggesting that the savage homophobia now on display in the country’s governing body is a direct outcome of years of right-wing American evangelical meddling in the affairs of this African nation—meddling in which Rev. Warren has played a key role.

As Political Research Associates note, in March 2008 Warren told Ugandans that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right. And as Rick Street at Religion Dispatches points out, Rev. Warren has identified Uganda as a “purpose-driven nation.” One of the leaders of the anti-gay campaign in Uganda, an evangelical pastor named Rev. Martin Ssempa, who has called for the arrest of gay activists, is a disciple of Warren’s.

A Zambian Anglican priest, Rev. Kapya Kaoma, who has documented the influence of U.S. evangelicals on African politics, states,

Rick Warren shows one face in the United States where he says he loves gays, and another face in Africa, which is on the verge of pogroms against this community. We need to hear his voice loud and clear on this issue that gays and lesbians are entitled to full human rights.

In Rick Street’s view, Uganda is “in many ways an experiment in right-wing Christian social thought.” The country’s location on the borderline between Christian and Muslim areas of Africa has attracted American evangelical missionaries who want to promote a militant Christianity to counter Islam. To further this agenda, right-wing American Christians have deliberately exported Western culture-war battles to Uganda, as they try to craft a truly godly Christian nation in Africa to shame decadent Western Christians who increasingly tolerate and affirm gay persons.

As Tarso Luís Ramos, the executive director of Political Research Associates, observes,

Anti-gay activists here in the U.S. have used vitriol and money to entice their African counterparts to campaign against ordination of gay clergy in the Episcopal and other U.S. mainline churches. They have also exported the U.S. culture wars, fomenting particularly severe forms of homophobia in Uganda and other African countries whose sexual minorities are now the collateral damage to our domestic conflicts.

And now this religio-political meddling in the affairs of African nations is bearing bitter fruit. The Ugandan legislation to criminalize homosexuality was introduced this past March, immediately following a conference held by the Ugandan Family Life Network, at which Don Schmierer, president of Exodus International, and Holocaust revisionist and anti-gay evangelical activist Scott Lively deliberately fanned the flames of homophobia in the nation’s political life. As Jim Burroway notes, Lively addressed members of the Ugandan parliament, informing them that legalizing homosexuality would be like legalizing “the molestation of children or having sex with animals.”

For those interested in global trends in Christianity, this is a significant story to follow. One of the powerful memes the religious right has sought to plant in the American mainstream media claims that African Christianity has retained a purer, truer form of Christian faith than have the decadent churches of the West. The claim constantly made in media presentations of the African churches is that these churches are now embattled, that they are being pushed by progressive groups in North American and European churches to adopt practices alien to traditional African Christianity—practices like accepting women in positions of leadership and tolerating gays and lesbians.

This is a completely distorted—a false—representation of the historical roots of African Christianity. This interpretation assumes that the churches of Africa have previously been immune to political and theological influences from the West, and are only now encountering these influences in the form of corrupting cultural currents that call misogyny and homophobia into question.

Uganda has a well-developed history of right-leaning evangelical Christianity that was exported from England, particularly in the East African revival period of the early 20th century. For various political reasons, the churches of Europe and North America have long had a vested interest in determining the fate of African Christianity—as these areas have had a vested interest in determining the economic and political course of African nations.

To a great extent, African churches are being treated today as the playground of the European and American political and religious right. In what is now happening in Uganda, we can see the outcome of the attempt of right-wing groups in the West to use African culture and African churches as toys in Western political games—we can see that outcome in its most horrifying and brutal manifestations.

I wholeheartedly agree with Political Research Associates. Rick Warren needs to take responsibility for what he and his confreres have accomplished in Uganda.

The graphic shows Rev. Rick Warren with Rwandan President Paul Kagame.