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By Roberto Rivera y Carlo|Published Date: January 25, 2010
“U.S. Exports Cultural War to Uganda” was the headline of a recent National Public Radio story. The particular “export” being discussed was a controversial Ugandan bill that would punish certain homosexual acts by imprisonment and even death. As the lede put it, “the battle over the Bible and homosexuality has torn apart Christian churches and entire denominations in the United States. But what happens when that culture war is exported to other countries? Ugandans are finding out — with potentially deadly consequences.”
First the slave trade, then colonialism, and now this!
One of the chief exporters of our cultural unpleasantness is apparently Scott Lively of Defending the Family International. According to NPR, in a March, 2009 trip to Uganda, Lively told Uganda’s Family Life Network that “the gay movement is an evil institution,” and that its goal was “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”
Even worse than its designs on the “marriage-based society” is the “gay movement’s” designs on our sons: Lively, whom NPR said “is considered a fringe player in the American culture wars,” told Ugandans that “male homosexuality has historically been, not adult to adult; it's been adult to teenage . . . it’s called pederasty — adults sodomizing teenage boys.”
As NPR’s Barbara Bradley Haggerty noted, this last bit is especially resonant in Uganda. Every June 3rd Ugandan Christians celebrate the Feast of St. Charles Lwanga and his Companions. The feast commemorates the martyrdom of Christian pages and their defender who were executed after they refused to have sex with the King Mwanga.
If Lively is an exporter then the principal Ugandan compradore, at least according to Jeff Sharlet, is David Bahati, the sponsor of the bill and, more importantly in Sharlet’s account, a member of The Fellowship. According to Sharlet, Bahati and Uganda are success stories in an effort involving “millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages” to influence Ugandan politics.
Throw the lack of alacrity on the part of some American Christians to denounce the proposed legislation into the hat; say “eenie meenie chili beanie;” and the zeitgeist has spoken: Uganda is the newest front in the American culture wars.
It’s an interesting hypothesis that’s missing one important part: Ugandans. You know, real Ugandans, the kind with agency who act and are not merely acted upon. Reading (or hearing) these stories, you would think that your average Ugandan has nothing to do on a hot afternoon but to settle down and wait for a line from their American brethren on how to order their society.
Let’s stipulate that the factual assertions in the NPR story, and Jeff Sharlet’s reporting for that matter, are spot-on. (There is no reason not to.) Let’s even stipulate that Jim Naughton, “a former canon in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C.,” is correct to doubt the sincerity of the subsequent denunciations by American cultural warriors: “I think if they were mortified, they would have been mortified immediately . . . instead they were mortified — oh, two, three months into the campaign against this thing, when it was getting real traction.” (I have no idea.)
Put these together and you are still several astronomical units from “exporting” the American culture wars to Uganda. For starters, “culture wars” implies two sides. As Naughton himself acknowledged, in Uganda “there’s already a great deal of suspicion and maybe animosity towards homosexuals.” That’s an understatement: if I gave you an NSA satellite and tapped every cell tower in the country you still couldn’t find what James Davison Hunter might call the “progressive” side on this issue in Uganda.
The idea that an increasingly Christian country whose most celebrated saints were martyred for their refusal to submit to homosexual demands are taking their cues from Americans on this issue is risible, the kind of risible that comes when we don’t actually see Ugandans but, instead, extensions of ourselves or proxies in a cultural cold war.
If you actually saw Ugandans you would know that, long before anyone in Africa had heard of Scott Lively or the purpose-driven life, Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, like his Namibian counterpart, had ordered to the police to “arrest, deport and imprison” gays. Likewise, the idea that homosexuality is a “scourge that is being deposited on [Africa] by the secular West” long predates alleged culture war exports: more than a decade ago, the president of Namibia called homosexuality an “alien practice” whose “most ardent supporters” are “Europeans who imagine themselves to be the bulwark of civilization and enlightenment.”
(Well, given the story of St. Charles Lwanga, it’s obviously not that alien.)
Of course, executing homosexuals is barbaric but it’s domestic, not imported, barbarism. Given what we know about African attitudes – homosexuality is illegal in most of sub-Saharan Africa – treating Africans as puppets being manipulated by Americans is, to say the least, condescending. Knowing what we know – or at least would if we were actually interested in other countries and their people – about how African leaders manipulated western fears and anxieties to their advantage during the Cold War, regarding Museveni as clay being molded by The Fellowship is, the stuff is arrogant nonsense.
Uganda’s president (for life?) is going to do what he thinks is best for himself and Uganda (in that order?), especially now that the discovery of substantial oil deposits along its border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo promises to give it what George Costanza once called “hand” in its relationships with the outside world. (At a “prayer ceremony,” Museveni thanked God for having created a rift valley 25 million years ago and the successive layers of vegetation that produced the oil deposits. Does this sound like a man who takes his marching orders from a “fringe player in the American culture wars?”) It’s the inability to imagine that this could be so that leads to headlines like NPR’s.
Not that the “orthodox,” to use Hunter’s taxonomy, side is any better on this score. When I read about American Episcopalians being consecrated as bishops by African Primates the expression “ecclesiastical flag of convenience” comes to mind. Given the apostasy of the Episcopal Church, it’s impossible to fault them for seeking an alternative. Still, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if their nominal shepherds starting acting the part, especially in matters unrelated to human sexuality. (“I can’t help but notice all the luxury automobiles in the parking lot. Do you think this is good stewardship?”) After all, this jurisdictional end run has almost everything to do with events in the U.S. and almost nothing to do with Africa.
Likewise, we cheer Francis Cardinal Arinze for giving the folks at Georgetown what’s what. But praising him for discomforting our opponents is not the same thing as believing that he and others like him have something to teach us about what it means to be the Church in the 21st century.
Both sides of the American culture wars share a kind of cultural solipsism that sees other people as extensions of themselves and, thus, the actions of these people only make sense when viewed through the American experience. (A related instance on seeing foreigners as extensions of ourselves helped to inflict what Derek Leebeart has called The Fifty Year Wound. LBJ actually thought that Ho Chi Minh might be bought off by the promise of a Tennessee Valley Authority for the Mekong River Delta.) Both sides agree on this much: it’s all about us.
Except that it’s not. As John L. Allen and Philip Jenkins have documented, Christianity in the 21st century will be global, which is a polite way of saying that it will be, both in terms of numbers and fervor, a largely Southern (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) phenomenon with a western rump (and bureaucracy). These Christians have definite ideas about what it means to be the Church, ideas that don’t easily fit into our culture war dichotomies, which makes sense since they aren’t waiting for us to tell them what to think, no matter how much we need to think they are.
For more information on how African Christians approach the question of ethics, buy Samuel Waje Kunhiyop’s African Christian Ethics from the bookstore. Click “Store” and enter the title. Or read Alan Jacobs’ article, “Suya Wars” by entering the title in the search box on the home page. |
