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Have the Culture Wars Gone Global? Religion & Sexuality in the Global South

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Have the Culture Wars Gone Global? Religion & Sexuality in the Global South TRANSCRIPT Have the Culture Wars Gone Global? Religion & Sexuality in the Global South Dr. Philip Jenkins Pennsylvania State University Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion March 2010 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, many of you know Professor Philip Jenkins and his good reputation. Professor Jenkins is currently the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, where he has taught since 1980. He is also the Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He has published twenty-two books, which have been translated into ten languages. Some of his recent titles are The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, and God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis, and most recently Jesus Wars. His topic today is: Have the Culture Wars Gone Global? Religion and Sexuality in a Global South. It could not be more timely, and that’s why we are delighted to have you back, Philip. DR. PHILIP JENKINS: Thank you very much. Okay. It may seem strange that the book I’ve just published is called Jesus Wars, and it’s on the fifth century debates. And what I’m talking about today is these very contemporary issues about, for instance, anti-gay laws in Uganda and so on. But, honestly, there is a connection, and the connection is basically how churches that try to be global deal with culture in different parts of the world. How a church can speak with one voice when it has to exist in so many different societies. And also, the overlap between power and the making of theology, the making of religion. And so in that way, I’m very much speaking to what James was talking about yesterday, the whole question of power. And just in terms of this audience, I’m very interested in the ways in which stories are read, understood, and remembered because I have a strong feeling that this issue, this anti-gay law in Uganda — and I’ll talk more about that in a second — is going to be TRANSCRIPT “Have the Culture Wars Gone Global? Religion & Sexuality in the Global South” Dr. Philip Jenkins. March 2010 remembered through a kind of folklore lens, which eclipses the reality. So, like I say, this is a different ways of looking at a story. So what I’m going to do first of all is tell a very short story, and then try and put it in context. Now, as everyone knows, Uganda recently attempted to pass a very dramatic, very draconian law about homosexuality. Just to give you some of the ideas about this, it creates an offense called “aggravated homosexuality,” which does allow the death penalty. This would include, for example, the assault of someone of the same sex under 18. It would involve somebody who knows himself to be HIV positive, has sex with somebody of the same gender. And it includes all sorts of other little horrors, like a three-year sentence for non-reporting, that is, when you know this stuff is going on and you don’t report it. It also includes an extra-territoriality feature, which is no, you can’t go off to London and do this. So it’s a startling, shocking law. So the law is one thing, but why are people in other parts of the world so focused on this law? There are plenty of atrocious laws around the place. But this has come to be seen as an example of exporting the culture war. Last March there was a conference in Kampala in Uganda on exposing the homosexual agenda where a number of prominent American evangelicals spoke including, I believe, Rick Warren and one called Scott Lively. And Scott Lively’s the author of the book called The Pink Swastika, which argues that homosexuality was actually a large part of the Nazis’ agenda and that you can see a systematic gay agenda to seduce children and corrupt minors and so on. Well, the conference happened, and it probably did a certain amount to inspire the present piece of legislation. But where do you go from that in terms of reporting the story? Now, I’m holding something here which you can download very easily. This is a report, and the name on the front is a man called Kapya Kaoma. And it’s called “Globalizing the Culture Wars, U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia.” And in some of the reporting of Ugandan law recently, there’s been a strong theme that these policies, these attitudes are being visited by American Christian Right people on other societies. And what they’re doing in a sense is creating bogus voices in Africa. 2 TRANSCRIPT “Have the Culture Wars Gone Global? Religion & Sexuality in the Global South” Dr. Philip Jenkins. March 2010 So, for instance, you have according to this vision, American conservatives who are stirring up this very homophobic sentiment in Africa. That they are writing documents which, in fact, they write and which are being presented as if they’re an authentic African voice. So it’s as you have a large, systematic deception, and that is the theme of this. And this, then, spills over into a number of stories that I’m sure you’re familiar with. You know, Jeff Sharlet did this book on The Family, supposedly a fundamentalist network in which a couple of lead players in the Ugandan story are participants. And so you have a kind of conspiracy theory. And Terry Gross, for instance, did an interview with Jeff Sharlet, and between the two of them, they really presented this story of — well, I like to call it the Protocols of the Elders of C Street — a very conspiratorial view. And that thing gets into a number of other stories, like, for instance, the split in the Anglican communion where you have Archbishop Akinola leading this African opposition to gay causes in the Episcopal church. And if you believe something like this, then these very conservative voices are actually being mobilized from the United States, from the Institute for Religion and Democracy, from different well-funded conservative groups. Now, what worries me a little bit is that that is one take on the story. It is a possible take on the story, but it’s a very minor part of the story. I’m afraid this is going to live on in folklore. What I would like to do is to look at where this particular piece of legislation comes from and what some of the directions are in global south Christianity, and then why this matters so much. Because over the next few years, we are going to see more and more stories like this, and responsible reporting is going to be so important. It’s going to be very easy to be misled. You’re going to be hearing a lot of voices out there presenting particular theories, and, you know, a healthy garbage filter does help enormously. Let’s just start by talking very briefly about Uganda. Uganda’s a country in which Christianity arrived in the 1870’s. Within a very few years, Uganda was generating a lot of martyrs, both Protestant and Catholic. Very early in the stage of Ugandan Christianity two issues that would be very important showed up. One was Islam. Because you had a king there who was influenced by Arab traders and some aspects of Arab culture in that part of the world, particularly a pederasty culture. Most of the early martyrs were young men who were executed for refusing the king’s sexual demands. So in the story of Ugandan 3 TRANSCRIPT “Have the Culture Wars Gone Global? Religion & Sexuality in the Global South” Dr. Philip Jenkins. March 2010 Christianity issues of Islam, tyranny, and homosexuality got intertwined quite early. The point I’m trying to make is that the issue of homosexuality is not something that was dropped on the Ugandan Christians from American Conservatives. Uganda also, early in the 20th century, formed a very effective revival movement of its own — like an Evangelical revival, very much like the American great awakening. There was a movement called the balokole which, by the way, generated an astonishing amount of music. And if you want to understand African Christianity, if you want to understand Indian Christianity, never mind public statements: look at the hymns. You know, we live in the golden age of Christian hymn writing. And they generated one hymn called the Tukutendereza Yesu, which all over east Africa attracts these amazing stories. We hear about Christians about to be martyred by Idi Amin’s forces in the 1970’s, and they all start singing the Tukutendereza Yesu, and then Amin’s assassins join in and then let the Christians go. There’s a huge body of legend about this. The point I’m trying to make is that there’s a very substantial Evangelical culture, and within that culture, there is a very strict, rigorous, moralistic element. You have a group called the Bazukufu, who are the ones who are even more Evangelical and revivalist than the Evangelical revivalists. And through the 1990’s, these groups got more and more focused on homosexuality as an issue, and particularly homosexuality at some of the universities. And in the late 1990’s, for example, really before there was any particular American or global involvement, you got a number of pressure groups who are leading very significant anti-gay campaigns.
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