Britain’s Church Times explains that U.S. Christian Rightists are using African clergy as proxies to fight a U.S. domestic culture war against American religious and sexual minorities.
RIGHT-WING organisations in the United States are cultivating African religious leaders as part of a strategy to undermine the social witness of US mainline Churches and promote homophobia in Africa, says an in¬?vesti¬?gative report by an Anglican priest and scholar, the Revd Kapya Kaoma.
The report, Globalizing the Culture Wars: US Conservatives, African Churches, & Homophobia, was com¬?missioned by the progressive think tank Political Research Associates. It argues that African bishops and other leaders are being used as proxies in an internal US conflict.
Organizations that seek to divide and destroy mainline Christian churches — specifically, the notorious right-wing Institute on Religion and Democracy — have recast human rights as “an imperialistic attempt to manipulate Africans into accepting homosexuality,” according to the Church Times.
The [PRA] report lists the tactics used, including the use of money and the ghost-writing by US conservatives of key speeches by African religious leaders. US religious conservatives have successfully presented themselves as representatives of mainstream US Evangelicalism.
The report suggests: “Many Afri¬?cans do not distinguish, for example, between the Christian Right, Evan¬?gelicals, the neo-conservative IRD, mainline renewal movements, [the] Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, and [the] right-wing megachurch leader Rick Warren.”
The conservative “renewal” [schism] groups are generally small, says the report, but their relationship with wealthy US donors and powerful African bishops has made them key players in the fight for the future of the Anglican Communion.
African Churches are being persuaded to separate from their international partnerships and to realign with conservative replacements. These tactics have been most successful in countries such as Nigeria and Uganda, which the report characterises as those where political leadership is dictatorial and civil society weak.
