Real Africa News

Seventh-day Adventist Anti-Gay Summit Held in Africa This Month

The news from Africa this year for LGBT rights is grim, and it looks like it's only going to get worse. As new laws have been signed this year, I could be put in prison for life in Uganda if I were to marry a man, and I could go to prison for 14 years in Nigeria if I were to have a meal with other LGBT people and just talk -- my parents could go to jail as well if they didn't turn me into authorities.
This is just the latest addition to already draconian laws on the continent where 38 countries criminalize homosexuality. But my church, which has a great deal of influence in both Uganda and Nigeria, hasn't said anything to condemn these new human rights violations. Instead, my church is planning a large, international summit on LGBT people on the continent to talk about LGBT people without allowing them to share their stories or perspectives.
This month in Cape Town, South Africa, the "In God's Image: Sexuality, Scripture and Society" summit will talk for four days about LGBT people or, in what appears to be a new church euphemism, about "alternative sexualities." (Apparently this summit was originally planned for Nigeria until it was clear with recent laws how problematic that could be, and now it's -- ironically -- in the only country in Africa where same-sex marriage is legal, thanks to Nelson Mandela's leadership).
The break-out session titles help show just how extreme and one-sided this conference will be. For example, "Alternative Sexualities: A Disorder or a Choice?, "A Continuum of Care with Inclusion of Pastoral Counseling to Conversion/Reparative Therapy", and "Relating to Children and Youth Challenged by Alternative Sexualities" are just a few of the breakout sessions that seem to be derived straight from the 1940s when we used such language to institutionalize queer people. We are using decades old ideas that have been proven, and cited by numerous organizations to be extremely harmful. We are causing irreversible damage and we are hiding behind our religious beliefs to do it.
The Seventh-day Adventist church is one of the largest protestant denominations in Uganda and has a growing number of new converts in East Africa. In 2010, in the heat of the "Kill the Gays Bill" media frenzy, the Vice President of the Seventh-day Adventist African Conference vocally supported the law in Uganda while it still included death for those convicted of "homosexuality" (he later said in a classic non-apology apology that he had been misquoted).The Seventh-day Adventist church has been present, promoting the homophobic messages that have been birthed in the states.
In the last few years, I've critiqued Seventh-day Adventist conferences in which a licensed "therapist" (though I use that term loosely) argued "We are not born gay," alleging that there is a "negative environmental factor which leads the person to think, 'I am gay" and just recently where an "ex-gay" presenter called LGBT people demon possessed (he later apologized, sort of, but the organization where he gave the talks has not). These are the types of presentations that have encouraged the criminalization of sexual minorities around the world and the new Anti-Gay Jim Crow proposed laws in the U.S.
While there are many things that are highly problematic about this summit, the most egregious is that no LGBT voices will be included in the summit. It's the epitome of talking at instead of with LGBT people that Christian evangelical churches are known for doing. Three professional testimonialists (they all have speaking tours, books, and videos about their ex-gay/holiness-not-homosexuality platform to promote) who say precisely what the church wants to hear are the only representation from the queer community, and they don't at all identify as being gay or lesbian anymore; they prefer the term "redeemed" as if every other LGBT person who doesn't find life-long celibacy or "conversion therapy" a viable option is not redeemed.