CNN.com has featured a commentary today by Kay Warren, the wife of Rick Warren, author of the Purpose Driven Life and founding pastor of Saddleback Church. Apparently Saddleback Church has a new HIV/AIDS Initiative for Southern California which needed publicizing (even though it constitutes, at present, only a single webpage and a 7 minute video message from Kay Warren), so CNN graciously extended their media platform to Mrs. Warren, the Initiative’s “Executive Director.” Here’s what she had to say:
Joana crawled toward me on her skeletal elbows and knees, each movement a painful reminder of the fact that she was dying.
When I met her, this emaciated woman was homeless, living under a tree. She had unrelenting diarrhea, little food, no earthly possessions, and only an elderly auntie who had taken pity on her to care for her needs.
Still, she roused herself to offer me, an American visitor to her part of Mozambique, a traditional greeting.
The African pastors who brought me to visit her told me that she had been evicted from her village when it became known that she had AIDS. Now, in this second village, her tiny stick house had mysteriously burned after her status became known. A short time later, Joana died — rejected, abandoned, persecuted and destitute. […]
I had no medication that could cure Joana, nothing to alleviate her pain, nothing that would restore her to health. But I offered the one thing that all of us can offer: I offered my presence. I put my arms gently around her, prayed for relief from her suffering and whispered, “I love you.”
This is a start, but much more is needed. Today, I challenge the worldwide church to take on the global giants of spiritual darkness, lack of servant leaders, poverty, disease, and ignorance. It’s past time for those who claim to be Christ’s followers to join the struggle against the devastation that the HIV virus brings.
How many more like Joana have to die before you become seriously disturbed?
I encourage you to read the whole article. I commend her apparent sincerity and desire to help AIDS victims in Southern California (if not in Africa). However, nowhere in her short commentary, or in her video, do I see any mention of the strategies to combat the disease that fundamentalist churches and pastors have actively promoted, strategies that the Bush Administration has implemented to the exclusion of other programs, like condom distribution and needle exchange, which we know will work to limit the spread of this pandemic disease. What strategies does the Religiosu Right promote, you ask? Why abstinence and faith in Jesus Christ, of course.
(cont. below)
That’s because the spread of AIDS is inevitably linked to the question of fallen human nature. Things like fear, weakness, and temptation do not respond to technical expertise or incentives. They only respond to “transcendent ideals and faiths” and the moral language they produce. As we’ve seen in places like Uganda, only when people regard faithfulness and chastity as normative will they stop engaging in the behaviors that spread HIV/AIDS.
Colson spells out the true Fundamentalist agenda regarding AIDS in this excerpt from his column at Townhall.com. And that agenda has nothing to do with preventing AIDS or helping those who already suffer from the effects of this horrible plague. In his own words he makes it clear that the focus is on converting people to the Christian faith as the only way to truly prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa. A more heartless and self-serving appeal than any I’ve seen in a long while.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for evangelical and fundamentalist Christians putting aside their condemnation of HIV/AIDS victims and offering them the help and assistance that these people truly need. For too long, many churches have approached this issue from a a judgmental, “holier than thou” standpoint, rather than acting with true compassion for all those who suffer in life without judging them, as Jesus, and so many other great spiritual leaders of the past, have taught.
But I find it more than a little hypocritical to call on Christians to help AIDS victims while at the same time the Bush administration, at the behest of his religious right supporters, has canceled funding for AIDS prevention programs which distribute condoms, teach safe sex, or encourage needle exchange. Abstinence training is the only appropriate method in the view of the religious right to fight the AIDS pandemic (and teen pregnancy as well). A policy the Bush administration has more than championed around the globe. Let’s take a look at how well it’s doing:
From its first day in office, an anti-condom policy has dominated many of the social policies of the Bush administration. In his 2000 campaign, Bush ran on an outspoken anti-choice, anti-gay platform in which he declared that he little in common politically with gays and lesbians and therefore they wouldn’t find a place in his administration. This thinking flowed from his Christian right-wing fundamentalism and was common to many of his religious backers in the Christian Coalition and other far-right think tanks like the American Family Association. Many of these groups blame lesbians and gays for the social ills of the country. So it wasn’t a shock when Bush adopted the “global gag rule” on his first day in office.
The global gag rule, originally instituted by Reagan and removed by Clinton, is a funding condition that requires international programs that receive money from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) not to provide abortion-related services. This includes providing education about safe sex or contraception. The International Planned Parenthood Federation called it a signal of “the Bush administration’s war against women and his overall contempt for their fundamental civil and human rights.”
While the “global gag rule” is rightly seen as an attack on women’s reproductive rights, it also has dramatically affected social service organizations that educate local communities on preventing sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS. The administration used the rule to withdraw USAID funding from groups that provided abortion counseling, but it also used the rule to badger organizations that provided sex education into adding abstinence components to their programs. From the start, the administration, following a religious ideology that opposes reproductive choice and contraception instead of sound medicine, worked to supplant the accepted practice of promoting consistent condom use as the best defense against HIV and other STDs with faulty and dangerous abstinence indoctrination. […]
Most recently Bush appointees in the Center for Disease Control . . . altered federal regulations regarding funding for HIV/AIDS prevention education programs in the US. The goal, according to Doug Ireland, is to eliminate funding for community and school-based programs that promote condom use as the best method of HIV/AIDS prevention in favor of “failed programs that denounce condom use, while teaching abstinence as the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS.” Additionally, the administration wants political appointees to screen all educational materials generated by programs that receive federal funding for 3 main things. First, they must advocate abstinence as the best method of prevention; second, they must inaccurately characterize condoms as less effective than abstinence education; and finally, they must adhere to moralistic guidelines about “obscenity” and be void of “sexual suggestiveness.” […]
The main problem with abstinence programs, like other areas of Bush administration politicized science, is that they don’t work. At least three major studies have shown abstinence programs – especially abstinence-only programs – fail to convince youth to avoid sex until they are married. Some 88 percent of youth who made a pledge to avoid sex until marriage as part of an abstinence program, according to a Columbia University study, broke the pledge. Sexual activity among abstinence students actually increased dramatically. Because they weren’t taught condom use, youth who went through such programs were one-third more times as likely to have unprotected sex, reported a study published in the American Journal of Sociology. But the CDC rules elevate abstinence above the medically sound principle of condom use as the best preventative measure against HIV infection and the spread of AIDS.
So both abroad and at home, we see a religious agenda promoted by our government, and its an agenda that is killing people:
The harmful effects of Bush’s PEPFAR prevention policies have most recently taken shape in Uganda where comprehensive prevention efforts were credited with dramatically reducing the HIV prevalence over the past decade. Pressures of PEPFAR funding requirements have caused a notable shift in the prevention approaches of the Ugandan government however as President Museveni and other leaders have strongly endorsed abstinence-only programs and increased anti-condom rhetoric over the past year. Some 32 million quality-approved condoms remain impounded in government warehouses while the U.S. government ramps up financing for abstinence-only approaches to HIV prevention. According to Ugandan AIDS activists, the government’s actions will undermine community efforts to reduce HIV prevalence and HIV transmission. These trends away from scientifically sound, evidence-based prevention strategies are occurring in Uganda and in other countries hard-hit by the AIDS epidemic, such as Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia.
Presumably this is the same agenda that Mrs. Warren and her husband support. So perhaps the principle reason (and this is just supposition on my part) for Saddleback Church’s new HIV/AIDS initiative is a financial one: to latch on to some of those federal dollars that this administration lavishes on “faith based” programs. Maybe that’s being a bit cynical. However, it seems to me that the two driving forces of these modern day mega-ministries are (1) the almighty dollar and (2) imposing their religious views on those of us who don’t share them.
I hope I’m proven wrong, and that the program Mrs. Warren heads up deals with all aspects of preventing AIDS, including condom use, and other measures proven to reduce transmission of the HIV virus. Because the only thing that should matter to any caring person is the eradication of the suffering and death this plague has wrought, and how that goal is reached shouldn’t be limited by the personal religious beliefs of anyone.
