Across Africa, major churches remain strongly oppose LGBTQ rights
In Ghana, home to a diverse array of religions, leaders of major churches have united in denouncing homosexuality as a “perversion” and endorsing legislation that would, if enacted, impose some of the harshest anti-LGBTQ policies in Africa.
In Nigeria, the umbrella body for Christian churches depicts same-sex relationships as an evil meriting the lengthy prison sentences prescribed under existing law.
And in several African countries, bishops aligned with the worldwide United Methodist Church are preparing to join an in-theworks breakaway denomination so they can continue their practice of refusing to recognize same-sex marriage or ordain LGBTQ clergy.
In the United States, Western Europe and various other regions, some prominent Protestant churches have advocated for LGBTQ inclusion. With only a few exceptions, this hasn’t happened in Africa, where Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran leaders are among those opposing such inclusion.
“The mainstream churches — all of them — they actually are totally against it,” said Caroline Omolo, associate pastor at the Cosmopolitan Affirming Community in Nairobi, Kenya. It is a rare example of a church in Africa serving a predominantly LGBTQ congregation.
“They have always organized a group to maybe silence us or make the church disappear,” Omolo said. “They don’t want it to appear anywhere.”
Ghana, generally considered more respectful of human rights than most African countries, now faces scrutiny due to a bill in Parliament that would impose prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years for people identifying as LGBTQ or supporting that community. The bill has been denounced by human rights activists even as Ghanaian religious leaders rally behind it.
“Their role in perpetuating queerphobia and transphobia is clear and it’s very troubling and dangerous,” said Abena Hutchful, a Ghanaian who identifies as queer and co-organized a recent protest against the bill in New York City.
“The bill’s strongest supporters claim to be doing this in the name of religion,” says Graeme Reid, director of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Rights Program. He called the measure “a case study in extreme cruelty.”
The lawmakers proposing the bill said they consulted influential religious leaders while drafting it. Among those endorsing it are the Christian Council of Ghana, the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the country’s chief imam.
“We don’t accept murderers, why should we accept somebody who is doing sex in a sinful way?” Archbishop Philip Naameh, president of the bishops’ conference, told The Associated Press. “If you take a stance which is against producing more children, it is a choice which is injurious to the existence of the Ghanaian state.”
The Christian Council — whose members include Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Anglican churches — considers homosexuality “an act of perversion and abomination,” according to its secretary general, the Rev. Dr. Cyril Fayose of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
“Homosexuality is not a human right and we reject it in all uncertain terms,” he declared earlier this year.
In Africa’s most populous country, the Christian Association of Nigeria has threatened to sanction any church that shows tolerance for same-sex relationships.
Such acceptance “will never happen,” Methodist Bishop Stephen Adegbite, the association’s director of national issues, told the AP.
Asked about Nigeria’s law criminalizing samesex relationships with sentences of up to 14 years in prison, Adegbite said there are no alternatives.
“The church can never be compromised,” he declared.
Such comments dismay Nigerian LGBTQ activists such as Matthew Blaise, who told the AP of being manhandled by a Catholic priest distraught that Blaise wasn’t heterosexual.
In Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, Catholic Archbishop Alfred Adewale Martins told the AP that Catholic teaching “recognizes in the dignity of every human person.” However, he said LGBTQ people who enter into same-sex relationships are leading “a disordered way of life” and should change their behavior.
Nigeria is home to one of the United Methodist bishops, John Wesley Yohanna, who says he plans to break away from the UMC and join the proposed Global Methodist Church. That new denomination, likely to be established next year, results from an alliance between Methodists in the United States and abroad who don’t support the LGBT-inclusive policies favored by many Methodists in the U.S.
Bishops Samuel J. Quire Jr. of Liberia and Owan Tshibang Kasap of the UMC’s Southern Congo district also have indicated they would join the breakaway.
The Rev. Keith Boyette, a Methodist elder from the United States who chairs the Global Methodist initiative, said the African bishops’ views reflect societal and cultural attitudes widely shared across the continent.
“Same-sex orientation is viewed negatively,” he said. “That’s true whether a person is from a Christian denomination, or Muslim or from a more indigenous religion.”