Last February I was interviewed over the telephone by an Anglican priest from Zambia. My caller, the Rev. Kapya John Kaoma, asked to hear about the IRD’s work with the persecuted church, particularly in Sudan.
I told Kaoma that for over twelve years IRD has worked for more robust U.S. policy, the passage of the Sudan Peace Act, the success of the north/south peace agreement, and especially to support Sudanese Christians in Sudan and in the United States. I shared our expanding vision of Sudan advocacy due to our knowledge that the radical Islamist regime oppresses most of Sudan’s people, Christian, Muslim, and followers of traditional religion. I described our effort to foster reconciliation and solidarity between all of Sudan’s marginalized peoples and to be advocates for Darfurians, Nubians, and Beja, as well as Christians.
“Are you concerned about the effect on churches in the Islamic world of the American Episcopal Church’s position on homosexuality?” Kaoma queried. I told him that this was a very serious concern of ours.
“It’s not just their ‘position on homosexuality,’” I elaborated, “it is abandoning scriptural authority and the Lordship of Jesus Christ, of which human sexuality issues are just one symptom.” I told him that my African Christian friends said that the American church’s revisionism made it much more difficult for them. It compromised their witness and left them vulnerable to radical Islamists.
Kaoma asked me if activism for Sudan was my full-time job. I told him that it seemed as if it could be, but I explained that I also raise awareness for the persecuted church in China, North Korea, India, Eritrea, Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria, Vietnam, Burma, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere around the world. And I told him about my book, Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children, and how our work in IRD’s Religious Liberty Program includes other human rights issues in which Christians should be on the cutting edge. The Church should exemplify Christ’s transforming power in the midst of such evil as Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army of northern Uganda and the international trafficking of children and women. I said that this should be the Church’s prophetic witness in the world.
Kaoma said that he was doing research for a report on the partnership between Christians in Africa and the United States. He failed to mention that he himself had been described as a “passionate activist for prophetic witness in the world.” Nor did he tell me that in his view, prophetic witness in the world included being “an active campaigner for women’s reproductive rights.” And he did not tell me that his research was for a 49-page report entitled, “Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia.”
The premise of Kaoma’s report turns out to be that the conservative renewal groups in the United States are exploiting and manipulating African churches to divide U.S. churches and stop their leftward progress. The report was released in mid November by Political Research Associates (PRA), “a progressive think tank devoted to supporting movements that are building a more just and inclusive democratic society.” PRA exposes “movements, institutions, and ideologies that undermine human rights, with a focus on the U.S. political Right.”
What kind of human rights are we talking about? Well, until recently, the Very Rev. Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, Dean and President of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was PRA’s president. Ragsdale was also formerly the chair of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC). She is probably best known to IRD audiences from an Alabama abortion clinic speech including the repeated refrain, “Abortion is a blessing.” Not long after IRD made this public, Ragsdale in an interview with the Boston Phoenix named IRD as “Exhibit A” of groups working to undermine her efforts.
Kaoma is extremely offensive in his portrayal of our African brothers and sisters. He says that IRD uses “African leaders as a wedge in U.S. conflicts” and that “the IRD has convinced African church leaders that western Christians are imposing their values on the continent.” No one need “convince” these godly, courageous leaders of anything! They have great spiritual discernment, wisdom, and insight.
And Kaoma falls back on the old canard that conservative American Christians “buy” the votes and convictions of African church leaders. As if Christians who are willing to die for their faith can be bought with chicken dinners, new shoes, or cell phones (all of which have been claimed by the Religious leftist revisionists)!
At the same time, the report has a strangely flattering, if exaggerated, perception of IRD as powerful and extremely effective at what we do. To him, of course, that’s a bad thing, but we could take some of Kaoma’s text and transfer it into an IRD annual report with little editing!
Kaoma says that IRD has a “long-term, deliberate, and successful strategy to weaken and split U.S. mainline denominations, block their powerful progressive social witness promoting social and economic justice, and promote political and social conservatism in the United States.”
“We want to emphasize that the effect of the conservative think tank the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) and renewal movements on the social witness of mainline churches cannot be underestimated,” he warns.
Declaring that “The IRD’s ultimate goal is to take control of mainline denominations,” Kaoma also ‘exposes’ IRD’s role in creating the Association for Church Renewal (ACR). “Through the ACR, the IRD has successfully coordinated more than thirty renewal campaigns, synchronizing their attacks on mainline churches using wedge issues such as homosexuality, women’s rights, and, recently, Islamophobia.” And he reveals that “IRD sponsors resolutions at mainline general assemblies knowing they won’t pass – but that debate over them will dominate the meetings.” “The neoconservative IRD,” he shrills, “has been on the forefront of attacking mainline progressive churches in the United States.”
Well, IRD has been on the forefront all right! We have been on the forefront of reforming the social witness of the churches and urging the churches to prayer and action for our persecuted brothers and sisters and other human rights issues in our broken, troubled world.
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