Archive for category Tribalism & Blind Obedience to Authority

Rick Warren plays a nice moderate evangelical Christian in the US. Outside of the States, though Warren is just another slick, hard core conservative fundamentalist whose preaching leads to horrific outcomes.

Case in point: Uganda is one the verge of passing one of the most horrific laws ever passed – a law condemned by European, Canadian and American leaders. The law will make it illegal to be gay and actually includes thing like life in prison and the death penalty for being gay and daring to actually have sex. Since I’m not actually able to say anything that is acceptable for a nice family blog like OneUtah, I’m going to have to defer comment on this particularly offensive exercise in hatred, bigotry and state sanctioned murder.

Andrew Sullivan has this to say:

Ugandan blogger, GayUganda, is waiting for the new law – inspired by American Christianists, abetted by Rick Warren – that will soon jail or execute him for being who he is. I’m unsure when in history a group of American “Christians” have actually intervened in a foreign country to create what is the equivalent of an ongoing pogrom of terror against a tiny minority, scapegoating them as evil, demanding that their own families inform on them if they are gay or face legal punishment, and threatening the death penalty for any homosexual daring to have a love life. And I can only imagine what the response in America would be if the target were any other minority – Jews or immigrants or the sick – or the usual targets of majoritarian hate. But a declaration of a form of genocide against gays gets shrugged off by the world’s leaders, including the Pope, whose silence is reminiscent of another Pope not so long ago.

Michelle Goldberg, from the American Prospect:

But celebrity American evangelist Rick Warren, a man with enormous influence in Uganda, has so far refused to condemn the bill. When asked, he gave Newsweek this non-response: “The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations.”

Warren’s silence has repercussions beyond Uganda. Draconian anti-gay legislation is appearing throughout the continent, often closely tied to the explosion of American-style evangelical Christianity. Warren has been a crucial part of that explosion and has tremendous clout with conservative African clergy and with many politicians. “If Warren wants to present himself as someone who cares about human rights, he should be condemning this vigorously,” says Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch.

Warren may seem an odd focus for criticism, but he has huge political influence in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi – all nations pursuing brutally regressive anti-gay policies:

Warren is very close to both the Ugandan and the Rwandan leadership. He counts first lady Janet Museveni, who has spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church, as a personal friend. During a visit to the country last year, Warren lent his voice to the anti-gay stance of Uganda’s Anglican bishops. “Dr Warren said that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right,” reported one Ugandan newspaper. “‘We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,’ Dr Warren said.”

Both Museveni and Warren have been patrons of Martin Ssempa, the American-educated Pentecostal pastor who is one of Uganda’s leading anti-gay activists. Ssempa, a vigorous supporter of the pending legislation, has published lists, replete with photographs and contact information, of gay and lesbian Ugandans on his Web site and led anti-gay marches through the streets of Kampala. Last year he won an award from the National Fellowship of Born Again Churches in Uganda for his work against homosexuality. (The headline in Uganda’s New Vision newspaper read, “Ssempa Rewarded for Anti-Gay Crusade.”)

Warren did much to elevate Ssempa to his current position, giving him a prominent pulpit at Saddleback Church, where he’s preached several times. As Max Blumenthal reported, in 2005, Rick Warren’s wife, Kay, praised Ssempa from the church’s stage: “You are my brother, Martin, and I love you.” In October, perhaps realizing that his association with Ssempa is bad PR, Warren publicly broke with him, though he didn’t explicitly mention Ssempa’s fierce homophobia.

As influential as Warren is in Uganda, he’s an even bigger man in Rwanda. Declaring Rwanda the world’s first “Purpose Driven Nation,” he’s made it the center of his humanitarian work, and he’s close to the country’s president, Paul Kagame. Two weeks ago, a story in Rwanda’s New Times newspaper began, “Renowned American pastor, Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church, yesterday delivered a special sermon at a prayer breakfast with a cross-section of Rwandan leaders, in which President Paul Kagame was chief guest.” (Only in the last paragraph did the article mention that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair attended as well.)

Goldberg ends with this roundhouse:

Rick Warren helped bring the language of the American religious right to Africa. His kind of Christianity, at once puritanical and magical, resonated strongly with people who’ve been angered, frightened and discombobulated by rapid social change. He, like many conservative American pastors, has developed a symbiotic relationship with his African counterparts. In this relationship, the Americans get adulation, a sense of being at the forefront of the faith, and the kind of voice-of-the-downtrodden authenticity that used to belong to liberals alone. The Africans get money, access, and a satisfying sense that they’re now the leaders of their religion, ready to save the West instead of vice versa.

Anti-gay politics are absolutely crucial to this bond. There’s no reason to think that Warren would risk severing it just to do the right thing.

I have never had much use for Rick Warren – but not at least I can find him hateful and despicable with a clear conscience. Again from Andrew Sullivan describing Warren as a silent enabler of vicious hatred:

This is an act of terror and murder against an already beleaguered minority, and Warren is an accessory to it. As a powerful figure in distributing AIDS funding in Uganda, he cannot bring himself to oppose a law that would condemn someone in a gay relationship to death, and imprison him or her for touching another human being, and inciting a wave of informing on family members and friends and acquaintances in order to terrify a sexual minority. This alleged man of God cannot speak out on this – except to protect his own p.r. His schtick of actually being the nice evangelical – a schtick that got him to Obama’s inauguration – is a lie. If he cannot condemn this fascist act of violence against a tiny minority of vulnerable human beings, then his position in this struggle is clear enough. [snip]

He lies. He has taken sides, whenever possible, to stigmatize, demonize and now physically threaten the lives of gay people in his own country and abroad. And his silence on this issue means the deaths of others. Warren needs to come out and condemn this law as evil, which it is. And to stop hiding his own enmeshment with the most virulent forms of fundamentalist hatred under the veil of media-savvy benevolence.

Besides the grotesquery of the law itself, what makes this so troubling is the role being played by American religious conservatives – people like Rick Warren and The Family – which provides housing for wingnut conservatives in a tax free location on C Street in DC. They can’t actually kill gay people in the US so they’re taking horror show on the road.