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Ever since a mysterious illness started killing gay men in the
early 1980s, religious groups have had a mixed record on coping with the disease that came to be known as AIDS. Although their
faith traditions called them to care for those in need, some people of faith found it difficult to fulfill this mandate when
it came to HIV/AIDS.
Over the years, however, that attitude has changed for many religious leaders and lay people.
As the death toll rises dramatically and the pandemic spreads to new parts of the globe (more than 40 million people worldwide
have been infected with HIV/AIDS, 25 million have already died and, according to the National Intelligence Council, the number
of those infected could rise to 100 million by 2010), religious organizations are working against AIDS with increasing passion.
Still, AIDS forces people of faith to confront issues of sex and homosexuality, drug abuse, gender, race, stigmatization,
poverty, and justice — not an easy task for many religions, yet facing difficult social issues has long been part of religious
history.
"I don’t care how you got AIDS — whether you got it from a needle, whether you got it through a blood transfusion,
whether through homosexual contact, or whether just being careless," the influential evangelist Franklin Graham has told Religion
& Ethics NewsWeekly in words that resonate across the religious spectrum. "It doesn’t matter how you got it. The fact is you
have it. The church of Jesus Christ, I think, needs to be on the forefront of this issue with love, with compassion, with
understanding and giving hope to those that don’t have hope."
Today, Buddhist temples in Thailand are providing health
care and sex education to treat AIDS and prevent its spread; Presbyterians in Africa are distributing home-care kits for AIDS
patients without access to medical care; synagogues throughout the United States give solace and spiritual care to AIDS patients
and their families; and the United Methodist Church lobbies the U.S. Congress for greater funding to fight AIDS.
It
is a significant change from 20 years ago, says the Rev. Jimmy Allen, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
"We have moved out of the days of fear…to a time of involvement with people living with AIDS," he says. Allen's family knew
those "days of fear" all too well. His daughter-in-law, Lydia, contracted the virus from a blood transfusion in the early
1980s, hours before giving birth to her son, Matthew.
The disease went undiscovered until Lydia and her husband, Scott
Allen, had a second son who died of AIDS as an infant in 1986. Matthew also had AIDS and lived with rejection upon rejection
from church Sunday schools until he died at age 13. In addition, Jimmy Allen's son Skip is gay and HIV-positive. "I have a
lot of differences of opinion with my gay son, but we decided to love each other," Allen says. "There is an acceptance level
when love is present that doesn't involve approval." It is a message he hopes to convey to churches. "My challenge to churches
is that they find out what's happening in the AIDS community," he says. "Once they see the pain and sorrow, the Christian
response has to be to care for the victim."
Mobilizing People of Faith
In the 1980s, as people began dying
of AIDS, Earl Shelp, a Baptist pastor and medical ethicist in Houston, was among the first to mobilize people of faith to
help. He founded Interfaith Care Partners, a non-profit organization in which small groups from Christian and Jewish congregations
are matched with an AIDS patient to provide assistance.
"There were religious voices condemning people with AIDS and
calling for their abandonment. We took that head on," Shelp says. "God's people are called to befriend and defend those who
are on the margins of society."
As AIDS spread in the United States, it became harder for communities of faith to
ignore the disease; their siblings, children, congregants, and co-workers were dying. Religious communities became increasingly
involved.
But in the 1990s, when the disease all but seemed to disappear, AIDS dropped off some agendas. Increased
awareness about prevention had slowed its spread, and the advent of the so-called “cocktail” of AIDS drugs dramatically reduced
the number of deaths in the United States.
Norman Sandfield, chairman of the International Jewish AIDS Network, says
his organization has all but ceased getting calls from Jews looking for either health services or spiritual solace. The former
are less needed, and the latter is being provided by a large number of synagogues that have embraced AIDS victims and their
families. "People I know who are Jewish and living with AIDS — it's a chronic condition. They have a medical problem, but
they're not planning on dying anytime soon," Sandfield says, in a statement that is true for affluent American AIDS patients
of all religions.
In truth, though, AIDS has hardly disappeared from the U.S. scene. Instead, it has moved from mostly
white, relatively affluent gay men to mostly poor African Americans who cannot afford treatment with the AIDS “cocktail.”
Less than half of all African Americans with HIV are recipients of Medicaid, the largest funding source for AIDS care. And
while many African American churches and faith-based organizations, such as The Balm in Gilead, vigorously address the AIDS
crisis in their ministries (through training institutes, awareness programs, prayer services, and capacity- building conferences
for church leaders), many others, although they are a major force in their urban and rural communities, have been reluctant
to address AIDS prevention, fearing it might undermine traditional Bible-based teaching on extramarital sex.
The vastness
of the international pandemic has both reawakened religious organizations that had de-emphasized AIDS and convinced newcomers
to the issue that they must act. In the Presbyterian Church (USA), for example, the AIDS issue is getting increased funding
at a time when the denomination is generally tightening its belt.
At a major meeting in October 2002, plans were formulated
to pair U.S. churches with African counterparts and to hire two Africa-based people to work exclusively on AIDS. "The Presbyterian
Church had been very active in the 1980s talking about issues of stigma and sexuality," says Jennifer Butler, the church's
U.N. representative. "But nobody had taken up the banner of looking at the crisis globally."
Many religious leaders
say their institutions still have not given AIDS nearly enough attention domestically or abroad. Richard Cizik, vice president
for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, cites a recent survey sponsored by World Vision, the
Christian humanitarian organization, that found only three percent of evangelicals consider HIV/AIDS a priority for giving.
He laments the fact that AIDS ministries have had to close their doors for lack of funds. "Our people are not willing
to invest dollars in these sorts of ministries," he says.
Yet at a recent conference on HIV/AIDS sponsored by Samaritan’s
Purse, Franklin Graham’s international relief organization, Graham called on evangelical Christians to attack AIDS “with the
same level of commitment, zeal, money, and resources that we have rightly applied toward combating international terrorism,”
and he acknowledged publicly that many Christians have been wrong to avoid AIDS ministry.
Rethinking Attitudes
Despite
all the efforts to combat AIDS, some theologians say communities of faith cannot truly be part of the solution without deep
introspection about traditional religious stances on human sexuality. "[AIDS is] a life-and-death situation and you need to
rethink your values," say Letty Russell, a feminist theologian and professor emeritus at Yale Divinity School. "The stigma
of having it is still so great. In the U.S., people assume you're gay. In other countries, they assume you're a prostitute."
Russell and others point to the fact that many religious leaders deny that AIDS is a problem, and some still condemn
AIDS patients as sinners. In other cases, they say, traditional religious beliefs inhibit efforts at prevention.
In
South Africa, for example, one of the countries most devastated by the pandemic, Catholic bishops in 2001 condemned the use
of condoms to prevent AIDS as "immoral and misguided" with one exception — for married couples, and even then it is limited.
The bishops said that when one partner is HIV-positive, a married couple could use condoms in some circumstances.
They also claimed that condoms "contribute to the breakdown of self-control and mutual trust," and may be one of the main
reasons for the spread of HIV/AIDS. Yet Catholics in general have been "in the forefront of responding to people with AIDS,"
according to Kenneth Overberg, S.J., a moral theologian at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.
But, he continues,
there is only so much the church can do without systemic change. "Many of us find the traditional teachings limiting," Overberg
says. "That work needs to be done delicately, but many of us know it needs to be done."
In San Francisco, Steve Peskind,
co-coordinator of the Buddhist AIDS Project, spends much of his time applying Buddhist teachings to the prevention of AIDS
and care for AIDS patients — breathing techniques, mindfulness meditation, end-of-life counseling, advocacy for compassionate
social action, spiritual reflection on impermanence and suffering, and simply being present for people with AIDS.
"We're
basically trying to infuse Buddhist perspectives into what is sometimes seen as an addictive culture of sex and sexual gratification,"
he says.
But Peskind also grapples with traditional Buddhist teachings about sexual misconduct that he says contribute
to anti-homosexual attitudes around the world. Gay Buddhists in San Francisco have met with the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader
of Tibetan Buddhism, to discuss Buddhist statements on homosexuality and “what the consequences may be, especially for sexual
minorities," Peskind says.
It is all the more unfortunate, say those involved in the issue, because religion has a
unique role to play in fighting HIV/AIDS. With its influence on believers' values and behavioral norms — and its role in caring
for the suffering — religion can have an impact on everything from prevention to treatment to dealing with the dying.
"[In]
Africa, but largely everywhere in the world, people are extremely religious, and religion is tied to the culture," says Russell.
"Religion is at the heart of people's culture and way of life, and if you don't address ways it can be used to change attitudes
toward sexuality, you're not going to be successful in stemming the disease."
In South Africa, where only about two
percent of the population is Muslim, Rukia Cornelius is in charge of awareness and education programs at mosques and Islamic
societies for an AIDS support group called Positive Muslims. “We believe in a theology of compassion,” she says, “a way of
reading the Holy Koran...that focuses on Allah as most compassionate.”
Too many Muslims, she observes, seem to believe
that HIV/AIDS does not affect them. They say that Muslims are not promiscuous, or that Muslims have strong moral values and
don’t have sex before marriage. “We do gratefully have pockets in our community that want to make a difference and are starting
to develop their own HIV/AIDS programs,” says Cornelius. But local Muslim judicial councils, she reports, ignore the situation
and refuse to use “the strongest tool available to us — the pulpit.”
In Senegal, however, where the HIV infection
rate is barely one percent, imams in Senegal’s mosques told Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro
that there is one important reason for the low number: the country is 95 percent devout Muslim. Homosexuality and marital
infidelity, the imams preach, are outlawed by the Koran.
Conservatives and liberals alike point to another African
country, Uganda, as an example of what can be done. There, schools, churches and mosques are used to provide AIDS education
and care, and as a result, Uganda has recorded declining rates of HIV infection since 1993, according to a 2001 U.N. report
— this at a time when the news about AIDS in Africa is almost uniformly tragic.
Religious leaders around the world
are hoping to recreate the Uganda experience in many, many other countries before it is too late.
Michael Kress
is editor-in-chief of the Internet site MyJewishLearning.com.
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