I was shocked when I came across Brian McLaren’s post on the Ugandan anti-gay bill currently proposed in the Ugandan Parliament. According to The Atlantic, the proposed bill would:
- Reaffirm the lifetime sentence currently provided upon conviction of homosexuality, and extends the definition from sexual activity to merely “touch[ing] another person with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality.”
- Create a new category of “aggravated homosexuality” which provides for the death penalty for “repeat offenders” and for cases where the individual is HIV-positive.
- Criminalizes all speech and peaceful assembly for those who advocate on behalf of LGBT citizens in Uganda with fines and imprisonment of between five and seven years.
- Criminalizes the act of obtaining a same-sex marriage abroad with lifetime imprisonment.
- Adds a clause which forces friends or family members to report LGBT persons to police within 24-hours of learning about that individual’s homosexuality or face fines or imprisonment of up to three years.
- Adds an extra-territorial and extradition provisions, allowing Uganda to prosecute LGBT Ugandans living abroad.
McLaren’s call for a “robust” discussion on this bill is valid and worthy, though in the end I’m not sure what it would accomplish practically. And his baffling calling out of “discernment” websites to stand with him and have a robust discussion on the bill is lost on me (especially since as I’ve pointed out before, he has no comments enabled on his blog). So, instead, I’m asking you to keep this bill in mind when you pray. Pray that not only would such a barbaric bill be defeated, but also that the the Gospel of Jesus would radically transform the lives of the LGBT population in Uganda.
In the end, regardless of our views on homosexuality (and Brian), this is definitely a cause we can all be rallied around as Christians.
UPDATE: Interestingly, I came across this quote from Ekklesia
Meanwhile an Anglican church leader in Uganda, while rejecting proposals that homosexuals should face the death penalty for sexual assault in some cases, says that prison terms should remain as a deterrent.
“We want to state categorically that homosexuality is unacceptable,” Bishop Stanley Ntagali of Masindi-Kitara diocese told Ecumenical News International in a recent interview.
He said he and his church views those involved in homosexuality as sinners who can repent and reform, adding: “We have to be a moral fibre of the society.”
While I sympathize with the bishop’s view on homosexuality (and any sin for that matter) and repentance, I find it unsettling and disturbing that Uganda’s religious leaders are practicing a form Christendom, an experiment that is a proven a failure as a strategy for transforming the world by the power of the Gospel, by inserting themselves into shaping public debates on legislative oppression of personal moral conduct. In the past Christendom has led to oppression, and now it continues to do so today.
I can’t help but wonder what one of my new favorite heros of the faith, Lesslie Newbigin would have to say about such a situation as this. I’m pretty sure this great quote out of his book, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, gives us a pretty good clue:
Corpus Christianum is no more, and we cannot go back to it. The religious wars of the seventeenth century marked the final destruction of Christendom’s synthesis of church and society. From the eighteenth century onward, Europe turned away from the Christian vision of man and his world, accepted a radically different vision for public life, and relegated the Christian vision to the status of a permitted option for the private sector. But for the modern church to accept this status is to do exactly what the Bible forbids us to do. It is, in effect, to deny the kingship of Christ over all of life–public and private. It is to deny that Christ is, simply and finally, the truth by which all other claims to truth are to be tested. It is to abandon its calling.
The Enlightenment’s vision of the heavenly city has failed. We are in a new situation, and we cannot turn back the clock. It is certain that we cannot go back to the corpus Christianum. It is also certain–and this needs to be said sharply in view of the prevalence among Christians of a kind of anarchistic romanticism–that we cannot go back to a pre-Constantinian innocence…perhaps we can learn how to embody in the life of the church a witness to the kingship of Christ over all life–its politics and economic no less than its personal and domestic morals–yet without falling into the Constantinian trap.