With mounting international pressure on Uganda to table the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, even key members of the Family — the secretive evangelical group with extensive links to Capitol Hill that has dominated headlines in recent weeks — has spoken out against the draconian legislation authored by one of its own Ugandan members.
Whether the plea falls on deaf ears is unclear. But passage of the bill could mean death sentences for gays and lesbians in one of Africa’s most homophobic countries — as well as severe restrictions for nongovernmental organizations working to combat HIV/AIDS in the region.
A near-nightly subject of cable news programs led by MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, the Family has cultivated relationships over decades with Ugandan political leaders, ostensibly in order to export its brand of fundamentalism to the developing nation. David Bahati, a Ugandan politician and the author of the bill, is a Family member who organizes the Ugandan equivalent of the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast — the latter being an annual event that’s become a staple of Beltway politics and has been attended by every sitting U.S. president since 1953.
With the bill currently before a Ugandan parliament committee, Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, talks to Advocate.com about why some Family members have spoken out and why President Obama should finally stare down the Christian right by skipping the yearly prayer event that President Dwight D. Eisenhower hoped would never become a tradition for sitting presidents.
You can read the rest of the interview at Advocate.com.
5 comments:
Do you consider The Family an evangelical organization? They seem to have social and political ties to various Christian groups, but they're not doctrinally orthodox, as you made pretty clear in your book.
It seems to me that they're more involved in non-sectarian American civil religion, with evangelical associations, and it makes as much sense to call them evangelical as it does to call Unitarians, Mormons, or Jehovah's Witnesses Protestants.
You make a subtle point, MDSF, but they function as an evangelical organization in the sense that they argue that Jesus is the "universal inevitable" and they're tasked with helping people see that. They take a soft sell approach, but they definitely evangelize and consider that essential to their mission. They're not trying to get you to join a church, or even to stop calling yourself, say, a Jew or a Muslim -- but they do want you to submit to Jesus. That's evangelism. Moreover, the vast majority of their membership over their 70 year history has been explicitly evangelical.
Thanks for clarifying, Jeff.
I guess I would make a distinction here between "evangelistic" and "evangelical." From what I understood in your book you described a theology of sorts, with Bible studies and some amount of proselytizing, but I would suggest that it doesn't correspond to orthodox (for lack of a better word) evangelical Christian theology.
For example, the "Jesus is everywhere" theology you refer to isn't really the triumphant theology familiar to most dispensationalist evangelicals.
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