This is What Christian Nationalism Looks Like

Deja Vu All Over Again in Uganda, Part Two

Read part one here. This is a series examining how a form of Christian nationalism is playing out in Uganda. There is a surprising twist at the end.

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My views of the world started to crash in 2009. I had already changed my views about the durability of adult sexual orientation. I went from believing therapy to help people change their orientation from gay to straight might work to believing it did not work, and in fact was mostly harmful. I had teamed up with then Regent University professor Mark Yarhouse to craft the sexual identity therapy framework and had become a noisy thorn in the side of reparative therapists.

Another thing happened in early 2009. In March, three Americans went to the African nation of Uganda to put on a conference about how people can change from gay to straight. One of those people was Scott Lively, who said the Nazi party was full of macho gays. He demonized gays and warned the audience that gays were after children and were the ruination of society. The other two Americans, Caleb Brundidge and Don Schmierer, provided the good cop to Lively’s terrible, awful, no good cop. Well, except they weren’t very good either.

Brundidge was the token real live ex-gay exhibit. Come see! He walks, he talks, he has been snatched from the jaws of Satan and now lives to tell about it. Schmierer was a older, fatherly figure there to reassure the audience that gays could be rehabilitated because they were not evil, just sick. Gays needed therapy and treatment, and if they got it, then they too, like Caleb, The Ex-Gay, could join productive society. However, Lively was never very far away reminding the group that if the rehab was refused or didn’t work, the gays needed to be put down.

The organizers of the event (e.g., Steven Langa, Martin Ssempa) hoped the conference would generate public enthusiasm for an anti-gay movement in the nation. They wanted that movement to lead to legislation which would “stamp out” homosexuality from Uganda for good. These organizers were Christian pastors and Parliamentarians. Some were affiliated with the Fellowship Foundation in Uganda, the same group that historically ran the National Prayer Breakfast every Spring in Washington, DC. Some were affiliated with various apostolic and dominionist Christian groups in the U.S. Some were Latter Day Saint organizations, such as Sharon Slater’s group which I wrote about in part one of this short series. What united them was their desire to pin all of the evils in Uganda on one group — LGBTQ people.

It worked. In October of 2009, David Bahati and Benson Obua introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009. It called for draconian measures, including the death penalty for “serial offenders” of the law. People who touched others of the same sex in an affectionate manner could be charged. Those engaging in any kind of sexual behavior would go to jail for years. Many groups around the world were horrified, including evangelical Christians in the U.S. Andrew Marin and I had little trouble organizing a Facebook protest group or about 15,000 in the name of evangelicals opposed to the Ugandan bill.

For his part, David Bahati expressed surprise that Christians in the U.S. opposed the bill. In fact, he said American Christian leaders privately assured him they agreed with him but were too afraid to say so. Bahati and the Christian pastors in Uganda were defiant even after popular U.S. pastor Rick Warren sent a Christmas video in 2009 imploring the pastors of Uganda to back away from their support of killing and jailing gays for private consensual behavior. The Ugandan response was firm, and they strongly rejected calls to stand down. They had no intention of giving away their moral position. God was on their side since Uganda was a Christian nation.

A Christian Nation

Then and now, Christian nationalism is relevant to this story. In 2009, Christian leaders in Uganda proclaimed that the main reason they wanted to rid the society of LGBTQ people was because Uganda is a Christian nation. The same is true now. Several parliamentarians appealed to God during debate on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Minister of Sports and Education, Peter Ogwang, told the Parliament:

We want to commit, in the name of the Almighty God, that we will not accept [homosexuality] to sell our country, our destiny and our continent because of the interests they might be getting as an individual.

Throughout the years the Ugandan Parliament considered the fate of homosexuals, American Christians began to grapple with what a Christian nation would look like here. For awhile, it appeared that American Christians didn’t want to go the way of the Ugandans. American Christian leaders lined up to oppose the Ugandan bill saying the government shouldn’t execute Old Testament law in the civil sphere.

However, at the same time, there was (and is) a movement of conservative Christians who proclaimed that America was founded as a Christian nation and has a special relationship with God. For me personally, my opposition to the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill was the gateway to considering the importance and potential horror of Christian nationalism in the U.S. Prior to reporting on that story, I had not seriously considered what an unseparated church and state would look like here.

As I looked into the U.S. Christian nationalist influences, all roads led to Aledo, TX and David Barton. I wrote my first article about a Barton historical claim in 2011, followed by the 2012 book Getting Jefferson Right (with co-author Michael Coulter). The book countered many claims Barton made in his ill-fated, but appropriately titled book The Jefferson Lies. Barton’s book was pulled from publication by Christian publisher Thomas Nelson due to historical errors, many of which we pointed out in our book. Honestly, we naively thought that episode might have done lasting damage to Christian nationalism. We were wrong.

I have heard when you cast out one demon, seven more come back. That may be a modest assessment. Thanks to Donald Trump and a coalition of various grievance groups, Christian nationalism is stronger and angrier than ever. In addition to Barton’s we-just-want-godly-laws crowd, we now see the ascendance of neo-Christian reconstructionists who want to elevate a Christian prince, or as Josh Abbotoy with American Reformer recently tweeted, a “Protestant Franco” to power.

In Uganda, there have been winners and losers under Christian nationalism. For the past 14 years, LGBTQ people have been the visible and obvious targets. In the U.S., we may speculate who would be targeted under a Protestant Franco. There are some obvious suspects.

Uganda has shown us that people who say they are followers of Christ believe they can legislate a moral society by eliminating the losers. Many Christian nationalists in the U.S. are eager to that here.

In the next part of this series, I want to talk about who might be the winners and losers under a Christian nationalist regime here. Sharon Slater, beware.