NEWS STORY: Religious groups’ response to AIDS falls short

c. 1998 Religion News Service ATLANTA _ The stories were legion, emotional and laced with deeply felt pain and anger. An African-American Baptist theologian told of an uncle, a life-long churchgoer, who felt stigmatized by his pastor as he lay dying from AIDS. A Roman Catholic nun spoke of the insensitivity of a priest who […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

ATLANTA _ The stories were legion, emotional and laced with deeply felt pain and anger.

An African-American Baptist theologian told of an uncle, a life-long churchgoer, who felt stigmatized by his pastor as he lay dying from AIDS. A Roman Catholic nun spoke of the insensitivity of a priest who blessed an AIDS patient from the door of his hospital room rather than enter. A former Southern Baptist Convention president recounted how his grandson with AIDS was turned away from a slew of church Sunday schools.”People with AIDS have been so abused by religious groups that when I work with AIDS people I often do not even tell them that I am ordained,”said the Rev. Melinda V. McLain, a United Church of Christ minister who directs a San Francisco interfaith AIDS support program.


McLain and the others were among a host of speakers at an”AIDS & Religion in America”conference here who were critical of the response of most religious groups to the continuing AIDS crisis. The prevailing tone at the conference, which ended Wednesday (Nov. 11), was that too many denominations have responded inadequately to AIDS, held back by moral qualms about a virus widely linked in the United States to gay men and intravenous drug users.

Moreover, they said, many groups that have tried to address AIDS have slackened in their commitment out of burnout or the mistaken belief the medical advances that now extend the lifespans of AIDS sufferers also have slowed the spread of the disease.

Figures released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) make it clear the epidemic is by no means over. At least 40,000 Americans are infected annually with HIV, the viral precursor to AIDS. Nearly 400,000 Americans have been killed by AIDS and AIDS-related complications, and as many as 900,000 Americans are believed to be living with HIV.

The disease has spread far beyond the gay subculture where it first surfaced in the United States and, primarily through heterosexual transmission, has hit women, minority and low-income communities hard. In the United States, AIDS is spreading fastest in the South.”I’m saddened by-and-large by the religious community’s resistance to AIDS,”said the Rev. Jeff Peterson-Davis, a Presbyterian minister who directs the Atlanta Interfaith AIDS Network.”You would think the religious world would show unconditional love toward sufferers. But that’s not been the case.” Despite the sense of too little, too late that permeated the four-day conference at the Carter Presidential Center, the irony is that the religious community has largely outpaced other segments of society in providing direct care for those suffering from AIDS and in mustering public support for governmental and private efforts to find a cure.

Faith-based AIDS programs account for more than a quarter of the nation’s 5,000 HIV/AIDS related service organizations. Moreover, that figure does not include AIDS ministries linked to individual congregations or those part of larger programs.”That’s the paradox,”said United Church of Christ minister, the Rev. Kenneth South, director of the AIDS National Interfaith Network, which sponsored the Atlanta gathering, the first such large-scale religion and AIDS conference in a decade.”The religious response to AIDS is proportionally the largest, yet it’s a minimal response if you consider that more than 210 million Americans identify themselves as having a religious connection.”When you compare it to the size of the religious community, it’s small, very small.” Organizers sought to further religious community involvement in AIDS work by inviting to the conference denominational communications officials, program development staffers and theologians _ those in positions to influence both leaders and congregants. They sought to broaden the religious response by including representatives from non-Judeo-Christian movements _ Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists _ normally left out of interfaith efforts.

Additionally, they made a special effort to get African-American and evangelical Christian groups to send representatives.

The black community is where HIV/AIDS is now spreading most rapidly in the United States. AIDS has become the leading cause of death among 25 to 44-year-old black men and women, according to the CDC, but African-American churches concerned about their middle class status have been slow to respond, said Randall Bailey, a Baptist minister who teaches at Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Center.


And it is within the theologically conservative Christian world where staunchly held moral concerns about the sexual activity and drug use associated with the disease’s spread has prompted the most resistance to addressing AIDS as a prime public health threat requiring a greater governmental and public response.

While representatives of historically black churches and the largely African-American Muslim American Society were well represented among the nearly 200 conference participants, conservative Christians were relatively rare.”A lot of conservative groups still don’t want to come to a conference like this because of one word: homosexuality,”said South.”After all these years, they still think AIDS is a `gay disease’ and that if you support people with AIDS you’re supporting the gay agenda.” One conservative group that did attend was the Salvation Army, which has come up against AIDS among the homeless and others it serves in the United States, as well as in the”marginalized”populations it serves in Africa and Asia, parts of the world where HIV/AIDS is now spreading most rapidly, mainly through heterosexual encounters.”The Army has learned to be both a lighthouse and a lifeboat organization,”Major Herbert C. Rader, a medical doctor and Salvation Army official, said in explaining his denomination’s effort to balance helping AIDS sufferers with its theological rejection of their lifestyle decisions.”We cannot change the `manufacturer’s instructions’ with respect to the immutable rules for healthy living, nor can we move the lighthouse to accommodate someone’s desire to sail near the rocks,”he said.”But we understand that our role is not to shout from the shore, but to push into the dangerous waters, to come alongside to help, and to rescue those who are foundering by all means available.” The general absence of conservative Christians at the conference does not mean they are totally absent from the fight against AIDS, however.

James A. Allen, the former Southern Baptist Convention president who has lost two grandchildren and a daughter-in-law to AIDS because of a tainted blood transfusion (a gay son also suffers from the disease), noted that the 16 million-member denomination’s women’s mission agency recently concluded a year-long AIDS awareness program.

In addition,”there’s a growing awareness on the congregational level, where it’s easier for evangelicals to get things done free from institutional politics, of the need to help those who have AIDS,”he said. Allen cited Love In Action, a nondenominational evangelical AIDS response group based in Annapolis, Md., with 200 chapters around the nation, as an example of growing conservative Christian engagement with the AIDS crisis.

Still, such efforts remain inadequate, Allen added, and he urged religious AIDS activists to keep pushing conservative churches to get more involved. Theological differences need to be put aside so the churches can respond to those in need, he added.”We need to give each other the right to be wrong on Scripture,”Allen said.

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But providing care to those suffering from AIDS is not enough, conference participants concluded. Prevention is paramount if the epidemic is to be stopped, they said, and that requires faith groups to confront openly the explosive subjects of sex and drug use. Specifically, it means dealing with health officials’ recommendations that the sexually active should use condoms and drug users should be given clean needles to cut down on the spread of HIV/AIDS.


Even religious groups that provide much care to AIDS sufferers _ Catholics, for example _ often recoil at the idea of handing out condoms to teen-agers and giving clean needles to drug addicts.”AIDS rolls up into one horrible ball all the issues that faith groups don’t want to deal with (about) the reality of life as it is lived,”said Reform Rabbi Marc C. Blumenthal of West Covina, Calif., board chairman of the AIDS National Interfaith Network.”But it’s here and must be faced.” DEA END RIFKIN

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