Preaching Prevention. Lydia Boyd

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СКАЧАТЬ is a focus that allows for a more nuanced understanding of the effects of public health policies that are enacted within diverse social and cultural frameworks and by persons who are motivated by multiple models of health and moral agency. This approach also enables us to explore how moral practices may be challenged, and how two overlapping moral systems may be navigated by social actors. In Uganda, the outlines of the accountable subject were encountered by youth in and through their efforts to abstain and be faithful, but these practices were complicated by efforts to manage competing models for personhood and competing outlines of what it meant to be successful and ethical in Kampala today. Only by understanding the underlying logics and moral orientations that Ugandan youth brought to the practice of abstinence can we fully understand the limits and possibilities that the message “abstain and be faithful to avoid HIV/AIDS” might have—in Uganda and elsewhere.

       Moral Authorities: Born-Again Churches and Social Protest in Uganda

      In Uganda the moral conflicts that surround AIDS prevention have been shaped by broader changes to Ugandan society since the 1980s. The epidemic coincided, as it did on much of the African continent, with a period of rapid urbanization that precipitated widespread alterations to social bonds. Family relationships were especially burdened by the epidemic, as exceedingly high rates of death and disability forced people to rely on extended relationships of kin and community in order to cope. But the changing nature of these same relationships—as young adults delayed marriage and women left their natal homes to find wage labor—also stoked concerns that the abandonment of “traditional” values was a cause of the disease and society’s misfortune. “Loose women” and “unruly youth” were a frequent target of blame for the virus in Uganda, as they were elsewhere.⁴⁶ Because it became associated for many—especially elders—with changing family dynamics and the perceived misbehaviors attributed to newly more independent women and young adults, the epidemic intensified questions about what types of persons are morally correct in Ugandan society and about the social costs of both modern and traditional ways of being. These practices of reflection have especially engaged the spiritual realm, and blame for sexual misconduct has in some instances, as Heike Behrend has recounted in her study of Western Uganda,⁴⁷ been attributed to occult forces at work in society. High rates of death during the epidemic fueled a sense of intense social, moral, and spiritual insecurity.

      This sense of insecurity has also been exacerbated by the instability of the promises of new forms of global governance and political economy in neoliberal Uganda. Ugandans today live during an era when material wealth is both more visible and far out of reach for most people. The youth I studied, who lived in Uganda’s largest city and who were mostly enrolled or recently graduated from the country’s most prestigious university, regularly expressed a sense of frustration with their prospects for success despite their relatively privileged positions. Levels of unemployment were extremely high, and youth were forced to depend for extended periods on their parents and other elders for support. There was a growing sense of ambivalence about both an older generation’s emphasis on traditional social obligations and the modern emphasis on personal empowerment and individualism inherent in policies like PEPFAR.

      It was into this environment that a born-again movement to prevent AIDS took shape in Uganda. The growth of a religiously oriented AIDS activism in the early years of the twenty-first century points to the expanding importance of spirituality as a mode of social critique in neoliberal Africa. A number of scholars have emphasized the ways that criticisms of contemporary conditions by Africans are taking new forms, focused less on tangible actors and more often now articulated through the “sacrificial logic” of Pentecostal and occult imaginaries.⁴⁸ Such analysis challenges assumptions about the oppositional relationships between faith and reason, and religion and politics, to uncover how the spiritual realm has become a critical field in which Africans engage the problem of the moral uncertainty of political power. Spirituality is central to our understanding of how young adults in Uganda manage the contemporary sense of material and physical crisis, the tension and ambivalence that characterizes the neoliberal promise of self-help, and the behavioral ideal of accountability.

      My interest in the world of born-again Christianity is with the ways such communities provided a model not only for moral behavior but for “moral ambitions” and ways of effecting or responding to social change that many Ugandans found objectionable.⁴⁹ Omri Elisha, in his study of socially engaged evangelical Americans, uses the term “moral ambitions” to “draw attention to the intrinsic sociality of such aspirations . . . ​their inexorable orientation toward other people and their inalienability from social networks and institutions.”⁵⁰ In Uganda, moral ambitions have long played a central role in the politics of the colonial and postcolonial state. In his recent history of colonial protest in eastern Africa, Derek Peterson argues that mid-twentieth-century political innovation was not centered in the struggle for democratic rights and independence but instead in the moral arguments that engaged anxieties related to changes in intergenerational and gender relations.⁵¹ Arguments over women’s newfound independence and youths’ perceived unruliness became ways for men to reassert their moral authority and to take control of a narrative of historical change. Like Elisha, I see the support of abstinence as an ambitious project engaged in by born-again youth, one through which they sought to enact ethical reform on themselves and, in the process, to transform society.

      In this way, this book engages broader questions about the meaning and effect of a seemingly expanding religiosity in the modern world. Far from Max Weber’s prediction of a “disenchantment” with belief, Ugandans and Americans alike have embraced new and old forms of religious practice to make sense of, and even forward, a neoliberal emphasis on rationality and self-help. PEPFAR was a policy that sought to transform the ways communities and governments responded to social problems by seeking to funnel money to community and religious organizations directly and by targeting faith as a basis of social transformation. By focusing on a community of religious activists who responded to PEPFAR’s call to action, this study illuminates something about the role of religious practice in contemporary international aid. I examine churches as places where politics happens in mundane but transformative ways: in lessons about sex, family, and marriage; and in the support of certain types of relationships over others. In this broader sense this study builds on questions about American evangelicalism and social activism today, but places these questions in a very different social and historical context than that of the United States—one governed by quite distinct models and orientations toward religiosity, sociality, and morality.

      This study also takes up questions about the nature and effect of the financial and personal relationships between American and Ugandan Christians. Since the 1970s, American Christians have become more active in political issues and social activism, a historical shift that has drawn extensive scholarly interest.⁵² But their efforts to engage Africans and others in their political projects—efforts that have become increasingly important to American Christian communities—have thus far received less scholarly attention. The recent controversy over Uganda’s antihomosexuality legislation, which I address in chapter 6, drew popular attention to the depth and impact that such intercontinental religious ties may have. My interest is not in the Americans who become involved in African affairs by donating money to churches, by supporting or withdrawing support for legislative efforts like the recent Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda, or by traveling in groups to volunteer in Ugandan communities. My concerns are instead with how American Christian perspectives are taken up and transformed by Ugandans themselves.

       Research Methods and Fieldwork Engagements

      I began field research for this book in July 2004, just months after the PEPFAR program began to disseminate funds to program partners in Uganda. I first became interested in PEPFAR after I spent that month interviewing North American missionaries about their work in the development sector. The PEPFAR program, and AIDS prevention and care work, emerged as a frequent topic in discussions with these missionaries, who were newly motivated by the program to respond to the AIDS СКАЧАТЬ