Churches Must Grapple with Condoms and Gender Equity

Ing’utu Mutembo, Communication, Justice and Peace officer of the Christian Council of Zambia, challenged fellow Christian communicators to come to terms with the realities of HIV/Aids in Southern African countries and the gender inequalities which underpin them. Ing’utu died on August 25, 2003, less than a week after the meeting, of respiratory difficulties.

Potentially churches can do a lot about the HIV/Aids epidemic. But, silence, incoherence and inaction are actually contributing to the high rates of infection and some fundamentalist Christians cause the severest stigmatisation of people living with HIV. They could be the saviours, they could turn the tide, but fundamentalist interpretations are part of the problem. This was the opinion of Church Council communicators from southern African countries meeting in Lilongwe, Malawi last August.

Churches have extensive networks of people, institutions, and infrastructure, and in much of rural Africa few other institutions exist. They are involved in the formation of values of young people in schools which they run, they have the people’s ear, in critical situations, and in addition the faithful are more likely to listen to their churches than to political, social or economic institutions. Morality, beliefs about disease, rules of family life and sexual activity are still areas where the churches have some jurisdiction. Faith is important in individual development, in community life and in social behaviour related to health. So, who better than the churches to act on HIV/Aids?

But first, churches have to get to grips with issues that are controversial for them, like condoms, and they’ll also have to talk a lot about sex – not one of their strong points. Musupole gets excited about this: “We’ve made sexuality and spirituality into opposites. Really they are so close they can be confused. Not only that but we have given far too much weight to sexual sins, and too little to other sins”.

Theologically safe ground for many churches is to base their HIV-related messages solely on fidelity and abstinence. Musopole pokes a big hole in condom rejection: “No condoms? What about women whose husbands are HIV positive? Should we tell them not to use condoms? There are millions of women in this position and we must advise them, we must advise them to use condoms".

Ing’utu Mutembo of the Council of Churches in Zambia (pictured above) was sceptical that promoting abstinence, fidelity and condoms would be enough: “when women do not have control over when and how sex happens, then what power do they have to insist on condoms being used?…Marital rape is very common, and isn’t even illegal in some African countries”. If women want to discuss HIV at home or go for HIV testing they are either implicitly expressing mistrust of their husbands or they become vulnerable to mistrust by their husbands. Many women are afraid of insisting on the use of condoms, or of going for testing or treatment because they would be beaten or divorced. If AIDS prevention programmes do not address marital rape and other aspects of gender-related power they cannot be successful.

Churches also stigmatise and discriminate against people living with HIV/Aids, this causes suffering and more infection. For many fundamentalist Christians, HIV is synonymous with adultery, drugs, and the big untouchable taboo of homosexuality – ‘God punishes your sins with disease and death’. HIV positive people are being turned away from their churches and publicly condemned. The social consequences of going public on HIV status can be so terrible, even in the best of circumstances, that many people choose to keep their own status secret, or that of their family members. People who think they may be HIV positive are reluctant to get tested, or to take adequate measures to prevent transmission. Mothers are so afraid of stigmatisation that they will risk infecting their babies rather than get tested. Stigma causes infection.

Margaret Kaamba, an HIV positive teacher at a religious school in Malawi, attends a self-help group in Lilongwe where people can confide in each other. Everyone is cautious about who they tell outside, not only because of stigma. “Many people don’t tell their own family, not to burden them” Margaret explains, “it is a great worry financially and a great sadness”. Margaret explains how HIV/Aids is an economic issue as much as a health issue: “The costs are very high. ARVs (anti retro-viral drugs) are deadly expensive, then there’s medicine for opportunistic disease, travel to clinics and hospitals, the loss of income, funerals, the adoption of orphans… the financial burden can be more than 80% of the family income” She explains that the way she copes is fairly typical: “we had used up our savings by the time my husband died, now I have to handle loans every month…many people have to mortgage their property and land, their productive assets, some have to sell them” she says, “everyone is living with HIV/Aids, we are all either infected or affected”.

The meeting in Malawi concluded by nominating a committee to get an authoritative theological document on HIV/AIDS, a “Kairos document” produced by eminent theologians -- to unite the churches on HIV/Aids issues for the first time and to lay the way for serious campaigns. Bringing churches together on an issue related to sex is a big challenge but the stakes have never been so high.

God must want us to stop Aids, so while theologians try to reconcile fundamentalist Christian perspectives with reality, perhaps most of us can agree on one thing that’s already being preached by many: extra-marital sex may be a sin, but without a condom it’s a much bigger sin.

The meeting of church communicators in Malawi was organised by EDICISA and sponsored by WACC.