How evangelicals in Oklahoma are quietly tackling the AIDS crisis in Africa.
Christ's Cosmopolitans
By Travis Kavulla, November 20, 2008
On a highway in northern Oklahoma, where undulating hills and thick foliage give way to the Great Plains, a roadside sign marks the exact middle of the continental United States. Were America a body, Oklahoma would be its abdomen. Or, as many Oklahomans put it, the “buckle” of the Bible Belt.
It is an overwhelmingly Christian state, home to a ferment of evangelical Christianity that regards the Bible as a road map to salvation and the End Times as an imminent event. On a recent two-week jaunt through the state, I regularly saw hamlets no bigger that 200 or 300 people that supported three or four Protestant congregations, running the gamut from staid, brick Methodist churches to prefabricated Pentecostal structures with names like “The Church of God” or “Christ’s House.”
Elsewhere in the United States, some regard Oklahoma and its old-time religion as narrow-minded—a smug take on the situation, since we are all narrow minded in our own ways. Still, the description does not always seem inaccurate. My first conversation upon arriving at Tulsa’s airport was with a male docent at the official tourism office who made a joke, needless to retell here, at the expense of “the Negros.” It was no surprise that, when I later met one of the men I’d traveled far to see, he brought up the state’s unfortunate “redneck” reputation without being asked.
This man, Steve Hollingsworth, has been trying to dispel that image for a long time. As founder and director of the Christian charity 4-HIM, he and his wife Nancy have spent two decades organizing mission trips with a humanitarian bent, travelling frequently from Oklahoma to West Africa as well as to Haiti. The couple is eager to combat the notion that evangelical, “unapologetically Christian” folks are small-minded and insular.
“Steve genuinely believes that everyone needs help, and that everyone wants to help others,” says Nancy, an elementary school counselor who wore a Barack Obama campaign pin for the duration of the weekend I spent with them.
The Hollingsworths are part of a new generation of hip evangelicals who have taken an increasingly broad interest in spreading the “social Gospel”—the belief that Jesus did practical things that were realities in people’s lives, and that practical charity should be recreated by his followers.
During my trip, we visited the often trendy, youthful churches typical of this movement in Christianity. The glitzy campus of LifeChurch.tv (it goes by its URL) featured a Christian rock band and a pastor who sermonized about discovering Jesus while president of his fraternity. His lesson for September—there are monthly, themed messages—was spelled out in a huge banner hanging over the stage: “You DON’T Have What It Takes.” The implication was that Jesus Christ and one’s communion with fellow believers is “what it takes,” a message also preached in a separate youth quarter, where the animatronics of the talking tree and squirrel I saw are said to have been designed by Walt Disney World engineers.
On Sunday morning, we went to the Skyline Church, which has fewer bells and whistles and meets in the ground-floor auditorium of a defunct energy giant’s Oklahoma City headquarters. The church’s pastor, Greg Dewey, preaches in a t-shirt and jeans, but for all his hipness he is an unreconstructed church conservative on matters that traditionally matter to evangelicals.
In his sermon, he spoke against abortion, alluded to sexual morality, and talked about the necessity of salvation by Jesus if one is to enjoy the life hereafter. He added, “I am so grateful that we have life after death, but it is not to the exclusion of life before death.” On that Sunday, like many others, his sermon veers toward social justice and poverty. “Let’s not get so caught in the American Dream that we don’t care for the poor and needy,” he tells his congregation. Referencing Oklahoma City High's dropout rate, he declares, “It is unacceptable for a follower of Jesus to allow this to happen.”
As a practical emanation of this theology, Skyline puts a heavy emphasis on its “missional communities”—small groups of Dewey’s parishioners who study the Bible together and volunteer at schools, homeless shelters, and nursing homes. In a place where conspicuous Sunday church attendance—and tithing—has sometimes been the gold standard of unction, Dewey is unabashed about the centrality of charity to his church’s mission. He tells his Sunday congregation, “If you must choose to spend either your Wednesday volunteering at one of our missional projects or your Sunday coming here, then good-bye, I guess I won’t see you on Sunday.”
The Gospel passage Dewey chooses is particularly apropos: Matthew 25, a chapter often cited in support of social-justice theologies. In it, Jesus identifies two types of men—sheep and goats. Each follows the Lord, but only the sheep in a truly Christ-like spirit. Jesus says to the sheep, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” And Christ chastises the goats for not doing these things. Neither group of men has any idea what Jesus is talking about—all had been unerringly kind to Christ himself. They ask how had they had pleased or offended him per se. Jesus replies, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” It is a powerful story—one that ends, moreover, with a threat of damnation. Be charitable, Jesus says, or “depart from me…into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
At Skyline, it packs quite the punch. Near the end of the sermon, Dewey pitches 4-HIM, Steve Hollingsworth’s charity, which today is raising money for orphans in Sierra Leone—the second, third, or, indeed, the poorest country on earth depending on whose statistics you’re looking at. Outside the auditorium, in the foyer, I sipped my post-church coffee (Rwanda-grown and Fair Trade) and watched 4-HIM’s table. I have never seen such a high fraction of parishioners so gingerly write checks.
Steve tells me later that some of the parishioners have gone or will go on mission trips to Sierra Leone. He has arranged 80 mission trips and, during 4-HIM’s decade of operation, some 1,000 churchgoers from Middle America have gone to some of the poorest countries on Earth.
"Is this an effective use of money?" I ask. "Wouldn’t more dollars get to Sierra Leone if fewer white people did?"
But Steve and Nancy insist that the strength of their mission is that it helps the recipients of charity and spiritually benefits the givers, too. “It changes their perspective on Africa from ‘These are poor people’ to ‘These are people who happen to live in a poor country,’” Nancy tells me. “I don’t feel any more alive, and walking in Christ’s footsteps, than when I’m Africa.”
Indeed, an Africa that is an impersonal amalgam of calamities can take on a sinister, almost barbaric character. So the small groups of Oklahomans who go on 4-HIM’s trips work on projects that put a premium on face-to-face collaboration with local Africans: building schools and churches and dispensing medical supplies and microloans. Volunteers live in orphanages and private homes and are impacted by the experience, Steve says, for a long while after they depart. One young woman who had gone with the Hollingsworths on a three-week trip told me it had changed her life forever: She now volunteers weekly and gives her tithe — 10 percent of her income — to mission-based charities.
Later on Sunday evening, when by law in Oklahoma bars are shuttered, the Hollingsworths took me to one such venue where, in lieu of drinking, a young-adult ministry was being held—yet another gathering of hip, young Christians.
A heavily pierced comedian decked out in punk apparel — Pastor Elijah was his stage name — told PG-13 jokes about Mexican food’s indigestibility alongside moral parables about his life and tribulations. The ministry’s leader was Jerome, dressed in skinny jeans and a florid shirt; formerly, he was drug dealer, during which time his index finger of his right hand—his trigger finger—had been shot off with a handgun. (Steve Hollingsworth told me that he, too, had dealt drugs in his youth, and this seemed a common refrain of the pre-conversion moral failing of these young evangelicals.)
After the comedy hour was over, and some classic-rock covers were played, Jerome gave a sermon. For the second time in the day, I heard Matthew 25 and its lesson of Christian charity. Again, the event ended with an appeal for funds for Sierra Leonean orphans. A hat was passed and from an 80-strong crowd, Steve Hollingsworth raised another $2,000 for his mission—he had raised over $5,000 in a single Sunday.
The Hollingsworths’ operation has an annual budget of some $600,000, up from a paltry $2,500 when it began in 1999. Despite this growth, it is decidedly on the smaller side of NGOs working in Africa. This has certain advantages. While it cannot pack a Red Cross–sized punch, 4-HIM and smaller mission-based NGOs have the potential to forge more intimate connections between two smaller groups of people—people, moreover, who have a pre-existing connection in their faith. By keeping the project sites to three or four at any given time, 4-HIM’s commitments remain manageable and its human connections tangible.
Steve begins work in a community after identifying a local minister, and ascertains his community’s needs by, first and foremost, asking him. 4-HIM limits any given commitment to 12 years; usually, the long-term objectives are to provide basic medical services for the duration and, over time, build water pumps, a dual-use church-and-school, and a clinic. The goal is to infuse cash and expertise into capital projects that suit the expressed needs of the community, which Africans themselves are capable of operating after 4-HIM leaves.
In this approach, 4-HIM and many smaller mission-based organizations avoid the pratfalls of modern NGO culture. In the post-Cold War era, as foreign-aid budgets intended for humanitarian relief have soared, most USAID funding and other American foreign aid has gone in large grants to equally large NGOs, which have a bad tendency of bringing a cookie-cutter approach to their aid work, which is in turn more geared to the grant-making processes than local needs. This unfortunate trend not only bureaucratizes and dehumanizes charity, but has proved startlingly ineffective—a trend catalogued in William Easterly’s White Man’s Burden, which Steve Hollingsworth counts as one of his favorite books.
The difference in 4-HIM’s approach is not only one of size. Many evangelicals tend to speak generically (and with a frustrating level of vagueness) of the “hope” that Christian relief efforts, as opposed to secular ones, can bring. But this is not merely an airy religiosity. Evangelical Christianity, like all religions, has its own beliefs, which stir a distinct ethics.
Even in hip evangelicals’ lives, there is no moment more meaningful than making what they regard as the ultimate and individuated choice of “being born-again” and, like Steve and Jerome and other sinners, change their behavior in the name of Christ. This ethics of redemption and responsibility, however steeped in the language of religion, is arguably just what Africa needs.
This message found political expression in the slogan “compassionate conservatism,” which signalled George W. Bush’s own born-again faith and set him apart from traditional fiscal conservatives. Compassionate conservatism, by that name, has since died a quiet death—but at least in Africa, ever nearer to evangelicals’ hearts, it has made a huge splash.
Indeed, almost all the major Bush initiatives in Africa were issues that evangelicals had been speaking out about for years, unobserved by much of coastal America. In the Bush administration, their lobby found an outlet for these programs, which all trend toward supplanting a foreign NGO-based, hand-out culture with African persons and African governments taking up the reins of their own development after charity workers leave.
Indeed, it has been mentioned that the ties to southern Sudanese congregations of the local Methodist church in Bush’s hometown, Midland, Texas, served as impetus to the Bush administration’s early and fierce, if utterly unreported upon, mediation of the long-running conflict there. Evangelicals’ emphasis on self-help is apparent in Bush’s plan for Millennium Challenge Accounts, which attempts to place the burden for development on Africans and not foreign NGOs.
Yet the most prominent legislative accomplishment of evangelical activism, in Africa policy or elsewhere, is PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—a bonanza of federal spending on HIV prevention and AIDS treatment programs in Africa and poorer Caribbean nations. In the past five years, $15 billion has been spent through PEPFAR, a figure which will increase to $30 billion in the coming five-year cycle. In terms of projecting American power, PEPFAR has probably been a non-achievement, so marginal and poor—in short, un-influential—are its beneficiaries.
But as a humanitarian project, the program has succeeded, working what evangelicals are fond of calling the "Lazarus Effect” on millions of lives through antiretroviral treatments and, more importantly for the long run, a bold new effort to prevent new infections.
Central to this message of prevention is the idea that people can change their own behavior, including their sexual behavior. This has riled many in the public-health community, which has historically focused on condoms as the be-all-end-all solution to any AIDS crisis. Indeed, in the developed world, where a majority of AIDS sufferers belong to high-risk groups, an approach that favors condoms and needles makes sense.
But in Africa, the AIDS epidemic is generalized; if anything, groups that are low-risk in the West, like women, are the most afflicted in Africa. Even after multibillion-dollar campaigns to encourage proper condom use in South Africa, empirical evidence shows that they are used, if at all, inconsistently—and even when employed in line with expected standards of usage have a success rate of only 80 to 85 percent, says Edward C. Green, director of Harvard’s AIDS Prevention Research Center.
He argues that the high frequency of polyamory in Africa is one of the reasons the African epidemic has blossomed while epidemics elsewhere in the world have remained confined to discreet groups within societies. One person can lead many more to be infected in a short time in poly-amorous networks, while the West’s sexual pattern, even though a typical European has more sexual encounters over time, is largely one of monogamy and serial partners.
Sexual behavior is at the heart of the AIDS epidemic. And evangelicals have been on the front lines of insisting that a widespread change in sexual behavior from poly-amory to monogamy or, for young people, abstinence is an essential part to any lasting solution to Africa’s AIDS crisis. Indeed, even avowed secularists like Green and the microbiologist Helen Epstein, author of The Invisible Cure, agree these days that condoms and prophylactics can be counterproductive or, at best, are only part of the picture.
Evangelicals’ willingness to present moral solutions to temporal problems has proved effective in places like Uganda, whose AIDS policy is frankly religious and geared towards behavioral change. Indeed, when Congressional Democrats threatened to block the requirements for monogamy and abstinence-promotion funding, Janet Museveni, Uganda’s first lady and a prominent evangelical, personally flew to Washington to lobby the Republican conference into holding ground.
Today, Uganda is one of the few countries in Africa which has seen its AIDS infection rate decrease.
The public-health community, however, still regards any strategy that calls people to chastity or monogamy as both impracticable and, seemingly, an assault on individual liberties. The last U.N. confab on AIDS in Mexico City saw many vehement condemnations of the “Puritanism” of evangelicals’ approach and see in all Christian aid efforts an attempt to proselytize. This is undeniably so; Steve Hollingsworth signs his e-mails “until all have heard” for a reason. Still, evangelicals—like most of the historic mission churches in Africa—have shown a willingness to clothe, house, educate, and feed even non-Christians. In his Togo operations, Steve says he gives out 70 percent of 4-HIM’s micro-loans to Muslim women, although he adds—with obvious gladness—that a number have since converted.
This, historically, is the way Christian missions have tried to win converts in Africa since their 19th century inception—by bringing innovation and charity, most often in the field of medicine and education, and thus winning people over to Christianity and building a global fellowship to believers. And were the government to award USAID grants solely on the basis of efficiency, it is unquestionable that many Christian charities would make the list, if not dominate it. There is small wonder why: Churches are more closely connected to Africans’ day-to-day lives than a clinic or a youth recreation center or a gender-resources library. Churches are more trusted, and have a longer history than any organization in Africa—the state included—of providing social-welfare services. It is simply baffling that mere sensitivities over proselytizing would preclude the churches from being the logical intermediaries of U.S. aid.
The irony to the current American involvement in Africa is that some of the most novel and effective interventions in the rather stultified world of NGOs and foreign aid to Africa are the result of the newfound interests of Middle America’s evangelicals in the matter. From a supposedly insular place and a supposedly small-minded religiosity has come the change in temperament and policy that humanizes foreign aid, and reconnects it to some of the everyday Americans who pay for it.
Mr. Kavulla is a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow and, last year, a Gates Scholar in African History at Cambridge University.
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