Editor's Note, December 22, 2008, 5:19pm: In the post below, Kathryn Joyce writes that “[Rick] Warren and his fellow evangelicals brought new visibility to the issue; simultaneously, faith-based AIDS groups such as Kay Warren's HIV/AIDS Initiative at Saddleback Church began receiving significant funding through PEPFAR and disbursing it to organizations on the ground that follow their religious guidelines.”
Kay Warren wrote a comment on the post stating: “Saddleback Church [has] not received a penny of PEPFAR money.”
Due to an editing error, the statement was indeed incorrect and has now been deleted. Records publicly available from the website of the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC) do not show Saddleback Church as a direct recipient of PEPFAR funding.
However, expert sources for this article underscored that while there is no known direct funding link between Saddleback and PEPFAR, the key question is which of the organizations and churches in various countries affiliated with Saddleback have received funding from PEPFAR. RH Reality Check is investigating these links and will report back to our readers on this issue when we return from our publishing hiatus in January.
The outcry among progressives since Wednesday, when President-elect Obama announced that Saddleback megachurch pastor Rick Warren would deliver the inaugural invocation, has been profound. Supporters of reproductive and LGBT rights recalled Warren's many insults to their causes: his comparison of pro-choice supporters to Holocaust deniers and of gays to pedophiles; his "ambush" of Obama during the election campaign's first (albeit unofficial) debate at Saddleback Church; and his general embodiment, beneath his jolly Hawaiian shirts and "new evangelical" concerns for AIDS, poverty and climate change, of religious right intolerance.
It's possible that Obama's selection of Warren was a move designed to outrage, as Salon's Mike Madden writes, noting that the two figures have consistently used each other politically, to signal to that they're willing to anger and depart from their friends. But Warren's undeserved reputation as a new-breed "moderate" evangelical, with his benevolent AIDS work in Africa supposed to negate his anti-gay and anti-choice advocacy at home, rests on a deeply flawed foundation. Warren's AIDS activism is nearly as troubling as the rest of his ideology (which even he acknowledges only differs from James Dobson's in style).
Warren's transformation into the evangelical AIDS "it person" is relatively recent. Earlier this month, on World AIDS Day, he awarded President Bush his ministry's first international P.E.A.C.E. award for contributions to fighting HIV/AIDS. Warren's own AIDS work, together with his wife Kay, began in 2002, ostensibly when Kay read a magazine article about the burgeoning population of AIDS orphans in Africa. That year, Warren led a group of evangelical churches in pushing a reluctant Bush administration to adopt a global AIDS policy, resulting in the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, launched in 2003.
"For all intents and purposes, [PEPFAR] was a good thing to do," says Jodi Jacobson, consultant for RH Reality Check and the founder and former executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), an NGO that promotes sexual and reproductive health and rights. "But with the entry of evangelical churches, in alliance with the Catholic Church, all funding for prevention became very fraught."
A division of aims within the global AIDS movement between those advocating for prevention funding and those working for treatment access helped draw faith-based groups. Though treatment and prevention are complementary in fighting HIV/AIDS, the entry of religious right activists exacerbated this divide between the two priorities. Treatment access advocates sought out partnership with evangelicals hoping for increased funding and attention for expensive treatment programs. But the faith-based solution naturally brought with it skewed policies that limited prevention options and led to what Jacobson calls the "profoundly ineffective" spending of AIDS money: with $20 billion spent on treatment over the past five years, but six new infections for every person treated. "No one doesn't want people to have access to treatment," she says. "But my argument is about the tradeoff. You can't treat your way out of this epidemic."
But churches anxious to follow Warren's lead didn't want to provide comprehensive HIV prevention services, such as safer sex education or condoms, so they lobbied for PEPFAR funding policy to be interpreted narrowly, creating stand-alone abstinence-until-marriage programs out of the law's 30% abstinence-only earmark. The new faith-based arm of the AIDS movement Warren had energized asked for, and got, a number of obstacles to prevention services: a prohibition on needle exchange programs for drug users; a ban family planning services in Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission clinics; and the anti-prostitution loyalty oath, which required all groups receiving PEPFAR funding, including those that work with sex workers, to condemn prostitution. As with conscience clauses, Jacobson says, this ideological interpretation of PEPFAR became a source of U.S. funding that "allows groups or organizations to avoid having to provide prevention treatment or care according to evidence-based criteria." The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation has stated that "PEPFAR has been successful not because of provisions such as the mandatory abstinence set-aside, but in spite of them."
Warren and his fellow evangelicals brought new visibility to the issue; simultaneously, faith-based AIDS groups brought a faith-based, rather than evidence-based, agenda to HIV prevention work. In Kay Warren's HIV/AIDS Initiative at Saddleback Church, that includes the core argument that "healthy choices" require faithfulness to the principle of abstinence, and "faithfulness requires faith": an evangelical priority that echoes her husband's reassurance to the far-right World Net Daily that his number one priority in his AIDS work was the salvation of non-Christians. Warren has made clear that his collaboration with non-evangelical AIDS activists wouldn't lead him to compromise on his biblical convictions.
"As a pastor, my job is to change behavior," Warren said. "I'm going to be training pastors how to teach behavior change."
"Despite his success in elevating the profile of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic among communities of faith in the United States who previously thought it was outside the scope of their concern, the prevention approach that Rick Warren promotes is riddled with hypermoralistic dictates," says Ariana Childs Graham, international policy advocate at SIECUS. "According to Warren, churches have a 'moral obligation' to promote abstinence and faithfulness as the only health behavior, ignoring the full range of prevention strategies that evidence has demonstrated needs to be part of successful HIV-prevention interventions."
In 2005, PEPFAR increased its commitment to faith-based groups through President Bush's New Partners Initiative, which sought to tap churches and faith-based groups as funding recipients. "What it meant is that the old partners, the public health people who distributed condoms, were disdained," says Jacobson. "Then new partners, many of whom had never stepped foot in Africa, were suddenly getting millions of dollars to go there. As far as we were concerned, it was a slush fund for the far right."
Progressive attempts to reform PEPFAR during its reauthorization process in February 2008 were heated. The late Rep. Tom Lantos championed a revision of the bill which struck the abstinence-until-marriage earmark, the prostitution pledge, and other prevention restrictions, and opened the door for PEPFAR programs that integrated family planning with HIV prevention as a natural combination of sexual health services.
The response of Warren and his fellow conservative PEPFAR supporters was cynical and swift. Staging a press conference on the day of the National Prayer Breakfast, four days before Lantos's death, Warren joined a menagerie of stalwart anti-choice leaders, including Reps. Chris Smith, Marilyn Musgrave and Joe Pitts, and activists Wendy Wright, Chuck Colson and Day Gardner. The group declared that the Lantos revision would "pour billions into the hands of abortion providers with little or no regard for the pro-life, pro-family cultures of recipient countries," strip abstinence programs of their funding and, by lifting the prostitution pledge, enable the sex trafficking of women. Lantos's reauthorization bill lost every point on reproductive health, and PEPFAR was reauthorized in its flawed state.
How that flawed policy plays out can be disastrous. As journalist Michelle Goldberg noted at Religion Dispatches, one of Warren's protégés in Uganda, the rabidly anti-gay pastor Martin Ssempa, has interpreted Warren's faith-driven solutions to the HIV/AIDS epidemic by burning condoms at universities and offering faith-healing to disease-stricken congregants. Other PEPFAR grantees, as Jacobson's colleagues in the global AIDS movement have witnessed, use their funds to promote fundamentalist interpretations of marital roles, advising women that if their husbands beat them, they should try harder to please them.
"We found enough examples of these things to make me very worried," says Jacobson.
Warren further entangles religion and treatment in his very own "Purpose-Driven Nation," Rwanda. He offered to extend an undisclosed amount of aid to the country if it adopted his bestselling book as an action plan for the nation, using churches as centers for capacity building and American evangelical leaders as medical and development advisors to the Rwandan parliament. The plan included the provision of a set of development kits to churches such as "school in a box" and "clinic in a box," the latter of which Warren says will eventually include AIDS medicines. The problem with this arrangement is comparable to the problem with other faith-based initiatives entrusted with the distribution of state services: that the provision of aid and services is performed with state dollars but with no accountability regarding the fair and non-coercive availability of that aid. Emmanuel Kolini, the Anglican archbishop of Rwanda, who called homosexuality a form of moral genocide, is on the National Steering Committee of Saddleback Church's Western Rwanda HIV/AIDS Healthcare Initiative.
"When such a high-profile, leading spokesman on an issue that affects women and gay people and men who have sex with men and sex workers reinforces messages of stigmatization of anyone who's different, it creates a climate in which money is going to organizations that have little to no accountability," says Jacobson. "We don't know what's going on with these groups abroad. In my mind it ties in to religious leaders who seek to heal the sick, but on their terms or not at all."
