By Rosie Dawson
The third of June is Martyrs’ Day in Uganda, a national holiday when Christians remember 45 young men, Protestant and Catholic, who were killed in the 1880s for their faith by King Mwanga II of Buganda, a Bantu kingdom within Uganda.
The commemorations were attended by presidents, priests and many people. Pictures on social media showed huge crowds converging on the martyrdom site at Namugongo, just north of the capital Kampala. A new amphitheatre at the Protestant shrine seats 20,000.
Some of the martyrs were burnt alive. The official Church of England companion to saints’ days records how “on their way to the place of execution these young Christians sang hymns in honour of the Lord and some were still singing when the flames surrounded them”.
There’s a particular feature of this story that appears crucial to understanding how Uganda’s Christian identity is tied up with sexuality. As well as refusing to renounce their faith, the young men in the Mwanga’s court also resisted his sexual advances.
Uganda has just brought in its new anti-homosexuality act, among the harshest legislation in the world against gay people. Anyone convicted for gay sexual acts faces a 20-year prison term, an underage person convicted of gay sexual acts can be jailed for three years, and the death penalty applies in “aggravated cases” such as the rape of a young person or transmission of HIV.
The measures have been condemned by the British government, President Joe Biden and the United Nations. From many churches, however, there has been a deafening silence while others support the new law.
“The Church in Uganda is the backbone of the legislation,” said Edward Mutebi founder of Let’s Walk Uganda, who fled the country in fear of his life in 2018. “If the church hadn’t pushed for this law so much we would not be where we are right now.”
Forty per cent of Uganda’s 48 million population are Catholics. A third are Anglicans. The Anglican church there has been among the fiercest critics of churches in the worldwide Anglican Communion that have approved same-sex marriage.
Along with those of Rwanda and Nigeria, its bishops boycotted the once-in-a- decade Lambeth Conference in Canterbury last summer. It is part of the Global Anglican Futures Conference (Gafcon) founded in 2008 and its chairman, Archbishop Foley Beach, from the breakaway Anglican Church of North America, preached at Martyrs’ Day on Saturday.
In April, a Gafcon conference held in the Rwandan capital Kigali, attended by more than 300 bishops, rejected the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury because of Church of England proposals that clergy should be allowed to say prayers of blessing for same-sex couples. Gafcon has posted no comment on its website about the legislation.
However, the Archbishop of Uganda, Stephen Samuel Kaziimba Mugalu, said last week: “The Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 is good and we are grateful to the president for assenting to it. Homosexuality … is being forced on us by outside, foreign actors against our will, against our culture, and against our religious beliefs.”
Homosexuality, he argued, led to a fall in population which in turn led to the “the collapse of countries, cultures, civilisations, and economies”. However, while generally supportive of the legislation, he says the church opposes the use of the death penalty and called for life imprisonment as an alternative.
Archbishop Kaziimba’s statement ended with a call to the churches “to develop pastoral healing ministries and recovery centres so the church will be a safe place to find healing, forgiveness, freedom, and hope” from sexual sins, including fornication and adultery.
His call has been welcomed by George Hope, Archdeacon in the diocese of Kitari, who teaches at Uganda Christian University. “People should feel safe, that they can come to the church for help,” he said. His message to people who commit sexual sins was that “God loves you, God died for you but his death doesn’t mean he wants you to remain as you are. He wants to rehabilitate you so that you get your fulness as a Christian.”
The archbishop’s talk of safe spaces has rung alarm bells for people within the LGBTQ+ community including Edwin Sesange, who came to the UK from Uganda 10 years ago. “I think he’s an ambassador for conversion therapy,” he said. “The archbishop is promoting a message that people are not born gay, that they become gay. I don’t agree with that. What he calls centres for healing I call conversion therapy centres.”
Meanwhile, the Religion Media Centre has learnt that a UK-based charity, the Core Issues Trust, is planning to assist in the development of the kind of ministries to which the archbishop refers.
Its director, Mike Davidson, rejects the term conversion therapy for the charity’s activities, which, he says, value client autonomy. He argues that there is science to support its position that a person’s sexuality is fluid and that those who have an unwanted same-sex attraction can change.
Core Issues Trust was a sponsor of the Gafcon conference in Kigali and had a presentation booth promoting its work. “There is clearly a need and they want us,” Mr Davidson said. “We can help with the upskilling of clergy who don’t know how to talk to these people.
“They might just say ‘stop’ or ‘don’t do it’. This isn’t good education. You have to give them an alternative, and you have to give them community otherwise they will find their home in the LGBT community.”
An African advisory group is being set up to collaborate with the trust on its future work. But one initiative already under way is developing links between young people in Uganda and the UK. “We felt that young people who are experienced in this area, who’ve dealt with these issues, can talk to young people in Uganda who are facing them,” Mr Davidson said.
Jayne Ozanne, director of the Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives, said she was appalled but not surprised to learn of the Core Issues initiative. “This goes against international pronouncements that conversion therapy is a form of torture and must be banned,” she said.
Ms Ozanne also criticised the archbishops of the Anglican Communion for not speaking out on behalf of LGBTQ+ people in Uganda. “I’m shocked and saddened by their failure to speak,” she said. “It appears they want to preserve a false unity at any cost. Now we see the true price of that ‘unity’ — LGBTQ+ people in Uganda are sadly having to bear the cost with their very lives.”
Within the Church of England several bishops have taken to social media to voice their opposition to the Anti-Homosexuality Act, although not in the numbers or as speedily as many would have liked and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has been criticised for not addressing the issue. The RMC understands that Lambeth Palace is considering issuing a statement.
