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 crisis. Their newfound interest in the epidemic raised questions for me about the impact of PEPFAR and the meaning of the expanding influence and involvement of Christian communities in AIDS prevention work in Africa. When I returned to conduct fieldwork in October 2005, I based my research in Ugandan church communities that were involved in promoting youth abstinence in Kampala. One church, University Hill Church (UHC), became the focus of my fieldwork and is featured prominently in this ethnography. Two other churches where I spent time are not described at length in this book, though my experiences there and the interviews I conducted with youth in those churches have contributed to the analyses I include here. One church identified as Pentecostal and the other two as nondenominational, though all belonged to the family of born-again churches that Ugandans consider distinct from the mainline mission churches—Anglican and Catholic—that have been dominant religious institutions in the country since the colonial era.
UHC was located near the Wandegeya neighborhood in Kampala and served a mostly English-speaking population. This is significant because English-language-dominant churches catered to a more educated, and thus elite, population than churches that primarily used one of Uganda’s indigenous languages. This was a church that had been positioned to serve a growing population of educated urban youth in Kampala, and many members of UHC were drawn from the city’s university campuses, especially nearby Makerere University. While the church comprised a multiethnic Ugandan community, the culture of the Ganda ethnic group dominated,53 in part because the church was led by a Ganda pastor and in part because the church itself, like the city of Kampala, is located in Buganda. For this reason, in this book I draw on literature from throughout the region to describe Ugandan cultural attitudes and orientations, but I sustain a focus, especially in the historical analysis I provide in chapter 2, on the literature of southern Uganda and especially Buganda.
UHC, as well as other churches I visited and spent time in, was actively involved in AIDS prevention activities. Over the course of my fieldwork, UHC sponsored and organized abstinence education projects, including public marches, concerts, workshops, and outreach and counseling programs. UHC was also the recipient of a modest amount of PEPFAR funding, which was received via a church-founded NGO that had been named the recipient of a grant for abstinence education. Because of the relatively sensitive nature of my research topic—which touches on spirituality, sexual relationships, and disease—both