Bridges of Hope

Much-Needed Honesty: Africa and AIDS
By Chuck Colson
July 7, 2005
BreakPoint

When the heads of the world's leading industrial nations, known as the G-8, meet this week, one of the subjects will be Africa. Even if sub-Saharan Africa gets the economic aid it is seeking from the West, it still faces a monumental AIDS crisis.

Besides killing millions of people, AIDS threatens to distort Africa's future in an almost unprecedented fashion. Because of AIDS, Africa's population now consists of a great many young people and a much smaller group of old people. What's missing, of course, are the people in the middle: the ones who raise children, care for their parents, and form the backbone of any good economy.

With this much at stake, it's time to get honest about AIDS.

An example of this much-needed honesty was a recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times. In it, Brooks wrote about his visit to Mozambique, a nation that has been devastated by HIV/AIDS. Among the places Brooks visited was a church that cares for the most heart-breaking victims of the epidemic: the orphans.

When asked about preventing AIDS, the pastor and parishioners initially spoke about condoms and "safe sex." Then, Brooks said, "they [slipped] out of the language of safety and into a different language": the language of faith. They told Brooks that it is "easier for those who have been touched by God to accept when a woman says no." This matters because, as Brooks writes, much of the AIDS crisis is driven by "predatory men who knowingly infect women by the score."

The wisdom regarding human nature that Brooks saw in "that church made of sticks," as he put it, is the key to preventing AIDS. The financial and technical assistance that the West can and should provide can only treat the disease. It can't prevent its spread.

The evidence is there for everyone to see: We've tried awareness, condom distribution, economic development, and much more. But the problem persists.

That's because the spread of AIDS is inevitably linked to the question of fallen human nature. Things like fear, weakness, and temptation do not respond to technical expertise or incentives. They only respond to "transcendent ideals and faiths" and the moral language they produce. As we've seen in places like Uganda, only when people regard faithfulness and chastity as normative will they stop engaging in the behaviors that spread HIV/AIDS.

Of course, you won't hear governmental and non-governmental officials saying any of this. In their estimation, Africa's problem is that it's too, well, African, and not enough like New York or London. Respect for tradition and belief in a transcendent ideal are things to be overcome, not embraced.

That's why Brooks came away from his trip "impressed by the level of medical expertise and depressed by the lack of moral, sociological, psychological and cultural expertise."

While I understand Brooks's "depression," his column had the opposite effect on me. It's so gratifying to see that someone like Brooks, an eminent columnist who is not a Christian, now understands why Christians have emphasized the moral dimension of the AIDS crisis: not because we're against sex, but because we're against suffering and death.

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AMEN.

Without God, any tangible aid resulting from the G8 summit is akin to slapping a band aid on a dying cancer patient. Without God, the G8 summit accomplishes little more than a temporary feel-good respite from deep societal ills and screams of the African soul that CANNOT be remedied with the almighty dollar. No matter how many of them we throw at the problem, it persists. Because AIDS, suffering, death, hopelessness... are not concerns which can be healed without God as the primary ingredient in the prescription.

Without God, there is no meaning, no solution, no reason, no hope. All we do, een our best efforts, even our most well-intentioned collective attempts, will fall far short of crafing a soultion to the problems.

Without God, we fail ourselves, we fail Africa, we fail this generation and those to come.

Please join me in supporting the efforts of Bridges of Hope, working to heal the AIDS crisis from a Godly perspective in practical application, living and breathing the reality of Philipians 4:13 in sub-Saharan Africa.