Facing a Pandemic: The African Church and the Crisis of AIDS

5. The Church, Globalization, and HIV/AIDS

Chapter 5 The Church, Globalization and HIV/AIDS 131 We are all human, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic affects us all in the end. If we discard the people who are dying from AIDS, then we can no longer call ourselves people. The time to act is now. We can make a difference. —Nelson Mandela1 An effective AIDS vaccine remains the world’s best chance to reverse this relentless epidemic. But the search for a vaccine must not come at the expense of our immediate response . . . we must do it as part of a truly comprehensive response. —Mitchell Warren2 The remarks by Nelson Mandela invite the international community to respond to HIV/AIDS in the age of globalization.3 In this chapter, I explore the concept of globalization and its relationship to HIV/AIDS and argue that the Christian community worldwide needs to respond to global changes and advocate for a “truly comprehensive response,” as Mitchell Warren argues, to the AIDS crisis: new forms of treatment, research and development of vaccines, and international collaboration in fighting against the disease in the African context. In the first section, I discuss the idea and inescapability of globalization, and then examine the international response to HIV/AIDS. I next argue that the imago dei provides a ground for the Christian community in Africa to scale up its response to HIV/AIDS by fighting for universal access to treatment. I will then argue that the Christian community should support the search for new treatments and for a vaccine, listen critically to cure claims, and support debt relief for African countries to enable the funding of HIV/AIDS programs. My larger objective is to challenge all communities of discourse to work together at a time of great stress in the human community. Churches must intensify their fight against HIV/AIDS because they recognize that human beings are created in the image of God. Jeffrey Sachs and Sonia Sachs have said: “Africa is the place where we will confront our own humanity, our morality, our purposes as individuals and as a country.”4 All the peoples of the global community share a common humanity, although cultures, symbols of faith, and political systems differ. The Prospects and Problems of Globalization The Christian community in Africa needs to adopt a critical yet supportive stance toward globalization, a concept that refers to concrete historical processes , socioeconomic realities, and more recent linkages and interconnectedness within the human family. Globalization is real, a promising development to some but deceitful, oppressive, and perilous to those who have looked in vain for the profits of this new revolutionary praxis of the free market and other social relations.5 It is an expansive praxis of modernity and postmodernity that promotes interdependence in order to enhance market profits and global well-being.6 Supporters of globalization flaunt the success of free market competition and technological developments in a global village where liberal economic and political doctrines dominate. Economic liberalization, which facilitates globalization , has dissolved artificial economic frontiers and created a global marketplace where transnational production and financing of goods and services determine economic activity and hold out the promise of economic recovery in poor countries. Advances in technology have simplified complex economic transactions across the globe. Amartya Sen has argued: “The predicament of the poor across the world cannot be reversed by withholding from them the great advantages of contemporary technology, the well-established efficiency of international trade and exchange, and the social as well as economic merits of living in open, rather than closed societies.”7 Thus, an important aspect of globalization is the new technology that has promoted international trade and encouraged an open and beneficial free market economy. While the articulations of these processes are recent, international connections , with their attendant concerns, have been with us for a while.8 132 Facing a Pandemic Christian communities in Africa cannot ignore globalization; it is all around us, represented by the growing McDonaldization and MTVization whose “infotainment” extends popular and consumer culture from the West to the world. Globalists support the internationalization of business on grounds that it promotes efficiency in production, creates opportunities for people to improve living standards, and promotes democratic ideals around the world. One impact of globalization is evident in recent migrations from countries in the south to the north, a trend that accelerated in the last decades of the twentieth century because of severe economic decline in...