Faith in the Time of AIDS: religion, biopolitics and modernity in South Africa by Marian Burchardt (review)

Over the past couple of decades the global public health response to South Africa’s HIV epidemic has been massive. So too is the amount of social science scholarship that has resulted. But relatively little work has explored the role of religion in addressing AIDS. Marian Burchardt’s book helps fill this gap, focusing on forms of religious engagement that have emerged as a result of HIV. Further, Faith in the Time of AIDS argues that religious responses to the epidemic have been surprisingly convergent with secular programmes, similar not only in form but also in content. While the author acknowledges the ways that religious understandings and prescriptions for dealing with the disease differ from and sometimes conflict with Western donor and local non-governmental organization (NGO) approaches, much more interesting are the parallels and intersections.

Organizationally, many churches in South Africa responded to the challenges of AIDS and the opportunities generated by global funds to combat it by creating their own version of NGOs, faith-based organizations (FBOs). Burchardt offers compelling empirical examples of how this happens, analysing aspects of the process including the ‘logic of projects’ and the emergence of ‘volunteers’ to illustrate what one might call the ‘NGOization’ of church-based activities to address AIDS.

One of the book’s most provocative and compelling arguments is that church-based responses to HIV and AIDS played a central role in opening a discursive space for public discussions about sexuality. Burchardt argues that this is true even – and maybe especially – for Pentecostal churches. This contradicts much of the prevailing conventional wisdom, which suggests that these churches are uptight about sexuality and therefore create obstacles to scientific sex education. Burchardt’s position, backed up by his ethnographic evidence, is more subtle and complex. He shows that Pentecostal churches and their FBOs promote messages about sexuality that emphasize ideas such as individual choice, ethical selfhood and sexual responsibility. Pentecostal leaders promote these values hoping that they will lead to premarital abstinence and fidelity in marriage, but Burchardt shows uncanny parallels with more secular messages that one might associate with a notion such as neoliberal personhood.

At its broadest, the book attempts to ‘explore what responses to AIDS tell us about religion but it also takes religion as a prism to understand responses to AIDS’ (p. 14). In fact, the focus is almost entirely on Christianity and especially on Pentecostal Christianity. The author (and this reader) appeared most confident about conclusions related specifically to Pentecostal Christianity. The book might have been usefully limited to such a focus, thereby reducing some nagging questions about how widely the findings apply.

Faith in the Time of AIDS becomes progressively more ethnographic as the chapters unfold. I found the first two chapters somewhat abstract, bird’s-eye and jargon-laden. But by the time one reaches the last three empirical chapters the author hits his stride and one can sense the depth of Burchardt’s fieldwork in Cape Town, where he worked mainly in the massive and mostly impoverished settlement of Khayelitsha. Much of this later material focuses on the lives of people living with HIV. The characters introduced in these chapters bring the overall argument to life and do justice to Burchardt’s nuanced position about the multiple and context-dependent ways in which people incorporate religion into their lives.

The final empirical chapter examines support groups for people living with HIV, particularly those organized by churches and FBOs. Using the illuminating concept of ‘medical sociality’, the author provides a compelling analysis of the processes by which support groups enable members to reconstitute themselves as social and moral subjects in the wake of the stigma they experience (or anticipate) after the devastating discovery that they are HIV-positive. While Burchardt alludes to some of the conflicts that emerge over the struggle for material resources associated with HIV support groups, I would like...