God Loves Uganda
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The title, God Loves Uganda, is, of course, ironic, since no one really knows or can speak for the geographic peccadillos of God Almighty the Father.  We don’t know for sure what He/She/They like, although there’s a good chance that Mt. Olympus or Delphi are pretty high on the list, and Sodom and Gommorrah probably pretty low.  But nobody really knows for certain.

And equally, it’s rather silly to think that we can (or should) speak of His/Her/Their political leanings, as in, to quote the evangelicals, ‘God Hates Fags.’  It’s not only silly because it’s pure hubris, it’s also silly because we pretty much know He/She/They doesn’t/don’t hate fags since He/She/They invented the birds and the bees, and homosexuality has been regularly observed in both bees (the Southeastern Blueberry) and birds (emus and chickens, to name two). It’s also been documented in worms, fleas, wasps, toads, rattlesnakes, spiders, turtles, salmon, cheetahs, and buffalo (Bruce Bagemihl lists them all in Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, which should be kept on the bookshelf next to Karen Haught’s The God Empowered Wife).

God may or may not love Uganda, but evangelical preachers from America certainly do, and corruptible Ugandans certainly love American money, that much is beyond theological or semantic parsing. The righteous lunacy of American religious fundamentalism has found a target in that fertile stretch of African soul, honing their fervour and delusion—and adding money—like a laser beam onto a single target, homosexuality.  Their efforts have been largely responsible for aborting Uganda’s successful AIDS program and creating a spurious and quixotic abstinence policy (the never ending radioactive half-life of the Bush agenda), allowing HIV to decimate the population.  And, most chillingly, they’re responsible for fomenting Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill which makes homosexuality punishable by death, legally, though vigilante beatings and murder have been standard for some time.

‘Something terrible…with potential to destroy Uganda’ is the subject of God Loves Uganda.  The film investigates the incursions and machinations of the biggest group waging an imperialist holy war in a foreign and sovereign nation, the International House of Prayer—from Kansas City, MO., a place with businesses like ‘Payday Loans, Ammo’—who stole the acronym IHOP from it’s true owners, the International House of Pancakes.  The differences are that the ‘Pancakes’ version is much older, starting in the 1950s, and doesn’t prescribe abstinence, but both create delusions that you are actually fulfilled, and leave you frothing and not able to think straight from sugar highs that have no real nourishment whatsoever, and both are not part of a balanced lifestyle.  Also, the ‘Pancakes’ version offers ‘Rooty, Tooty, Fresh ‘n Fruity,’ whereas the ‘Prayer’ version doesn’t, and one tries to lure you with ‘Bacon Temptation,’ while the other tries to get you to avoid temptation.

But why Uganda? Uganda is strategic.  Left unmoored, a vacuum after Idi Amin destroyed the place, and now with a huge percentage of the population being young, and poor, and hungry, and by targeting the orphans, who without education or shelter or food, are easily lured by wealth and prestige, and following American money is an irresistible Faustian bargain (in the clearest sense of the term; selling their souls for profit).  These new Evangelical ministers, created to whip up the populace and take over the government, have become the wealthiest people in the country, with mansions and personal chefs and homes in Las Vegas.

The movement is led by Lou Engle—one of the founders of The Call—and Pastor Scott Lively—author of The Pink Swastika/ Why and How to Defeat the Gays, so it’s little wonder that the focus is not on thinking about ‘what would Jesus do?’ but instead is obsessed with gay sex.  This may be a lark for Americans, this African Adventure Tour, something to put on their resumes for Bob Jones University, before settling into privileged suburban life.  But the scattering of seeds into the volatile face of Uganda society has created a hybridized version of the message, the somewhat more intense culture creating a much more emphatic version of the message.  Preachers are preaching—in the new superchurches or on thoroughfares like orange sellers on freeway off-ramps in L.A.—that the homosexual agenda is to destroy human society, and they must be killed (the film features some devastating footage of David Kato, a local gay rights activist who was bludgeoned to death in the street), that the gays were responsible for the Nazi takeover, and that they want to bring to Africa their practices of fisting and ‘eating poo poo.’  They also preach that Barack Obama relishes killing babies, especially by chopping them up.

It’s a powerful documentary, and it’s also not going to change anyone’s mind any more than Michael Moore’s films change anyone’s mind.  Any viewer of a given mindset (being Sundance, presumably bending liberal) will not be challenged—fundamentalism is a scourge, and fundamentalist imperialism is a war crime (witness the Utah-sponsored Proposition 8 in California).  The thing is, the film isn’t a polemic, or Manichaean.  It’s a document.  I realized this, as I sat enraged and fuming at the credit scroll at the end.  Two women in the row behind me were leaving, and they said, clucking their tongues in concern, asking, rhetorically, ‘It’s curious that the evangelicals gave access.  I guess they didn’t know that they’d be portrayed as nuts.’  And it struck me, seeing the ‘Thank yous’ on screen to all the participants: were they portrayed as nuts?  There was nothing to say they were nuts.  The only tendentious or editorial voice was the choice of venue, and the fact that it was the festival, and the fact that it was an audience who’d go to that kind of festival.  It was a given.  But if presented at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, or on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, would the anti-evangelicals seem like the crazy ones?  The baby-killing, AIDS-mongering, marriage-hating lunatics of the left?  The director grew up in the black church, and so sees the missionaries, in general, as kind-hearted and well meaning, if misguided, and culturally blind to what they are creating.  It was us who brought our own prejudice, our own world view; the film just presented us with the missionaries being who they were, behaving in a way that made them proud.  It was the mark of exemplary and laudable documentary filmmaking.  It subscribed to the ‘give them enough rope’ theory.

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