spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

This section aims at exploring some key issues in the relation of Christian religion and
HIV/AIDS in Africa. It would be impossible to offer a comprehensive outline of Christianinfluenced
engagement with HIV/AIDS, because the field is too vast and still growing. However,
current research trends provide some guidance in this matter: Pentecostal churches and their
emphasis on morality, faith-based organizations and their well-financed prevention/outreach
programs, mainstream theology and its redefinition of Christian concepts, and the complex web
of religion, health and state — are all topics that are regularly researched within the discourse of
HIV/AIDS in Africa. This range of particular responses to HIV/AIDS underlines the importance
of exploring how Christian faith and church affiliation mould and define social representations of
AIDS in Africa, for these kind of conceptualizations and narratives will continue to infuse the
discourse of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Pentecostal responses to HIV/AIDS
African Pentecostalism has been identified as the most prominent form of African Christianity
nowadays. Even though the label ‘African Pentecostalism’ is a blurred one and covers all areas
of the Pentecostal movement in Africa, the dramatic increase in the number of Pentecostal
churches and their increasing impact on African societies has made the Pentecostal movement a
serious player in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The Pentecostals’ active involvement in
prevention, counseling, and care (often in alignment with international organizations like
PEPFAR 29 ) has put African Pentecostalism on the map of global responses to HIV/AIDS.
In this sense, the Pentecostal movement has come a long way, because initially Pentecostal
churches were very reluctant to address the pandemic. The strong association of HIV/AIDS with
immoral sexual behavior, and therefore with sin, meant that born-again believers distanced
themselves from HIV-infected people, because in their perspective the virus was clearly God’s
punishment. This stigmatizing attitude began to change with the turn of the millennium, when
Pentecostal leadership was shocked to learn that AIDS was present even within their own circles.
Lay members as well as pastors fell ill, and this urged the churches to take action against
HIV/AIDS.
Although research on African Pentecostal responses to HIV/AIDS is relatively new, as well as
contradictory, (see e.g. Smith 2004; Adogame 2007; Green & Ruark 2008; Gusman 2009;
Parsitau 2009), it is possible to discern a few of the predominant elements that define Pentecostal
responses to HIV/AIDS. When one looks at, for example, Pentecostal rhetoric on prevention, it
29. The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief.
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