World AIDS Day 2015

If you know me at all, you know I have an obsession with genocide. I have read volumes and volumes about the Holocaust. But I've also read much about Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia as well as Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China. If I can come up with on reason I'm so interested in these morbid events, it would come down to trying to understand how the world let it happen.

And on this World AIDS Day, I'm reminded of a holocaust that happened right here in America in my lifetime.

Again I'm left wondering, "How did we let this happen?" Yes, it was a little different. This was a terrible disease killing people instead of madmen.

I'm always most particularly interested how the Christian church responded to all of these holocausts. I can only read about all of these massive human slaughters. But this one I lived through. And during the height of the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s, I had the vantage point of viewing it as a closeted gay man from inside the evangelical world.

When AIDS hit, I was just out of high school. I entered a conservative, evangelical seminary to train for ministry. This was in 1983. I spent the next ten years at evangelical colleges, as a student, undergraduate, graduate and then as an employee of a parachurch organization with offices on some of these conservative colleges.

AIDS was huge news in those years. Not on our Christian college campuses. We had chapel twice a week. I rarely missed. I don't ever remember AIDS being a topic of any chapel session. I don't remember it ever being talked about in class. Well, wait, it was mentioned a few times, the gist being the "reap what you sow" line.

It was a fearful time. Huge numbers of Americans polled in the early years believed that people with AIDS should be tattooed or put into special camps. I get it. It was a terrifying disease and so little was known about or how contagious it might be.

Still, the American churches did so little to help. Oh yes, you can find a handful wonderful examples of Christians and churches here and there who developed wonderful ministries to help people with AIDS. But I was on the inside and I, too, stood by, afraid of everything, especially myself.

Indeed even this very day, a Christian minister friend posted the "reap what you sow" passage from Galatians. I don't know if this is coincidental on World AIDS Day or not.  I’m not saying “reap what you sow” isn’t a true maxim.  Of course, it is.

The church did not lead. The American evangelical church was happy to let the government deal with it. The problem was that the Reagan administration was doing practically nothing. Indeed it took Reagan years to even publicly utter the word AIDS after over 20,000 people had died.

Gay communities all over the country took the lead to take care of the dying when often even the suffering ones’ own families refused.  And they did a remarkable job. The organizations started in the homes of dying people to care of other dying people have become benchmarks for how to do it for all kinds of charities. And it brought LGBT people together like never before.

But where were the evangelical churches? I think I know. AIDS proved them right in their minds. Those people were getting what they deserved. It was solving a pesky problem. Indeed the only thing I heard in my circles in those years went along the lines of "They brought his on themselves."

Even if that were true, it isn't how Jesus taught his followers to love.