One important difference, however, has been the enduring importance of traditional conceptions of family and morality. This largely shields Africans from the cultural upheavals that America has suffered, including redefinitions of male-female roles, chastity, holiness, and, of course, the normalization of homosexual sex. Liberal American Christians judge the African position on homosexuality as cruel to one set of human beings. But Africans have no problem in naming homosexuality a sin and praying for the redemption of all sinners.

As an African and an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana teaching at a seminary of the Presbyterian Church (USA), I have keenly followed the fractious debate on the subject of same-sex relations within the Presbyterian family of churches. It is hard to generalize about African and American societies and cultures in all their respective complexities and contradictions. But one distinction can be sharply maintained: The mainstream acceptance and promotion of same-sex relations in the West and America is solidly opposed in African societies.

My first “welcome to America” moment occurred when I invited an imam to my Introduction to Islam class at Columbia Theological Seminary.The imam talked about the basic tenets of Islam for an hour and asserted, among other things, that Jesus is not the Son of God, denied that he was crucified, and maintained that the Bible has been falsified. My students listened respectfully throughout the lecture. When he paused and invited discussion, the students replied with rather timid and politically correct queries, at which point the imam said: “Why are you not asking me about jihad, about terrorism, women? I know you have all these questions. Why are you not asking me the hard questions?” So one student queried him about Islamic teaching on homosexuality. The imam answered by defining the practice as un-Islamic, not of God, unnatural. Suddenly, the faces of a good number of the students went red with shock and rage. I stepped in and gently steered the discussion away from the topic.

After the class ended, the few conservative students in the class approached and slyly suggested that I invite the imam again. Other students urged me to cancel a scheduled visit to the mosque the following Friday. I resisted those efforts and we all visited the mosque, after which the imam and his elders unexpectedly hosted the class for an Ethiopian feast. A lesbian student who had been most upset after the class confessed that she was glad she came, because she saw a hospitable and warm side of the imam.

As I look back upon the whole episode, I think I ended up more unsettled than my students. They were agitated by what the imam said about homosexuality, but seemed wholly at ease with his negation of fundamental Christian beliefs. If this were a seminary in Ghana, my home country, the reverse would have been the case.

A second incident followed shortly afterward. It concerned the student family housing policy at the seminary that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Many on campus denounced it, insisting that the policy discriminated against same-sex couples and should therefore be changed. I asked the Dean of Students whether any same-sex couple had been denied accommodation, and was told that there has never been a same-sex couple that ­requested family housing. I was perplexed. It seemed to me that tensions were raised among students and faculty needlessly, perhaps merely because some people felt entitled to an ideological victory lap.

I wrote an email to colleagues in which I said that, given the present climate of divisive debate on the issue within the church, we should be circumspect, avoiding situations when we take controversial public stances about homosexuality for purely symbolic reasons. I pointed out how such positions could affect our enrollments, especially from the Global South.

The responses I got from faculty and staff ranged from condescension to outright commands to “suck it up.” If Christians in Africa didn’t like it, well, that just showed that they stood in desperate need of education from the West on issues of women and homosexuality. Only a few faculty colleagues would converse with me on the issue, while a few staff expressed full-hearted support.

The amount of controversy surrounding homosexuality at the seminary has not taken me by surprise. In 2010, the 219th General Assembly of the PC(USA) passed what became known as Amendment 10-A to its Ordination Standards (ratified in 2011). The original ordination standards read as follows:

Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman . . . or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

The language of the new ordination standards reads:

Standards for ordained service reflect the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life. The governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation and suitability for the responsibilities of office. The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all the requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation. Governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.

By removing “the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness,” the new standards open up the possibility that practicing homosexuals can be considered for ordination. For that matter, cohabiting heterosexuals can be ordained. Given the sexual mores of contemporary American society, by dropping the requirement of faithful marriage for couples and chastity for singles, the PC(USA)’s new standards clearly show that these are no longer biblical values that must be observed. The old formulation about living “in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church,”has also been removed, a further suggestion that the PC(USA) is distancing itself from the authority of scriptural norms.

Four years later, the 221st General Assembly (2014) of the PC(USA) approved Amendment 14-F of its Book of Order to redefine marriage, which has since been ratified:

Marriage is a gift God has given to all humankind for the wellbeing of the entire human family. Marriage involves a unique commitment between two people, traditionally a man and a woman, to love and support each other for the rest of their lives. The sacrificial love that unites the couple sustains them as faithful and responsible members of the church and the wider community.

The union between a man and a woman is ­traditional, but no longer necessary. This opens the way for PC(USA) ministers to perform same-sex ­weddings.

These changes strike me as drastic. Downplaying obedience to Scripture, significantly dismantling the sexual discipline expected of church leaders, redefining marriage—I longed for a genuine discussion of what it all means for the church. But I have found little interest among my colleagues in America. Many regard further discussion as backward-looking and counterproductive. We seem to have a new orthodoxy in the church, and the task is to carry it forward. I find that some of my fellow Presbyterians have misgivings, but regard the subject as too hot, something to be avoided or whispered between confidants. The church has not been immune to the denunciatory spirit of secular activists working for gay rights.

What my American colleagues affirm as necessary or accept as inevitable strikes the vast majority of Africans as highly controversial, even bizarre. In order to confront this divergence of views, I helped organize a Global North-South Consultation on Human ­Sexuality, which took place in July 2013 outside Accra, Ghana. People on all sides of the sexuality debate presented papers and responses, which were subsequently published in a special issue of the Journal of African Christian Thought. While neither the Global North nor South was univocal on the issue (we deliberately invited people from both sides of the debate from both hemispheres), there were clear and sharp disagreements about Scripture, biblical interpretation, and cultural factors as they bear on the church’s teaching about sex, marriage, and family.

The African view enunciated at the consultation was that both Testaments clearly proscribe homosexual acts. African participants expressed the concern that since homosexual practice in the Bible is almost always named with other acts and behaviors also described as sinful, normalizing one would mean normalizing the others, such as stealing, moral corruption, violence, idolatry, and so forth. This stance reflects a general tendency among African Christians to accord great authority to the Bible. African participants saw a muddying of biblical teaching on sex as undermining the Bible’s authority overall. This muddying, moreover, only seems explicable to Africans as the result of a tacit capitulation to changing cultural norms in the Global North.

To affirm that the Bible condemns homosexual practice as sinful is neither a uniquely African literalist reading of Scripture nor the view of right-wing Evangelical homophobes. It is a view shared by some liberal, pro-gay, Western biblical scholars. Dan O. Via, a pro-gay New Testament scholar, in Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views, allows that “the biblical texts that deal specifically with homosexual practice condemn it unconditionally.” Walter Wink, a well-known liberal New Testament professor, is equally clear in his review of Robert Gagnon’s important work The Bible and Homosexual Practice: “Efforts to twist the text to mean what it clearly does not say are deplorable. Simply put, the Bible is negative toward same-sex behavior, and there is no getting around it.”

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