Why Global Churches Struggle Over LGBT Rights: Some African church leaders who refuse to accept gay rights have described the assumption that they’d fall in line with American and European evolving understandings of sexuality as being akin to a colonial-era decree to “civilize” the benighted darker races. The debate over whether to accept LGBT Christians as full members of their sacred communities, entitled to all the rights and responsibilities as their straight brothers and sisters in the gospel, or whether to exclude them because they do not conform to “traditional” understandings of sexuality and gender, is a thoroughly twenty-first century one.
