I många afrikanska länder är attityderna mot homosexualitet kraftigt negativa, liksom lagarna i många fall straffar homosexuellt beteende. I samband med att politiker i Uganda under 2019 talade om att införa dödsstraff påpekades följande av The Guardian:

Claims that homosexuality is un-African are common on the continent, though contradicted by many historians and experts.

Nu visar ny forskning, i studien ”Christian Missions and Anti-Gay Attitudes in Africa”, att det kristna inflytandet i Afrika i hög grad är skyldig till dessa negativa attityder och repressiva lagar:

We argue that colonial Christian missions had a long-term impact on anti-gay attitudes in
Africa. We use a geo-coded representative survey of African countries and the location of historical Christian missions to estimate a significant and economically meaningful association
between proximity to historical missions and anti-gay sentiments today. Using anthropological
data on pre-colonial acceptance of homosexual practices among indigenous groups, we show
that the establishment of missions, while nonrandom, was exogenous to pre-existing same-sex
patterns among indigenous population. The estimated effect is driven by persons of Christian
faith and statistically indistinguishable from zero on samples of Muslims, nonbelievers, and
followers of traditional indigenous religions. Thus, we argue that our results are indicative of a
causal effect of missionary religious conversion to Christianity.

Studien tyder alltså på att det inte är den afrikanska historien i första hand som innefattade anti-homosexuella attityder utan de kristna missionärernas läror, vilka sedan övertogs av de afrikanska konvertiterna. Ett osmakligt arv.

Tipstack till Christian Bjørnskov.