Seventy percent of the world’s people identify themselves as members of a faith community. Communities of faith play a very significant role in influencing people’s behaviour and attitudes, and in providing care and support for AIDS. Faith-based organisations - often called FBOs - have been involved in the AIDS response since the earliest days of the epidemic and have often been among the first to respond, providing services, education and care.
A powerful impact
Religious communities, mosques, temples, churches, hospitals and clinics have reached out to provide support to those living with and affected by HIV. Their leadership has great influence in the lives of many people, and leaders speaking out responsibly about AIDS can make a powerful impact at both community and international level. Recent examples include calls from the Pope and Archbishop Desmond Tutu for the G8 to increase funding for AIDS.
Long term presence
Moreover, churches and faith-based organisations have more often than other actors, a long-term presence in regions and situations at risk, opting for the most marginalised and trusted by the local communities. Finally, churches and faith-based organisations also have the ability to influence the attitudes and behaviours of their community members by building on these relationships of trust and respect.
Aids competent churches
Over the last five to six years the different churches and faith-based organisations have worked hard on their “theology in times of AIDS”. The most perceptible outcome of these theology-oriented activities is a growing understanding among theological academics and church leaders of the relationship between scriptural messages around compassion, forgiveness and acceptance, and the presence and impact of HIV and AIDS in church communities. This understanding is affecting the way church leaders and their congregations for example, view and care for community members who are infected or affected by HIV and AIDS, and is affecting the way that people living with HIV and AIDS view themselves as accepted and supported by the community.
Stigma and discrimination
The response of the religious community can also be negative however. People living with HIV have been stigmatized by religious leaders and communities of faith. Approaches to HIV prevention methods and attitudes towards people at increased risk of HIV infection such as men who have sex with men, have sometimes hindered the response. Much work remains to be done to eradicate stigma and discrimination.
A research done by Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiatives in Africa, shows how often churches and other faithe based organisations score rather weak on HIV and AIDS related attributes:
- Lack of policy to deal with HIV/AIDS within the church
Rather little mainstreaming of HIV/AIDS into theological functioning of the church
- Great difficulties in redressing issues of sexuality and patriarchy by and in the church
- Churches often under estimate the role and position of women with regard to HIV/AIDS.
- Great difficulties addressing the imbalanced power relations between men and women
- Lack of networking and collaboration
- Although changing for the better, stigma and discrimination is at times rife and the language used while dealing with the pandemic can in itself be stigmatising.
- The focus is still too often on individual sins not the structural sins (structural injustice) of the society/community
- Lack of advocacy and activism
