These companion volumes are the products of a workshop inspired by the observation that public religion is a major contributor to the social discrimination and state-sponsored homophobia that have undermined human rights and health for sexual minorities in Africa over the past few decades. Yet many of the direct victims of religiously justified homophobia adhere strongly to their faith. The notion of a secular route to human rights, sexual liberation, and sexual health as predominated in the West is to them alien and alienating. How to understand this hitherto underexamined phenomenon? How to imagine ways past the present mostly bleak political environment?

One way not to do so is commonplace in media coverage in the West and in much of the scholarship on “African homophobia.” This presents prejudice against sexual minorities as equally present across the many cultures, religions, and political systems of the continent—a monolithic hostility to sexual difference that supposedly pervades traditional, Christian, and Islamic beliefs, which bleed into ostensibly secular institutions to an extent rarely seen in the West. Ergo, sexual minorities in Africa must be suffering from false consciousness and self-harming when they profess to faith.

Chitando (a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Zimbabwe) and van Klinken (Associate Professor of Religion and African Studies at Leeds University) aim to debunk such intuitively implausible characterizations. Contributing authors use interdisciplinary methods (ethnographic observation, interviews and focus groups, textual analysis and exegesis, and personal reflection) informed by critical theory (feminist, postcolonial, queer, and liberation theology). In a total of thirty pithy chapters, they demonstrate the specificity of various eruptions of politicized religious homophobia and show important nuances within different strands of “the church” and Islam and between religious and state institutions. They even, notwithstanding the prevailing bleak tendencies within public religion today, find alternative faith practices that offer hope for a better future.

Part 1 of Christianity and Controversies focuses on Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, umbrella terms for an increasingly ambitious and assertive force across the continent south of the Sahara. A plethora of churches aggressively promote the literal interpretation of the Bible's “six bullets” against homosexuality (Corinthians, Leviticus, etc.), which they pose as an existential threat to the majority population. In a highly competitive religious marketplace, this enables them both to win converts (with the often significant revenue stream that flows from that) and to legitimize claims to step into the role of seriously disappointing or failed states in providing basic social welfare. Yet, van Klinken's chapter also makes an important point, somewhat reassuring in a climate of gathering extremism. The very ambition and fanaticism of some of the Pentecostals is beginning to evoke opposition from African artists and intellectuals like Binyavanga Wainana, whose 2014 coming out as a gay man and as a withering critic of Pentecostalism was inspired by the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda.

Part 2 discusses mainline churches in Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa, revealing similar patterns of obsession, failure of imagination, and lazy literalism that can be powerfully seductive for politicians but can also backfire. S. N. Nyeck's chapter, for example, offers a possible insight into the dramatic rise of Pentecostals at the expense of the Catholic Church in Cameroon. By failing to counter the homophobic nationalism in rival new churches and political discourse, the Catholic Church contributes to the erasure of its own history of support for the rights and dignity of Africans oppressed by colonial racism. Van der Wall on the Dutch Reformed Church, meanwhile, examines debates around the proposed ordination of an avowed lesbian in a Stellenbosch church. Literalists won, but van der Wall sees hope in the feminist and African hermeneutics marshalled to fight against homophobia. These emphasize community, pluralism, and an “ethics of hospitality” (134) which could engender safe spaces for a diversity of voices to be expressed and respected within the church in the future.

Part 3 continues this line of thought with examples of subversion and transformation of the hegemonic homophobic narrative in Christian ideology and practice. This includes testimony from Zimbabwean LGBTI people who remain active in the church with “an exciting Christian life” (154), Zambians who reject the term MSM in favor of “men who love men” (157), discussion of a range of faith-based organizations and religious leaders who approach the issue with humanity and humility through HIV/AIDS activism, and an account of a transformative learning experience through critical “contextual Bible study” (chapter 9). The appendix is a testament to the power of respectful dialogue between liberal Episcopalians from the U.S. and African Anglican theologians. The Elmina Consultation Statement is a moving commitment by the latter to promotion of the safety and dignity of all people, explicitly reaching out to LGBTI minorities.

Public Religion follows a similar arc, enriched by bringing in Islam and Rastafarianism. The latter is a marginalized group of Christians that one might think has potential to empathize with other such groups. Alas, that is not the case in Zimbabwe, as Sibanda shows. Rastafarians there have “jumped on the bandwagon” of politicized homophobia to curry bread crumbs of respect from the political elite. Chapters discussing Islam also focus on the instrumentalist use of increasingly explicit homophobic rhetoric—campaigns of competitive prudery fought in the press, parliaments, and pulpits. In Nigeria, such homophobia serves as a (likely shortsighted) political strategy to distract attention from potentially much worse conflicts with Christians. Disturbingly, Currier and Cruz show that homophobia cultivated at the grassroots level can be effective in bringing Muslims and Christians together in a fraught process of healing from a terrible civil war (in this case, Liberia).

The assumption pervading these case studies is that, if we are to fight against homophobia in any remotely effective way (as the editors and authors unanimously desire), we should clearly identify the discrete historical trajectory of the debates in different places. In Tolino's chapter on Egypt, for example, a law existed against male prostitutes since 1961, but it only came to be directed against homosexuals in a general sense around 2000. Court cases then invoked a mishmash of legal, theological, and national defense arguments as the state (and, implicitly, Coptic Christian leaders) sought to thwart the growing popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Côte d'Ivoire, once regarded as a cosmopolitan and relatively tolerant country, homophobic discourse only erupted in 2014, in part to counter suspicions of neocolonial influences by France. The backlash in Senegal was sparked in part by anti-HIV education campaigns that included outreach to men who have sex with men. These are significant differences with lessons for activists on where and how to target or frame their interventions.

Part 2 analyzes the role of international trends and interventions which, in many cases, have had a negative impact on existing “cultures of discretion” that formerly enabled milieux or safe-ish social spaces for sexual minorities. The American Christian Right's role in propagating explicit forms of political homophobia in Uganda is perhaps the best documented, while in other cases, hectoring by Western governments sparked a patriotic backlash. But authors here look beyond kneejerk outrage against Western cultural colonialism to find African agency in deploying Western connections (or, in the Rastafarian case, borrowed Jamaican patois) for their own indigenous agendas. These may include aspirations to assume a Pan-African or even global leadership role, particularly in the Anglican and some Pentecostal churches.

Part 3 considers several currently marginal articulations of faith that could potentially become the basis of a counterhegemonic, gay-friendly public religiosity. Notably, Homewood finds that some churches “are excellent for cruising” and “include significant large gay subcultures” (248). His informants support the editors' view that “whether the queer theorist likes it or not, in African contexts religion offers a space conducive to many such [queer] variations and riffs” (13). If one counts faith in the power of rational argument and empirical evidence as a religion of sorts, then the final chapter by McCarthy and Brennan makes a supportive case for African believers to embrace sexual diversity as a good thing for the whole population.

Over thirty authors discussing continental trends and local contests in more than a dozen countries reveal numerous, often dispiriting, similarities in the story of the emergence of politicized religious homophobia. Yet, they also identify enough cracks in the edifice to imagine the cultivation of allies or the emergence of counternarratives based, for example, on the abovementioned African hermeneutics. It may seem incredible given the tide of religiously inspired or justified homophobia that we have witnessed in the last few decades, but tides do recede and there may be more room for optimism for inclusive expressions of faith than is commonly acknowledged. These books are a most welcome contribution to understanding the complexity of homophobias in Africa and to imagining better ways to navigate the stresses of Africa's rapid and often painful transitions.