MOSCOW, August 11 (RIA Novosti) – American Evangelical leaders are turning to Central and South America, promoting anti-gay legislation, Reuters reported.
Mat Staver and Samuel Rodriguez, both prominent American Evangelical Protestant preachers and activists, have joined together to form a group known as NHCLC/Conela (National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Conela). As Staver claimed on the air of Faith and Freedom radio show, the organization aims to “create a firewall for … Judeo-Christian values.”
The analysis by Reuters’ Alistair Bell and Mitra Taj, released on Sunday, has been connected to the expansion of American evangelists to Latin America with the local social movement for legalization of gay marriage.
The report stresses that the “[evangelicals’] fight against gay marriage has already been lost in Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico City, which have legalized it in the last four years.” However, the Evangelical clerics have succeeded in Peru, where a local lawmaker, who is a member of NHCLC/Conela, has blocked a bill, sanctioning gay civil groups.
Staver also told the Faith and Freedom show he believed Washington was promoting gay rights across the world.
"They were looking to us in America for help. Why? Because America through this current administration has been using a bully pulpit to try to tell them what to do on abortion and homosexuality and they don’t like that,” Staver, the legal advisor for NHCLC/Conela commented.
Bell and Taj also point to Uganda, where the activity of the Evangelical church has led to the adoption of a state ban on homosexuality, though it was lifted by the country’s constitutional court this month.
Roger Ross Williams, the director of God Loves Uganda, a documentary about the influence of conservative US Christians in the East African nation, told the Independent in March, “The anti-homosexuality bill would never have come about without the involvement of American fundamentalist evangelicals.”
According to 2012 Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life Project’s estimates, there are around 98 million Protestants in Latin America. The proportion of Protestants is coming close to majority in Guatemala and Brazil, a country traditionally dominated by Catholicism, where 22.2 of the population currently identifies as Evangelist Protestants.
