Aids and Postmodern Religion

Resumo

Thirty years ago, when the HIV/AIDS pandemic struck with a vengeance,
some religious groups distinguished themselves by presenting a
pastoral and prophetic face of the divine, comforting and supporting
people who were infected and insisting on justice from the medical
community. Some other religious groups, that will remain nameless,
claimed that AIDS was God’s wrath on homosexuals, that AIDS was
divine punishment, and worse. Now, although such ranting still exists
in some few religious traditions, the normative religious responses
to HIV/AIDS are constructive and creative, what religion ought to be
in an increasingly postmodern world. If religion is to have any role
at all, it must be to bring affirming, enhancing beliefs to the creation
of an inclusive global society. Otherwise, it will be written off as increasingly
irrelevant, or worse, as a drag on globalized justice. The
media in many affluent societies, especially the United States,
have all but forgotten about the disease. But many religious
people are among the leaders keeping attention on the survivors
and pressure on the medical industrial complex for drugs,
prevention strategies, and a cure. These leaders come from a
variety of religious groups and often can be found working
right alongside people who profess no religious belief whatsoever.
My brief look at AIDS and postmodern religion reveals
the on-going usefulness of religions as human-enhancing enterprises
and religious people as motivated by their faiths to
act for the common good.