Miami Herald - June 16, 2003
Leonard Pitts Jr.

Jesus replied: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

I know what you're thinking and, no, you haven't wandered into a Sunday school lesson by mistake. Not even close. What you've wandered into is a knotty moral thicket at the intersection of money, faith and AIDS.

By way of illustration, let me tell you about Mr. Stearns, who went to Washington, D.C. last week. Actually, Richard Stearns, president of the Washington State-based Christian relief group World Vision, wasn't alone. Dozens of evangelical Christian leaders traveled to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress on President Bush's plan to allocate $15 billion to the fight against AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean.

Contrary to what you might expect, they're for it. No, that's not a typo. These conservative religious leaders really do want Congress to fully fund a program designed to fight a disease once known as the gay cancer.

Assuming you haven't fainted into your corn flakes, let us continue.

Because that's not the reason I'm telling you this. No, what gets me is something Stearns said. As reported in The Washington Post, these evangelical leaders acknowledge that they've come late to the fight against HIV/AIDS -- an understatement, given that AIDS has been killing for nearly 25 years now.

Stearns explained the tardiness by saying that in the 1980s, evangelicals saw AIDS as an affliction of drug users and gays and "had less compassion for the victims."

Deal with that one for a minute. Because they thought less of the sufferers, they cared less about the suffering.

Contrast that with Jesus' saying that loving your neighbor is Christianity's second greatest commandment and tell me you don't see a disconnect wider and deeper than canyons.

Unfortunately, we've seen that disconnect before. I'm thinking of the Christian Coalition's 1996 apology for generations of white evangelical support for segregation and opposition to civil rights.

Then as now, it was good to see conservative Christians move to where they should have been all along. Then, as now, their support was more than welcome.

But then, as now, you wondered: What took you so long? Why did you not understand what everybody else figured out long ago? Why are you the last to pitch in when, by rights, you should have been the first?

Christ, after all, had compassion for tax collectors, adulterers, prostitutes, lepers and others who were not welcome in most homes.

He famously walked with the disregarded, the dispossessed and the despised. But these days, many would-be Christians walk by them instead.

"Love the sinner, hate the sin," they chirp.

Even if you buy that dubious formulation, it's hard to see evidence of love in their decision to ignore a deadly pandemic.

Indeed, some evangelical Christians even employ God to justify their callousness, arguing that AIDS is a divine curse upon gay people.

Somehow, they never get around to explaining how the "curse" managed to strike people like 13-year-old Ryan White, whose only sin was to be a hemophiliac in need of a blood transfusion.

Was God's aim that bad?

Or, as seems far more likely, is the problem simply that some of His people are distressingly small of spirit, disturbingly slow to respond to pain, disappointingly selective in their obedience to the second greatest commandment?

Makes you wonder what they'll do the next time some outcast is suffering and in need.

Maybe I'm being uncharitable. It is, after all, a good thing that the evangelical community has joined the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Better late than never, as they say.

But late, nevertheless.

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