ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the public role of Christianity in Zambia has serious social consequences for homosexuals and human rights activists who dare to challenge state-sanctioned homophobia. European missionaries brought Christianity to Zambia starting in the middle of the 1800s. Europeans invented myths about African sexuality that persist in contemporary Africa. They also introduced laws criminalising homosexuality. Homophobia in Zambia is state-sanctioned. The elevation of Christianity as a state religion means that laws against homosexuals can be justified in the name of Christianity, thereby preventing serious debate and reform. Homophobia is a threat to Zambian democracy. Zambians have traditional and religious values in which they find comfort; a democratic and plural society requires that all people are treated with dignity and equality before the law. A major contradiction arises when churches claim to be championing democracy and inadvertently curtail the rights of homosexuals by opposing the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the denial of full human rights to homosexual people.
