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THE EXPORT
Before there was a Jesus or a Mohammed on the African continent, there were gods.
Before the Portuguese arrived in West Africa in the fifteenth century, before the British codified their anti-sodomy laws and exported them to every colony they touched, before the missionaries came with their Bibles and their certainty, there were spiritual systems that had governed these lands for thousands of years. Systems that recognized gender and sexuality in ways that did not require a binary. The Sekrata of Madagascar. The Yan Daudu of northern Nigeria. The Mugawe of the Meru in Kenya. Roles recognized, named, and embedded in social life long before any European set foot on the continent.
The same is true of South Asia. The Hijra of India are among the oldest documented gender-nonconforming communities in human history, present in Sanskrit texts and Mughal court records stretching back centuries. They were not marginalized figures. They collected taxes and duties in the Sultanate and Mughal courts. They performed blessings at births and marriages. They were woven into the fabric of Hindu religious practice. In 1871, the British named them criminals. The Criminal Tribes Act, based on Christian beliefs about gender, listed Hijra among communities to be registered by police, prohibited from dancing, singing, or wearing women’s clothing — cultural elimination dressed as public order. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, introduced in 1864 as a legal transplant of the British Buggery Act of 1533, criminalized same-sex acts across the subcontinent. The law stayed on the books for 154 years.
The same is true of Mesoamerica. Before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century with the Inquisition and its particular horror for what they called “sodomy,” the peoples of what we now call Mexico and Central America had their own frameworks. Two-spirit identity was recognized across dozens of indigenous cultures. The Mexica god Xochipilli presided over male homosexuality alongside flowers, music, and dance. These were not aberrations. They were part of the cosmology. The Spanish came and burned the codices. The Inquisition came and declared it sin.
The British came to Africa and wrote the laws. And the laws stayed when the colonizers left.
This is the first export. Not the one this report is primarily about — but the one that made everything else possible. The laws being defended today as African tradition were written by the people being accused of cultural imperialism. The theology underwriting the moral argument was brought at gunpoint. And the Americans now helping defend them built their movement on a religion that was itself imposed on Africa by force.
That is not a rhetorical point. It is a documented historical fact. And it is the fact that almost no coverage of this story, in any outlet or any language, has been willing to state plainly.
GHANA, MAY 2026
On May 27, 2026, the 4th African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family and Sovereignty opened in Accra, Ghana. About 300 lawmakers and faith leaders from across the continent were in attendance. Sharon Slater, the Mormon founder of an Arizona-based organization called Family Watch International (FWI), designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), was among the conveners.
On May 29, while the conference was still in session, Ghana’s Parliament passed the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill. The bill criminalizes same-sex acts with up to three years in prison. It criminalizes the promotion, funding, or sponsorship of LGBTQ activities with up to ten years. It makes it a crime to publicly identify as LGBTQ. It contains an extradition clause for queer Ghanaians abroad. The lead sponsor was Reverend John Ntim Fordjour. The bill enjoys the formal support of the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the Christian Council of Ghana, and the Office of the National Chief Imam.
The timing of the conference and the parliamentary vote in the same week was not coincidental. It was the point.
Ghana’s Parliament has now passed versions of this bill twice. The first time was in February 2024. Then-President Akufo-Addo declined to sign it, citing pending constitutional challenges. The bill lapsed when Parliament dissolved. It was reintroduced in March 2025 in the newly seated Ninth Parliament and passed on May 29, 2026. President John Mahama, who took office in January 2025, has not yet signed it. The Catholic Bishops have urged lawmakers “not to rest” until he does.
The bill’s passage made international news. What most of that coverage missed is that the legislation now awaiting presidential assent in Accra is the product of a decade-long organizing campaign with documented roots in American evangelical organizations operating across Africa, organizations that found fertile ground partly because of something they brought with them, and partly because of something the British left behind.
THE LABORATORY
In 2013, Ghanaian lawyer Moses Foh-Amoaning founded the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values. He built it as a deliberately tripartite body: it unites the Christian Council, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the Pentecostal-Charismatic Council, Muslim organizations, and the National House of Chiefs under a single structure. This was not incidental. It was the design.
The design addressed a problem. Christianity alone cannot claim to speak for a continent where hundreds of millions of people are Muslim, where traditional African religions retain significant cultural authority, and where “Western imperialism” is a political charge that lands with weight. A movement built on Christian theology could be dismissed as a foreign import. A movement built on something called “family values” — a phrase with no specific theology, which Christianity, Islam, and traditional African religion can each inhabit without theological compromise — could claim to be indigenous.
Writing in The New Humanitarian on June 3, 2026, doctoral researcher and journalist Caleb Okereke observed that the “family values” container does the work of inclusion precisely by being theologically empty. It is a secular shell around a Christian right project that needs Muslim and other bodies in the room to claim continental legitimacy. This is the second export: not a law, but a rhetorical vehicle — one designed to make an American evangelical project look like an African cultural defense.
By 2019, the World Congress of Families (WCF), a US-based network with ties to far-right movements in Europe and Russia, organized a conference in Accra on the “African family.” Sharon Slater of FWI was a speaker. About eighteen months later, in 2021, the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill was introduced in Ghana’s Parliament. The coalition pushing the bill described itself as “affiliated to the World Congress of Families and then the UN Family Caucus with lots of international friends.”
In December 2022, Slater signed a memorandum of cooperation with the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, one of the highest jurisprudential authorities in Sunni Islam, at its headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A Mormon woman whose organization has been designated a hate group by the SPLC, signing a formal cooperation agreement with the highest Sunni legal body in the world, in Saudi Arabia. Under the banner of “family values.”
The 4th African Inter-Parliamentary Conference in Accra this past week is the latest iteration of a gathering that began in Uganda in 2023. Previous editions drew lawmakers from 29 African countries. One of the conference’s stated ambitions is the adoption of an African Charter on Family Values and Sovereignty, a continental legal instrument that would present unified “African family values” to heads of state for adoption into national law across the African Union.
THE TEMPLATE
To understand how the coalition was built, you have to go back to Uganda in March 2009.
Three American evangelical leaders traveled to Uganda and gave a three-day conference on “Exposing the Homosexual Agenda.” One of them was Scott Lively, founder of Abiding Truth Ministries in Springfield, Massachusetts. Lively described gay people as “the most dangerous social and political movement of our time.” He framed homosexuality as a Western import. He compared gay people to the Nazis and to the architects of the Rwandan genocide. He gave a four-hour closed briefing to the Ugandan Parliament.
One month later, Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, the legislation that became known internationally as the “Kill the Gays” bill. Email exchanges between Lively and Bahati, entered into evidence in subsequent litigation, documented Lively’s direct input into the bill’s language and framing.
Lively and his colleagues later attempted to distance themselves from the bill’s harshest provisions. They were widely discredited in the United States, where courts found them to have no standing as religious leaders and where federal litigation against Lively under the Alien Tort Statute, brought by Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) and the Center for Constitutional Rights, documented what it described as a “crimes against humanity” campaign. The case was eventually dismissed on jurisdictional grounds in 2017. Not on the merits.
Uganda passed its Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2023. It carries the death penalty in some circumstances.
Frank Mugisha, Executive Director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, has attended these conferences as an observer and opponent. “Ninety percent of the headliners and the speakers are from the West,” he told the International Bar Association in 2026, “and they’re coming to talk about our family values, and the only thing they’re speaking about is homosexuality.” The people being told their culture is under threat from Western influence are watching Western organizations run the conference.
The rhetorical architecture Lively introduced in Uganda — gay people as predators, homosexuality as a Western import threatening children, legislative resistance as cultural self-defense — did not stay in Uganda. It became the operating framework of the interfaith coalition that Foh-Amoaning was building in Ghana. It is the framework that the African Inter-Parliamentary Conference continues to deploy. The framing traveled because it worked.
There is a particular cruelty in the “Western import” framing. American evangelical organizations, operating on the theology of a religion brought to Africa by European missionaries, using laws written by British colonial administrators, tell African nations that their indigenous culture is under threat from Western influence. The movement that presents itself as resisting Western cultural imperialism is built on a vision of Africa that is itself profoundly colonial.
THE COLONIAL RESIDUE
Britain decriminalized same-sex acts in 1967. By then, most of its African colonies had already won independence. The anti-sodomy laws written by British colonial administrators — laws that had no basis in the pre-colonial legal traditions of the societies they governed — stayed on the books. Ghana’s existing criminalization of same-sex acts, which the new bill strengthens, traces directly to Section 104 of the Criminal Offences Act, inherited from British colonial law.
This is not a minor historical footnote. It is the foundation of the entire structure.
Pre-colonial West African societies were not monolithic in their understanding of gender and sexuality. Anthropological documentation across the continent records recognized social roles for gender-nonconforming individuals that predate colonization. These roles were not universal and they were not without complexity. But they existed. They had names. They had functions within communities. The British colonial legal apparatus arrived and declared them criminal. The missionaries arrived and declared them sin.
India chose a different path. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was repealed in 1952, three years after independence. In 2014, the Supreme Court of India recognized Hijra and other transgender people as a legally protected third gender. In 2018, the court partially struck down Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law that had been on India’s books since 1864. India spent generations dismantling what Britain installed. Ghana is moving in the opposite direction, strengthening laws the British wrote.
What is being defended today as African tradition, the criminalization of same-sex intimacy and the framing of LGBTQ identity as a foreign pathology, is not pre-colonial. It is colonial. The laws being strengthened are the laws the British wrote. The theology underwriting the moral argument is the theology the missionaries brought.
The descendants of colonized peoples are defending colonial law as indigenous culture, with the active assistance of American evangelical organizations whose domestic reach was curtailed by courts and cultural shifts they spent decades trying to reverse. That dynamic is shifting. Haley McEwen, author of the 2024 book “The US Christian Right and Pro-Family Politics in 21st Century Africa,” told Reuters in March 2026: “The transnational pro-family movement has reached new heights in terms of their level of influence now that Trump is in office.” The organizations that exported this movement because they were losing at home are finding the domestic ground has shifted under them. They are not fighting abroad instead of fighting domestically. They are fighting both.
WHAT WAS EXPORTED AND WHY IT LANDED
It would be a mistake to read this story as one of passive African recipients being manipulated by American puppet masters. That framing is its own form of condescension. That framing also misses the mechanism.
American evangelical organizations found fertile ground in Africa not because they manufactured homophobia from scratch, but because the ground had already been prepared — by British anti-sodomy law, by a century of missionary activity, by the replacement of indigenous spiritual frameworks with imported ones that carried imported moral structures. FWI and WCF did not arrive in a vacuum. They arrived in countries where colonial-era criminalization was already on the books and where the theological infrastructure to moralize it had been installed over generations.
What the American organizations brought was organizational capacity, legal drafting expertise, legislative strategy, and international network access. The coalition in Ghana is tripartite — Christian, Muslim, traditional — because Foh-Amoaning understood that continental reach required interfaith legitimacy. The Americans understood that too. The WCF’s ties to Islamic organizations, to European far-right parties, to Russian Orthodox political networks: these are not accidents. They are the architecture of a movement that learned, after losing the domestic culture wars in the United States, to fight them abroad.
The roster extends beyond FWI and WCF. Focus on the Family, Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, and MassResistance have all been documented operating in Africa. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s researcher Graeme Hodges described them collectively as the “old guard” — groups with decades of experience trying to keep sodomy laws on the books in the United States and prevent marriage equality. They lost that battle at home. They did not stop fighting it.
The World Congress of Families has documented ties to Islamophobic, far-right, and white supremacist movements in Europe — movements that have called African migrants “slaves” and “poison.” The same network helping African nations codify anti-LGBTQ law into continental legal frameworks views the people of those nations as subhuman when they arrive in Europe. The “family values” banner covers all of it.
The Senegal case makes the mechanism visible in its starkest form. In March 2026, Reuters published an exclusive investigation confirming that MassResistance, a US-based Christian nationalist organization from Massachusetts, worked with And Sàmm Jikko Yi, a Senegalese network of Islamic and civil society organizations, to push Senegal’s anti-LGBTQ law. In December 2024, And Sàmm Jikko Yi contacted MassResistance first, seeking strategic support, mobilization advice, and discussion of establishing a MassResistance chapter in the country. They discussed tactics for awareness-raising and advocacy with Senegalese authorities. A Christian nationalist organization from Massachusetts, coordinating strategy with an Islamic network in Senegal, to pass legislation criminalizing LGBTQ identity in a Muslim-majority West African nation. The “family values” container held all of it. MassResistance has also documented its work in Ghana, publishing accounts of establishing anti-LGBTQ youth clubs in Ghanaian secondary schools through its partnership with the local organization Freedom International. The clubs meet weekly using MassResistance materials. They are targeting the next generation.
MAHAMA’S DECISION
Ghana’s bill awaits President John Mahama’s signature. He has previously stated that marriage is between a man and a woman. He has also indicated he would wait for legal guidance before signing. The Supreme Court is still considering constitutional challenges.
If he signs, it becomes law. Three years in prison for same-sex intimacy. Ten years for advocacy. Criminal liability for being publicly nonbinary. An extradition clause that reaches Ghanaian citizens abroad. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have all formally condemned the bill. The World Bank has previously withheld loans to Uganda over its Anti-Homosexuality Act, and similar economic pressure has been raised in discussions about Ghana’s bill.
The African Charter on Family Values and Sovereignty, if adopted by African Union member states, would export this framework to the entire continent.
THE AMERICAN NOTE
There are Americans in this story who do not appear in American coverage of it.
Sharon Slater of Family Watch International is an American citizen. Scott Lively is an American citizen. The World Congress of Families was founded in Chicago. The legislative drafting frameworks, the rhetorical architecture, the conference infrastructure: these are American exports, built by American organizations, funded in part by American donors, deployed in countries where American evangelical groups lost the domestic argument.
The laws they are helping write will imprison people. In Uganda, they carry the death penalty.
American organizations are not bystanders to what is happening in Ghana. They convened a conference the same week Parliament voted. Their representative signed a cooperation agreement with the highest Sunni legal body in the world in order to build a coalition broad enough to claim a continent.
The gods were already there. The missionaries replaced them. The colonizers wrote the laws. The laws stayed. And now organizations that lost the domestic culture wars are helping defend those laws as African tradition, in countries where their theology was installed by force, to people whose ancestors did not choose it.
That is the export.
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
Sources: The New Humanitarian (Caleb Okereke, June 3, 2026 — cross-confessional coalition analysis, “family values” as secular container, Ghana as laboratory, Foh-Amoaning 2013 coalition founding, Slater/Islamic Fiqh Academy MOU December 2022); Graphic Online/Ghana (bill passage confirmed, sponsor names, May 29 2026); Democracy in Africa (Sharon Slater/FWI documented Ghana influence, 2019 WCF Accra conference, 2021 bill introduction, coalition self-description “affiliated to WCF”); CNN (FWI Uganda/Kenya/Ghana involvement, Slater conference appearances, December 2023 investigation); Harvard Political Review (Lively email exchanges with Bahati confirmed, parliament address, rhetorical framework documentation); AllAfrica/Foreign Policy (Lively Uganda timeline, missionary movement origins, “predator” framing as deliberate import); Yale Global/New York Times 2009 (3-day Kampala conference March 2009, three American evangelicals, bill introduced one month later); NPR (Lively parliament address confirmed, SMUG lawsuit documentation); MambaOnline (4th Inter-Parliamentary Conference Accra May 27-30 2026 confirmed, African Charter ambitions); Chronicle AI/Ghana Citizenship (bill details confirmed, Mahama decision pending, 2024 lapse history); Americans United/SPLC (Hodges “old guard” quote, Focus on the Family/ADF/FRC/MassResistance documented Africa involvement, FWI hate group designation, WCF far-right European ties); Reuters exclusive investigation (wire — MassResistance/And Sàmm Jikko Yi Senegal coordination confirmed, December 2024 contact confirmed, Schaper/Mboup quotes, Ghana Freedom International connection, March 16 2026); Rightify Ghana (Ghana — MassResistance Ghana youth clubs confirmed, Bueman Senior High School documented, weekly meetings confirmed); RNZ/Reuters (McEwen “transnational pro-family movement has reached new heights” quote, Trump administration context); Catholic News Agency/AllAfrica (Catholic Bishops Ghana “not to rest” statement); International Bar Association (Mugisha “90% from the West” quote, February 2026); Britannica (Hijra history, Section 377, 2014 Supreme Court recognition, 2018 partial decriminalization); History Workshop (1871 Criminal Tribes Act, police registration mandate, cultural elimination provisions); Harvard Divinity School/Religion and Public Life (British criminalization “based in Christian beliefs about gender,” Hijra court roles, 1871 law repeal 1952); Engenderings/LSE (Section 377 as legal transplant of British Buggery Act 1533, Hijra Mughal court roles, pre-colonial documentation); Wikipedia pre-colonial African gender diversity (Sekrata, Yan Daudu, Mugawe documentation with academic citations); Wikipedia Two-spirit/Mesoamerican indigenous sexuality (Xochipilli, pre-contact frameworks, Spanish Inquisition targeting documentation)
