In 2000 Robert Garner, a British anthropologist who became an AIDS activist, prefaced an article on the effect of religious affiliation on sexual behaviour in an AIDS-stricken South African township with the comment that the religious perspective was a “virtual foreigner” in the literature on AIDS (Garner, 2000: 41). In a review article on religion and HIV/AIDS policy Jill Olivier noted the longstanding “invisibility of religious organisations to the view of public health and policy makers”. It was only in the late 1990s that religious organisations, until then considered by healthcare professionals with suspicion if not hostility, started to be seen as partners in the fight against HIV/AIDS in an African continent notorious for its poor public health delivery (Olivier, 2011: 82). In 2001 UNAIDS made reference to religious organisations for the first time in its Global Strategy Framework and the following year the American government launched the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) which explicitly identified religious organisations as possible beneficiaries of public funding. In subsequent years, Olivier further observed, the desire to understand the role of faith-based organisations in health matters provoked a “flurry of research” sponsored not only by religious organisations but also by international health and development organisations such as UNICEF, WHO and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Olivier, 2011: 87).
It is to this new field of enquiry that this paper is dedicated…