AIDS and Postmodern Religion

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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.