Good, Bad Religious Leaders: Binary Talk in a Tanzanian Health Project

Abstract

ABSTRACT NGOs recruit religious leaders as health actors in Sub-Saharan Africa. Program designers both construct religious leaders as opponents of family planning interventions who discourage their congregants from using family planning and as proponents who persuade their congregants to use them. This article investigates a family planning project that recruited religious leaders in Morogoro, Tanzania. Research findings show that binary talk obfuscates the structural underpinning of high fertility rates. The construction of static binaries of good and bad religious leaders observed mismatches with peoples’ own realities and it misses the lifelike nuances of actors’ own ethical action.