Resisting Rights to Renounce Imperialism: East African Churches’ Strategic Symbolic Resistance to LGBTQ Inclusion

When American Anglican and Lutheran churches elected to ordain same-sex partnered clergy, nearly all African counterparts either denounced LGBTQ inclusion or entirely dissociated from their bilateral partners. Why did these disagreements over domestic policies introduce transnational schisms, and what explains this variation? I argue that East African churches responded to bilateral partners’ LGBTQ inclusion by adopting a strategy of symbolic resistance. They invoked domestic anticolonial sentiments to buttress their symbolic capital, relative to domestic religious competitors. Churches who relied least on US counterparts (financially or institutionally) fortified that resistance by dissociating entirely. All others maintained bilateral partnerships but publicly denounced LGBTQ inclusion. This research contributes insights about transnational norm diffusion. Beyond simply dismissing norms deemed incongruent with domestic ideals, actors in the global South capitalize on incongruence to gain domestic symbolic capital. Global rights movements thereby unwittingly incentivize domestic actors to mobilize a strategy of symbolic resistance that obstructs transnational agendas.