In the heart of Africa lies Uganda, a nation vibrant with culture, resilience, and deep spiritual roots. Churches and mosques echo with worship, and billboards cry out with scriptural affirmations. Uganda wears its religious identity like a badge of honour—a self-declared Christian nation, draped in devotion. But beneath the hymns and hallelujahs, a haunting question persists: What is love without tolerance?

How did we get here, to this place where sermons burn hotter with hatred for homosexuality than with outrage at corruption, abductions, and collapsing hospitals?

In recent years, Uganda’s religious leaders have rallied around one issue with more ferocity than perhaps any other: homosexuality. It has become the ultimate scapegoat, the social cancer, the enemy of moral order, according to them. Pastors thunder from pulpits, politicians find unity in criminalising it, and mobs feel justified in humiliating or harming those they suspect to be queer. All of this, somehow, in God’s name.

Yet, for a country grappling with staggering unemployment, where graduates ride boda-bodas to survive, and families are one hospital bill away from ruin, how did a person’s sexuality become the nation’s moral crisis?

Where are the fiery sermons condemning the billions stolen from public coffers—money meant for medicine, roads, and education? Where are the televised prayer crusades for abducted youths, snatched in broad daylight for daring to speak truth to power? Where is the holy outrage for the mothers who give birth by candlelight in ill-equipped clinics or the unemployed fathers standing at street corners with CVs that no one reads?

Instead, we are fed the lie that gay people are the true threat to Uganda’s future.

It’s a gross misdirection. While the religious establishment locks arms with the political elite to demonise minorities, the real rot—nepotism, dictatorship, police brutality, election rigging, and institutional decay—goes unchallenged. It's not that our churches are blind. It’s because they’ve chosen silence where it matters most, and noise where it’s safest.

Let’s ask the hard question: Is this truly Christian love?

When Jesus walked the earth, his most powerful acts weren’t reserved for the perfect or pious. He broke bread with the rejected, dined with outcasts, and defended the persecuted. He rebuked the hypocrites—those who flaunted religious law while ignoring the surrounding suffering. If he were here today, would he be leading a rally against LGBTQ+ people? Or would He be sitting in the slums, healing the sick and comforting the violated?

Love without tolerance is tyranny dressed in scripture. It is the selective morality of those who twist religion into a weapon, conveniently silent on the abuse of power, but thunderous when judging private lives.

Uganda deserves better. We deserve a faith that speaks truth to power, not just to people’s bedrooms. We deserve churches that challenge oppression and demand justice for all, regardless of whom they love. We deserve a version of love that aligns with the God who said, "Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me."

So, for God’s sake—literally—let’s reclaim the genuine spirit of love. One who is patient. One that is kind. One that is not self-righteous or easily threatened. One that champions mercy over moral panic.

Because in a country drowning in man-made suffering, the last thing we should criminalise is love.