The issue we are about to raise is not a nice one, but the holy books of Judges and Ezekiel are not nice either. There is a heart cry of our Caribbean Christadelphians, especially of our sisters and interested women friends, one that can no longer be suppressed.
Statistics from the World Health Organization on the AIDS pandemic as it affects the Caribbean make chilling reading. At an ever-increasing rate, Christians and other religious people are being infected by unfaithful, unbelieving partners with HIV, and are dying of AIDS. Women are estimated to outnumber men as active members of Caribbean churches, including the thirty or so Christadelphian ecclesias, by a ratio of five or six to one. So this threat falls most seriously on the wives and children of unbelieving and promiscuous men.
With unemployment rates in some Caribbean lands, much higher than the worst years of the great depression in Europe and North America in the 1930s, the present economic desperation is shattering the biblical family — a married couple and their children cohabiting in the same household. Tens of thousands of migrant, casual workers prowl the hemisphere in search of some sort of gainful employment, however menial. Trained professionals from the islands are doing hedge clipping in Florida. Many pass through Belle Glade, Florida, dubbed the AIDS capital of the western hemisphere. Wives leave husbands and children behind in a frantic search for any kind of domestic work, geriatric nursing, janitorial jobs — anything that can produce a few dollars to send home.
In a recent newspaper article, the director of a major medical institution in an advanced country boasted that his Jamaican and Guyanese nurses and nursing aides were “the finest in the world.” But he expressed dismay that so many of them, after months or even years of lonely service, returned home only to be infected by a melange of STD’s, including AIDS.
So it is that some of us face a terrible dilemma. The Scriptures counsel thus: “If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. And if a [sister] has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy” (I Cor. 7:13-14). What if the unbeliever is HIV positive?
There is not a state in the world whose laws protect a married person from this death sentence. Legally, persons infected with HIV are absolutely free to murder as many partners as they wish in any country except one. Cuba is the only country in the world where AIDS patients are totally isolated on diagnosis.
What should a Christadelphian spouse do? Separation and divorce are wrong. The unbelieving partner has legally defined sexual rights which he or she is invariably eager to exercise. Very few indeed are the men or women who voluntarily admit that they are deadly carriers of sexually transmitted disease.
And what about this scenario, which is not hypothetical? If you know that someone is going to infect an innocent partner, who is all unsuspecting, what should you do?
“Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Your views and spiritual advice are earnestly sought. Our Caribbean members have hardships enough, without this extra burden. At the very least, they need our prayers.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One