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The president surprised the nation during his State of the Union address, describing the plight of Africa's 30 million AIDS victims and calling for $15 billion to curb the plague.

The President's words brought back memories of my own initial reaction to people with AIDS: Fear and rejection. Though I wouldn't admit it, deep down I believed people who got AIDS brought it on themselves.

But God has a way of dealing with our prejudices, as he did with me one Christmas in the mid-1980s. I was in a North Carolina prison for women. The atmosphere was glum, as it often is on holidays. The crowd that gathered to hear me preach was somber and subdued.

After the service, a prison official said, "Do you have time to visit Bessie Shipp?"

"Who's Bessie Shipp?" I asked. When they told me she was in an isolation cell dying of AIDS, I drew back. My first reaction was that I didn't have time. Yet, just the night before, I had seen a television report of Mother Teresa embracing two men with AIDS. If that frail, 90-pound nun could do it, how could I, the strapping ex-Marine, do less?

"I'll go," I said reluctantly.

We walked down a narrow corridor, and a door was opened to reveal a small, dark cell. There sat a petite African American woman wrapped in a bathrobe, shivering in the cold. She had an open Bible on her lap.

I came right to the point: "Bessie, we don't have much time. Do you know the Lord?"

"I want to," she replied softly. "But I don't always feel like he's there."

"Would you like to pray with me to know Christ as your Savior?" I asked.

Bessie looked down and finally whispered, "Yes, I would."

I took Bessie by the hand, and we prayed together in that cold concrete cell. Two days later the governor released Bessie, and she was baptized in her hospital room. The next week she died—but not before curing my AIDS phobia.

But sadly, I suspect there are still Christians hung up on AIDS, as I was. George Barna reported last fall that evangelicals are slightly less likely than other Americans to want to help children orphaned by AIDS. How can we look the other way? Unless we devote substantial resources to fighting this modern plague, tens of millions of Africans will die an early death from AIDS. It is Christians of all people who can advocate solutions that offer hope.

Up until now, efforts to stem the tide of African AIDS have focused on condom distribution and other so-called safe sex methods. But the African nation that has witnessed the most dramatic reduction in HIV infections took a different approach. Uganda has aggressively promoted an "abc" prevention approach that prioritizes "Abstinence," "Be faithful," and only then "Condoms." Ugandans have responded with a dramatic delay in the onset of teen sexual activity and a reduced number of sex partners among adults.

The result? HIV infection rates have plunged from 18.5 percent in 1995 to 8.3 percent by the end of 1999—a 50 percent drop in just four years.

Ugandan newspapers give considerable credit for this success to Trans World Radio, which joined the AIDS battle with a one-time special produced in Kenya and with weekly AIDS broadcasts. The programs comfort the afflicted and instruct the healthy on how to avoid becoming infected—not by condom use, but through teaching chastity before marriage and fidelity afterward.

By contrast, African nations that emphasized condom use alone, and have the highest condom user rates on the continent, also suffer the highest HIV prevalence rates. Clearly, condoms must no longer be treated as a panacea for HIV prevention.

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June 2003, Vol. 47, No. 6