He Once Championed Ghana's Anti-Gay Bills. Now the Country's Top Anglican Says Don't Criminalize Us.

Archbishop Cyril Kobina Ben-Smith has spent years as one of the more visible religious voices supporting Ghana’s push to criminalize LGBTQ+ people. As recently as 2024, he signed a statement invoking Leviticus to justify the effort. So it was notable when, in a BBC interview last week, the Anglican Primate of West Africa said plainly: “We do not support the criminalization of gay persons.”

Ben-Smith leads nearly two million Anglicans across Ghana, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, making him one of the highest-ranking figures in the global Anglican Communion. His comments came as pushback against Ghana’s Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, which cleared parliament earlier this year and punishes the “willful promotion, sponsorship or support of LGBTQ+ activities” with up to five years in prison. The law also carries a “duty to report” provision — meaning friends and family members of LGBTQ+ people, though not journalists or medical and legal professionals, could themselves face prison time for failing to report someone.

A genuine reversal, with real limits

It would be a mistake to read Ben-Smith’s comments as a change of theological heart. In the same interview, he reaffirmed that “we believe that God created male and female” and that the church continues to view same-sex relationships as falling outside its teaching. What’s shifted is narrower but still consequential: Ben-Smith is now drawing a distinction between the church’s religious position and the state’s power to imprison people for who they love, saying LGBTQ+ people “have lived in this country for a long time, and we’ve lived with them. They’ve never been a problem,” and that “the church does not support people to be criminalized.”

That distinction matters because Ben-Smith was, for years, part of the reason the law had religious cover in the first place. In late 2021, he led Ghanaian bishops in publicly backing an earlier version of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, drawing public criticism at the time from then-Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. As recently as 2024, a statement he signed described the criminalization push as “born [of] the belief that the practice is unbiblical and ungodly,” citing Leviticus 20:13 by name. The BBC interviewer pressed him directly on this history, and on the fact that LGBTQ+ Ghanaians are now seeking asylum in the UK, citing fear of violence they say the church’s endorsement of these laws has helped enable.

The law itself, and the region around it

Ghana’s law has drawn condemnation from the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch since it passed. HRC’s David Stacy called it a bill that “violates the fundamental rights of LGBTQI+ people and allies,” adding that “every single lawmaker who voted to pass this bill is wrongly using their power to strip away the basic humanity of the people they are supposed to represent.”

Ghana isn’t acting alone. It’s one of five West African countries currently tightening restrictions on LGBTQ+ people, alongside Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal — where President Bassirou Diomaye Faye signed a law in March doubling prison terms for same-sex acts and criminalizing “promotion” of homosexuality outright. Uganda’s 2023 law remains the region’s most extreme, carrying penalties up to death for some offenses. What sets Ghana apart from most of its neighbors in this wave is that it’s majority Christian rather than majority Muslim — about 71% of Ghanaians identify as Christian, versus roughly 17% Muslim — which is part of why a shift in tone from one of the country’s most senior church leaders carries weight beyond the immediate legal fight.

What it does, and doesn’t, change

To be clear about what this is not: Ben-Smith’s comments don’t repeal the law, and he hasn’t called for it to be struck down. He’s drawn a line specifically around criminalization and imprisonment while maintaining the church’s opposition to LGBTQ+ identity itself — a position that will strike many as an uncomfortable middle ground rather than genuine allyship. For LGBTQ+ Ghanaians currently living under a law that can send them to prison for who they are or who they support, a religious leader declining to endorse imprisonment specifically is a small, incomplete shift — not protection, and not repeal.

But in a region where religious leaders have often provided the moral architecture anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is built on, a reversal from someone with Ben-Smith’s specific history and reach is being watched closely by rights groups looking for any crack in the coalition that made Ghana’s law possible in the first place.