At the core of Invisible Children lay a particular strand of evangelical Christianity. Russell first traveled to Africa as a child missionary and formed the organization as an alternative to traditional missionary groups, whose ostentatiously religious model he found problematic. Invisible Children’s alternative was to project a secular imagination to the general public. As Jason Russell told the New York Times in 2012, “We view ourselves as the Pixar of human rights stories.”
But to religious audiences, Invisible Children gave the impression that it was a deeply Christian organization. Speaking to an audience at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, Russell made clear that he understood that his cause depended on hiding his own beliefs: “A lot of people fear Christians. . . . they fear Invisible Children — because they feel like we have an agenda. They see us and they go, ‘You want me to sign up for something, you want my money. . . . You want me to believe in your god.’ And it freaks them out.” The military strength to stop Kony lay, after all, with the secular state, and Invisible Children’s less religious and more musical-theater-grounded appeal would prove a hit with the Obama administration.
Its calls to apprehend Kony were directly tied to the US State Department. By 2008, the government had dubbed Kony a “specially designated global terrorist,” and the Pentagon was providing intelligence and operational support to Uganda to capture him. When those efforts failed, the US military became directly involved. Operation Observant Compass, Washington’s 2011 military intervention, produced a sprawling network of bases and airfields. The counter-LRA operation was spread across five countries in central Africa, costing an estimated $780 million, some of which would make it into the bank accounts of Invisible Children. Kony 2012, rather than an attempt to draw awareness to evils being committed against children, was primarily a lobbying effort on behalf of this policy, enabled by millions of dollars provided by USAID. Indeed, unlike many other NGOs operating in the region, Invisible Children directly worked with the US military on designing pamphlets dropped by US Air Force jets, and far from trying to keep such activities hidden, Invisible Children boasted about its relationship with the military, regardless of the potential risks to the communities they claimed to be helping.