The Splintering of South African Evangelicalism during the Last Decade of Apartheid

Abstract

ABSTRACT Traditionally, evangelical Christians support, if only passively, the government of the day and are reluctant to take a stand on political issues. Under apartheid, this represented a dilemma for black evangelicals. Most of them experienced the evil effects of the regime on a daily basis. But they were unable to articulate their opposition to apartheid in religious terms. The situation changed in the mid-1980s. Two ambitious initiatives saw the light during this period, signalling that evangelicals are not necessarily apolitical. The first was the National Initiative for Reconciliation (NIR), a campaign in favour of reconciliation across racial lines launched by African Enterprise, an evangelical mission organisation based in Pietermaritzburg. I argue that – dismissed as irrelevant by black activists and ignored by the majority of Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) ministers – the NIR did not reach its objectives, at least in the short term. Meanwhile, a group of black evangelicals, largely from Soweto, formed a movement called Concerned Evangelicals, which challenged the notion that faith-based reconciliation was sufficient to resolve the crisis. For the first time, an evangelical body was taking a radical stance on apartheid in South Africa. Its creation sanctioned – for a while – the institutional division of South African evangelicalism.