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

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.