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14 The Evangelical Invention of Apartheid
- University of Virginia Press
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222 14 The Evangelical Invention of Apartheid “Calvinism is a determinist creed which consorts naturally with conceptions of racial superiority and of national separateness.” So wrote Leopold Marquard, a liberal Afrikaner, expressing a view widely held throughout the apartheid era by both supporters and enemies of the South African government.1 But what precisely was the “Calvinism” that so many considered foundational to Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid doctrine? To some historians, it was an Old Testament religion reborn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the South African frontier, well insulated from the European Enlightenment.2 Others see it as a product of twentieth-century intellectuals, chiefly “neo-Calvinists” in the tiny Gereformeerde Church, whose “Christian-national” ideology enabled Afrikaners to dominate South Africa and defy the world.3 Still others minimize the Calvinism -apartheid link or deny it altogether.4 In fact, in the 1930s, the principles of segregation (which originated mostly among English-speakers) were radicalized, theologized, and bonded to a rising Afrikaner nationalism, primarily by the mission leaders of the Dutch Reformed churches (DRC). It is there, in the spiritual home of the vast majority of Afrikaners , that one finds the closest tie between “Calvinism” and apartheid. Yet the DRC mission leadership was not, in fact, notably “Calvinist” in that period. It did not stress the covenant theology of the eighteenth-century, nor had it yet adopted the neo-Calvinism of the Netherlands, which was still a novel ideology, except among some junior clergy. Though Reformed in its confessions and worship , the DRC was strongly evangelical and ecumenically minded, with close ties to U.S. and Scottish Presbyterianism. Its strong conservatism in race relations owed more to the social history of the Afrikaners than to theology. As it had evolved into a volkskerk (church of a people) in the nineteenth century, it had established separate churches for blacks, above all to forestall anti-missionary attitudes among the white laity. But ecclesiastical segregation was not unique to the DRC, having been adopted in the early twentieth century, if for somewhat different reasons, by Congregationalist and Scottish missions as well. In the 1920s, the DRC and other Protestants moved even closer together when Johannes du Plessis, the prominent Afrikaner missiologist, formed an alliance with liberals, Englishspeaking missionaries, and black Christians to address the “Native Question.” The confluence of Afrikaner nationalism and missions, and the application of The Evangelical Invention of Apartheid 223 the DR mission policy to South African society as a whole—formative developments in the pre-history of apartheid—would begin around 1929, just as Du Plessis ’s heresy trial was weakening his grip on Dutch Reformed missions. Johannes du Plessis and the Evangelical Missiology of the Dutch Reformed Church Johannes du Plessis believed that his fellow Afrikaners possessed a unique aptitude , and a unique divine calling, to be pioneer missionaries in Africa. “I can imagine for my beloved Church in South Africa no other, no more exalted function than the evangelization of all Africa. To that end, religious persecution drove us to this Southern shore; to that end, Divine Providence prepared us over two and half centuries; to that end, we stand here today, a beacon in the South, established by the divine Hand.”5 It was the Afrikaner church, not the Afrikaner volk as a whole, that, in Du Plessis’s view, was called to preach the gospel for the salvation of the “heathen.” He found evidence of the church’s missionary obligation throughout the Old and New Testaments: “The Gospel of Christ does not include the idea of missions, but it is the idea of missions, and nothing else.” “Missions cannot be taken away from Christianity without tearing its heart from its body.” Christian missions were necessary in South Africa to protect “civilization” from the “heathen by whom we are surrounded.”6 Yet he made little of this theme, which Dutch Reformed spokesmen would greatly extend after his fall from favor. In the 1920s, liberal theologians and enthusiasts for the Social Gospel, among them British and American missionaries in Asia, had begun to rethink the whole mission enterprise. In 1932, their modernist views were widely publicized in Rethinking Missions, a “laymen’s inquiry,” conducted by William Ernest Hocking, a prominent Harvard philosopher, and funded by the U.S. tycoon, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was a devoted Baptist. The inquiry concluded that “ministry to the secular needs of men in the spirit of Christ . . . is evangelism in the right sense of the word,” and...