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319 Conclusion The Voortrekker leader M. W. Pretorius charged the English-speaking missionaries with preaching “that the Gospel changes what was decreed by God, that baptism and confession destroys the eternal and thus necessary difference between white and black.” Among mission theorists, the English-speakers’ apparent complicity in gelykstelling, or equalization of the races, provoked Cornelis Spoelstra’s neo-Calvinist critique that “Anglo-Saxon” mission schools exposed Africans to “equalization in all thinkable evil,” and the German critique, exemplified by Siegfried Knak’s accusation that “Anglo-Saxon” missionaries ignored “the order of creation [Schöpfungsordnung], the meaning of history, and the coming of God’s Kingdom.” From 1828, when John Philip published his Researches in South Africa, until at least the 1950s, when Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd blamed Philip for the “blood which was spilt, and the strife engendered” in South African history , Philip served as a symbol of “Anglo-Saxon” missions, whose errors, many whites believed, must be undone if white supremacy was to be secured. The gravamen of the case against Philip was, of course, that he fostered gelykstelling , but most critics, noted, too, his allegiance to British imperialism and to liberalism. The most sophisticated critics, the twentieth-century missiologists from the Continent, included among the “Anglo-Saxon” follies an embrace of individualism and a belief in progress, science, liberty, and human rights—in short, the assemblage of values frequently attributed to the “Enlightenment.” The German and neo-Calvinist critics of “Anglo-Saxon” missions were correct in discerning a close kinship between English-speaking Protestantism—and by extension, its missions—and Enlightenment values, particularly liberal affirmations of liberty, equality, and the rule of law. The Canadian philosopher George Grant rightly spoke of a “liberal-Puritan synthesis” among the English-speaking peoples, describing it as an “intimate yet ambiguous co-penetration between contractual liberalism and Protestantism.”1 In South Africa it is difficult to disentangle the two—either in the thinking of missionaries and their white liberal allies , or in the aspirations of black Christians. Yet it would be wrong to regard the Enlightenment as the principal impulse toward racial equality. As Philip asked mockingly in 1828: “What missionaries [have been] sent forth to promote the civilization of savage tribes, which have not sprung from the spirit of Christian missions?” Until the mid-twentieth century, the primary impetus for black 320 The Equality of Believers advance and racial reconciliation in South Africa came from Christian actors with Enlightenment preoccupations as part of their arsenal of ideas, and not the reverse. Support for the expansion of racial equality, though far from constant among missionaries, was much stronger in English-speaking missions than in either Continental “pietist” missions or missions of the Dutch Reformed Church. Statistical confirmation of this disparity can be seen in regard to two controversial issues of black advancement: ordination of black clergy and provision of secondary education for blacks. By 1911, British, American, and English-speaking South African missions had ordained one black clergyman for every 3 ordained missionaries in the field; the Lutheran (German and Scandinavian) missionaries, only one black for every 23 missionaries; and the DRC, with 225 missionaries in the field, had ordained only one. And while mission societies of all stripes educated African pupils, divergence among their education policies was dramatic. Only secondary education enabled blacks to progress in careers whites considered their own— commercial farming, advanced trades, clerical occupations, and the professions; and, as of 1911, the English-speaking missions were educating approximately seven secondary-school students per missionary, the Lutherans fewer than one, and the DRC none at all.2 Prior to 1948, the DRC—and, hence, its contribution to apartheid theory— must be understood chiefly against the backdrop of the English-speaking world. Dutch neo-Calvinism contributed to apartheid, but only belatedly and indirectly, by providing a theoretical underpinning of Afrikaner nationalism and a defense of apartheid ideas previously adopted on other grounds. Apartheid was, in fact, an elaboration by DRC mission leaders of the segregationist ideas of Englishspeakers . It arose from the DRC’s urgent need to square the imperatives of its successful evangelical missions with its aspiration to be a volkskerk protecting white Afrikaners from, among other things, black economic competition and black political domination. Neither the racist speculations of the psychologist M. L Fick and the sociologist Geoff Cronjé, nor the flirtations with Nazism by some Afrikaner nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s, should distract attention from the fact that the apartheid theory of the Afrikaner church...

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