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39 3 Confining the Gospel of Equality The Dutch Settlers For much of South African history, white settlers sought to confine the egalitarian implications of evangelical missions to the spiritual realm. In the nineteenth century, the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), the spiritual home of most Dutch-speaking settlers, pioneered the practice of segregated churches, and, in the twentieth century, decisively shaped apartheid theory. Yet, paradoxically, by the time it reached its greatest power, the DRC had become one of the most evangelical, mission-minded churches in the country. There was a severe tension between two of its most fervently held commitments—to evangelize people of color and to preserve white supremacy. And the interplay between these two convictions explains in large part the church’s eagerness to enter the political realm in the twentieth century, as well as the shape of the apartheid ideology it would champion. For almost the entire period of Dutch East India Company rule, from 1652 to 1795, the DRC alone had the right to hold public worship. A slow trickle of European immigrants added many non-Dutch and non-Reformed people to white settler society, but most were absorbed into Dutch culture and incorporated into the Dutch church, as were almost all white children born in the colony. Not until the late eighteenth century did a non-Reformed group, the Lutherans, gradually gain the right to conduct worship services of its own in Cape Town. The Dutch Reformed sacraments of baptism and communion provided a social boundary that reinforced the emerging identity of white settlers as “Christians,” and excluded most “heathen” slaves, Khoisan, and free people of color. Membership in the DRC also reinforced a cultural boundary between Dutchspeaking settlers and other white immigrants. Under the transitional regime of the Dutch Batavian Republic (1803–6) and under subsequent British rule, freedom in the exercise of religion was expanded to embrace all Protestants. With immigration from the Netherlands largely ended, the newcomers, chiefly British and German, formed their own churches. The DRC remained the religious home of the long-established Dutch speakers and the most effective guardian of the Dutch language and cultural identity. But, after 1817, the British Governor Lord Charles Somerset, responding to a shortage of Netherlands-born clergy, imported Scots ministers to fill Reformed pulpits. The British government was 40 Missionaries, Converts, and Enemies simultaneously attempting to anglicize the colony. By 1834, twelve of the twentytwo DRC clergy were Scottish, only eight South African, one German, and one Dutch. Some Scots ministers encountered opposition from their Dutch flocks and from the Dutch colonial press. In time, however, most became fluent in Dutch, and several settled in South Africa and became absorbed into Dutch culture. Although English was sometimes used in worship service if worshipers requested it, the DRC remained an ethnically demarcated church, closely tied to the Dutch language and culture. In the early twentieth century it would be possible for Afrikaner nationalists to reclaim the church as an exclusively Dutch- (later Afrikaans -) speaking institution.1 The Dutch and their Afrikaner descendents would always remain a majority among South African whites. After 1910, when four colonies joined to form the Union of South Africa, Afrikaners would become dominant in the new political system, and remain so until 1994. The DRC, in consequence, has rarely been out of the spotlight of South African history. The Continuing Reformation: Evangelicalism in the Dutch Church There was a counterweight to the early Dutch settlers’ conviction that they and their descendents were in a special covenantal relationship with God. Adherents of the Continuing Reformation—a Reformed movement rooted in German pietism and English Puritanism—were convinced that the Protestant Reformation remained unfinished. They maintained that all people, whatever their national origin, needed to be converted and to enter an intensely personal relationship with Jesus. Jonathan Gerstner has found hints of the Continuing Reformation in South Africa as early as the 1660s. After the arrival of the Reverend H. Kroonenburg in 1752, the majority of pastors in Cape Town “exhibited a continuing reformation zeal,” proclaiming that one’s place in God’s covenant was not guaranteed by birth but could only be gained, one person at a time, through grace and the power of the Holy Spirit.2 Such pastors were often intensely critical of their white flocks. Many in Cape Town, said the Reverend J. F. Bode in 1784, placed little value on “the beloved proclamation of Christ’s Gospel, and for . . . [them] . . . it is the fragrance of...

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