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58 4 w฀ Church, State, and the Death of God A Prolegomenon to the Black Messiah sometime after February 1974, the Black Consciousness–affiliated People’s Experimental Theatre (PET) organization circulated a collection of poems and short theater pieces. It prominently featured a poem entitled “Casualties” by Roli Karolen, which compared Abraham Tiro, who had recently been assassinated in Botswana, to Jesus Christ. As Karolen explained, both Jesus of Nazareth and “Tiro of Dinokana” lived short lives, preached truth, suffered, and died. The poet equated Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount with the words the young South African was best known for: “a graduation speech [that] made headlines.” “Prophet, Martyr and Hero to your people / Settlers adopted Jesus of Nazareth and called him God / Whitey rejected Tiro of Dinokana and called him Terrorist,” Karolen declared. Six years after the founding of SASO, his poem demonstrated the degree to which resistance politics had become Christianized and sanctified. He called upon the followers of both Tiro and Jesus to recognize their bond: “that Blessed are the Jews who lived with Jesus / Blessed are the Blacks who shared with Tiro / Sacred are all those who keep up with struggle / Of the son of David and the son of Azania.” These were not idle words, nor did they offer a thoughtless comparison. By the middle of the seventies, political rhetoric had assumed a Christian aura, and Christ had in turn been incarnated in the cauldron of South African politics.1 This melding was by no means inevitable. Despite the profusion of Christians in SASO; despite the long history of missionary advocacy and mission school– educated Africans resisting industrialization, segregation, and the expansion of the apartheid system; and despite the outcry of international church figures such as Trevor Huddleston at the fall of Sophiatown, the mainstream Christian church’s critical voice in South Africa was far from assured in the late Church, State, and the Death of God w 59 1960s.2 A 1968 memo from UCM’s organizers captured the tenor of the time. Since theirs was “a religious organization,” they explained, “it is concerned with Man’s relationship to God.”3 They had founded UCM to initiate a traditional discussion of faith, in which God was apart from human experience and Christian students were called “to love, trust and hope in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”4 Although it advocated multiracial fellowship, the UCM’s constitution was not altogether different from the teachings of the government - and apartheid-supporting Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), which taught black seminarians little more than to “accept that you are a sinner, you are saved by grace, and you have to be grateful for salvation. It didn’t say anything about what was happening [in the world.] It wasn’t applied.”5 By tracing the changing perspective and debates over the appropriate role and context for the Christian voice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this chapter shows the steps that led from the sacred relationship between individuals and God to the sacred struggle of Jesus of Nazareth and Tiro of Dinokana on earth. In the process, I lay the intellectual groundwork beneath a forthcoming concept: the promised “Black Messiah.” To understand the marriage of faith in politics and faith in God in 1970s South Africa, we must detour from student struggle to consider wider debates about the relationships between church and state that conditioned this discourse’s emergence. There, one can explore the theological structures and concerns that prefaced calls for sacred struggle. DRC seminaries may have taught their students not to apply theology to the world, but that church’s history and connection with National Party politics demonstrated that Christianity was already intimately involved in its own sacred struggle for “Christian nationalism” in white South Africa. Thus, the unfolding relationship between church and state and between faith and politics cannot be understood without first considering the fraught premise of Christian opposition to apartheid in the first place. The chapter then considers alternate Christian voices during the 1960s and explores the development of moral and religious opposition to apartheid at the decade’s close. The actors involved—from the Catholic Church to the South African Council of Churches (SACC) to Beyers Naudé’s Christian Institute and the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPROCAS)—are familiar from the secondary literature. But where other scholars have focused largely on the political maneuvering behind church-state relations, I instead consider the intellectual content behind such wrangling...

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