Religion: White Theology's Last Bastion

The Afrikaans churches are shunned abroad, isolated at home

At the somber granite monument to South Africa's Boer pioneers near Pretoria, at Krugersdorp where the Boers defied the British and re-established their republic, and at other sites across the nation, white Afrikaners gathered to mark the Day of the Covenant, their Thanksgiving. It was on Dec. 16, 1838, that 470 Afrikaner farmers fought off a raid by 15,000 Zulu warriors, killing 3,000 of the attackers without losing any of their own number. On the eve of the battle, the Afrikaners vowed that if God granted them victory they would ever after commemorate the day as a Sabbath.

For more than 1.8 million whites in the three Dutch Reformed churches that dominate in South Africa, this year's Sabbath marked the end of an especially perplexing year. The churches continue to provide the moral underpinning for the nation's policy of racial separation, a role that has left them increasingly isolated from the mainstream of Christianity, not only abroad but at home.

The Afrikaners have long believed that their nation struck a special covenant with God ordaining them to preserve a Christian civilization. South Africa is, in a sense, the last Protestant theocracy on earth. In a country where American-style separation of church and state is as foreign as interracial marriage, Calvinist piety pervades schoolroom and board room.

The Afrikaans churches are also the last major bastion of the theological view that racial segregation is the Creator's will. The doctrine is a relatively new one. At first, the Afrikaans churches made no distinction between God's white and black children. The church remained integrated for about two centuries and, mainly through zealous missionary efforts, growing numbers of nonwhites entered the fold. Only in 1857 did the Afrikaans God formally become a prime divider of men.

Such a policy has made the Dutch Reformed churches pariahs in most of the Christian world. Those who were members of the World Council of Churches quit in 1961 over W.C.C. criticism of South African racial policies. The dominant Afrikaans church this year cut its last direct link with Protestantism in Holland over support there for W.C.C. grants to African revolutionaries. The only remaining international tie is with a group of orthodox Calvinist churches. Now relations with the nonwhite Reformed churches within South Africa are deteriorating.