Religion: White Theology's Last Bastion

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Of the three Dutch Reformed churches, two are relatively small (combined membership: 338,000). Ironically, the one with the more liberal theology takes the hardest line on race, while the more doctrinally conservative church has a group of members who signed last year's Koinonia Declaration, a rare Christian Afrikaner protest against South African racial policies. By far the most important of the three churches is the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk, or N.G. Church, which is often sarcastically called "the National Party at prayer." It claims the allegiance of 1.5 million of the nation's 2.5 million Afrikaners, including Prime Minister P.W. Botha and his predecessor John Vorster, now President. English-speaking Protestant and Roman Catholic organizations, both white and black, are quick to criticize government policy, but they have minimal influence on the Afrikaner-dominated regime. When the N.G. Church speaks, however, the government listens.

Not that it ever hears anything unpleasant. Official N.G. Church policy, issued after a 1974 synod, has dropped old racist theology in favor of nominal support for racial equality, but holds that South Africa's system of apartheid is morally acceptable. "The New Testament does not regard the diversity of peoples as such as something sinful," the policy statement says, and the teaching in Galatians 3: 28 that "there is neither Jew nor Greek" in Christ relates to overall spiritual unity, not "social integration."

Church-state unanimity runs deeper than doctrine. The liberal Johannesburg Sunday Times this year published a major expose on the Broederbond, the secret clan of 12,000 leading Afrikaners sworn to uphold apartheid and considered to be more powerful than Parliament. The Sunday Times reported that 750 Afrikaner ministers, fully 40% of the clergy, were Broederbond members.

The N.G. Church is, confusingly enough, not one church but four. N.G. missionaries years ago set up three "daughter" churches, one each for black Africans, "Coloreds" (those of mixed race) and the small Indian community. The three nonwhite satellites together have 1.3 million members. Though divided racially, the four groups have identical doctrine and are all members of a powerless umbrella body called the Federal Council of Dutch Reformed Churches.

Last March, the federal council bowed to nonwhite wishes and proposed that the four churches, establish a joint governing body with far-reaching power over doctrine, discipline and issues of "general concern." Leaders of the Colored daughter church rejected the plan in favor of one even more daring: unification of the four churches. The white church, at its quadrennial synod a few weeks later, flatly rejected any accommodation to its nonwhite Reformed Christians. (The obvious fear: the church might gradually integrate at regional and local levels, and also lay the moral grounds for giving blacks a say in secular government.) The delegates also rejected a suggestion that they rename the nonwhite factions "sister" rather than "daughter" churches. The synod elected as the church's new moderator E.P.J. Kleynhans, who believes that church integration is an "indefensible policy" and takes pride that the church has been "a century ahead of the state" in developing apartheid.