Religion Is in Crisis in South Africa : Ferment Over Violence Grows as Black Deaths Mount

A new kind of liberation theology is taking root in most of South Africa’s largest Christian churches as a growing number of clergy and lay people, most of them black, seek ways of keeping pace with the country’s revolutionary climate.

At the same time, frustration is welling up in the ranks of black clerics from numerous denominations who feel unable to meet the demands of their congregations because they believe that their churches’ predominant white leadership is losing touch with black perceptions.

The groundswell has gained impetus from the continuing political violence in the black townships during the last 15 months in which nearly 900 people have died--most as a result of police action.

The movement among a small but influential group of clergy has sparked an outcry from many white Christians who refuse to accept the liberationists’ theological distinction between just and unjust violence. The issue is putting pressure on church leaders--such as the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg and Nobel laureate, Desmond M. Tutu--to reconsider their intolerance of violence as a means of political and social change.

Tutu is not alone. Anglican Archbishop Philip Russell of Cape Town and Roman Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley are caught between the black-white dichotomy within their ministries, unable to commit themselves to the interests of one community at the expense of the other.

Afrikaner cleric Beyers Naude is one of the few white churchmen who has committed himself to the black cause. As general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, which represents more than 70% of Christians, he told an interviewer recently that if effective international sanctions were not imposed against the apartheid regime soon, “Then in all probability churches and individuals will accept violence,” and would have to consider seriously the concept of a just war.

Naude’s words recall the development of liberation theology in Latin America in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when writers such as Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez were quoting clergy as saying: “Let us by all means avoid equating the unjust violence of the oppressors (who maintain this despicable system) with the just violence of the oppressed (who feel obliged to use it to achieve their liberation).”

The most cogent manifestation of South Africa’s own liberation theology is a 25-page treatise known as the Kairos Document, which was published recently by Johannesburg’s Institute for Contextual Theology and signed by 151 clerics and lay people from 16 denominations.

Kairos (Greek for “crisis and opportunity”) is a challenge to the church leadership. Its calls on Christians to “participate in the struggle for liberation,” and urges support for civil-disobedience programs, consumer boycotts and work stoppagesas means of achieving a just society. It criticizes church theology for being too spiritual, and delivers a scathing attack on “state theology . . . the theological justification of the status quo with its racism, capitalism and totalitarianism. It blesses injustice, canonizes the will of the powerful and reduces the poor to passivity, obedience and apathy.”

One of the Kairos signatories is black Methodist minister Otto Mbangula, who says that the country does not need liberation theology as much as it needs a black theology. Whites need to be made more aware of the black predicament, Mbangula says. Urban blacks are losing interest in a church that carries lingering aspects of the missionary era. “The black townships are in flames, but white people don’t . . . experience (the violence) first hand--they are only told about it.”

Clerics such as Mbangula describe the churches’ profession of nonviolence as “extremely suspect,” arguing that this stance effectively gives tacit support to the growing militarization of the state. The challenge to the church is explicit, but to the state--the declared adversary--it is compelling, even critical.

Not only through force of arms has the ruling white National Party been able to maintain power, but also through its profession of Christianity as preached by the insular Dutch Reformed Church, primary pulpit of the conservative Afrikaner elite. It was the Dutch Reformed Church that provided religious justification for apartheid by preaching separation of the races.

The larger churches have always challenged this approach, but now the challenge is being borne by an increasing number of clergy within the Reformed community.

With the opposing forces growing ever more strident and forceful, the government and its church are responding with superficial social and political reforms.

But as a white Anglican churchman, sympathetic to black aspirations, observed recently: “For the black church members the question is no longer how we will work out our problems together; all they want now is to rule.”