Clergy Can’t Duck This Moral Imperative

The horror in South Africa continues: 130 blacks a month are being killed, and thousands are now held in detention camps without the right to contact their families.

“The business community in South Africa is the engine for apartheid, and we’ve got to stop fueling that engine,” said Rep. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.).

Most Washington watchers predict that the House bill calling for total U.S. divestiture doesn’t have a chance of passage by the Senate. Yet one thing is clear. The frustration of Americans with the oppressive regime of President Pieter W. Botha is mounting.

I recently attended a full-day briefing for 150 invited American clergy at the State Department. Harshly condemning the government of South Africa, our host, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, told us: “An immoral system does not serve our interests. It offends our moral principles. And we must continue to seek to end it.”

The urgent question is, how? And for religious leaders meeting at the State Department, a critical side of that question is whether religion can play a constructive role in preventing the racial holocaust that so many predict as inevitable.

The South African and American experts addressing us did not hold out much hope. They spoke of the daily increase of oppression and brutality, the complex divisions among blacks, the growing militancy of white supremacists and the failure of the Botha government to encourage dialogue and confidence that apartheid is really being dismantled.

Willie P. Esterhuyse, a professor of philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, spoke candidly about the “troubled South African white church. It was the church that invented and sanctified a theology for apartheid,” he told us. “It gave the Afrikaners their white tribalism.”

Today, according to Esterhuyse, 84% of South Africa’s population, black and white, is Christian. One wonders, might those churches and the world religious bodies that they represent hold a crucial key to whether there will be a peaceful transition or a brutal blood bath in South Africa?

One senses they might. Most religious leadership has repudiated the racist theology of yesterday. At issue is whether they will now have the gumption and moral courage to unlock the healing needed so desperately.

When South Africa’s minister of law and order, Louis le Grange, banned all religious commemorations of the 10th anniversary of the Soweto riots, the reaction of the religious community was swift and strong. The South African Council of Churches condemned the ban. Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi called for defiance. The country’s Roman Catholic bishops labeled it “a recipe for disaster.” Anglican Bishop Desmond M. Tutu declared: “We have not yet reached the stage where we must ask for permission from a secular authority to worship God.”

The defiance of the ban and the relative calm of the Soweto commemorations in churches throughout the country ought to send a powerful message not only to the Botha regime, but also to other troubled spots throughout the world.

The business of religion is to protect and promote the sanctity of human life. It is to work for the release of the oppressed and the relief of the victimized. It is to crash some sense over the heads of embittered competitive factions, and to exert pressure for peaceful solutions in the face of those who insist on the power of the fist, the gun and the bomb.

Can it work? Sometimes. It did in Mahatma Gandhi’s torn and bleeding India. It did just a few months ago when Cardinal Jaime Sin and his church made the difference. Catholics went into the streets of Manila, stood in front of tanks and forced a peaceful revolution. He called it a “miracle.”

South Africa needs such a miracle. It requires a religious leadership, backed by a world religious community, which is ready to stand behind Isaiah’s cry: “Cease to do evil; learn to do good. Devote yourselves to justice.”

Failing such moral leadership, Isaiah will certainly have the last word: “But if you refuse and disobey, you will be devoured by the sword.”