Key South Africa Church Splits Over Racial Policy

The powerful Dutch Reformed Church, to which most of South Africa’s politically dominant white Afrikaners belong, split Saturday when extreme conservatives decided to break away and form their own new church committed to preserving strict racial segregation.

The decision was made at a meeting here of 2,000 conservatives who came from all parts of the country to protest what they regard as a shift toward more liberal doctrine by the Dutch Reformed Church, which in the past has given vital theological sanction to the apartheid policy of white domination.

After a five-hour session behind closed doors, the extremists ordered a special “Committee of Dissatisfied Members” to found a new church that will uphold the principles of rigid apartheid and whites-only membership.

A spokesman, Willem Lubbe, said after the meeting that the new church would be called the Afrikaans Reformed Church. He described it as “a church of Christians among white Afrikaners” and said it would hold its first services here today .

Mixed Marriages Curbed

Among other things, Lubbe said, the new church would forbid marriages between whites and nonwhites, which the government recently legalized with the approval of the Dutch Reformed Church after years of prohibition.

The schism in the church follows a political split that rent the once solidly united Afrikaner community in 1983, when Andries P. Treurnicht broke away from the ruling National Party in protest against reforms to the apartheid system cautiously introduced by President Pieter W. Botha.

Treurnicht, who is also a Dutch Reformed Church theologian and former editor of its official newspaper, formed the Conservative Party, which in last month’s whites-only general election became the main parliamentary opposition party.

The church split comes as differences over the morality and political practicability of apartheid continue to shake Afrikaner nationalism.

Such a split in the religious ranks of the devout Afrikaner people is potentially the most disruptive of all. The influence of the Dutch Reformed Church is enormous. More than 70% of all Afrikaners belong to it, including most government Cabinet ministers and all of its prime ministers and presidents since the country was founded in 1910. It is often jokingly called “the National Party at prayer.”

‘Ideology of Apartheid’

The Dutch Reformed Church’s religious teachings over decades helped to form the ideology of apartheid. They provided the theological justification for segregating the races and for regarding the white Afrikaners as a distinctive people with a God-given right to exist as a separate nation with their own homeland in which blacks would have no citizenship rights.

The church itself was racially segregated, between the white or “mother” church and separate “daughter” churches for blacks, the mixed-race Coloreds and a small number of Asians converted to the Dutch Reformed faith by missionaries.