Political Predikants

The Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa (official title: Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk) bares its teeth indiscriminately at foxtrotting, modern bathing suits and free speech. Along with its two smaller sister communions, it has denounced Christmas celebrations as "heathen rites" and castigated South Africans, especially women, for smoking and drinking. At its last synod the church elders condemned Freemasonry, the equality of the sexes and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights (as defying the "pattern of inequality" which God created).

Politically, the church has not been so fastidious. Claiming two-thirds of South Africa's 1,500,000 Boers as members, it has been a powerful and unabashed leader of extreme Boer nationalism. During World War II, Reformed predikants (Afrikaans for "pastors") refused to baptize children of South African soldiers who were fighting with the British against the Germans. Daniel Malan, once a predikant himself, has lined up most of his fellow clergymen behind his rabble-rousing campaign for apartheid (race segregation policy). "The Negroes," the church has officially announced, "cannot have the vote because they are incapable of exercising it with responsibility towards God."

The "Herrengroup." Only a few clergymen have dared to denounce church policy. Last week in Cape Town, 45-year-old Pastor Daniel Devos, once a highly regarded member of the synod, addressed a rally in support of a new nonpolitical church of his own. Said Pastor Devos: "One thousand political predikants rule behind the scenes, change cabinets at will, control the church." Both church and government leaders consolidate their power through a secret society, the Breeder-bond--Brotherhood. "Their aim," he added, "is a republic which will suppress all resistance and destroy the freedom of all races except a single 'Herrengroup.'"

An audience of 2,500 applauded, but few came forward to sign up. Boer nationalists like the Reformed Church precisely because it is such a handy political tool. Less politically minded churchgoers, instead of joining Reformed splinter sects like Devos', have switched to other Protestant sects or to Roman Catholicism. "Like vultures battening on a dead body," the church's official newspaper, Kerkbode, commented, "the sects batten on the church." Angrily the political predikants have rebuked Roman Catholic nuns for refusing to discriminate in hospital work between blacks & whites.

Shut-Up Shops. A few days after Devos' speech on Good Friday, the political power and the religious weakness of the Dutch Reformed Church were contrasted. Out of sympathy for the predikants' strict-construction Calvinism, the government declared the day a strictly religious public holiday.

No afternoon papers were published. Not a theater, restaurant or shop was left open throughout the Union of South Africa.* Only one thing marred the pious observance of the political predikants: very few in their congregations seemed to choose to go to church.

*A distant relative of the Reformed Church, the Free Church of Scotland, although nonpolitical, is equally strict in its religious interpretation. Militant Free Churchmen, best known to Scots as the "Wee Frees," this month published a stern complaint against the larger and more liberal Church of Scotland for "its indiscriminate and reckless traffic" in dances, whist drives and theatrical productions.

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