South Africa's Conscience

South Africa's brutal policy of apartheid, carried out by Christians in the name of Christianity, has long been a challenge to the Christian conscience. Afrikaners traditionally see themselves as the Children of Israel in a Promised Land where God put the black man to serve Him by serving the whites, hewing wood and drawing water. For generations the Dutch Reformed Church has wrapped segregation in a mantle of scriptural self-righteousness ("If God had wanted the races to mix, he would have said so in the Bible"). President Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd is a regular churchgoer who, like most of his Nationalist Party colleagues, acts as if he is following the will of God in keeping the black man down.

Although the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church has shown increasing signs of opposition to the government, it was the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches in South Africa that took the lead in fighting apartheid. But last week a major segment of the Dutch Reformed Church expressed aloud its discontent with South Africa's increasingly harsh racial policies.

Critical Resolution. The occasion was a seven-day "consultation" on South Africa's racial problems between six representatives of the World Council of Churches and ten delegates from each of South Africa's eight Protestant Churches that are World Council members. The conference closed with a resolution highly critical of apartheid; the right to own land and to participate in the government, it said, was "part of the dignity of the adult man," there were no scriptural reasons for prohibiting mixed marriages, and there was insufficient "consultation and communication" between the races. "It is our conviction that there can be no objection in principle to the direct representation of colored people in Parliament . . . No one who believes in Jesus Christ may be excluded from any church on the grounds of his color or race. The spiritual unity among all men who are in Christ must find visible expression in acts of common worship and witness, and in fellowship and consultation on matters of common concern."

The resolution was voted on by representatives of the Anglican, Methodist, Congregational and two Presbyterian churches, all of whom backed the entire document. Also among those voting were the three Dutch Reformed Churches, at least some of whose representatives backed it. Later the Dutch Reformed Churches found it necessary to clarify their stand. The smallest of the three churches--Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk with over 200,000 members--rejected the resolution and stood pat for total segregation. The two largest--the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerks of Cape and Transvaal, with a combined membership of more than 1,200,000--insisted as before that "a policy of differentiation can be defended from the Christian point of view," but then it cautiously suggested that black Africans who are permanent dwellers in white areas should be granted a share in government. It was a "most remarkable statement" according to Novelist Alan (Cry, the Beloved Country) Paton, one of the Anglican delegates to the consultation and a longtime foe of apartheid, who praised the Dutch Reformed for their "courage."

New Atmosphere. That the churches' courage consists merely in advocating a relaxation of apartheid within a context of "differentiation" shows something of the climate of South Africa. But that the declaration was made at all, by the leading spiritual and moral power among the traditionally segregationist Afrikaners, is something of a milestone. Premier Verwoerd was reported to be both worried and irate. His toned-down views were presumably voiced by Die Transvaler, the Nationalist newspaper he once edited himself. "No matter how beautiful were the thoughts expressed by the consultation," editorialized the paper, "their application would lead to the collapse of Christianity in South Africa."

The exact opposite might prove to be true. The Anglican and the Dutch Reformed Churches find themselves drawn together in mutual concern, as they have not been since Anglican Archbishop Joost de Blank of Capetown threatened to resign from the World Council of Churches if the Dutch Reformed Churches did not mend their racial ways. At the close of the World Council consultation, Archbishop de Blank rose and begged forgiveness from the Dutch Reformed Church men for any hurt he might previously have caused in his impassioned campaigning. Promptly and warmly they forgave him. Says Alan Paton: "The archbishop's action, and the response to it, shows something of the new atmosphere."

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