South African Race Tensions

Early in June, Dr. Joost de Blank, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, preached a sermon in New York City.

“It is a sad commentary on the work of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa,” he said, “that it spends a great deal of money on missionary work but believes in keeping African and white congregations apart. It has a warped and inaccurate Calvinistic outlook.”

Subsequently, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, sided with his Cape Town colleague in criticizing South African race policies of the Dutch Reformed Church.

The Anglican comment angered Calvinists all over the world, and the criticized church reacted by announcing its withdrawal from a proposed all-church conference which had been scheduled for South Africa in December.

What lies behind bitter feeling over the issue of apartheid, a South African term for racial segregation?CHRISTIANITY TODAYinvited Professor Ben J. Marais of South Africa to prepare the interpretive summary which follows. Professor Marais teaches Christian history at the University of Pretoria and is a Dutch Reformed minister. He has studied at both Yale and Princeton.

The Professor’S Report

People who have never lived in this lovely country can never realize the dominancy of this problem. Its shadow falls over every other aspect of national life, forming a great dividing line.

The South African racial drama is extremely complicated. People judge developments very differently. Some pick out one thread—the great housing schemes for Africans, for instance, and paint a picture of fortunate and contented Africans, “salvaged” from the terrible slums of western Johannesburg. Others only stress repressive legislation and present a picture of a gathering storm, of a terribly frustrated people, and of a country on the verge of a rumbling volcano. Up to a point, both pictures are true, but both can be terribly misleading if not put into true perspective.

The total South African population is just over 12½ million, including less than 3 million whites, usually referred to as “Europeans.” The main colored groups are the Bantus, numbering 8 or 9 million; the “Cape Coloreds,” a racially-mixed group of 1 million; and a few hundred thousand Indians.

Historically, the black-white problem started as a problem of land, of grazing rights and ownership. Basically, the possession of land is still the problem in color relations, although one hears more of political and economic issues.

African reserves constitute about 20 per cent of the total land area. No white may own land in these reserves, and no African may own land outside them. In plain figures it means that 20 per cent of the total population (the whites) own 80 per cent of the land. Most of the reserves are situated in well-watered and fairly fertile areas; others are arid.

Unified Society Rejected

According to apartheid policy in vogue in South Africa today, the idea of a unified society of whites and Africans is absolutely rejected. Stringent separate development is propagated. Within the broad folds of apartheid, however, many differences of opinion exist.

According to prevailing ideology, Africans must be given the opportunity to develop in their own cultural background and must not be forced to become “pseudo-whites” or Westerners. It is argued that only in separate development or apartheid will the Africans come into their own. In their own areas, they will have their privileges, political and otherwise. In “white” areas, they will not be granted political rights, but will be looked upon as “temporary” sojourners.

Extreme apartheid ideologists dream of a future in which all Africans will be removed to their own areas and if any Africans are allowed to enter the white areas it will only be as migratory laborers, and that for a limited time. In South Africa, one often hears about the great “sacrifice” whites will then have to make. It will mean that whites will have to do their own dirty work and the African laborers in industry and even on the farms will have to be replaced by whites, not to mention hundreds of thousands employed as domestic servants. People who take this point of view realize that if Africans are permanently employed in industry, they could not in the long run be excluded from citizen rights in the white areas, and this, they say, would lead to total integration and disappearance of the white group in the vast black African morass. This, to the white group, would not only mean a loss of color. It would, according to this line of argumentation, mean much more: not only racial suicide, but a loss of calling, of a God-given responsibility which the white Christian group has towards God, towards pagan Africans, and towards their own past cultural and religious heritage.

During recent years, parallels have been drawn between Israel in the Old Testament and the white Christian group in South Africa, and attempts have been made to give a scriptural basis to apartheid, especially on the basis of diversity in nature and creation. Apartheid has been “proven” to be scriptural by politicians as well as theologians.

Some branches of the Dutch Reformed Church, for instance, accepted such scriptural bases as late as 1951. These attempts, however, have been officially abandoned by the main Dutch Reformed denomination, and seem to have lost the day, although many ministers of religion in Dutch Reformed churches still propagate this line of thought. And if one must judge from correspondence columns of Afrikaans political newspapers, most Afrikaans-speaking citizens still accept it. During political elections, there are still the standard slogans in the Afrikaans-speaking rural districts: “God has divided people into different races; who are we to undo what God has done.” “We must accept and honor God’s decrees.” “Apartheid is according to God’s will.” Many devoted white South African believers honestly believe that apartheid is scriptural and because it either seems to be a “just” solution to them or seems to fortify the position of the white group, they stand for it.

Whites Struggle

If one knows the three-centuries-old struggle of this small white group on the tip of the erstwhile Dark Continent to keep its way of life and to guard against being swamped by the pagan millions of Africa, its way of looking at the racial situation is easily understood.

Apartheid as a political theory is not formulated by these people—they will vote for it almost to a man—but this theory was formulated by Afrikaans cultural and political leaders, some of them men of great personal integrity and idealism. According to protagonists of apartheid, it is not an oppressive policy or theory, but it is actually designed to give justice to whites as well as to Africans. In a mixed society, they say, the African will always be discriminated against, and he will remain inferior in status. In his own area or country the African will be boss and progressively be made responsible for running his own show. There the African will have his own schools, teachers, and policemen. Industries will be developed in his own areas. Exactly how this is to be done, and by whom it will be financed, is not yet clear, even to apartheid people. Of course, it is admitted, all this will take time and the movement of all these Africans back to the reserves or away from white residential areas will cause some inconvenience and even temporary grievances.

These champions of apartheid give a very vivid picture of the alternative to apartheid or total segregation. The present drift will lead to more and more Africans being drawn into white areas, into great or growing industrial cities for which they are not fitted. To most of them it means such a tremendous cultural or moral adjustment that it leads to mass frustration, to a vast moral breakup. Their old tribal cultural and religious taboos and restraints are torn to shreds, long before they are able to adjust themselves to the standards of a new society. The result is moral chaos and anarchy and heightening of tensions between the two main color groups, a situation which must utlimately lead to a vast emption.

Much of what is said in this connection is true. Whether apartheid or total territorial segregation can be a solution, however, is quite another question. At the moment, it seems extremely doubtful that the majority of Africans will ever accept it. As far as whites are concerned, although most feel for some sort of “separate development,” it must be seen whether they will be willing to support apartheid when it is fully implemented and they have to do without Africans as laborers in industry, agriculture or as domestic servants. Some propagandists for apartheid, especially politicians, meet this type of objection with the promise that once there is absolute territorial segregation, all needed African labor will be drafted on the temporary plan.

The moral and spiritual implications of such a system, however, makes it from a Christian point of view absolutely unacceptable, as it would cause the worst moral and spiritual breakup imaginable. Whereas many white Christians accept apartheid in general, as either a promising temporary or permanent policy, few responsible Christian leaders accept a policy of migratory labor on any vast scale. The dangers are all too obvious.

The churches have, on the whole, followed traditional patterns. English-speaking churches have generally declared themselves for a unified society, though in practice they have mostly followed a policy of separate church development with a degree of integration at some points. Afrikaans churches have often stood more solidly for segregation or separate churches for the different color groups whether on “practical” cultural, linguistic or even “scriptural” grounds.

The Dutch Reformed Church had followed a practice of separate churches for white and nonwhite believers for more than a century, although it did not become official policy until the 1880’s.

Among some English churches, notably Anglican, there has of late developed a more resolute and outspoken opposition to apartheid, although this church itself still has a long way to go to become a fully integrated church in theory and practice.

Baptism At Dead Man’S Rock

The site known as Dead Man’s Rock is located along Beaver Creek at East Liverpool, Ohio. About 30 people were gathered on the bank for the August Sunday afternoon baptismal service. A woman was strumming a guitar. The Rev. Gallard McCartney was out in water that came up to his waist.

Three people had already been immersed. Six other candidates were waiting. Next was the minister’s own nephew, 21-year-old Cline Cogar. The youth, whose home was in a nearby West Virginia town, had decided to come to East Liverpool only two weeks before. He had heard that his uncle was holding a tent evangelistic campaign. Besides, young Cogar needed a job. He thought the minister might be able to help.

As McCartney later said, he immersed his nephew then brought him up. “He was smiling,” the minister recalled, “as many do after baptism. Then he started shouting and grabbed me and in a moment we were in the swift current farther out. We both went under. We became separated. When I came up, he had disappeared.”

Cogar’s body was recovered downstream some 15 minutes later. Attempts to revive the youth failed. The remainder of the baptismal service was called off.

McCartney said he had conducted many baptisms before, including several since he had come from Akron, where he pastored several churches as a minister ordained by Fundamental Methodists, Inc.

Unable to explain the drowning any more, the minister said, “I’d rather it was me than him.”

Europe

The Methodists

In Stuttgart, Germany, the executive committee of the World Methodist Council approved a motion urging that a conference of Central and South African Methodist leaders be held next spring to work on the problem of racial tensions.

The motion was submitted by Dr. T. Webb of Johannesburg, who asserted that Gospel proclamation of man’s equality should be followed in achieving racial equality among all races.

During the five-day conference, renewed effort to strengthen ties among the world’s 18,000,000 Methodists was urged by Dr. Harold Roberts, World Methodist Council president who is also head of Richmond College, a Methodist theological school connected with the University of London.

The 50-member council executive committee heard reports on church union proposals involving Methodists with the Anglican Church in England, with Presbyterians and Anglicans in West Africa, North India and Pakistan, with Presbyterians, Anglicans and Baptists in Ceylon, and with the Evangelical United Brethren Church in the United States.

Meanwhile, the Methodist Church of Denmark observed its 100th anniversary with a series of festival services in Copenhagen. Methodist Danes include some 4,000 adults and 6,000 youth.

Retired Bishop Ivan Lee Holt of St. Louis had been scheduled to attend the commemorative meetings, but was unable to come because of the sudden death of his wife in Brussels, Belgium.

Fateful Sequel

In Germany, six-day ceremonies marking the 250th anniversary of the Church of the Brethren were highlighted by a rededication service on the banks of the Eder River at Schwarzenau, where the first of the Brethren was baptized in 1708.

Following the service, the gathering of some 400 German Brethren plus other members of the denomination from four continents was addressed by Dr. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, Bishop Ernst Wilm of Bielefeld, president of the Evangelical Church of Westphalia, and Dr. William M. Beahm, moderator of the Church of the Brethren. Other observances were held at Kassel and Berleburg.

Among witnesses were American members of the Brethren Heritage Tour, arranged by the Church of the Brethren. The tourists also visited places connected with the early history of the pietist movement in Europe. (The Brethren movement was launched at Schwarzenau by Alexander Mack and a small group who had withdrawn from the state churches in Germany and were influenced by the pietist movement, which emphasized repentance, faith as an attitude of heart, and regeneration and sanctification as experimental facts.)

The night of August 13–14, after a month in Europe, 20 members of the touring Brethren party boarded a New York-bound plane of the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. The plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean 130 miles west of Ireland, killing all 99 aboard.

Only days later, a car accident in Sweden killed the wife of Dr. M. R. Zigler, European director of the Brethren Service Commission. Zigler was injured.

Modern Slavery

A Hungarian clergyman told a Western assembly this summer that exploitation, bondage and slavery is to be condemned, “even though in modern form.”

The Rev. Josef Nagy, director of Baptist young people’s work in Hungary, told the Congress of the European Baptist Federation that “no man or nation has the right to rule over another.”

The six-day Congress was attended by 10,000 from 22 countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Middle East

Moslems And Christians

A former principal of Beirut’s Near East School of Theology says he does not believe a Moslem-Christian war in Lebanon is in the offing.

The Rev. Cullen Story, now back in the United States, explains why:

“1. The present constitution of Lebanon … stipulates that the country shall have a Christian president but the country itself is to be pro-Arab. There is nothing in the basic organization of Lebanon, then, to indicate any Moslem-Christian war will ever occur.

“2. The so-called ‘kid-glove treatment’ of the opposition by the ‘Christian’ army under General Shehab seems to be evidence of a studied resistance to any vis-a-vis conflict of Moslems and Christians.

“3. Christian groups in Lebanon are not united together to form any common front against Islam. Witness the outspoken views of Maronite Patriarch Meouchi, that, to say the least, are in direct contrast to those of President Chamoun.

“4. These groups, though embracing an approximate 50 per cent of Lebanon’s population, sense that they live in a Middle East containing an overwhelming Moslem majority. The last thing they would want would be to court the disaster of an open conflict with Islam.”

Far East

Christian Education

Addresses by Bishop Otto Dibelius of Berlin and a closing public worship service attended by some 16,000 highlighted the eight-day fourteenth World Convention on Christian Education in Tokyo, sponsored by the World Council of Christian Education and Sunday School Association (headquarters in New York).

The convention reportedly was the largest international gathering ever held in Japan, with more than 4,000 delegates from 63 foreign countries on hand.

Japanese Christian leaders were said to be hoping that the meeting would serve to lend impetus to the advance of the Gospel in their country. Tokyo also played host to the eighth such gathering back in 1920, when fire destroyed a specially-constructed four-story convention building only a few hours before sessions were to start. A theater building was secured as a substitute meeting place.

Last month, the convention was held at Aoyama Gukuin, one of Japan’s leading mission schools. The Rev. Michio Kozaki, president of the National Christian Council of Japan, was chairman of the organizing committee.

Presiding at the climactic public worship service was Methodist Bishop Shot K. Mondol of India, new president of the World Council of Christian Education and Sunday School Association.

Bishop Dibelius, head of the Evangelical Church in Germany, asserted that the teaching of youth in totalitarian countries poses a challenge to Christian educators. He said control over the education of young people imposed by Communist nations is giving such states a monopoly in that field.

The August 6–13 convention was preceded by the World Institute on Christian Education, held July 10-August 1 at Nishinomiya with 312 delegates from 62 nations. The institute heard a number of addresses, then divided into discussion groups which met at Seiwa College. Closing plenary sessions were under the leadership of Dr. Paul H. Vieth of Yale Divinity School.

The theme of the convention was “Christ—the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

Only Teens Laugh

What forms does current Christian witness take in Communist China? In the Catholic realm, reliable reports indicate that Red Chinese government leaders have waived overt suppression in favor of setting up a collaborationist church hierarchy with Roman liturgical rules.

But how about Protestants? Last month, a top Methodist missions official expressed hope for “resumption of contact” with Christians in mainland China. “There is a great deal of evidence that Methodists and other Christians in China hunger for fellowship with the Western world,” said General Secretary Eugene L. Smith of the Methodist Church’s Division of World Missions. Smith told a South-wide Methodist Missionary Conference at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, that “we do know there is some religious freedom among the Christians of Red China.”

Not long after Communists won control over 600,000,000 Chinese, machinery was set up to handle Protestantism through an organization known as the Three Self Love Country Movement. The organization, billed as patriotically self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating, originated with the Communist Chinese Religious Affairs Bureau as a means of maintaining contact and control over Protestant churches. The Three Self Movement reportedly has 60 per cent of Red Chinese Christians.

This summer in Red China, Protestant churches were definitely open and active. Whether they were growing or declining was not clear. There was evidence that even evangelistic tours were tolerated, although the traveling evangelists were being officially denounced. YMCA athletic activities seemed to be flourishing.

Communists would have it believed that their Chinese have religious freedom to the extent that the government is not embarrassed. Jail sentences, however, are still being meted out to clergymen whose words or deeds are viewed as revolutionary. The Three Self Movement keeps a close tab on clergy patriotism. The group holds one local conference after another to keep “People’s Government” loyalties fresh in the minds of ranking Protestants.

In the spring of 1957, at the invitation of Three Self Movement leaders, 15 key Japanese religious leaders went on a guided tour of Communist China. They visited Shanghai, Peking, Hankow, Sochow, Canton, Hanchow, and Nanking. Since then, the visitors’ remarks have told more about the state of the church in Japan than they indicated of actual conditions in Red China. With one exception, the religionists gave reports which were interpreted as having a generally favorable tone toward the Communist China situation. The reports have been raising eyebrows, prompting concern as to whether Communist ideology had made inroads among those who guide Christians in Japan, whether these individuals were forgetting the incompatibility of Christianity and communism.

Among those who reviewed the reports with alarm was the Rev. Samuel E. Boyle of the Reformed Presbyterian Mission in Kobe, Japan. Boyle, a missionary to China before Communist occupation, keeps up to date on doings behind the Bamboo Curtain through Tien Feng (Heavenly Wind), a church magazine published in Shanghai. Issues of Tien Feng are rare in the free world, but Boyle has managed to secure copies regularly. Knowledge of the Chinese people and gleanings from Tien Feng prompted an evaluation of his own:

“The significance of the visit of a Japanese Christian delegation, including orthodox Japanese ministers, cannot be exaggerated. We see already the spreading virus of error entering the Japanese church by printed page and verbal reports of the 15 delegates. The pro-Communist church in China which cooperates through the liaison apparatus called ‘The Three Self Love Country Movement,’ dominated by Wu Yao Tsung of the YMCA, had made what we earnestly believe to be a nonbiblical and spiritually disastrous truce with the Communist state. The Japanese delegation stoutly denies this interpretation of the facts. Thus in Japan, as formerly in China, Bible-believing missionaries find themselves in opposition to the prominent leaders of the Asian Protestant movement.

Social Relations

For eight years, the United Church of Japan has been studying social relations. This summer the church issued an official statement:

“We intend firmly to oppose rearmament and to lay the foundation for world peace. We advocate the cessation of the production, use and testing of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. We oppose the erecting of tariff walls as an expression of the selfishness of one nation. The Christian must so participate in politics as a citizen that the state fulfills its true function and that power is given to social justice.”

“Two powerful motives serve to blind Asian leaders of the church to the danger inherent in the Chinese ‘Three Self Love Country Movement’ solution of tensions between Christianity and a Communist state. The first and strongest motive is nationalistic pride and ambition to be counted patriotic by the state. The other motive is to achieve an indigenous, united and effective national Christian church which can be totally free from Western denominational control and foreign money, with the power which such money always imposes on the Asian Christian recipients. That the problem in Japan is now complex and dangerous, not to Western missions alone, but to future Christianity in Asia, seems apparent to us.”

Among those who visited Red China were the Rev. Jun-ichi Asano of the United Church, Mrs. Tamaki Uemura of the Japan Christian Church, the Rev. Seiju Yuya of the Baptist Conference of Japan, the Rev. Shigeo Yamamoto, of the United Church, Mrs. Masako Takegami and Mrs. Hatsue Nomiya of the Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Rev. Kaneo Oda of the Free Methodist Church of Japan, the Rev. Shuichi Ogawa of the United Church, the Rev. Shigeji Ogasawara of the Japan Episcopalian Church, the Rev. Aoyama Shiro of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Japan, Professor Yoshio Inoue of the Tokyo Union Theological Seminary, the Rev. Mitsuo Senoo of the Japan Evangelical Kyodan, the Rev. Ichiro Nakagawa of St. Paul’s University in Tokyo, and Editor Seiichi Waki of Christ Weekly in Tokyo.

The fifteenth member of the delegation, the one who took exception to generally favorable comments on Red China, was Toshio Suekane, general secretary of the YMCA in Yokohama, who said:

“You’ve heard that there are no flies, no dogs, no cats (which would all be a burden to the people to care for so they were eaten as food because of economic necessity) and no prostitutes. Externally this may be true. The situation is changed from what it was 11 years ago. But people clearly show their heartache. Only teen-agers laugh freely. The older ones are very serious and stem, not light-hearted. This is true even among Christians. They are all politicians, concerned with the government. That’s all you hear.”

“My fountain pen was stolen twice in Hong Kong,” Suekane concludes, “yet I still prefer this harbor city to oppressed Red China, though I could lay it down anywhere in China without being stolen. Freedom is more precious than a pen.”

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