Ian Smith’s Rhodesia: Only the Churches Stand in the Way

Christian churches provide the only organized force standing in the way of Rhodesia’s march toward a racially separated society based on the South African pattern.

“Separation and discrimination,” the church leaders have declared, “are a direct contradiction to the New Testament teaching that race, like other human distinctions, has lost its divisive significance, and should not be used to regulate relationships between man and God, and man and man.”

The declaration, issued in the heat of election campaigns in both Rhodesia and South Africa, was in effect the churches’ political manifesto, a dramatic stand for justice and human rights. It was signed on behalf of the Anglican, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches, the United Congregational Church of South Africa, the United Church of Christ, the Bible Societies of Rhodesia, and the Christian Council of Rhodesia. (The Dutch Reformed Church, an exception, supports separate development.)

Prime Minister Ian Smith thought it best to ignore the Christian challenge, seeing it more as an irritant than as a serious political danger. Even since his smashing election victoryOnly 8,326 of the country’s 5,000,000 Africans were permitted to vote, whereas 87,000 of the 250,000 Europeans were enrolled. he has skillfully avoided any direct clashes with church leaders.

During the elections the churches threw their weight solidly behind the multi-racial Center party, which, while it seemed to represent all that is healthy and sane in white Rhodesian attitudes, lacked the dedicated organization of the Smith party. The Center party lost all the fifty white seats but won seven of the eight African seats, and polled over 30 per cent of all the white votes.

“There are moments in the life of the church in a country,” the Catholic Mirror mused in an editorial, “when giving witness requires one to say with John the Baptist: ‘It is not lawful.’ There are moments when the well-being of his flock requires of a pastor that he humbly defy Caesar in the name of Christ.”

This has now happened in Rhodesia, for the churches, led by the four Rhodesian Catholic bishops and the Anglican archbishop of Central Africa, have declared that they will defy all government attempts to introduce racial discrimination in their affairs.

They particularly oppose the Land Tenure Act (it sets clearly defined areas where the interests of either whites or non-whites are paramount) and the new republican constitution, which gives authority to apartheid-style laws. The controversial Land Tenure Act divides the country into two areas of approximately equal size—one for the 250,000 whites, the other for the nearly 5 million blacks—and forbids “occupation” of one area by members of the other race. In effect this means every white man gets 200 acres, every black man, ten.

The Catholic Church has threatened to close down all its institutions unless the Land Tenure Act is repealed. The bishops complain that the act means that clergymen and missionaries will no longer be able to move freely among all races, that African children will be denied entry to multi-racial church schools, that Africans will be allowed entry only to church mission hospitals reserved for Africans, that whites and non-whites might not be permitted to meet together for the purpose of worship, and that white and non-white priests will not—without government approval—be allowed to live together.

The chairman of the Rhodesian Catholic Bishops Conference, the Reverend Donald R. Lamont, said he considered the men who framed the new republican constitution “the real terrorists of this country.” Some aspects of the constitution, in his opinion, “constitute moral violence, moral terrorism. It is worse by far than mere physical terrorism; worse because it attacks a nobler element in man, the transcendent character of the human person.”

Central Africa’s Anglican Archbishop, Francis Oliver Green-Wilkin-son, has warned that the claims of Rhodesia and South Africa to be defending Christian standards are not only a great lie but a great danger to Christianity. “We must miss no opportunity,” he urged a diocesan synod of Zambia meeting in Lusaka last month, “to show the falsity of the great lie. If this fundamental deception is allowed to pass unchallenged, there is every reason to fear that Africa north of the Zambezi frontier will turn increasingly to atheism in disgust at a Christianity allied to the maintenance of high standards of living for the minorities who rule now in Southern Africa.”

Both Protestants and Catholics oppose the government’s move to cut 5 per cent next year from salaries paid to mission primary-school teachers. The churches fear further cuts, until the schools—now educating more than 700,000 African children—are taken over by the government. (If the Catholic Church were to close its 820 schools, 4,500 white pupils would be without education—not to mention some 150,000 Africans.)

If the churches jointly decide to close their schools and dismiss their teachers, the Smith regime is likely to take drastic action: perhaps the expulsion of the leading rebel missionaries. This will make matters even worse for the Africans whom the missionaries are defending.

ODHIAMBO W. OKITE

No. 1 Churchman Of 1970

President Richard Nixon will receive the Religious Heritage of America Churchman of the Year Award June 18 for “creating an atmosphere for a return to the spiritual, moral, and ethical values of the Founding Fathers.”

The President was specifically cited by the RHA’s two top officers, Clement Stone and Wallace E. Johnson, for organizing the Sunday White House services and for supporting the presidential prayer breakfasts. Stone, an insurance company executive, was reported to have been the largest single contributor to Nixon’s 1968 campaign.

Other awards by the RHA: Church-woman of the Year—Roman Catholic Mrs. Anna May Moynihan; Clergyman of the Year—Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America; Hall of Fame Award (first recipient)—the Reverend John A. O’Brien, professor of theology at Notre Dame University and leader of the liberal Catholic movement.

In announcing the selection, the RHA hailed O’Brien “as a champion of planned parenthood” and a leader of those advocating changes to allow priests to marry.

Beirut Conference: Zionist Racism?

When the Jews regained Old Jerusalem three years ago this month, Christians renewed with vigor their discussions about the relation of Old Testament prophecy to the existence of the modern State of Israel. Last month, shortly before Israel’s twenty-second independence day on May 11, more than 400 church leaders, politicians, and other professional persons, as well as students and Palestinian commandos, met in Beirut, Lebanon, to express opposition to “the Zionist racist and expansionist concept.”

The delegates, who came from thirty-seven countries, were, according to conference organizer George Montaron, “not left-wing Christians only, but Christians from the center, right, and conservatives.” Though many were Arabs, he said, they had “nothing against Jews and Judaism.” Montaron added: “We have no objections against the Bible, which we believe is the Word of God. But we object to the use of the Bible for political ends and reject claims that the Bible contains a call justifying the existence of the State of Israel.”

While the World Conference of Christians for Palestine was not political, leaders stated that the assembly was in part a response to a call by Lebanese president Charles Helou (a Maronite Christian) for world Christianity to aid Palestine.

There was also some expression of wishful thinking. An official spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, himself a Christian, said: “We are simply fighting for our rights and not because of hatred, for we know that hatred would bring us the same diseases afflicting Zionism. We are in the process of building a healthy generation free of hate.” (As he spoke, Palestinian commandos were making raids in northern Israel that Israeli spokesmen said caused several deaths.)

The conference ended with resolutions condemning the State of Israel as illegal and declaring that “the Christian conscience cannot allow this grave injustice and clear prejudice to law and morality.” One resolution urged support for the “legitimate struggle of resistance and revolution of the Palestinian people.”

Conference officials defined as the most important step of the conference the formation of a Permanent Secretariat of Christians for Palestine. It will propagate the rights of Palestinians to return to Palestine.

In the United States, the president of the Jewish Synagogue Council of America disagreed sharply with conference conclusions. Rabbi Solomon J. Sharfman described them as a “manifestation of religious triumphalism at its ugliest and most insensitive.”

LILLIAN HARRIS DEAN

Personalia

The Reverend Robert W. Battles was elected secretary of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Battles is pastor of Manhattan’s Gospel Tabernacle, which recently moved to new quarters on the East Side after more than eighty years on Eighth Avenue, just off Times Square. He succeeds Dr. William F. Smalley, who is retiring after serving 24 years as secretary.

Dr. Leslie H. Woodson, pastor of Memorial United Methodist Church in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, has been named chairman of the board of Good News, the “Forum for Scriptural Christianity in the United Methodist Church.”

A Freedoms Foundation Award was presented to Dr. Harold Lindsell, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, last month for his editorial “Is Patriotism Dead?” (see July 4, 1969, issue, page 20).

In San Antonio, Texas, last month, Father Patrick Flores, 40, son of a migrant farm worker, became the first Mexican-American to be consecrated a U. S. Catholic bishop.

Recently on a month’s tour of the United States was Mrs. Nguyen Thi Khang, head of the Hoa Khanh Children’s Hospital near Danang, Viet Nam. President Nixon praised her work with the hospital, which is related to the World Relief Commission of the National Association of Evangelicals and has cared for more than 50,000 patients.

Black United Church of Christ minister Grady E. Poulard, 33, has been named director of community services for the American Institute of Architects. He formerly was a race-relations specialist for the National Council of Churches.

Donald S. Harrington, rector of the Community Church in Manhattan, withdrew as the Liberal party candidate for governor of New York.

Awarded honorary degrees at Wheaton (Illinois) College this month were Representative John B. Anderson (R.-Ill.), doctor of laws; World Evangelical Fellowship president Ben Wati, doctor of divinity; and W. Dayton Roberts, an official of Latin America Mission, doctor of literature.

Succeeding Dr. Howard E. Kershner as president of the Christian Freedom Foundation and editor of Christian Economics is H. Edward Rowe, for six years the foundation’s executive vice-president.

Dr. Orley R. Herron, Jr., will succeed Dr. Glenn A. Richardson as president of Greenville (Illinois) College next month.

Religion In Transit

The overseas mission boards of the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) are considering united administration of all overseas operations … The American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America are exploring a similar step.

The Lutheran Seminary of Philadelphia will relocate at the city’s Episcopal seminary campus “as a nucleus of an ecumenical cluster of seminaries.” The action last month ended the Lutheran’s fifteen-year search for a new campus; about 140 students will be affected.

Crozer Seminary (American Baptist Convention) will close this fall, sell its Chester, Pennsylvania, property for about $3 million, and merge with Colgate Rochester/Bexley Hall divinity school in Rochester, New York (see also May 22 issue, page 36).

Episcopal contributions to the National Committee of Black Churchmen for the Black Economic Development Conference last month topped $225,000—$25,000 more than the goal set at the special convention of the church in South Bend last September.

The Ohio State Council of Churches last month became the first northern state council to receive the Roman Catholic Church as a member.

The Arizona Southern Baptist Convention executive board last month ousted twenty-three of the twenty-seven members of the state’s Baptist Hospital Association. At issue is whether to sell three hospitals.

A Redwood City, California, court last month took a mighty dim view of a $375,000 bequest to the Mighty I Am religious cult (it promises immediate ascension to heaven after death to members in good standing). An heir to the estate of Mrs. Gertrude Anderson contested the willing of the money to the cult; the court agreed there might have been “undue suasion” and turned the $375,000 over to a bank pending further investigation.

World Scene

Using a portable, collapsible baptistry, Southern Baptist missionaries at TogoMission immersed a Togolese chief and six of his West African villagers … Some 2,000 Zambians have been baptized and four Southern Baptist churches built in Zambia as a result of the Bible Way correspondence school, a highly successful method of teaching the Bible to Africans. Enrollment of 50,000 has been predicted by 1975.

While prayers were chanted in Latin and Armenian, Pope Paul VI and Vasken I, Supreme Catholicos of the Armenian Church, sat side by side on two thrones in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel last month, exchanged the kiss of peace, and pledged to strive for Christian unity.

The Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem has announced plans for a seminary complex in the Old City to concentrate on Armenian studies.

The Baptist Crusade of the Americas, carried on during 1968–69 in thirty North and South American countries, resulted in nearly 500,000 decisions for Christ, a crusade committee reported.

Total decisions for Christ reached 6,670 during the Luis Palau United Evangelistic Crusade in Mexico City in April; attendance at the ten-day event ranged from 8,000 to 14,000.

The pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Hildersham, England, posted a note on the church bulletin board recommending that parishioners try a meal at the local pub; the tavern manager reciprocated by tacking up a message suggesting that patrons try a Sunday at Holy Trinity.

The Ontario, Canada, home-and-school federation overwhelmingly voted to abolish religion classes in the province’s public schools and replace them with instruction in moral values and comparative religion.

People’s Church in Toronto, said to be Canada’s largest Protestant congregation, raised $414,000 in one night to support more than 400 overseas missionaries and raise their salaries.

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