On 26 September, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in New York. His speech was delivered in the language of international politics but, beneath the surface, it was dripping with biblical allusions.
On the very same day in Cape Town, the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice at the University of the Western Cape was closing a two-day conference marking the 40th anniversary of the South African Kairos Document, signed on 25 September 1985.
The timing was uncanny.
Speakers at the conference included Frank Chikane, Allan Boesak and Itumeleng Mosala.
The Kairos Document was a radical theological declaration, written by theological scholars and Christians with a conscience, at the height of apartheid. They called that moment kairos — a Greek word for a decisive, critical time — because South Africa stood at a crossroads during the state of emergency, forced to choose between complicity and courage. The document exposed how religion was being captured and manipulated. It named three ways theology was operating in response to this capture.
There was state theology, when government violence dressed itself in sacred robes. Then there was church theology, when religious leaders called for peace and patience while refusing to confront the brutality of apartheid. And there was prophetic theology, when faith dared to side with the oppressed, speaking truth to power and naming empire for what it was. It was this prophetic theology that helped energise the struggle against apartheid. And it is this prophetic spirit that lives on in Kairos Palestine and in movements across the world that insist faith cannot be neutral in the face of oppression.
The conference this year honoured that legacy and linked it with Kairos Palestine and other global kairos movements that continue to claim religion for justice rather than domination.
Which brings us back to Netanyahu at the UN. He is a secular politician, not a rabbi. Yet his speech was laced with sacred language. He called Israel “a light unto the nations”. He told the world his soldiers “fought like lions”, a direct echo of the biblical oracle that gave its name to “Operation Rising Lion”. He invoked God’s help as though divine providence itself stood behind the Israeli military.
There was no doubt in our minds that Netanyahu’s performance on the UN stage, complete with antics such as graphs and even a pop quiz, demonstrated just how urgent that work remains. He invoked divine assistance — “with God’s help” — to frame military victory as providential destiny.
This is state theology in its purest form: violence made sacred, occupation reframed as covenant, genocide draped in biblical imagery. It is part of what I call the sacred economies of violence — the way religion is traded, packaged and consumed to legitimise killing and dispossession. In Netanyahu’s speech, we hear the workings of a theological necropolitics: the justification of who must die and who is allowed to live, rendered sacred by appeal to the bible.
Of course, Netanyahu himself would never claim church theology. But Zionist theology often functions in that role. Where church leaders in apartheid South Africa once used biblical verses to preach obedience and order, Zionist theology uses scripture to silence dissent, demanding loyalty and patience in the face of brutality. It is church theology in an even harsher key, not merely moderating resistance, but actively erasing it.
And what of prophetic theology? Here too, Netanyahu twists the script and dares to steal its mantle too. He dares to usurp the voice of the biblical prophets, speaking of good and evil, light and darkness and of history’s moral arc (a blatant play on Martin Luther King Junior’s popular use of the phrase). But the biblical prophets denounced kings and kingdoms that trampled the poor. Netanyahu invokes them to shield state violence. That is the theft of prophecy. Prophecy, in his hands, is stripped of its dangerous edge and turned into another weapon of state theology.
This is why religion must be taken seriously in social justice struggles. Too often, social justice activists treat religion as a sideshow, or worse, as the territory of “the crazies”. Secularism becomes a default stance and the ground of faith is ceded entirely to those who abuse it. But Netanyahu’s speech makes clear: religion is already shaping the narrative, sacralising the war, giving it cosmic weight. To pretend otherwise is to fight with one eye closed.
Desmond Tutu and the authors of the Kairos Document showed us another path. They insisted that theology is never neutral. It can bless the tanks of empire or it can stand with the people in the streets. It can justify the occupation of Gaza or it can join the cry for liberation. Neutrality, they taught us, is not neutral at all; it is siding with the oppressor.
Forty years ago, South Africans declared their kairos moment. On 26 September 2025, as Netanyahu wrapped his war in biblical prophecy at the UN, we declared ours again. We ended our conference on Saturday, by joining thousands of people in Cape Town’s Palestine Solidarity March, under our banner: “Tutu was not silent, and neither are we.”
That is why religion matters — not only to people of faith, but to anyone committed to justice. For social justice movements and for the academy alike, the study of religion cannot be dismissed as marginal or irrational. Religion remains one of the most powerful frameworks through which violence is justified and resisted. To take it seriously is not to endorse its every claim, but to recognise its role in shaping political life and human dignity. Only then can we expose how it is misused and recover its potential as a resource for liberation.
Sarojini Nadar holds the NRF/LMS Desmond Tutu South African Research Chair in Religion and Social Justice at the University of the Western Cape. She is the author of Gender, Genocide, Gaza and the Book of Esther: Engaging Texts of Terror(ism) (Routledge, 2025).