Pat Sidley
Last week’s march on Parliament by thousands of angry Christians highlights the rapid growth of fundamentalist Christian groups in South Africa, and mirrors the advance of the religious right wing in the United States.
The marchers had come to protest the exclusion of the words “Almighty God” from the Constitution. But their agenda reaches much further than this.
Several of the groups, which marched under the same banner and share the same concerns, have large memberships, including the KwaSizabantu ministers, who see themselves as a counter to the more liberal churches which signed the Rustenberg Declaration several years ago.
One of the organisers of the march, Reverend Peter Hammond, says many of them have grave concerns, aside from the Constitution, such as the exclusion of Ascension Day from the public holidays, the proposed legalisation of abortion and the growth of the pornography industry.
The group set up to represent those interests is called “The Christian Voice” and it raised tens of thousands of rands locally to fund the march, says its representative Reverend Soon Zevenster of the Evangelical Reform Church.
Hammond and Zevenster told the Mail & Guardian that the group was set up only a month ago with the express purpose of taking up these causes and the march was only a beginning.
The group hired the buses and trains used to ferry the poorer supporters of its cause from the surrounding townships and squatter camps, according to Zevenster, and printed close to 400 000 pamphlets advertising the march. Money was raised through individual congregations by asking ministers in churches to support the cause.
Hammond’s group, the Frontline Fellowship, co-operates with several other groups (with which it shares offices in Cape Town). These include United Christian Action, whose purpose it is, he explained, to carry out the political and social concerns among the “silent majority”. The chairman of United Christian Action is Ed Cain, who gained infamy some years ago when he was associated with the Christian League, a front group used by the previous government to counter the influence of the South African Council of Churches.
“He must have been burned in that experience,” maintained Hammond, who said Cain authored the organisation’s constitution, which explicitly bars the acceptance of any government funding. Cain’s daughter Mirian runs another associated group, African Christian Action, whose business it is to fight pornography, abortion, and so on.
The Frontline Fellowship itself, according to Hammond, sends missionaries, bibles, medication and food into countries such as Sudan, Malawi and Mozambique and, to a lesser extent, Rwanda and KwaZulu/ Natal. Hammond, with some of his missionaries, spent an uncomfortable week in prison in the hands of Frelimo troups in 1989, when they abducted him from Malawi and accused him of gun-running. He vigorously denies this, stating that he was released after a week.
The Frontline Fellowship, he says, is funded by spontaneous donations from several sources, including local ones, and others in the United States and Europe. He does not, he says, raise funds, having biblical objections to the notion of fundraising. The money flows in spontaneously to do God’s work, he explains, while being critical of the Christian Voice’s
The size of the march, which caught even its organisers off guard, has struck a chord of worry among the leaders of the “mainstream” churches. Many of these leaders noticed with concern that the numbers of marchers must reflect the fact that some of their own members were among them.
At the Press Club in Cape Town this week, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu dealt with some of the complex issues raised.
“There are those Christians who claim that there are unambiguous and categorical directives regarding what the Christian position ought to be on issues such as abortion, homosexuality, divorce, euthanasia, etc.
“Such people are able to claim that ‘the Bible says’ and then believe that they have dealt once and for all with a complex issue and anyone who disagrees with them is really not Christian.”
He argued, too, that the inclusion of the words “Almighty God” in the last Constitution did not prevent abuses of power — a point which Hammond acknowledges. But he points at previously Communist states which guaranteed in constitutions a right to religious freedom — and failed to provide it.