Anthony Egan CHRISTIANITY IN SOUTH AFRICA: A POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY edited by Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (James Currey/David Philip, R120)
Christianity as a historical subject in South Africa has been largely under- researched
and rarely studied. Given that almost three- quarters of South Africans regard
themselves as Christians, this is surprising. Given that so much that has been written on “church history” is antiquarian and dull, one may feel this is justified. Yet the history of Christianity in South Africa – properly studied – presents the reader with a mirror of the country’s rich,complex and turbulent history. It is this approach, thankfully, that the authors of this new book take.
In the often densely packed 25 chapters of this large book, scholars from South Africa and abroad give what is probably the most comprehensive account ever written of
Christianity’s impact on our history. We see the impact of the Reformed Church on Cape Dutch society and the problems raised by the church effectively being a department of the government.
Missionaries – either praised to the heavens as liberators or damned to socialist hell – receive a balanced, well-considered treatment. The paradoxical nature of the relationship between African traditional religion and Christianity is brought to the fore, as are accounts of the distinctions between official Calvinism and Afrikaner popular beliefs in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The growth of segregation and apartheid inevitably forms one of the foci of the book. Authors illustrate the often painful shifts in perception of the church-state relationship over the last century or two, and all too briefly describe the dynamics of church
resistance to apartheid. Quite innovative and welcome are sections of Christians’
relations with Muslims and Jews, as well as chapters on Christianity’s contribution to liturgical music, art, literature and architecture.
One is tempted – with some justification – to hail this as the best single general history of Christianity in South Africa. Why then do I feel such deep reservations about it? It is without doubt a major historical work, edited and written with great skill and style.
My complaint with this present volume is that it does not even begin to address the more complex issues, some of which I have raised above. It gives us an excellent summary of where our scholarship is; it fails to advance the scholarship further, at a time when this is sorely needed.
It is a masterly synthesis of scholarship. That perhaps is its problem.The
history of South African Christianity, church history or religious history – depending on whether you approach it from a theological or historical, religious or secular perspective – suffers from a number of enormous narrative and analytical gaps.
To a considerable degree it is trapped in a “great men” (women seldom figure) or “official” mentality. We all know that most right-thinking churches (left-thinking to the former regime) opposed apartheid, and that heroic persons like Huddleston, Hurley,
Tutu and Calata took great personal risks.
But I can find no solid research done on how the church on the ground responded to these issues – were ordinary Christians actually indifferent or, at times, against the statements and activities of church leaders? How did organisational structures within the different churches affect the responses to apartheid of the institutions?
Did, for example, more democratic, “bottom-up” churches give activist clergy and
laypeople more or less space to operate? We have yet to research the internal politics of Meetings, Circuits, Synods and Bishops’ Conferences.
On a wider scale, there are hardly any comprehensive accounts of the histories of denominations in South Africa. A few exist. Usually they are seriously out of date; sometimes they are very limited either by their focus on leadership structures, on changing theologies, or too narrowly focused on the political activities of effectively a few key people.