Religions in South Africa face make-or-break decisions in the next two months. The South African Council of Churches must appoint a new general secretary. The council comprises the major denominations, including Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Reformed, Congregationalists, Rhema and some African independent churches. It can be a powerful voice.
The Muslim Judicial Council must also be re-elected. This is the parent body of the country’s Muslim community, and its election is more than usually important because of the recent demise of the highly respected Sheik Nazim. These two elections will exert a decisive influence on the role that religions play in the transformation of the country. Many have been troubled because most religious communities have failed to find their role in democratic South Africa.
Some see that role as to run religious organisations, co-opting and privatising spirituality as an individualistic concern, concentrating on the heavenly or hellish destination of souls. They see religion as a personal matter with some good works thrown in: a cop-out with a spin-off, maybe. Others think in terms of promoting a powerful religious industry and their own authority with- in it.
Some sincerely believe in such enterprises, but others tend to strut, filled with their own self- importance and expecting every- one from petrol attendants to the government to give them priority. Their own priority is to enhance their power and their religious empires, often by attacking other religions or the government. They let the opposition and its media do their thinking for them, and sink ever deeper into a rosy self-indulgent ecstasy, imagining they can save the nation by yapping at the president’s heels.
When the church refused to stand up to apartheid, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston used to say: “The Church sleeps on sometimes it stirs in its sleep.” Some still snore. Power-hungry religious role players are alienated from the motives and lifestyles of their founders like Jesus or the prophet. Such attitudes wreak havoc on spiritual resources and are a major reason for religions becoming irrelevant.
Such people often refer to religion as “the conscience of the nation”, a horrendous example of proud self-centred conceit that justifies them in criticising everyone except themselves. Their attempt to confine the spiritual awareness of humanity into pietistic religious clubs is a self-indulgence that Professor Martin Prosezky sees as the heart of heresy.
The principles of corporate moral and ethical living, and the need for a spiritual interpretation of life in society, have long since passed into the mainstream of modern life and need no pulpit bashing to promote them. We don’t need religions to make us good: atheists and agnostics believe in ethical values as much as anyone else because these priorities emerge in the exigencies of producing successful society.
The British theologian Don Cupitt said recently that in many ways the quest for a new world in secular culture represents a much further developed version of the original Christian programme than anything available from the churches today. “And that is the reason for the so-called ‘decline of religion’. It might be better called the redundancy of the Church … the Church has been left in the past, as Christianity has moved out of it and has continued to develop in the larger world outside.”
Religions have two roles to play that can save both themselves and South Africa: building faith in transformation and building communities. The great majority of our people have elected a government to lead the delivery of a better society, and want strong religious forces to participate in that governance of transformation. Religious leaders, rooted in the activity of a just and loving God among us, have a major role to play in enabling us to believe in ourselves and our country.
The famous dream of Martin Luther King was that the United States could be transformed. We need religious leaders who can spread dreams of transformation, not nightmares of doom, who think positively not negatively, who are driven by faith not cynicism, by the desire to serve, not to be served.
The other major role of our religions is their structures in our communities that “together muster a resource which is comparable to none”, as President Thabo Mbeki said in 1997. Particularly since the demarcation of the new mega-cities and municipalities, local religious communities represent a latent potential from which models can be developed for cooperation with local authorities to translate visions of alleviating poverty, homelessness and disease into achievements, and move faith, wealth and knowledge from the haves to the have-nots with mutual benefit.
Nations are built from neighbourhoods. There are already signs that some of the new mayors are eager to cooperate with religious communities in making change happen.
The appointments at the South African Council of Churches and the Muslim Judicial Council can write religion into our history in a new way. Or write themselves out of it.