Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (166 page)

Elsewhere, it seemed that more potential existed for a delivery of state machines into the hands of responsible politicians. The precedent was the independence won by the British Gold Coast as Ghana only three years before the Belgian Congo, but after infinitely more careful local preparation. The British government, despite major blunders like its brutally inept and demoralizing handling of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya through the 1950s, was generally prepared to listen to anglophone Christian missionary organizations which understood the realities of anti-colonial movements and saw positive possibilities. Max Warren, an exceptionally able secretary of the Church Missionary Society and in many ways the successor to J. H. Oldham as an international Protestant statesman, played an important role as a mediator between British officialdom and the new leadership, especially in the CMS's long-standing areas of activity in East and West Africa.
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Some observers in Europe and in nationalist circles in Africa confidently expected that Africans would think Christianity too closely associated with colonialism to let it flourish in the newly independent states. This was the reverse of the truth.
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As we have seen (see pp. 963-5), beyond the European-initiated Churches there was now an extraordinary variety of African-initiated Christian practice which made Christianity even beyond its ancient north-eastern African heartlands at least as indigenous a religion as the great alternative, Islam. Moreover, the political institutions left by colonial powers at independence produced widespread disappointment. Artificially created chunks of colonial territory had been set up with democratic forms, civil services and judiciaries. Even in European society, these worked only when sustained by widespread prosperity and painfully acquired consensual norms and national identities. They rarely functioned effectively in Africa, and the generation of liberation politicians who became rulers at independence frequently succumbed to the corruption of power. People let down by government turned to the Churches for their welfare, self-expression and a chance to exercise control over their own lives. Nowhere was this more true than in the one region which did not readily succumb to decolonization, the Portuguese and British southern territories dominated by the Union of South Africa.

The Union was an amalgam of British colonies and two former republics dominated by 'Afrikaner' descendants of colonists from the Netherlands. Afrikaners were proud of more than two centuries of struggle to establish themselves in a wilderness, buoyed up by a militant Reformed Protestantism which told them that God had delivered them this land, and determined to resist any extension of power to non-whites, whether African or Asian. Indeed, as the twentieth century wore on, the Afrikaners turned their military defeat by the British in the second Boer War (1899-1902) into a gradual rebuilding of Afrikaner ascendancy, removing what political rights had existed for non-whites in some parts of the new Union. Most British settlers, and successive British governments anxious to avoid confrontation, connived at the process, which culminated in the victory of an Afrikaner Nationalist party in the 1948 all-white general election. In the intervening years, Africans had quit white-initiated Churches on a massive scale to lead their own Christian lives; the segregation of races widened inexorably. After the Nationalist victory, successive governments, with cabinets stuffed with Dutch Reformed pastors and elders, turned this de facto situation into a system with its own crazy and cruel logic, known by the Afrikaans word
apartheid
, separateness. This was often glossed by the South African government as 'separate development'. The separation of blacks, whites, Asians and 'Coloureds' was small-mindedly real; the development entirely one-sided.
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At the heart of apartheid was a great act of theft from the Churches: the entire mass-education system which they had built up from primary level to higher education, a beacon for Africa that had benefited students from as far away as Uganda. From 1953 all this was delivered into the hands of the government and became an instrument to hold black Africans back rather than advance them. The Roman Catholic Church resisted the confiscation the longest, but it too was eventually defeated by the effort of financing its independent schools.
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Around the world, as the cruelty and arbitrariness of apartheid became apparent, a chorus of protest went up. From Western governments it was muted, because South Africa had a strategic importance in the 'Cold War' against Communism which had been in operation from the late 1940s (a card played to the full by the Nationalist government, which talked much of Communism as the enemy of Christian civilization). The Soviet government did indeed use the struggle against apartheid to further its own interests, but on the Western side the bulk of opposition had to come from the Churches. They alone among the coalition of activists could effectively draw on their international fellowship to keep open overseas links for South Africans and help the beleaguered liberationist political party which Christians dominated, the African National Congress.

Given the almost blanket support of the South African Dutch Reformed Church for apartheid, and its withdrawal or expulsion from ecumenical activities in worldwide Church bodies, the Anglican Church was best placed to lead the struggle in South Africa. For all the Nationalist government's efforts to shut down any sphere of cooperation between whites and non-whites, Anglicans led the Churches' resistance, and had the capacity from time to time to intimidate the ostentatiously Christian Nationalist regime - admittedly often against the wishes of many in their prosperous white congregations. Throughout all the Anglican Communion's centuries of involvement with politics and social change, its role in the liberation struggle in South Africa should perhaps give it most pride. It is a story of heroic individuals who turned what was often a personal singularity and craggy awkwardness into a stubborn refusal to compromise with evil. Exemplary was the monk Trevor Huddleston, sent out to South Africa by his Community of the Resurrection: he was tireless in his anti-apartheid work alongside the ANC and then, after a reluctantly obeyed recall from his order, he spent a lifetime in helping the struggle from afar, as an Anglican bishop and eventually archbishop. Desmond Tutu, another exceptional Anglican priest of the next generation who rose to be Archbishop of Cape Town - perhaps Anglicanism's greatest primate in the twentieth century - recalled his astonishment as a boy at witnessing Father Huddleston, the picture of Anglo-Catholic authority in his black hat and white cassock, showing an automatic English courtesy to Tutu's mother: 'I couldn't understand a white man doffing his hat to a black woman, an uneducated woman ... it made, it appeared later, a very deep impression on me and said a great deal about the person who had done this.'
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Perhaps most important of all for the eventual defeat of apartheid was an English Anglican priest who briefly visited South Africa only once: John Collins. Like Huddleston, Collins was an example of a type which Anglicanism has traditionally been good at fostering: an undisciplined, extrovert rebel member of England's solid middle class, for whom the Church's untidy historic legacy of niches for eccentrics provided a perch in a canonry of London's St Paul's Cathedral. Canon Collins ruined the breakfasts of many a choleric Tory reader of the
Daily Telegraph
by his pronouncements as chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but his contribution to South Africa's future was the International Defence and Aid Fund, an umbrella organization which, after the South African government banned it in 1967, managed to avoid journalistic scrutiny for another quarter-century. The fund gathered money from across the northern European and North American world via a host of personal contacts; it provided a cleverly disguised financial lifeline for those struggling in the most dangerous of circumstances to resist apartheid, to fight lawsuits or survive the disappearance of their loved ones into South African jails. The South African security services, so adept at penetrating and subverting such organizations, never succeeded in infiltration here, nor did they unmask the agents who were distributing the funds: tens of thousands of people were given around PS100 million. Collins's IDAF remains one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century liberal Protestantism.
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Churchmen like Huddleston, Tutu and Collins played a major part alongside the imprisoned Nelson Mandela in ensuring that the African National Congress remained firmly committed to an effort to establish a genuine and all-inclusive democracy when the white minority regime eventually lost the will to resist. The liberation struggle in South Africa remained much more closely linked than elsewhere to the concerns of liberal Western Christianity for other freedoms - homosexual rights, the ordination of women - and that has been an important factor in recent travails of the Anglican Communion. Moreover, Archbishop Tutu was at the forefront of the movement to seek national healing rather than sectional revenge after the eventual defeat of apartheid and the coming of universal democracy in 1994. He headed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission which has been imitated in other places riven by long-term hatreds and atrocities. Nelson Mandela as president symbolized the commitment to a Christian reconciliation when he proclaimed that the old Afrikaner national anthem
Die Stem
('The Call') should continue to stand alongside the serene Xhosa Christian hymn written in 1897 by a Methodist schoolteacher,
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika
: 'Lord, bless Africa . . . Descend, O Spirit; Descend, O Holy Spirit'.
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Not the least dramatic aspect of this reconciliation was the repentance shown by the official bodies of the South African Dutch Reformed Church for their part in providing ideological blessing for the lunacy of apartheid. As recently as 1982 they had responded angrily to their exclusion from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches with an emphatic assertion of their constant testing of 'the demands of Holy Scripture . . . to strive for the best practical way in which to fulfil our apostolic calling to be the Church of Jesus Christ giving due consideration to our experience within the unique South African ethnic situation'. Only eight years later, the year that Nelson Mandela was freed after twenty-seven years in jail, the Church in a declaration at Rustenburg took practical steps to restore property to the 'relocated' and provide funds for renewal and resettlement of exiles, since 'Confession and forgiveness necessarily require restitution. Without it, a confession of guilt is incomplete.'
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On the other side of the Atlantic five years later, in 1995, another Church actually born in racism gradually and painfully came to a similar realization. The Southern Baptists, by now America's largest Protestant denomination, in a charged and emotional meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, expressed repentance for their historic origins in a movement to oppose the abolition of slavery: twenty thousand delegates overwhelmingly passed a resolution to repudiate what they had once said on slavery and to make an official apology to African-Americans. They quoted the Bible to prove their new case for condemning slavery, albeit with more good-heartedness than profound scriptural exegesis - and it has to be said that they remain an almost entirely white denomination.
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Other mainstream American Churches, such as the Episcopal Church of the USA, are also aware of their often inglorious role in the story of slavery and its accompanying racism. That is why they may be more sensitive to other liberation struggles than Churches elsewhere which do not have that past story.

These statements of penitence are as resonant as those made by European Churches conscious of their tarnished part in the Nazi crimes of the Second World War. They betoken a new humility in Western Christianity born of experience. Such turnarounds in the Church may encourage wariness in those inclined to make confident dogmatic pronouncements intended to lay down unchangeable truths for the future. But humility is by no means the only mood among the Churches worldwide in recent decades. Afrikaner South Africa saw the defence of its special racial system as part of a more general defence of traditional Christian values against a godless liberalism, intent on demolishing the Christian family and all the institutions dependent on it. Conservative Christians everywhere have continued to echo this wider theme: even now that apartheid is only a sour memory, a cultural battle continues. It began at the end of the 1950s, and has now become the widest fault line within Christianity - Chalcedonian, non-Chalcedonian, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Pentecostal alike - casting more ancient conflicts into the shade.

A CULTURAL REVOLUTION FROM THE SIXTIES

The nemesis of Pope Paul VI as Church reformer was a pair of issues in human sexuality. In his reaffirmation of universal clerical celibacy and ban on contraception, he had not understood the profound cultural revolution which had been occurring in the West from the early 1960s, in which new understandings and expressions of human relationships played a central role. Alongside sex was a phenomenon which began by affecting European liberal Protestantism, but which quickly spread throughout all the Churches of Western Europe, and beyond them, into their cognates in Canada and European-origin Australasia: steep falls in the number of those actively involved in corporate religious practice. The process was labelled 'secularization' by students of the sociology of religion, and during the 1970s and even early 1980s, it was confidently expected to set patterns for the whole world. The United States was also part of the cultural revolution - in fact it provided most of the symbolism of the changes, not least through the Hollywood film industry, but also through a veritable industry of youth protest centring on popular anger about America's war in Vietnam. Yet the USA has behaved differently from Europe in the matter of churchgoing and religious activism, if not in the sexual revolution. The divergence was perceptible from the early 1970s and emphatically gathered pace in the 1980s.
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