Aspects of the Present Religious Scene in South Africa Christo Lombaard

Faith matters: aspects of the present religious scene in South Africa

Christo Lombaard Christian Spirituality University of South Africa

In preparation

Some key points in the history of South Africa:

¢ “Golden Age” 1: Mapungubwe (1075–1220) ¢ 1652: Jan van Riebeeck Dutch and British colonialism ¢ “Golden Age” 2: mining (1870 ff) – gold, diamonds, charcoal, platinum ¢ Anglo-Boer / South African War, 1899-1902 (incl. guerilla warfare & concentration camps): → British rule ¢ 1948: Afrikaner (= National Party) rule Red danger, Black danger, Roman danger ¢ 1989: Fall of Berlin Wall ¢ 1994: African (= African National Congress) rule

Population Groups in South Africa:

¢ Black (different language & tribal groups) ¢ White (Afrikaans & English) ¢ Indian ¢ Coloured

¢ Pop. ± 50 million ¢ 11 official languages; 9 provinces

Literature

Davenport, TRH & Saunders, C 2000. South Africa: a modern history (5th ed.). Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Giliomee, H. 2003. The Afrikaners – Biography of a people. Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers.

Thompson, LM 2010. A history of South Africa (3rd ed.). Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.

1 Introduction If South African society had to be diagnosed, broadly, it would be have a doctor worried. Apart from the country’s economy (cf. e.g. Du Plessis & Smit 2007) and daily interpersonal relations in the urban areas, which are in good health, almost other all aspects of society are faltering. It is a traumatised society, still, even though the popular expectations around 1994, the year of the turn from white rule to black democratic rule that has been much idealised, had been much different. With crime and corruption in government and police services, as well as in broader society, crumbling (and at times failed) road and water and electricity infrastructure, courts and correctional services flailing, disastrous education policies and practices, unemployment at a rate of 40%, and with the country topping world scales of murder, rape and HIV/Aids rates (cf. Faber 2009 for a brief overview), it all adds up to a society with a poor prognosis.

In a way these strains can be understood as simply the by-product of a society going through the massive societal adjustments; the country has been hit with wave upon wave of change over the past quarter of a century: • The global changes that were brought about by the revolution of Information Communication Technologies, particularly e-mail and the internet, with all the social implications thereof for the effects of freer information flow, dawned in rudimentary form in South Africa late in 1987 (cf. Lombaard 2003:16-27); • The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had a direct impact on the way the country set aside its remaining apartheid policies in favour of a transition to democracy, starting in February 1990 and culminating just more than four years later in the April 1994 elections (cf. Lombaard 2009:89-93); • The 1994 transition from white to black rule also focused via the new 1992 Constitution the worldwide trends towards other equalities and urgencies, namely of gender, sexual preference, ecological sensitivity, and such matters.

2 These multiple concurrent changes, by no means listed here exhaustively but rather as examples, fill the agendas of social identity construction within the South Africa of today in such ways that a matrix of fluid characteristics can hardly be drawn up with any accuracy. It is against this diverse background that current religious trends in South Africa are to be understood. In what follows, therefore, a few of the religious trends within South African society are indicated. Rather than aiming in any way at giving a substantive overview here, some developments in religious circles are indicated in order to convey some sense of the diversity of trends developing, at times unrelated to one another, at time in interesting intersections.

Numbers and predictions • Mainline churches • AICs (African Independent / Instituted / Initiated Churches)

All are liberation theologians

Exegetical trends • The Pretoria school of structuralism • Historical-critical methods • Africanisation • Popularisation: the “How to read the Bible books”

(Christian) Faith trends

• A(nti)-faithful • Unchurchly believers • Charismatics (including Angus Buchan [= Mighty Men]) • The spiritually-inclined • The thinkers (New Reformation) • New (= old) Orthodox (Evangelical Initiative) • The churchly

All the Presidents’ amens: • Backgrounds: o Christian National Education o Marxist thinking o Enlightenment thinking • FW de Klerk • Nelson Mandela (ANC’s Religion Desk: Cedric Mason) • Thabo Mbeki (ANC’s Religion Desk: Cedric Mason) • Jacob Zuma (ANC’s “Religion Desk”: Mathole Motshekga)

The constitution of religious liberalism • SA Constitution • South African Charter for Religious Rights and Freedoms § (Schools and religion) § (Religion in the press)

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