Evangelical Nationalism in Apartheid South Africa

Nationalism, the politics of group identity, or “imagined communities” as Benedict Anderson coined the concept,1 has been controversial in modern history for several good reasons, with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa still counted among the most pertinent examples. Christianity has similarly been controversial. Both nationalism and Christianity have, in some cases correctly, been identified as responsible for fostering situations of violence and repression. Moreover, each of them typically makes a distinction between insiders and outsiders. One crucial difference between Christianity, on the one hand, and exclusive or ethnic nationalism2 on the other, is that Christianity generally seeks to make insiders out of outsiders through conversion, whereas nationalism resists permeation from the outside. When Christianity and ethnic3 nationalism combine, as was the case with Afrikaner Christian nationalism during apartheid, it makes for an interesting, if paradoxical, set of circumstances. Effectively, the in-group has to convert outsiders not only to its system of religious belief, but also to its wider worldview and political ideology, without, of course, allowing outsiders to become real insiders since that would contravene the rationality of exclusive nationalism.

Christianity · Ideology · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Rationality · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious Education and Schools · Religious studies

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