Civic Sacrament and Social Imaginaries in Transition: The Case of the South African Churches and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

This article reflects on a seminal moment within South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): the appearance of the African Initiated Churches (AICs) before the Commission in 1997. It demonstrates how this moment brought into relief divergent contestations of the public within South African Christianity in three ways: first, by situating the TRC within the liturgical performance of a reimagined South African nationality, making it a "civic sacrament" of reconciliation; second, by highlighting the formative role churches themselves played within this liturgy, deploying theological language to create a healed, secular body politic; third, by displaying the different social imaginary of the AICs—a social imaginary which interrupted the TRC's liturgical recreation of time and space, as well as challenging the historical relations between church and state in South Africa. The paper concludes with the question posed in this "interruption," a question that challenges the broader church with regard to fulfillment of the liturgy not in the secular nation-state, but in that City which is to come.