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.     

Breaking the body of Christ: the sacraments of initiation in a habitat of white supremacy

Since the racially segregated space of the United States operates as a habitat of white supremacy, the vice of white supremacy pervades the church's corporate body and thereby permeates all of its practices, including those of baptism and the Eucharist. Rather than turning to the church's sacraments as an antidote to the vices of a presumed external culture, this paper chronicles the way in which these very practices have been corrupted by it. The church cannot reform itself from within. In order to enable these sacraments to build the body of Christ, the church must work to dismantle regnant patterns of white supremacist racial segregation in the world.     

The Strange Birth of Anglican Synods in Australia and the 1850 Bishops' Conference

The emergence of synods in Australian Anglicanism and their shape flowed in large measure from the social democratic forces at the time and these were for the most part expressed by Anglican lay people. While the Bishops' conference in 1850 identified the issue of church governance and lay involvement the precise recommendations of the conference were nowhere followed. The popular memory of this process which gives determining influence in shaping the form of church constitution to the theological opinions of the local bishop owes its origins to some key interpretations at the beginning of the twentieth century which were part of the political debate about a national church constitution, a debate which was being argued with theologically shaped rhetoric. The reality in the middle of the nineteenth century was quite different but nonetheless implied a theological perspective which validated the use of contemporary social and political ideas in shaping church structures. In order to secure a model which incorporated the whole church community the synods used the mid nineteenth century parliamentary model. Whether that remains the best model for synods is a question.     

The Protestant working class in Belfast: education and civic erosion – an alternative analysis

This paper explores and reassesses the issues of social decline, educational underachievement and civic erosion in relation to the Protestant working class in Belfast. Prior to the ‘Troubles’ the Protestant working class in Belfast had at its heart a civic-mindedness which was in tune with working-class communities across the UK at the time. This civic-mindedness encouraged the growth of extended communities and placed an importance on church attendance and educational achievement; something which has been conveniently ignored in most analyses. Owing to population movements in Greater Belfast which followed the violence that followed the introduction of internment without trial in August 1971 Protestant church congregations dwindled and school attendances dropped significantly. The paper ultimately seeks to provide a ‘long view’ of the Protestant working-class experience in order to assist those who are concerned with the problems facing it in the current era.     

Christianity and Freemasonry: The Compatibility Debate Within the Church of England

Perceptions of the Church of England as a traditional stronghold of Freemasonry persist. Periodically, allegations have erupted alleging that membership of the brotherhood and of the church are incompatible. The compatibility of Freemasonry and Christianity became an issue most recently when the new archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, expressed his own unease about the question shortly before his enthronement. This article uses primary sources from Lambeth Palace to explore in detail a previous episode during the 1950s when the compatibility question created a furore within the ranks of church and brotherhood that involved leading members of the British establishment, including His Majesty King George VI and the archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. Addressed by Parliament and the Foreign Office, as well as the popular media, the affair, implicating the Crown and the church, seemed to threaten disestablishment. An examination is made of the difficulties that the question raised for Anglicans at all levels and the way in which the controversy was handled by leading Freemasons and churchmen. The article goes on to address subsequent incidents that raised the compatibility question, looking at changing attitudes and behaviour over time and the implications for the nature of both institutions.     

Pioneering Leadership: Historical Myth‐Making,Absence, and Identity in the Churches of Christ in Victoria

This article explores the role of historiography in the developing identity of congregationally autonomous churches by examining the process and meaning behind the historical myth‐making associated with pioneering church leadership. In the absence of a clerical hierarchy or recognised historical expertise, four competing claims for the title of “first evangelist” emerged in the Churches of Christ (Disciples of Christ) denomination in colonial Victoria. Each of these claims is critically analysed in the light of rapidly developing church identity, the work of the evangelists in the 1860s, the influence of Australian nationalism, and historiographical portrayals which sought to make these four men heroes even in their absence. Finally the article examines absence of another kind — historiographical omission — and the question of the heroic in denominational church history.     

The Sunday morning journey to church considered as a form of ‘micro-pilgrimage’

Using mixed methods data, the social significance and narrative of local journeys to church on a Sunday morning are examined and reframed as a form of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage studies over the last 30 years have criticized the concept proposed by Turner and Turner of pilgrimage as entirely opposite and peripheral to social structures and relation. Recent literature has reinterpreted Turner and Turner’s terminology of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’, developing these ideas to identify the continuities that remain between much of everyday life and contemporary pilgrimage. Furthermore, there has been a shift in focus, prompted by interest in mobilities, from pilgrimage centres to recognize the significance of the journey to such centres. This paper advances the discussion further to argue that local scale journeys to church should be considered as a form of micro-pilgrimage: local journeys to church services that can form part of a break from daily social structures to be used to prepare oneself for the act of worship or immersion in the social relations based in the church. The concept of micro-pilgrimages therefore recognizes that these journeys can, like longer pilgrimages, contain qualities of liminality and communitas that combine social and religious significance and meaning for the pilgrim.     

Strategic Essentialism and Vatican Policy

Abstract

Just as women's NGOs around the world use essentialism strategically—calling upon their assigned roles as mothers to create change for their children that they might not feel empowered to create for themselves—the most recent Vatican policy holds on to the remnants of essentialism as a policy for protecting exclusive male access to ordination, and therefore power in the church. Previously, essentialism had protected male superiority in existence, social roles, the family, and the church, but one by one, all of these have been conceded except male superiority in the church. The paper further proposes that the traditional male role, of which the church has been a principal support, has in fact now become detrimental to males.     

The Limits of Mastery: Slaveholders,Slaves, and Baptist Church Discipline

Existing scholarship describes early southern evangelical churches as racially radical institutions that, as the eighteenth century surrendered to the nineteenth, capitulated to slavery, implementing accommodations intended to make them more attractive to respectable, slaveholding churchgoers. This essay argues that that transition was never as complete as suggested. Based on a set of 65 Baptist church minutes from congregations located in 4 different southern states, it shows how evangelical churches continued to exercise a degree of authority over slave-owning members and their treatment of bondpeople from the late eighteenth century through the end of slavery itself.     

Church Women's Groups and the Empowerment of Women in Solomon Islands

Throughout the Pacific, church women's groups play an important social and spiritual role in the lives of many indigenous women. However, these groups rarely attract the interest of development practitioners or theorists concerned with the empowerment of women, largely because of their outwardly conservative stance. Preoccupied with sewing classes, pastoral care, and social work, church women's groups appear to epitomize a welfare approach to women's development. Yet, while welfare concerns remain central to the activities of many such groups, by drawing on case studies from Solomon Islands in the period leading up to the onset of political crisis in 1999, this article demonstrates that a welfare approach does not preclude women's groups from engaging in strategic activities for the empowerment of women. Such activities include support for logging protests, workshops to affirm the importance of women's roles and develop their confidence, and opportunities for them to travel and expand their knowledge basis. Furthermore, the process of coming together to engage in welfare activities which many women enjoy greatly can provide opportunities for confidence‐building, income generation, and networking.     

Christianity,Gender, and the Working Class in Southern Dunedin, 1880–19401

This article is a study of the southern suburbs of Dunedin, which during the late nineteenth century became the most industrialized and working class urban area of New Zealand. Analyzing the social composition of fifteen southern Dunedin churches, I question the idea, widely held by New Zealand historians, that the working classes had largely turned their backs on organized religion. In keeping with recent scholarship in the social history of British and Irish religion, I show that unskilled workers were better represented in many southern Dunedin congregations that previous historians have acknowledged and that skilled workers numerically dominated most churches. When women are included in the analysis, working class predominance increases further. Signing the suffrage petition in remarkable proportions, working class Christian women turned the southern suburbs into a world‐leading first wave feminist community. Moreover, varieties of popular Christianity flourished beyond the ranks of active churchgoers. I conclude by suggesting that New Zealand historians need to rethink the old “lapsed masses” and “secular New Zealand” assumptions and to investigate the diverse varieties of Christianity shaping the culture, and their sometimes conflicting this‐worldly meanings.     

The Gender of the Church: Conflicts and Social Wholes on Ambrym

There is a strong connection between historical village migration and present day church belonging on Ambrym Island in North‐Central Vanuatu. Church adherence has become an expression of where one comes from and an idiom for the social wholes founded on such belonging. The churches also make manifest the conflict lines between such wholes. The dynamics of such social wholes is tightly related to historical transformations in gendered practice that the traditional focus on male leadership in the church has not sufficiently explored. Through different kinds of fundraising and Christian ceremonies women create new arenas for sharing and community, and women have come to dominate the church movement.     

The Polygamy Question: Missions,Marriage, and Assimilation

Polygamy was a vexed question for missionaries in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the mid twentieth century, Christian missions of various denominations worked with the Australian Commonwealth Government to achieve a policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white Australian culture. Yet there was little consensus as to how this assimilation policy could or should be applied to Aboriginal marriages. This article demonstrates that the issue of polygamy exposed divisions between church and state as well as among Christian denominations over their understandings of marriage. These differences stemmed from differing spiritual visions of assimilation in Australia. The conflicts over marriage in the Northern Territory, therefore, reveal that assimilation, and settler‐colonialism more broadly, operated on a religious plane as Aboriginal people, missionaries, and bureaucrats engaged in a spiritual contest over what represented a legitimate and acceptable marriage in that land.     

A black and white sermon: John Jasper’s capitalization on white exploitation in late nineteenth-century Virginia

Groups within southern society seized on John Jasper’s sermon arguing that the sun moved around the earth in order to reinforce ideas of African American inferiority. Jasper, however, took advantage of these efforts at exploitation. By embodying the stereotype whites sought to promote, Jasper became very popular with white visitors, and tourists to Richmond frequently requested renditions of the sermon. Through preaching his sun sermon on 253 occasions, Jasper was not only able to secure the financial and social independence of his church, but also provided inspiration to African Americans through highlighting that southern white supremacy could be overcome.     

The religious self-alteration of Shem Irofa'alu during the anti-colonial Maasina Rule in Solomon Islands (1944–1953)

This essay explores the post-World War Two anti-colonial Maasina Rule in north Malaita, Solomon Islands, to show how a church leader Shem Irofa'alu decided to establish a religious movement independent of the state and the traditional evangelical church. Irofa'alu's movement indexes an important moment of culture change towards increasing enthusiasm for the often-overlooked Christianity-based forms of sovereignty in the region. It highlights that Maasina Rule was not only a powerful rupture in social processes, but also sharpened the growing division between state and church. Irofa'alu's role in Maasina Rule shows that his influence peaked between 1948 and 1950 and then went into rapid decline. This change in fortune coincided with a critical turning point in the colonial government's attempts to end the movement through appeasement. No longer the head of the evangelical church in Malu'u sub-district and frustrated about the mother church's governance, Irofa'alu retreated to his home area and set about establishing a new church, Boboa (‘Foundation’), his first attempt at organizing a self-governing assembly before introducing Jehovah's Witnesses in north Malaita. In later years, Irofa'alu became a prophet-exemplar for new generations of religious leaders trying to establish Malaitan sovereignties based on their own power to move the truth of prophecies away from foreign state and church organizations.     

American Presbyterians,Freedmen's Missions,and the Nile Valley: Missionary History,Racial Orders,and Church Politics on the World Stage

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American Presbyterian “home” and “foreign” missions developed parallel and mutually reinforcing policies towards freed slaves in Egypt, Sudan, and the U.S.A. as well as towards Egypt's indigenous Christians, the Copts. Yet the racial ideologies and social hierarchies of these three countries reflected distinct historical trajectories of migration and conquest. In the Nile Valley, American missionaries struggled to understand, address, and sometimes revise Egyptian and Sudanese social hierarchies, which they found alternately idiosyncratic or unjust. This essay conjectures that these interactions, in the long run, induced the Nile Valley missionaries to confront the lingering injustices and incongruities in American social hierarchies, particularly in the mid‐ to late twentieth century. In this way, the “foreign” mission experience had a backflow for missionaries and their church by raising questions about American racial orders and by strengthening a commitment to civil rights and social justice agendas.     

Least of the laity: the minimum requirements for a medieval Christian

This article investigates the minimum level of religious observance expected of lay Christians by church authorities, and the degree to which legislation and procedures attempted to enforce these standards.¹ Once baptized, a person entered the community of the faithful; and the medieval church was as much accountable for the health and salvation of the ignorant, the ambivalent, the disobedient or distracted as they were of the devout. From the twelfth century, theologians, clerical authorities and the laity turned with concerted enthusiasm to the question of lay observance, advancing high ideals for lay commitment and expanding opportunities for lay participation. Yet while acting to elucidate and advance these qualities, the church was nevertheless mindful of the number of Christians who might fail to reach even basic standards. The resulting balance of the ideal and the possible, and the degree to which it reached and was enforced upon the less-enthusiastic laity is explored here through expectations for knowledge, observance of sacraments, and participation in regular duties such as church attendance, tithe-paying and fasting. The result was a complex ideal of lay observance that was balanced by a tolerance of laxity and even failure, and a system which increasingly exhorted specific expectations but was hesitant to define contumacy or disobedience in many but the most obdurate or scandalous cases.     

Gunnar Olsson's Transformers: The Art and Politics of Rendering the Co–Relation of Society and Space in Monochrome and Technicolor

Human geography is concerned with the co–relation of society and space. However, every device that has been used to express the co–relation of social space breaks down. Consequently, this paper engages with the fundamental difficulty of providing a consistent and effective rendering of relations. Specifically, the paper explores the poststructural work of Gunnar Olsson, a writer who has provided the most sustained and far–reaching engagement with co–relation to date. Consideration is given to Olsson's deconstruction of logic, dialectics, semiotics and the empty forms of co–relation (=, /, —, □, ?, ○, etc.). This deconstruction enables one to appreciate the ethical and political performativity of Olsson's surrealist and hyperrealist optical art: dematerialized points, torpedoes, ovoids, Moebius bands, and so on. In addition, the paper raises a peculiar but nonetheless vital question: what is the colour of co–relation and social space? In answering this question, the paper moves through two monochrome series (one rendered in black and white; the other in blue–grey) and one Technicolor series (rendered in ruby and gold). In the final showdown, however, the dyes leak in all directions. Social space is iridescent.     

The pastoral role of Contemporary Christian Music: the spiritualization of everyday life in a suburban evangelical megachurch

Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), popular music featuring evangelical Christian lyrics, is one of the most widely consumed forms of commercial entertainment for America's 70–80 million white evangelical Christians. CCM is an excellent lens through which to examine the complex interactions of religious faith, community sentiment, and popular music practices in the contemporary US. I explain how CCM performs the ‘pastoral’ task of reinforcing Christian faith in an evangelical megachurch in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. I argue that a monthly concert series not only guides evangelical Christians in their ‘walk’, but also helps constitute the flock by building a sense of community. I suggest three spatial analytics to understand CCM's pastoral role: the place of the suburb, the sacred space of the church coffeehouse, and the body. At all three scales of analysis, the musical and religious practices of CCM at one suburban church spiritualize the everyday lives of the participants.