Does God have a vote? That’s the provocatively flippant title to an analysis on the role of religion in a secular South Africa, published in the liberal Helen Suzman Foundation’s Focus magazine.
To any South African the answer would seem blindingly obvious. Not only does the local version of the deity have a vote, but he is also a card-carrying member of the African National Congress. Or so says President Jacob Zuma.
It also so happens that he — in this patriarchal corner of the universe where no uncertainty about gender or brand of faith is tolerated — is a close gabba of Zuma, to whom he reassuringly confided that the ANC would rule until Jesus returns. Further, to vote for other political parties is assuredly to do the devil’s work and these people will be sorted out chop-chop when he does eventually return to relieve the ANC of the burden of governance.
In similar vein was last week’s extraordinary kerfuffle around Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s angry warning to the ANC that God wasn’t only Zuma’s tjommie. Responding to the government stumbling through calculated visa delays the Dalai Lama’s attendance at Tutu’s 80th birthday bash, Tutu made plain that he had his own, long established, direct line to God.
Quivering with fury and shaking his finger, Tutu shouted: “We will pray, as we prayed for downfall of the apartheid government, we will pray for the downfall of a government that misrepresents us … Watch out ANC government! Watch out!”
The Arch then laid into God’s own pal, much in the fashion of a certain carpenter with the moneylenders. Tutu said he had once listened to a State of the Nation speech by Zuma, in which the “disgraceful” president had paid tribute to everyone, apart from religious leaders, in bringing about democracy.
“This president did not mention a single religious leader. Let the ANC know that they cannot airbrush us out.”
Then the ANC, in turn, implored Tutu not to pray for the ANC’s demise. In any case, argued spokesperson Jackson Mthembu, Tutu “should know deep in his heart that the ANC is doing its best, therefore very few in the religious community will pray for the demise of the ANC”.
Such a heated tug-of-war over God’s political affiliation verges on the bizarre, especially in a secular society. For its is a fact that the 1994 Constitution does, unambiguously, dislodge faith from its previously central place in public life by declaring South Africa to be a secular state with complete freedom and equality of religion.
This was undoubtedly distressing to the 80% of South Africans who identify themselves as Christian, but was inevitable when crafting a constitutional order that would protect minorities. So what the Christians sullenly surrendered, the minority faiths — the Muslim 1.5%, the Hindu 1.3%, the Jewish 0.2%, the 0.7% other faiths, and not to forget the 15% of those with no religion — embraced.
But a 1990s’s assumption of a secularist victory and the gradual fading of “archaic” religion from public and political life have not come to pass, as Professor Ivor Chipkin and Doctor Annie Leatt point out in Focus. South Africa has not only remained deeply religious — nine out 10 believe in the “power of prayer” — but the churches, especially the charismatic, Pentecostal and fundamentalist denominations, have become increasingly influential and politically assertive.
In South Africa, as elsewhere in Africa, the failures of the state in education, health and other services are being addressed by faith-based movements. The flipside is the vigorous championing of social conservatism: an anti-gay, anti-female, traditionalist belief system that is totally at odds with the Constitution.
Few would dispute that South Africa faces a crisis of morality, mired as it is in corruption and violence. But whether the assorted faithful, given their performance over the millennia, are particularly equipped to resolve it, deserves deep scepticism. When it comes to governance, it’s better to put one’s faith in constitutions and judges, despite their fallibilities and imperfections, than clergymen competing to claim divine inspiration.
Unfortunately, South Africa’s newly minted Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng delivers the worst of all possible worlds. He is a lightweight jurist whose only visible claim to distinction is being favoured by Zuma, a fervent adherent of a charismatic Christian faith that believes in making lots of money and, metaphorically speaking, stoning homosexuals.
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