Tristan Borer, Challenging the State: Churches as Political Actors in South Africa, 1980-1994 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998); William Johnson Everett, Religion, Federalism, and the Quest for Public Life: Cases from Germany, India, and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Reviewed by Stephen W. Martin

University of Cape Town
originally published in Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 105 (Nov. 1999)

Challenging the State

Many authors, including H. Richard Niebuhr in his pioneering study The Social Sources of Denominationalism, identify two traditions running through Christianity: a church of the people, particularly of the socially and economically marginalised, and an institutional church, often though not always in collusion with power. Both reflect the social forces within a given context, whether racism, capitalism, nationalism or other forces. Each has located itself differently, in different contexts, with reference to the state. The question of whether either was a genuine agent in particular contexts-and if so, how-remains a debatable one.

Two Christianities, dominant and alternative, have been very much in evidence historically in South Africa. But "for a brief moment" in the late 1980s, as Tristen Borer argues in her engaging study, Challenging the state: Churches as political actors in South Africa, 1980-1994, "the institutional church was the church of resistance" (166). During this brief moment, the possibility of a church reflecting the aspirations of the majority of South Africans was realised and the dissonance between institutional church and people's church was suspended. But the moment soon faded in the aftermath of the changes after late-1989 and early 1990. How this came about is traced through a study of the transformation of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference (SACBC) between 1980 and 1994 into "political actors".

The issue defining politicisation and confrontation with the state for Borer is the question of legitimacy. And so key to her definition of "political actor" is pronouncement on the legitimacy of the South African state. Does this imply that churches were not political actors as long as they saw the state as reformable? While Borer's analysis admits of "degrees of politicisation", making the question of legitimacy so central may be problematic. Would it preclude the Dutch Reformed Churches and other religious institutions that functioned to legitimise the state from being political actors? Or is "political actor" a term only of opposition to the state? And is "political action" (protests, calls for sanctions, civil disobedience) not defined in a way that excludes the praxis of African initiated churches, many of whom found other ways (for instance, through different appropriations and uses of symbolic resources) to be politically engaged? It is, however, the legitimacy question which invoked the wrath of the state and therefore drove the "spiral of engagement" (see below) between churches and the state forward. This Borer chronicles well.

How did the SACC and SACBC function in this context? After all, neither are strictly "churches", although Borer speaks of them clearly in "church" or "ecclesiological" terms (e.g. p. 167). They do have a certain politico-ecclesial identity. Indeed the development and transformation of this identity forms the main outline of the study. This is given some warrant by the fact that the SACC, particularly after the 1982 Eloff Commission, saw itself as more than an umbrella organisation for churches, but as a church itself. Many disaffected and disillusioned Christians-disillusioned not by Christianity but by their churches-found a Christian identity within the SACC. While not a church in the same sense as, for instance the CPSA or the Reformed Presbyterian Church, it assumed the identity of a church of the people, representing an alternative Christianity within institutional churches.

The SACBC, as the decision-making body within the Catholic church, was closer to being a church than the SACC. Hence while its political activity was slow and often lagging behind the SACC, it was able to implement its policies better than the Council, which always had an ambiguous relation with its member churches. The SACBC, however, reacted negatively to the idea of a people's church.

One of the strengths of Borer's study is its attending to what she terms "the role of ideas", which she identifies (perhaps unfortunately) with "the religious context". Forgetting for a moment that religion must be more than "ideas", (and politics more than "practices"), this dimension of her study is careful to attend to the development within contextual theology. Borer presents an important catalogue of the development of contextual theology and its impact from the black consciousness movement to the debates around the position of the churches as South Africa entered its new dispensation. She attends especially to the impact of contextual theology on the churches through the SACC and SACBC. This historical work is alone worth the price of the book.

In addition to what she terms the "political" and "religious" contexts, there is a third side to Borer's portrait: the institutional context. Specifically, the way the SACC and SACBC were organised constrained their public actions and the actions of their members. She is careful to point out that while the SACBC was consistently more cautious than the SACC, the Catholic Church in South Africa produced figures of the same quality and conviction as Protestantism, figures such as Denis Hurley, Smangaliso Mkhatshwa and Buti Tlhagale. Yet the particular way the SACBC was structured within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church precluded their taking a central role, unlike the leadership of the SACC. The same ecclesiological organisation, however, also allowed decisions to be implemented more effectively. This is an important point, to which we return below.

Political, religious and institutional contexts interacted within what Borer terms "a spiral of engagement". As state repression increased generally-and specifically targeted church groups-so the level of politicisation intensified. As the spiral loosened in the early 1990s (and the "brief moment" spoken of above faded), confrontation gave way to mediation and negotiation. Borer's narrative ends with questions about the future role of faith communities in the South Africa so many of their members struggled for. What is to be the shape of churches in the new society? Will they remain "political actors"? In what way, if at all, will they engage the state?

Religion, Federalism, and the Struggle for Public Life

Churches were also "political actors" in Eastern Europe, at about the same time their activities climaxed in South Africa, though the question of legitimacy there was much more delicate. The term favoured by William Johnson Everett in his study, Religion, federalism, and the struggle for public life, in describing the public activity of churches is "publicity". Publicity is the rendering of a claim or claims open to rational debate, where the terms of debate are set not by historical or ethnic factors, but by a mutually agreed and broadly legitimated social covenant. This covenant is holistic, embracing God, the people and the land.

Everett's study looks at three contexts: Germany, India and the United States, in identifying the dynamics of religion and federal republicanism in the contemporary world. In so doing, he identifies a praxis that goes beyond the idea of "challenging the state" to engaging the public (or publics) more broadly. Everett's study complements that of Borer by dealing with the ecclesiological nuances of churches as social actors, and to some extent escapes from the Troeltschean strait jacket of "church-sect" categorisations. He also gets away from the idea of "people's church" vs. "institutional church" implicit in Borer's analysis, which may be descriptively accurate, but is unhelpful in formulating a new, reconstructive understanding of the churches' role post-1994.

Introducing a typology of "institutional", "communal" and "associational" ecclesiologies, Everett proceeds to explore the interaction of these types in the struggle for "covenantal publicity" (initiating a forum for debate). The norm that Everett holds the three types to is one of for ever widening publics in differentiated institutions. While he appreciates strengths and weaknesses in all three types, for Everett it is the associational that functions best in legitimising covenantal publicity. Here the broadest and most inclusive kind of publicity can be engendered, as the associational type encourages a loyalty that transcends racial, gender and class distinctions.

Communal ecclesiologies narrow loyalty down to the tribe or the ethnic group, while institutional ecclesiologies-which recall the days when baptism was a sign of citizenship as well as church membership-are insufficiently differentiated from the state. Everett's study, oriented as it is towards the project of developing a federal republican polity, and ecclesiologies that support it, may have limitations in South Africa-unless of course one accepts (as I think Everett does) that federal republicanism is a kind of meta-norm for all societies. He puts his case well, and his studies illuminate three very different contexts.

Nevertheless, the way associational ecclesiologies are held forth will also need careful thought in South Africa. Within the SACBC, for instance, as Borer points out, a strictly heirarchical polity was able to succeed in implementing policy better than the more voluntaristic membership of the SACC. Moreover, despite their more communal orientation, African Initiated Churches have developed a praxis that was as recent work by Robin Petersen has shown, profoundly public and empowering of activity in other spheres. Why not, then, affirm a plurality of institutional types (rather than rank them on an evolving scale of promoting greater or lesser publicity)? Both Borer and Everett are sensitive to the fact that religion is not simply a matter of cultural values, but of institutional forms. And these forms have significance.

While they are an improvement on Troeltsch, we wonder whether Everett's distinctions are not too much at home in modernity and its setting "reason" and freedom over against "nature" and determination. Is it really a matter of deciding to form a new community on the basis of blood ties versus careful argumentation? Or is it rather to find new ways of negotiating old boundaries-including those of different "rationalities"? Are not reason, ethnicity, etc. crossings within human persons and communities which must each be honoured? They are part of the fabric of South Africa post-apartheid. No longer sources of division, the challenge is to make them resources for enrichment.

Federalism also has dissonant rings in South Africa amongst progressive peoples, being a term appropriated by the National Party and the IFP in the negotiations of the early 1990s. It may well be, however, that the association of federalism with certain conservative politics in South Africa is unfair and Everett's advocacy must be taken more seriously. At any rate, his concept of "publicity", if unchained from the ambiguous legacy of the enlightenment, provides an important term for the South African debate that covers the transformation of the churches into "political actors" (in Borer's terms) in the struggle years, but also stretches to their normative activities and role in a new society.

Both Everett and Borer suggest resources for addressing the impasse of churches after their moment of triumph in 1988-89. Borer's study will be of interest to students of South African society and religion during the 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, it is a seminal study of two important institutions and, in general, of the dynamics of politicisation in church-state confrontations. Everett's study captures in very different contexts the shape of Christianity as it interacts with the quest for covenantal publicity-the very thing the SACC and SACBC were struggling for in the 1980s in South Africa. Though written within different disciplines and focussing on different situations, they complement each other well and hold forth the promise of ecclesiology that transforms rather than reflects the social forces and divisions of its context, that unites institutional church and prophetic church.