The Dutch Reformed Church supplied theological justification for apartheid, arguing from scripture for the separateness of peoples, and it split its own membership by race into daughter churches for Black, Coloured and Indian congregations. That is the fact from which everything else follows. In 1982 the Coloured daughter church, the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, declared a status confessionis, holding that apartheid was not a political question on which Christians might differ but a heresy, and adopted the Belhar Confession, which states that unity, reconciliation and justice are matters of faith. Belhar remains the most significant confessional document produced in Africa and its acceptance by the white Dutch Reformed Church has never been completed.
Other churches acted earlier or more loudly: the South African Council of Churches under Desmond Tutu and Beyers Naude, the Catholic bishops, and the 1985 Kairos Document, which distinguished state theology, church theology and prophetic theology and rejected the first two. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held faith community hearings in 1997, the churches appeared as perpetrators, bystanders and victims at once. Tutu chaired that commission, and the framework of confession, restitution and forgiveness it worked within was recognisably a theological one applied to a legal task, which is both why it reached what a court could not and why its critics say it substituted absolution for justice.