Countries
South Africa
Also Known As South African
Africa
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South Africa is overwhelmingly Christian, but the shape of that Christianity is distinctive: alongside the mission churches sit the African Initiated Churches, of which the Zion Christian Church at Moria is the largest, drawing millions to its Easter gathering. Dutch Reformed theology supplied part of the intellectual scaffolding for apartheid, and the same churches later confessed that role, while the South African Council of Churches and figures such as Desmond Tutu made the churches a centre of resistance. African traditional religion, including ancestor consultation through the sangoma and inyanga, is widely practised and often alongside church membership rather than instead of it. Hindu and Muslim communities descend from indentured labourers brought to Natal and from the Cape Malay population deported by the Dutch East India Company.
Facts
Law and State
Establishment StatusThe 1996 constitution guarantees freedom of religion with no established church and permits religious observance at state institutions on an equitable basis. Apostasy or Blasphemy LawSouth Africa retains a common-law offense of blasphemy, defined as unlawfully and intentionally acting in contempt of God, with no repeal statute ever passed. Its constitutional validity under the post-1994 bill of rights, which protects freedom of expression and bars discrimination on religious grounds, has never been tested in court. Convictions have been vanishingly rare for decades; the last recorded one was in 1968, against a student newspaper editor who published a piece asking "Is God Dead?" and received only a caution. 4 Registration or Recognition RegimeNo law obliges a church or religious organization to register or hold any licensing certificate to meet or operate. Registration with the Non-Profit Organisations Directorate under the Nonprofit Organisations Act of 1997 is voluntary, sought mainly for the standing and credibility it offers when dealing with donors and government departments. Tax exemption is separate and also voluntary, applied for through the South African Revenue Service's tax exemption unit as a Public Benefit Organisation; since 2001 an applicant no longer needs NPO registration first, and religious activity is one of the approved categories of public benefit activity. 3 Disputed
Legal StatusThe 1996 constitution guarantees freedom of religion with no established church and permits religious observance at state institutions on an equitable basis; the CRL Rights Commission has proposed regulating religious practitioners, which the churches have resisted. 3 South Africa's 1996 constitution, adopted after the end of apartheid, guarantees freedom of religion with no established church and permits religious observance at state institutions on an equitable basis available to all recognised traditions. The Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, a body created under the same constitution, has separately proposed regulating religious practitioners, following public concern over reported abuses by some independent churches and self-styled prophets, including cases of congregants made to eat grass, drink petrol or undergo other harmful practices presented as acts of faith. Established churches and religious bodies have resisted the proposed regulation, arguing that state licensing of religious leaders risks the state deciding which religious claims are legitimate, a role the constitution's own religious freedom guarantee is meant to keep the state out of. Whether existing criminal law against the specific harmful acts is the more appropriate remedy had not been legislatively resolved as of the report. Demographics
Religious CompositionAround 85 per cent Christian, including a very large African Initiated Church sector, with African traditional religion widely practised alongside church membership, and Hindu and Muslim minorities of roughly 1 to 2 per cent each (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020; Statistics South Africa). 1 Government
CapitalPretoria (administrative capital); Cape Town (legislative capital); Bloemfontein (judicial capital) 2 Government Type Sovereignty StatusSovereign UN member state 2 Established Year31 May 1910 (Union of South Africa formed from four British colonies: Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange Free State); 22 August 1934 (Status of the Union Act); 31 May 1961 (republic declared); 27 April 1994 (majority rule) Geography
LatitudeApproximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement. LongitudeApproximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement. Location
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Religion and History in South Africa
South African Christianity arrived with the Dutch East India Company in 1652 and was for a long time an instrument of settlement, but the more interesting story is what Africans did with it. Mission Christianity produced a literate elite that founded the African National Congress in 1912, and it also produced its own opposite: from the 1880s Ethiopian churches broke away to be led by Africans, and from the 1910s Zionist churches, tracing to a healing movement from Zion City in Illinois, combined Christian practice with prophecy, healing, white robes and river baptism in a form that spoke directly to African religious expectations.
The African Initiated Churches that resulted are now the largest religious formation in the country, and the Zion Christian Church gathering at Moria in Limpopo each Easter is among the biggest annual assemblies in Africa. Beneath and within all of this, the ancestors continue to matter: consultation through a sangoma or treatment by an inyanga is routine and is not generally understood by those who practise it as an alternative to church. Islam came in two streams, with people exiled by the Dutch from the East Indies to the Cape, among them Sheikh Yusuf of Macassar, and with later Indian migration; Hinduism arrived with indentured labourers in Natal from 1860.
The Churches Under Apartheid and the Confession That Followed
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Around 85 per cent of the population, including a very large African Initiated Church sector of which the Zion Christian Church is the largest.
The /Xam material recorded by Bleek and Lloyd comes from the northern Cape.
Its own cited description places Xhosa tradition in South Africa.
Originated Here
San, Cultures South Africa holds San communities and the historic /Xam homeland of the southern and eastern Cape.
Spread Events Here
Anchored to South Africa as the church under discipline, though the World Alliance's own action was taken internationally.
Sources
1. Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020
2. The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency)
3. International Religious Freedom Report
United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom, US Department of State, 2023View the Source 4. End Blasphemy Laws Project: South Africa Country Page
End Blasphemy Laws Coalition (Humanists International and partner organizations)View the Source The Church Struggle in South Africa
John W. de Gruchy (25th anniversary edition with Steve de Gruchy), Fortress Press (25th anniversary edition; originally Eerdmans, 1979), 2005View the Source The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005Originated Here: XhosaView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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