Afrikaner Calvinism
[1] A number of modern studies have argued that Boers gathered for the Great Trek inspired by this concept, and they used it to legitimise their subordination of other South African ethnic groups.
[2] Dissenting scholars have asserted that Calvinism did not play a significant role in Afrikaner society until after they suffered the trauma of the Second Boer War.
[3] White settlement in South Africa is traced to the 1652 arrival of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope, seeking to establish a supply and refreshment station for its ships and crews bound to and from Indonesia.
[4][5] Among their Afrikaner descendants, individual religious communities such as the Doppers became known for establishing their own doctrine in rifts with the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church).
There was also a movement called the Reveil (Awakening), supported by those who did not separate from the State Church, like Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, whose writings became known in South Africa.
The timing of this influence was significant, coming on the crest of a wave of evangelical revival, the Reveil in the Dutch Reformed Church, which had been led in South Africa by the Scottish preacher, Andrew Murray.
Dirk Postma came from Zwolle to the South African Republic in 1858, and was accepted as a minister of the Hervormde Kerk, but on learning that he and his congregation could be required to sing hymns (rather than the Psalms only), he and the Doppers, numbering about 300 adults, among whom was the South African Republic's President Paul Kruger, broke away from the state church to form the Gereformeerde Kerk in Rustenburg in February 1859.
[7] The separatism of the Doppers, expressed in the severity of their doctrine, the austere puritanism of their worship, and even in their distinctive dress and speech, set them in stark contrast to European influence.
Nevertheless, the Doppers were symbolic of resistance to all things English in South Africa, and despite their small size and distinctiveness they were culturally sophisticated and disproportionately influential during and after the Great Trek.
Paul Kruger, first president of the South African Republic upon its reacquired independence after the brief British annexation, adopted the Calvinistic principles in its political form, and formulated a cultural mandate based on the Voortrekkers' conviction that they had a special calling from God, not unlike the people of Israel in the Bible.
The Doppers waged an intellectual war against the perceived influx of uitlander culture which was flooding into the Transvaal through the mass settlements of foreign immigrants lured by gold and diamonds.
After the four South African colonies united politically into the Union of South Africa and relinquished control to democratic elections, a small, anonymous group of young intellectuals called the Afrikaner Broederbond, formed in the years following the Second Anglo-Boer War to discuss strategies for addressing the overwhelming social problem of poor whites and other Afrikaner interests.
By the account of Irving Hexham, according to Klaus Venter and Hendrick Stoker who were themselves disgruntled members of the secret organisation, in 1927 the Broederbond moved to Potchefstroom University, asking that the school would take over leadership of the then-struggling group.
The Broederbond believed, with deep-rooted conviction, that what their past had provided them through the interpretation of faith was a model of anti-imperialism, self-discipline and responsibility, which in the end would preserve justice for all – blacks, coloured, and whites – against Communist deceit.
[citation needed] After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, under enormous international pressure, the Broederbond began a slow and quiet re-examination of their policy proposals.
The conviction had finally become established, although not universally that, if the Afrikaner people, language and religion were to survive, they must take the initiative to emerge from the laager, and invite South Africa in.
Liberation theology, which attempts to reconcile Christianity with the Marxist doctrine of class struggle, has gained a foothold in some quarters, and appears to have advocates on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum.
[citation needed] American-style evangelicalism and Arminianism also appear to have made inroads, which with its more individualistic emphasis has less potential for a full-scale civil religion.
Some scholars are attempting to draw lines of distinction between Calvinism per se, the history of the Afrikaners, and the civil religion of the apartheid regime in particular.
