TRISTEN TAYLOR: Woe to the ANC

Paul the Apostle started an intellectual revolution in AD48 that would obliterate the gestalt of his time and replace it with a conception of humanity that remains very much part of our present.

The ancient world was brutal. Entire cities were routinely put to the sword, the survivors sold into slavery. The gods treated people as playthings in their internecine battles, the strong treated the weak with similar callousness, and the Homeric ethic of glory in war reigned.

Of course, this is a bit of an oversimplification and there were exceptions. The fourth century BCE monotheistic Greek philosopher Alcidamas said “God has left all men free; nature has made no man a slave.” But his was a rare and decidedly odd viewpoint in a world where power was almost always concentrated in some king or emperor and there was no equality before the law. 

Then came along a Jewish itinerant preaching that God had not chosen just one people but God had chosen all. Jesus Christ’s message contained radical statements about the dignity of the last, encapsulated in “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).

Yet it was Paul who built the early church. Without him, Christianity would probably have remained an obscure sect, and he defined the religion’s essence in just two sentences. The first sums up the Christian moral code with admirable simplicity. In a letter to the Galatians (5:14) he stated that “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’”

The second overturns the ancient notion of the essential inequality of human beings. He wrote that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

These messages had such appeal that they drove the spread of this new religion throughout the Roman Empire, especially via women. A Roman governor, Pliny the Younger, sent a letter to the emperor Trajan in 112 describing Christianity’s expansion: “For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms. But it seems possible to check and cure it.”

Pliny and Trajan’s efforts were in vain. The Catholic Church became the Roman Empire’s official church in 380. The church’s canon law is the world’s oldest existing legal system and is based on the notion of natural law, which comes from the inherent qualities that human beings possess simply because they are human.

St Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, synthesised Aristotle’s philosophy with scripture. For Aquinas, all people possessed the same inherent virtue of rationality and, given this was provide by nature and thus from God, natural law applies to all. Human law, the laws that we write to order society, are derived from natural law. As such, human laws cannot be just if they contradict it.

In his book Dominion, historian Tom Holland states that Christian philosophers and theologians predating Aquinas had by 1200 come up with the principle that “the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was — in a formulation increasingly deployed by cannon lawyers — a human ‘right’.”

Fast forward 800 years. Christianity’s principles of equality and human rights are deeply embedded in the foundations of SA’s secular legal code. The constitution’s expression of fundamental human rights is universal. They apply to every person on the planet. Everyone except, it appears, to Zimbabweans.

The ANC never seems to tire of invoking the Lord’s name. Back when he was the party’s secretary-general Gwede Mantashe said: “According to our belief, we were anointed by God to lead the country from oppression to freedom.” If that wasn’t clear enough, he then declared that there is “a directive given to us by God that this country should be led by the ANC”.

Not to be outdone, the late Jessie Duarte said in 2016: “Let us not just leave Athlone for the DA and leave the people to be confused by the devil. (They) must understand the devil wears blue and the good people wear yellow.”

Of course, ANC leaders are free to declare that the party is the right hand of God since they have both freedom of speech and religion, which are products of the Reformation. On the matter of liberty, Martin Luther said: “I want to believe freely and to be slave to the authority of no-one. I will confidently confess what appears to me to be true, whether it has been asserted by a Catholic or a heretic.”

A few months from now the ANC will revoke the special residency permits of 600,000 Zimbabweans and then, presumably, deport all of those unable to miraculously secure some other visa. Send them back to a land of violent political repression and hunger. Why? For no other reason than Zimbabweans aren’t South Africans.

Perhaps the ANC is cleverer than it appears. Maybe somewhere deep within it there is a theological genius who can explain how abandoning those who live among us to Zanu-PF’s tender mercies is loving thy neighbour. How impoverishing the poor is actually providing them with the necessities of life. How revoking those permits is in accordance with natural law.

We are owed explanations. After all, Sisi Ntombela, the former deputy president of the ANC Women’s League, did once say of the party: “This organisation is God’s. He is with us and He will always be with us.” But until such hitherto unknown theological justifications are made the only reasonable conclusion is that the ANC has sacrificed its Christianity on the altar of xenophobia.

With a national election looming, the ANC’s Christian leaders are surely figuring out how best to slouch their way off to various churches. But they might have more important matters than electioneering to consider. After allowing 600,000 fellow human beings to live in peace, they might want to fall on their knees and repent.

Dr Taylor, a freelance journalist and photographer, is a research fellow in environmental ethics at Stellenbosch University.