LETTER: A clearer perspective of the ACDP

FM columnist Chris Roper recently described SA’s longest-standing Christian political party, serving in a country where Stats SA says more than 80% of the population professes to be Christian, as a “backward, bigoted party, with little concern for the human rights safeguarded in the constitution”.

Roper’s attack on the ACDP is an attack on those Christians, and possibly people of other faiths who hold all or some of the party’s values.

The concern that motivates my letter originates not only with the desire to give a clearer perspective of the Christian worldview (one that the ACDP happens to align with), but also with how we engage with and relate to one another in the midst of our different worldviews. Doing so respectfully, honourably and honestly can only do good for our democracy.        

First, Roper takes aim at the fact that the ACDP acknowledges God in its constitution. That the ACDP does so shouldn’t be surprising or upsetting for anyone with knowledge and understanding of SA’s Bill of Rights and the country’s demographics. The constitution gives explicit recognition to freedom of religion in SA. And even if ours wasn’t a deeply religious society, citizens, including non-Christians, still have the freedom to vote – or not vote – for a party that acknowledges God in its constitution.

Roper goes on to say “the ACDP believes in … the right to physically abuse your child under the guise of discipline”, but offers no basis for such a statement. Biblical discipline involves more than just corporal punishment. Christians recognise that when corporal punishment is exercised outside of love and without discipleship, it does indeed become a form of abuse.

Considered carefully, the ACDP’s position on corporal punishment is one that speaks to a regulated practice for which parents must be trained. It speaks to justice and order, and to subsidiarity. Subsidiarity, in this instance, involves the right of parents to govern within the home and without undue interference from government.   

When it comes to education, the ACDP supports the right of parents to decide the content of their children’s education, including sexual education. How many parents would be willing to relinquish such a right, especially when they have an understanding of what it would mean to do so?

If the decision on the significant matter of what children must learn does not ultimately rest with parents, then with whom does it rest? If with the state, parents should consider carefully the argument made by Jeanette de Klerk-Luttig, of the office for moral leadership at Stellenbosch University, that education is the government’s biggest failure of the past 25 years.

Giving parents the freedom to influence or speak to the education of their children – to decide how they want their children to be educated, by whom and on what – serves as an important check on the power and the role of the state.   

Roper, too, takes aim at what he calls “the usual four donkeys of the apocalypse”, beginning with “biblical marriage”. But at issue here is the notion of protecting religious and/or cultural practice – protecting how social groups choose to define and practise marriage.

Furthermore, evidence suggests the ACDP’s opposition to abortion, prostitution and pornography is anything but an attempt at “policing … women’s bodies”. The party has taken an explicit stand against GBV, for example, and defends unborn children partly because, if allowed to live, some will be women.

Having read this statement made by the ACDP in 2009, I fail to see how, aside from the porn industry perhaps, there could be any practice that involves the policing of women’s bodies more than the practice of prostitution, legalised or not.

Roper is critical of opposition to pornography. Since pornography helps create and fuel demand for the modern form of slavery that is sex trafficking, what precisely does he mean when he refers to “sexuality and freedom”? 

Finally, there is no contradiction between the ACDP’s opposition to abortion and assisted suicide, and the party’s support for the death penalty as a punishment for capital crimes. Instead, these three policy positions are perfectly aligned with the party’s world view.

This is a world view that values the sanctity of human life. It therefore encourages defence of those who cannot defend themselves and sees the state as responsible for punishing those guilty of capital crimes. On the first score the intention is to protect human life, and on the second, to exercise justice against those who, through their actions, have failed to properly value human life.

Craig Bailie

Craig Bailie has a keen interest in church-state relations and the intersection of Christianity and politics, and recently completed studies in applied exegesis. The views expressed are his own. An extended version of this comment can be found here.

The editor replies: The FM does not endorse the views expressed in this letter

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