The Sins of Our Ancestors: Conservative Evangelical Christianity and Cosmological Responses to Racial Division in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This dissertation analyzes the efforts of South African conservative evangelical Christians to build multiracial congregations in the wake of apartheid histories of racial violence, division, and inequality. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted predominantly in Johannesburg, I trace their efforts to address the ongoing salience of race in everyday life through a theologically and socially conservative lens. I ask what semiotic and discursive techniques they employ—some of which emerge from Southern African history, while others stem from a transnational history of conservative Christianity—to respond to the country’s racial, cultural, and socioeconomic divides. The dissertation is divided into two parts, the first of which begins with the anxieties conservative evangelicals exhibit toward “religious others” like Pentecostalism and African traditional religion that nonetheless overlap uncomfortably with some of their own practices. They reproduce historical Euro-American fears of ecstatic forms of religion yet reshape these concerns to echo prevailing secular discourse over materialist excesses. Likewise, they reframe Christianity as a salvific force against earlier colonial and apartheid injustice, as well as post-apartheid poverty and inequality. Associated with notions of racial difference is “culture,” which takes on ambiguous meanings for evangelicals, who support the celebration of cultural individuality, provided it remains within the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy.
The second part focuses on three topics that have fostered global controversy among conservative Christians: shifting gender and sexuality norms, the creation vs. evolution debate, and the intersection of religion and secular political authority. I consider each theme from a South African perspective, first examining how conservatives craft an opposition to progressive attempts to spread LGBTQ acceptance, while distancing themselves from more extreme voices within the evangelical world. Next, I turn to their reframing of debates over human origins as a means to associate biological evolution with apartheid-era racism. Finally, I suggest that pervasive discourse around discipline emerges as part of a cosmological model for legitimate authority, which structures their ambiguous stances toward the state and perceived social disorder. These ethnographic analyses together reveal multiple dimensions of how a conservative brand of Christianity positions South Africans to aspire to a new multiracial future.