H.J.C. Pieterse

Interreligious orientations among South African youth: Expressions of religious identity

In a religiously plural world it is important to ask how people of different faiths and with different religious identities can live justly and harmoniously together. In this article we take as point of departure that there is an inescapable link between a persons religious identity and his or her attitudes towards adherents of other religious. Against the background of a narrative understanding of religious identity, we explore three questions regarding the interreligious orientations of a sample of South African youth: What are the interreligious orientations of this sample of South African youth? How do they evaluate these interreligious orientations? What is the religious location of these interreligious orientations?

Religious beliefs and ethnocentrism: A comparison between the Dutch and white South Africans

In 1990 the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa denounced publicly the ethnocentric system of apartheid as sin. The question is whether this official concession implies that ethnocentrism and apartheid have disappeared in the conciousness of ordinary perople. In order to answer this question a select sample of white South Africans in the Pretoria region was investigated with regard to their attitudes concerning ethnocentrism and apartheid as well as their relation to the Christian faith and the church. For reasons of comparison the results of the research into an a-select sample of the Dutch population, which is known because of its relatively low degree of ethnocentrism, have been added to that.

Immanentistic beliefs in God: an elite response to secularisation

This article reports the results of three empirical surveys on the reaction to modernity of white Dutch Reformed Church members of the higher socio-economic group in the eastern suburbs of Pretoria over the past twenty years. It deals with secularisation, especially rationalisation on the individual level, and has to do with a change of belief in God in the sense that there is some evidence of a fading away of a transcendent view of God. Whereas C J Alant found in the sixties that 90 per cent of this group still professed a manifest supernaturalism as far as the person of God was concerned, I spotted a tendency towards an innerworldly view of God among a specific group of modal members of the white Dutch Reformed Church in the eastern suburbs of Pretoria.

Human Rights: A Channel for Salvation?

In the light of many severe social-economic and health problems many South Africans today experience a situation of helplessness and despair. In the face of these problems we ask whether there is a better solution than leaving the country and starting a new life elsewhere. If Christianity still has anything to say regarding these social-economic problems it must be the belief in salvation - salvation from a situation of helplessness and despair. The belief in salvation should appeal to and inspire people and therefore trigger change-oriented action. But does it happen in practice? To gain insight into this question we did empirical research among two groups of youths: a group of grade 11 students at some private (Catholic and Anglican) schools, and a group of grade 11 students at Afrikaans-medium public schools whom we investigated in a comprehensive survey research project, about their belief in Gods salvation in the past, present and future, as well as in his salvation in both their personal relations and local and global communities. The question is whether this belief has an effect on their human rights culture, which theoretically can be positive or negative, or lead to no effect at all. The conclusion of this research is that their belief in divine salvation has a non-exclusive, differentiated positive effect. The effect is non-exclusive, because other religious factors like an open type of religious socialisation, ritual praxis and church participation, and more especially non-religious factors like gender, home language, political and cultural orientations also have an effect, sometimes even a stronger effect. The effect is differentiated, because only their belief in Gods salvation in their personal life and their own communities has a positive effect on their human rights attitudes, whereas the other modes of Gods salvific activity have a clearly ambivalent (positive/negative) effect or even no effect at all.

Social Location of Transformative Orientations Among South African Youth

In the previous article we asked the question of to what extent a group of 538 Grade 11 students from Anglican and Catholic church-affiliated schools in the Johannesburg/Pretoria region show transformative orientations in the fields of ecology, economics and politics. In this article we deal with the question of what the social location of these transformative orientations is. The more transformatively oriented students are to be found among female, ANCoriented, transethnically directed, postmaterialistic, self-controlling, non-religious, and sometimes Anglican (in each case non-Catholic) students who regard work as something interesting, participate in political communication and consensus building, and see politics and study as a value. Students who favour socio-economic equality more specifically are to be found among the more religiously inspired and motivated students.

The role of Christian church leaders in the peace process in South Africa

The objective of this article is to progress descriptively within the first phase of the research process, namely observation towards a problem statement. On the basis of interviews with Dr LouwAlberts and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, literature, a survey on violence by the HSRC, and press reports we describe the role of Christian church leaders in the peace process which culminated in the National Peace Accord. Our research identified a problem which needs further research: there is a discrepancy between the religious understanding of peace by the church leaders and the religious understanding of peace by the people on grassroots level.

Transformative Orientations among South African Youth

In this article we ask the question of to what extent a group of 538 Grade 11 students from Anglican and Catholic church-affiliated schools in the Johannesburg/Pretoria region show transformative orientations in the fields of ecology, economics and politics, and which population characteristics mark the more transformative students among them. The frame of reference is taken from Habermass colonisation theory and the critical comment on it from the so-called culturalisation perspective. The students appear to be transformatively oriented in the ecological and economic domain, whereas their attitude towards politics is more or less ambivalent. The question of where the more transformatively oriented students may be found, what their characteristic are, and whether religion plays any role in that will be developed in the next article.