Apartheid originated as a church self-governance doctrine generalized across the whole polity

Evidence

Originally referring to the self-governance and self-determination of the separate – or separately conceived – churches that were supposed to minister to these differentiated national communities, the doctrine of apartheid quickly came to be generalized across the entire polity. The separateness of a theological community committed to developing the authenticity of “one’s own” came to ground the political theology of separate development. The spirit of self-determining national differentiation fueled the power of political segregation ordered by and in the overriding interests of whites. The pernicious legal order and political practices identified as apartheid were in the first instance anchored in this belief structure, the set of convictions (to use Thomas Blom Hansen’s useful term), I am marking by its political theology. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1515

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘political theology’ as the belief structure anchoring apartheid’s legal order.
• XREF: Connects to Goldberg’s broader argument about racial neoliberalism and to Weber’s work on Protestant ethics and political orders. — connects to: Apartheid’s ideology rested on God-ordained separate-but-equal racial development — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1507; Apartheid’s segregation doctrine was generalized from church self-governance to the whole polity. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1515; Academic intellectuals guided the theological framework that formalized apartheid — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1542 (+1 more)