During the constitutional negotiations some Christian groups mobilised to have God recognised as sovereign authority over the polity, a demand that presupposed God's willed intervention in history and a human obligation to act in ways that could guarantee God's blessing.

This was coupled with a widespread belief that an acknowledgement of God in the preamble to the Constitution would lead to the assertion of ‘biblical principles’ in social morality and public life. Linked with this was the demand that biblical principles, or at least ‘public morality’, should be included in the Constitution's interpretation clause, providing a Christian or moral majoritarian interpretation of rights that would preclude the legalisation of termination of pregnancy, gay rights and the availability of pornography.

CHRISTIAN FOUNDATIONS?

The foundational principles of apartheid were explicitly religious in at least two senses. The first was a political theology of race that precluded the possibility of representation as a basis of political power and legitimacy, except where this representation was limited to whites. Political power, therefore, needed a constitutive outside or transcendental authorisation. The political theology of apartheid acknowledged a God that differentiated between the country's inhabitants and sanctioned that difference.

The second foundation was a Calvinist sociosexual morality which, like everything else under apartheid, was shot through with race (Theron, 2008). Closely linked with social panic about the purity of Afrikaner women, apartheid policy was extremely concerned about sexual morality and what it construed as miscegenation (Van der Westhuizen, 2007). In its racial incarnation this led to the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (No. 55 of 1949) and the Immorality Act (No. 21 of 1950), both of which sought to preclude intimacy, love and the creation of families across racial lines.