ABSTRACT
This chapter follows the church as it navigated the growing Afrikaner nationalist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. New Afrikaner nationalist organisations, led by young nationalists such as Nico Diederichs and Piet Meyers, brought with them new ideas on how the movement should be forged, but, as this chapter will show, all were united by anticommunism. The DRC remained the central moral organisation within Afrikanerdom. This chapter demonstrates how individual nationalist ambitions, specifically that of Diederichs, coincided with the DRC’s moral anticommunism, leading to the establishment of Antikom, the DRC’s central anticommunist vehicle, in 1946. The church, this chapter argues, thus became a site for Afrikaner anticommunist unity. This coincided with the National Party’s rise to power in 1948 and the implementation of the apartheid policy. Anticommunism became inseparable from apartheid. Furthermore, this chapter explains how the DRC and its anticommunist alliance provided moral support for the new Afrikaner regime’s banning of communism in 1950, arguing that this ushered in an era where the church acted a moral legitimiser of the state’s suppression of growing black dissent. In the 1950s, the DRC, however, became idle in its anticommunist activities following the state’s intervention to combat the ‘threat’ of overt communism.
