Afrikaner Calvinism () is a cultural and religious development among Afrikaners that combined elements of seventeenth-century Calvinist doctrine with a "chosen people" ideology based in the Bible. It had origins in ideas espoused in the Old Testament of the Jews as the chosen people.
A number of modern studies have argued that Boers gathered for the Great Trek inspired by this concept, and they used it to legitimise their subordination of other South African ethnic groups. It is thought to have contributed the religious basis for modern Afrikaner nationalism. Dissenting scholars have asserted that Calvinism did not play a significant role in Afrikaner society until after they suffered the trauma of the Second Boer War. Early settlers dwelt in isolated frontier conditions and lived much closer to pseudo-Christian animist beliefs than organised religion.
Background
White settlement in South Africa is traced to the 1652 arrival of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope, seeking to establish a supply and refreshment station for its ships and crews bound to and from Indonesia. From its headquarters in Amsterdam, the Company recruited crew and equipped voyages for the Orient. Most of its Dutch employees were Protestant Calvinists, who were the majority of the population in the region, supplemented by other Protestants: Lutheran Germans, Scandinavians, and numerous French Huguenot refugees who had fled religious persecution in France. Among their Afrikaner descendants, individual religious communities such as the Doppers became known for establishing their own doctrine in rifts with the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church). By the late nineteenth century, the separatist churches of Gereformeerde Kerk had developed in South Africa.
Settlement period
The Dutch settlement of the Cape of Good Hope was the first colonial success in South Africa. The company established strict rules for trade between the settlement and the native population. Only a Company administrator could authorize trade or Christian missionary ventures among the Africans. Settlers were forbidden from stealing or shooting cattle, which were a form of wealth and sustainability for the Africans. The early Europeans were shocked by the differences in the customs, clothing and appearance of the Africans. False rumours that the natives were cannibals reinforced the motive to avoid unnecessary contact. The Cape was a walled garden, with Africa on the outside and Europe within. This strict order minimised conflicts with the Africans during the early settlement period.
But many settlers believed they had arrived with a missionary motive, which included spreading the superiority of European culture. These factors contributed to the settler practice of indenturing the native Khoisan population to serve as workers and servants. Within that master/servant relationship, the Europeans would teach the Bible to them in hope that the message would filter back through the servant's family (along with reports of the superiority of the European way of life) and thus bring about conversion.
The farmers who lived outside the physical walls of the towns had a different arrangement with natives than did the townspeople. To them, occupation meant ownership, and ownership implied the right to protect their property. As they settled into the seemingly unoccupied territories surrounding the Cape, they enforced their assumptions about ownership and its rights against the wandering hunters or herding tribes who crossed the Fish River into farm territories. The settlers considered the farms to be an extension beyond the towns of the separation between the white and the black occupants of the land.
Separation and rules of exchange were opposed very early in the Afrikaner mind to invasion and conquest. And, this anti-imperialism extended also to the theory of missionary obligation that developed within the Dutch Reformed Church: the Kingdom of God will grow within the sphere of influence assigned to the church by divine providence, as children are taught the Gospel by their parents and family. If God deems it fitting for the Gospel to be received by the natives, and taught to their children, then this is his glory. Toward that end, Christians have a defining role given them from God, a calling, or covenantal responsibility as God's people, to keep themselves pure in the faith and just in their dealings with the heathen, and to be absolutely unyielding in their protection of what has been legitimately claimed in the name of the Triune God.