Servants of Power

Servants of Power is a major new study of the role of the 'English' Churches in the development of repressive and segregationist social structures in South Africa. James Cochrane looks particularly at the Anglican and Methodist churches from the turn of the century until the 1930s, employing the tools of historical materialism with a framework of committed Christian values. Dr. Cochrane analyses a wealth of contemporary primary material to show conclusively how these churches — perhaps inevitably — conformed to the norms of the dominant capitalist and racist ethos of the periods under review. In this sense they became not so much the servants of God as the servants of the temporal and secular power. This is both an original and a demanding and challenging book, the first serious revisionist account of South African church history.