A cry from the ruins of conscience: Need for an interfaith summit to reassert moral leadership

A searing interfaith appeal challenging South Africa’s religious and moral leaders to confront injustice, reclaim prophetic courage and stand with the oppressed.

By WILLIAM SOLOMON STEENKAMP

Dear prophetic voices, clergy and custodians of moral conscience in our nation

Peace be upon you. Shalom. Salaam. Thula sizwe. Namaste.

As South Africa reached the end of another socially violent, economically destructive and morally exhausting year, the nation stands at the edge of ethical collapse. Despite three decades of constitutional democracy, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, marked by extreme income disparities, structural unemployment, land dispossession, gender-based violence and the routine devaluation of Black life (World Bank, 2023; Statistics South Africa, 2024; Piketty, 2020).

As a brand-new year breaks upon us, loaded with sacred possibility and moral consequence, I come before your conscience without titles, platforms or pretence.

I do not write as an academic scholar or socioeconomic transformation mobiliser observing society from a safe distance, nor as a quasi-politician trading in political leverage or cheap media exposure, and certainly not as a democratic socialist activist craving public sensation or narcissistic attention.

I write as a simple, deeply spiritual Christian, standing amid the wreckage of a nation I love, with a devotion that wounds me, carrying a grief so deep it eludes description. I speak with no intention to impress, persuade or posture, because prophetic silence has become unbearable and faith, if it is still faith at all, demands to be spoken from the broken ground where our people stand deserted and traumatised.

I write as a loyal South African servant sculptured by an unfinished liberation struggle, one who has watched hope and dreams deferred again and again until, as scripture warns, the heart itself grows sick, leaving the soul exhausted, emotionally paralysed and spiritually depleted.

To hold steadfastly and unconditionally to faith in God amid our chronic socioeconomic calamity is among the most excruciating ordeals borne by survivors of colonial and apartheid violence, compounded by betrayal that has become habitual, normalised, almost expected.

I write as a survivor of systemic oppression and generational trauma, refusing entitlement, bitterness, wounded pride or the seduction of vengeance, and speaking instead with a stripped, trembling honesty embedded in historical annihilation and moral survival.

I write to you as a Black descendant and survivor of my ancestors’ own holocaust and genocide as an indigenous people, approaching your cloth and collar from within a shared moral and spiritual inheritance. I speak as one formed by humility and fallibility, bound in covenantal relation and joined in communion with the moral wisdom that flows through many faith traditions, each bearing witness to truth, accountability and the sacred dignity of human life.

Yet I am haunted, relentlessly and painfully, by a single gut-wrenching question that refuses to release me, that burns in prayer and silence alike:
How did we, as people of faith, allow this to happen while still daring to call ourselves faithful?

South Africa carries pain in muscle and memory, learned in childhood, where vigilance became second nature and hunger waited patiently until it could no longer, erupting in substance abuse or despair to silence it. Our endurance of fear is mistaken for consent. Time has proven that our pain is not healing, because the nation’s pain piles itself upon unresolved histories while pressing grief into daily life. Loss is counted but never repaired, all the while suffering takes forms that leave nothing truly changed. Systems have learned how to delay without appearing cruel, naming harm while letting it continue. So much so that justice is promised but never delivered.

Faith is lived here in exhaustion, prayed through tears that return each night and rise again at dawn, practised without witness as streets absorb blood, children are buried before laughter ripens, women move through public space with alertness written into the body, and kitchens become sites where scarcity waits with familiarity. Faithfulness to church reputation outweighed faithfulness to wounds.

أنا منكم ومعكم — ana minkum wa ma‘akum
Kgosi ke kgosi ka batho (Sesotho)
A leader is a leader through the people.

The separate parishes (divided by apartheid) are now brought together under the banner of integration and unity, yet I see the same pattern. Unification has too often been pursued for appearances, for optics, for the pacification of those who caused the harm, for the feeding of the pastoral ego and never, not once, for justice. You have preserved the church’s image while leaving us, those who bear the heaviest burdens of history, alone with our grief. You have avoided disruption and discomfort at the cost of moral courage.

We, who have survived the worst of history, experience this as distance, absence, aloofness, sacred abdication, spiritual abandonment and betrayal, with no guidance or care from you. In shielding the church’s reputation, you have shielded it from reckoning.

That question, the one our ancestors carried and the one we carry now, has not disappeared. It has grown heavier in your silence and today it rises again:
What have we done to deserve this? How long, O Lord?

This cry comes from people who still believe, but no longer feel held. What confronts us is false shepherding, rarely born of malice, more often of fear and accommodation. When faith is severed from justice, it loses its power to heal. It numbs. It anaesthetises. It teaches wounded people to endure what God never ordained, to spiritualise suffering that should have been confronted, and to accept injustice cloaked in sacred language.

The state, now a Faustian coalition of political expediency and elite self-preservation, drifts further from the communities it claims to serve.

We do not ask for perfection from clergy, only not to be left alone in our suffering. We ask for shepherds who will stand with us, speak with us, and place their comfort and reputation at risk for the sake of human dignity.

أنا منكم، وأقف معكم
Ana minkum, wa aqifu ma‘akum
I am from you, and I stand with you.

The state, now a Faustian coalition of political expediency and elite self-preservation, drifts further from the communities it claims to serve. It betrays the emancipatory promise of liberation while entrenching privilege, corruption and impunity.

What was once a moral project has degenerated into a technocratic state presiding over social ruin, inequality and criminal capture.

In 2026, it is no longer intellectually honest, theologically faithful, morally permissible or even ethically acceptable to treat South Africa’s crisis as normal.

We enter this new year under indictment. South Africa stands exposed before history, conscience and God. We face existential threats to our sovereignty and social cohesion, as denial has become our national liturgy. Scripture across traditions refuses our evasions. ‘Justice, justice you shall pursue,’ commands the Torah (Deuteronomy 16:20). The Qur’an is uncompromising: ‘O you who believe, stand firm in justice, witnesses for God, even against yourselves or those closest to you’ (Qur’an 4:135).

Justice postponed is justice denied, and forgiveness demanded without repentance is tyranny disguised as peace.

Hope that avoids truth is not hope but moral cowardice. The prophets thunder against it: ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil’ (Isaiah 5:20).

The Bhagavad Gita names our moment with surgical clarity: ‘When righteousness declines and injustice prevails, I manifest Myself’ (Gita 4:7), not to comfort the powerful, but to restore dharma through disruption. South Africa does not only require reform, policy adjustment or managerial fixes; it requires judgment before renewal. ‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24), or the nation will continue to rot beneath the language of progress.

What is demanded in the new year is the painful birth of a new nation, designed through truth-telling, accountability, restitution and the restoration of shared human dignity. Any spirituality that evades these reckonings stands condemned by its own scriptures. The Qur’an warns against performative piety: ‘Do you command righteousness of others while forgetting yourselves?’ (Qur’an 2:44).

The prophets name it without mercy: ‘They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious, saying “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace’ (Jeremiah 6:14). Such escapist spirituality does not heal the nation but instead anaesthetises it while injustice tightens its grip.

Contemporary South African religious leadership has, with notable exceptions, retreated into ritualism, symbolic reconciliation and depoliticised prayer.

Liberation theology has long insisted that faith divorced from social justice is a distortion of religion itself (Gutiérrez, 1973; Cone, 1997). Sacred texts across traditions reject passive spirituality and affirm moral intervention in the face of oppression:

‘Faith without works is dead’ (James 2:17).
‘Whoever among you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand’ (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, 49).
‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (Deuteronomy 16:20).
‘Action is superior to inaction’ (Bhagavad Gita 3:8).

Contemporary South African religious leadership has, with notable exceptions, retreated into ritualism, symbolic reconciliation and depoliticised prayer.

Political theology warns that such neutrality is never neutral: it functions to stabilise unjust power relations (Metz, 2007; Boesak, 2017). Forgiveness without repentance, reconciliation without restitution, and prayer without action constitute what Bonhoeffer famously described as ‘cheap grace’ (Bonhoeffer, 1959).

The South African state increasingly exhibits characteristics of a predatory elite democracy, a system in which political elites extract value while public institutions decay (Mbembe, 2001; Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012). Despite mass poverty and unemployment, political office has become a site of enrichment, protected by opaque party-list systems, coalition bargaining and weak accountability mechanisms.

Simultaneously, transnational criminal syndicates operate with near impunity, particularly in urban townships and informal settlements, which increasingly resemble internal war zones (Shaw & Gastrow, 2022). These conditions meet the criteria of structural violence, where social arrangements systematically harm particular populations (Galtung, 1969).

South Africa’s moral credibility is further eroded by its continued diplomatic and economic engagement with the Zionist state of Israel, despite overwhelming international legal evidence pointing to apartheid practices and genocidal violence in Gaza (Amnesty International, 2022; UN Special Rapporteur, 2024).

Decolonial ethics insist that a nation forged through international solidarity against apartheid cannot selectively apply moral principles (Fanon, 1963; Said, 1997). The call to sever all ties with Zionist Israel is an ethical coherence premised on South Africa’s own liberation theology and constitutional values.

‘Never, never, and never again shall it be that one nation dominates another.’ — Mandela (1994). This global covenant was never designed for domestic territory only.

Communities such as the Cape Flats, Umlazi, New Brighton, Westbury and many others exhibit conditions analogous to low-intensity warfare.

International humanitarian ethics demand the prioritisation of civilian protection where state authority has collapsed (ICRC, 2016). Declaring these areas humanitarian disaster zones is a moral and constitutional obligation, not an authoritarian impulse.

‘Whoever saves one life, it is as if they saved all of humanity’ (Qur’an 5:32).

Political theorists have warned that party-dominated electoral systems often alienate citizens and entrench elite power (Michels, 1915; Mair, 2013). In South Africa, proportional representation without constituency accountability has weakened democratic responsiveness, while coalition politics has commodified governance.

My cry is directed to institutional clergy, prophetic voices and leading moral figures whose public witness carries ethical weight in society. Voices such as Reverend Allan Boesak, whose theology insists that faith without resistance is empty; Advocate Sikhokana, whose legal and moral interventions expose the contradictions of constitutional democracy without justice; Megan Choritz and many anti-Zionist Jewish voices, who have demonstrated that moral fidelity requires rejecting apartheid, occupation and genocide regardless of identity; Gogo Aubrey Matshiqi, traditional healer, spiritual leader and political analyst, who warned that the fires and attacks on democratic institutions were signs of an approaching storm of chaos in South Africa; and all faith leaders, theologians, jurists, activists and public intellectuals who understand that conscience cannot be delegated to institutions alone.

With urgency, profound respect and humility, this appeal reaches spiritual leaders across traditions.

In our own time, real and living witnesses still walk the earth bearing sanctions, imprisonment, travel bans, exile and relentless state repression as the cost of truth spoken aloud, of injustice exposed without permission, of standing in unguarded solidarity with the wounded, the discarded and the silenced of the world.

Reverend Dr Munther Isaac is a Palestinian Lutheran pastor, theologian and prophetic public intellectual, best known as the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem and academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College. He has emerged as one of the clearest moral and theological voices against apartheid, occupation and genocide in Palestine, insisting, often at great personal and institutional cost, that Christian faith cannot be neutral in the face of systematic injustice.

Francesca Albanese stands as a particularly searing sign of judgment against hegemonic power. Armed with neither army nor capital, but only truth and international law, she dared, as United Nations Special Rapporteur, to document the blood of Gaza and to name alleged war crimes without trembling before imperial state apparatus. For this fidelity to conscience, the United States sanctioned her personally, restricted her movement and threatened her livelihood, the first UN human rights expert punished for truth-telling. In this act, hegemonic power unmasked itself.

Ales Bialiatski, founder of Viasna, was imprisoned for practising what religious institutions routinely preach but rarely defend: visiting prisoners, documenting abuse and standing with the persecuted. Crowned with a Nobel Peace Prize while left behind bars, his cold cell exposes the obscenity of honour without rescue and virtue without risk.

Narges Mohammadi, beaten, re-arrested and brutalised, has carried in her body the cost of insisting that women are fully human and that the gallows are not instruments of justice, while pulpits that proclaim ‘family values’ fall silent before a woman prophet crushed by brutal idolatrous state power.

Mahrang Baloch’s crime was memory: naming the disappeared, carrying their photographs and refusing erasure. For this, she was arrested, isolated and restricted, revealing the terror states feel towards memory armed with conscience.

Alaa Abd El-Fattah has been imprisoned, silenced and driven to hunger strikes for declaring that authoritarianism is not peace, his body becoming a living parable of truth starved by tyranny while religious leaders feast at the tables of a neoliberal capitalist regime and call it prudence.

Alongside them stands a wider cloud of witnesses: Mansoureh Behkish, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, Joshua Wong, Nur Khan Liton, Rayhan Asat and countless others, harassed, jailed and exiled because they exposed lies. They wander without sanctuary or pulpit because too many temples have locked their doors, preferring institutional survival over costly discipleship.

The silence of most local and global clergy — no fasting, no lament, no thunder from the pulpits — stands as a moral failure as grave as the sanction itself.

It is within this moral vacuum that another tragedy unfolds, one for which the church cannot plead ignorance. One need not wonder why pews are being deserted while the desperate redirect their tithes, meagre resources and fragile hope towards false prophets, fabricated miracles and theatrical deliverance. When authentic spiritual leadership retreats into silence, accommodation and moral cowardice, the abandoned will seek meaning wherever it appears to breathe.

Deprived of truth, they become prey to charlatans who promise instant salvation — spraying insecticides, compelling people to drink petrol, to eat grass and snakes — while accumulating obscene wealth in the name of God from a vulnerable, abandoned flock, even as followers sink deeper into poverty, waiting patiently for a deliverance that never comes.

In the vacuum created by ecclesial betrayal, alternative ‘Christ-like figures’ arise, and the desperate convince themselves that their prayers have been answered by the arrival of a ‘new messiah’. This is how false prophets flourish — through deception and the abdication by true shepherds, if we are to truly call ‘the ordained’ true shepherds.

Taken together, these realities constitute a devastating indictment.

When global and domestic activists suffer sanctions, prisons and exile for telling the truth, while clergy suffer nothing for remaining silent, the judgment of history is already written. This is precisely the moment the Kairos Document warned against: when the church spiritualises injustice, retreats into neutrality and offers reconciliation without repentance, it becomes a false church in service of a horrific, soul-destroying status quo.

It is equally a violation of the Belhar Confession, which declares that God is, in a special way, the God of the poor and the oppressed, and that the church must stand where God stands — against injustice and with the wronged.

The shrinking of civic space is both a political crisis and a spiritual one. The gravest scandal is not state repression alone, but the domestication of faith through its laundering of injustice by means of silence, selective moral outrage and ceremonial reconciliation.

In the spirit of the ancient prophets, and of Jesus himself — persecuted for confronting hegemonic power, hypocrisy and religious complicity — these witnesses expose the obscenity of cheap forgiveness offered without repentance, restitution, truth or justice.

This is the radical, sacred, prophetic intervention demanded of spiritual leadership in South Africa today. It is a direct summons to churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, faith-based NGOs, academic institutions and civic bodies — to the South African Council of Churches, the Muslim Judicial Council, the Hindu Council of South Africa, and Catholic, Protestant and independent hierarchies alike — to awaken.

Prayer without prophetic action and truth spoken to power is blasphemy, while remaining silent in such conditions cannot be construed as pastoral restraint — it is moral abdication. History will not ask whether moral leaders prayed, but whether they acted.

Silence has become moral violence and collaboration.

أنا منكم ومعكم
Ana minkum wa ma‘akum
Umntu ngumntu ngabantu
A person is a person through other people.

It must be stated plainly that this appeal is not an attack on religious identity, but an indictment of moral abdication and ethical cowardice.

Forgiving political and moral aberrations without demanding accountability normalises betrayal and launders corruption, for reconciliation without justice is moral fraud. Prayer without prophetic action and truth spoken to power is blasphemy, while remaining silent in such conditions cannot be construed as pastoral restraint — it is moral abdication. History will not ask whether moral leaders prayed, but whether they acted.

A people’s commission to review constitutional, electoral and economic arrangements is consistent with democratic renewal theory and participatory governance models (Habermas, 1996; Santos, 2014).

The historical role of South African faith leaders during apartheid was not pastoral neutrality but prophetic confrontation (Villa-Vicencio, 1988; De Gruchy, 2005).

To abandon this legacy is to betray both God and history.

‘Cry aloud, do not hold back’ (Isaiah 58:1).
‘Stand firmly for justice, even against yourselves’ (Qur’an 4:135).

Political theology affirms that silence in the face of injustice is itself a theological position — one that sides with power (Metz, 2007).

This article proposes the urgent convening, within the next six to eight weeks, of a national interfaith summit for justice and socioeconomic transformation, mandated to engage the state and society on five imperatives:

Proposed National Interfaith Summit for Justice and Socioeconomic Transformation

• Constitutional and economic restructuring for substantive equality and restorative justice
• Electoral reform to restore community accountability
• Declaration of humanitarian emergencies in war-torn communities
• Ethical foreign policy consistency, including severing ties with Israel
• Reassertion of prophetic moral leadership across faith traditions

South Africa is crying from the ruins of conscience. The question is no longer whether the cry is heard, but whether those who claim moral authority will finally respond.

We are not expecting the clergy to enter politics, but we demand that they reclaim their sacred calling: to speak truth to power, defend the oppressed, and confront the corrosive influence of wealth, access and self-interest that masquerades as spiritual leadership.

Moral authority is forged through courageous intervention in the presence of evil, not proximity to power.

This is a summons to the moral conscience of South Africa. Clergy, prophetic voices and all custodians of ethical authority must introspect with honesty.

Are you serving God, His people and truth — or your ego, access and self-interest?

William Solomon Steenkamp is an independent scholar, public ethicist and faith-rooted social critic from Kimberley in the Northern Cape Province, South Africa.

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