This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Apartheid became law in South Africa in 1948, and the Dutch Reformed Church did not merely tolerate the system, it helped build the theology that justified it. The church supplied much of the religious argument the National Party leaned on to defend racial separation, and it organized its own congregations along the same racial lines the new law imposed on the country at large.
That support was not a passing alignment. For over three decades the church functioned as something close to the government's own religious arm, its structure and its preaching reinforcing the same racial order the state was enforcing through law, courts and police.
International pressure and dissent from within the church itself eventually began to erode that standing, but only after decades in which the Dutch Reformed Church's theological backing had given apartheid a religious legitimacy the system could point to as more than mere state policy.
What that alliance changed for the Dutch Reformed Church's spread and standing was its transformation from a settler community's church into an institution whose name became, for over thirty years, difficult to separate from the apartheid system it had helped defend.