The Faith of Gary Haugen

Gary Haugen was just 22 years old in the fall of 1985, when he attended a meeting that would change the course of his life. He had arrived in South Africa that summer, fresh out of Harvard, just a few days before P. W. Botha’s apartheid government declared a partial state of emergency. He was working for Michael Cassidy, the founder of African Enterprise, an organization focused on evangelizing and racial reconciliation.

Together with Desmond Tutu, the new Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, Cassidy launched the National Initiative for Reconciliation. In September, hundreds of church leaders gathered in Pietermaritzburg. Their hope was that the Church would help South Africa through the crisis. The situation was desperate enough that even leaders of the powerful Dutch Reformed Church, which was allied with the white-supremacist government and usually avoided such gatherings, attended. And on the evening of September 11, about 15 church leaders, Black and white, from different denominations, gathered.

[Read: How Apartheid haunts a new generation of South Africans]

The conversation was “very tense, very raw,” Haugen told me in an interview earlier this year. Bishop Tutu was one of the last people to speak; as he was preparing to do so, the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church were uneasy, visibly stiffening. Tutu addressed his remarks directly to them. “I just want to thank God that he brought you, my white brothers, here to South Africa,” the Anglican bishop told the Dutch Reformed Church leaders, as best Haugen recalls his words decades later. “I thank God that you came because you brought the mission hospitals, and I was born in a mission hospital. I thank God you brought the mission schools, and I went to a mission school. But most of all, my brothers, I thank God that he brought you because you brought the word of God. But now I’m going to have to open up that word of God and show you why