Young Church stalwarts adopted the rule of emerging from worship on Sundays to range through the streets, assaulting all who refused to recognize the Church's supremacy. From the frontier the Church gradually expanded backwards to the heartland, despite the increasingly frantic efforts of the Anglican Bishopric of Capetown to stop its spread.Įventually it became an organized political force to be reckoned with, with Church adherents winning an increasing number of seats in the Provincial Assembly and demanding more and more vociferously to let the Church have "A Decisive Moral Voice" in Drakian affairs. The still-living remnants of the original founders were horrified by the direction their Brethren were developing, but by this time they had completely lost control and were submerged and drowned out in the waves of young new adherents.Īll along the frontier, what was now known as the Draka Church Militant proved highly attractive to landowners, overseers, soldiers and slave-takers, all welcoming a faith sanctifying as a glorious Divine Mission what they were busily doing anyway. The conquest of the whole of Africa and the enforced conversion via enslavement of its Pagan and Muslim inhabitants came to be regarded as a supreme Divinely Ordained Goal, a Goal which had to be furthered at all costs and which justified every sacrifice and "any act which may seem otherwise callous or cruel". Later, slave-taking came to be seen as a positive good, and all references to even a theoretical abolition in the far future were deleted from the Brethren's doctrines.įinally, any wish even for betterment of the salves' daily treatment was gone from the sect's doctrines and daily practices. From regarding slavery as an evil which would one day be abolished but which must be endured for the present, the missionaries gradually came to see in it some positive aspects, as "it gave Heathens the chance to See the Light". Over some two to three decades, the sect's basic orientation and doctrine underwent profound changes. That was mainly work for young, vigorous people, the original founders' descendants or locally-recruited adherents. The Brethren encountered little competition from other missionaries in the hard and thankless job of going up to the expanding frontier and dealing with the contempt and obstruction of estate owners. The provincial authorities granted them permission to do this, after thoroughly checking the content of their preachings to ensure that it contained no "inflammatory" items and that they would tell servants to obey their masters. They made no headway, however, their efforts encountering less hostility than indifference and ridicule.Īfter some fifteen years of this, they decided to concentrate on evangelising the "indentured servants" and bringing them to the fold of Christ. The original religious immigrants, like many Britishers of their time, were quite opposed to slavery, horrified by what they found in Drakia and tried to agitate for abolition. But in the CTL (Christian Draka Timeline) they landed at Capetown, where their influence was to be eventually profound. In the STL they emigrated to Australia instead, where they remained obscure and never achieved more than a thousand members, and their descendants were eventually engulfed with the rest of the Australians in the aftermath of the Final war and killed or made into serfs. The defining event was the arrival in Drakia of several hundred members of The Holy Ghost Brethren, a completely obscure British sect, hoping to gain more converts. This timeline diverges from the timeline of the "Stirling Draka" (hereafter STL ) in the early 1800's, when Draka society was already well-launched on the road of an expanding slave society but its culture and ideology were still in a state of flux. History of the Christian Draka and the Draka Church Militant
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