Launched in 2006, JOY! Magazine emerged as South Africa’s first major glossy Christian lifestyle publication aimed at bridging faith and popular culture for a generation of believers.
Over the years, it has consistently marketed itself as “South Africa’s leading Christian magazine”, boasting widespread circulation and ties with prominent evangelical networks. The publication has positioned itself as both inspiration and platform for conservative Christian voices and serves as a cornerstone of the evangelical media machine, shaping discourse at the intersection of faith, politics, society and identity.
The November edition of JOY! Magazine arrives like a quiet summons to battle. On the cover, Erika Kirk stands in soft, somewhat forgiving light. She is the sanctified widow recast as warrior, while her late husband, Charlie, lingers in a modest box of remembrance. The composition tells its own story: femininity as faith’s new frontier, grief refashioned into divine purpose.
Branded a “Biblical Values Edition”, the magazine dresses anxiety as faith, draping cultural panic in the language of devotion. It is beautiful in the way propaganda often is, tender on the surface yet unyielding underneath. The tone is measured but militant, calling for spiritual vigilance even as it disguises moral panic as devotion.
Underneath Erika’s soft imagery, the militant undercurrent only grows stronger. Inside the pages of the magazine, the editor’s note strikes the same chord: “Now is the time for the church to stand firm in truth and defend righteousness in a world that’s losing its moral compass.”
Faith is portrayed as under siege by a hostile world, even as believers are urged to take the offensive, to “hold fast to God’s Word” and reclaim the culture.
Beneath the drama beats an old and tired story of the Christian persecution complex. JOY!’s pages suggest Christians are not the religious majority despite Statistics South Africa stating that 84.5% of citizens identify as Christian. Instead, they perceive themselves as a misunderstood and disregarded minority besieged by secularism and sin.
This myth is how the evangelical right manufactures urgency and radicalises its followers. It transforms faith into a struggle for survival and casts moral hegemony as self defence. The illusion of persecution legitimises aggression, convincing believers that dominance is discipleship. Without this narrative of attack, there would be no holy war to wage and no justification for power disguised as piety.
This sense of persecution resonates strongly in South Africa’s post-apartheid moment, where many conservative Christians feel displaced by a secular and pluralistic order. Evangelical media such as JOY! offer their audience a moral certainty by laundering nostalgia of an imagined past.
Their producers, and the audience they serve, fear the dwindling hierarchical power they once enjoyed, particularly in the face of the growth of progressive movements such as feminist and queer rights activism.
But this media industry’s outrage often extends beyond cultural anxieties into the legislative sphere. For instance, many churches are currently objecting to the CRL Rights Commission’s proposals to regulate churches and are framing it as state persecution; the pending Marriage Bill and Hate Speech Bill as assaults on religious liberty; and long-standing issues such as abortion, the decriminalisation of sex work, Comprehensive Sexuality Education in schools and the so-called “transgender ideology” as proof of moral collapse.
Within this moral panic, JOY! and its allies position themselves as the last line of defence for God’s order against a state and society seen as lost to sin.
The issue’s central anxiety is moral decline that reverberates across its pages. “What one generation tolerates, the next embraces” functions as both sermon and slogan.
One of its chief evangelists is Errol Naidoo, founder and head of the Family Policy Institute, and one of South Africa’s loudest Christian right-wing voices. In his column, Naidoo warns against “lukewarm Christians” who compromise for acceptance, accusing them of endangering the nation’s soul. “Lukewarm” is a term lifted from Revelation 3:16 and means to be condemned as faithless and unworthy “neither hot nor cold”.
If we do not guard against this infiltration, we will find ourselves living in a South Africa that is hostile to those on the margins, people whose very existence already invites suspicion and dehumanisation. At worst, our constitutional rights could be under threat.
In evangelical circles, it is a weapon. The phrase conjures up shame, pushing believers to prove their zeal through louder, stricter, more visible conviction. The guilt becomes a furnace of overcompensation which radicalises the ordinary believer. To reject moderation is to belong and to doubt is to fail God. This subtle spiritual manipulation is what keeps movements like Naidoo’s alive due to a perpetual cycle of fear and fervour.
The phrasing is deliberate in his opinion and is a near echo of the language used by Republican and pro-Trump officials to deflect responsibility for their own rhetoric. JOY!, Naidoo and their ilk parrot their talking points, importing American paranoia wholesale, framing queerness and progressive politics as literal threats to life.
Crucially, he blames the family for this supposed radicalisation. In a sidebar, Naidoo chastises Christian parents for failing to shield their children from “godless ideologies”, quoting Ephesians 6:4 as indictment.
The implication is clear and implies that faithful parenting could have saved Kirk’s killer. In a few paragraphs the tragedy is repurposed into moral instruction: parental failure, not political extremism, is the real sin. It’s a deft inversion that turns shared responsibility into personal shame.
Simultaneously, Naidoo in his writing titled Killing the Messenger: Why the Gospel Threatens the Left, wields Kirk’s death as proof that secularism breeds violence. He describes the 22-year-old assassin as “radicalised on the internet and university campus” and, pointedly, as having “a transgender partner”. The phrasing is deliberate and is a near echo of the language in the US to deflect responsibility for their own rhetoric.
Another article, The Family Under Fire, broadens this crisis into a full-blown campaign. Reporting on a Constitutional Court decision allowing husbands to take their wives’ surnames, the author warns that “for decades, the family has been under attack”. The ruling is an ordinary act of gender equity, but it is portrayed as a destabilisation of God’s design.
JOY!’s idea of family is a sanctified relic: heterosexual, hierarchical, immovable. Its fragility is ideological, not biological. As scholar Hayley McEwen observes, Christian-right movements have long captured “the family” as a vessel for nationalist and patriarchal politics, recasting social constructs as divine order. By tethering morality to this nuclear model, the magazine transforms every feminist advance into an existential threat.
As the magazine closes, a final image crystallises its politics. A full-page advert for Idols winner-turned-pastor Heinz Winckler’s newly formed organisation called ONE80 which splashes the slogan “Faith. Family. Freedom.” across a borrowed blue-and-red logo, a near replica of Kirk’s Turning Point USA’s arrow.
Winckler has admitted that ONE80 draws inspiration directly from Kirk’s movement. But the imitation is both aesthetic and ideological. “Faith. Family. Freedom.” mirrors the mottos of the American Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, two of the most powerful right-wing evangelical organisations in the US.
ONE80 presents as a revival is, in fact, replication, a sort of South African franchise of US grievance. The advert is almost poetic in its desperation, it shows how deeply local evangelicalism longs for legitimacy within the global Christian Right. In chasing Kirk’s legacy, Winckler reveals the movement’s dependency: a crusade built not on revelation but on reproduction.
JOY!’s “Biblical Values Edition” does not emerge from a vacuum. Its idolisation of the family, its warnings about universities and “the left” all echo a transatlantic inheritance. For more than half a century, US evangelicalism has exported its cultural wars through missions, media and money. Those narratives found a receptive audience in apartheid South Africa, where theology was used to sanctify hierarchy. The democratic era didn’t dissolve that alliance between these two actors; but it merely redirected it from race to morality.
Today, the echo is seamless. Figures like Naidoo and Winckler, and JOY! preach the same gospel of grievance heard from pulpits in Texas or Tennessee. They cloak political ambition in religious sincerity, using fear to build solidarity. Their project is less about saving souls than securing power over women, children, the LGBTQ+ community and a nation that refuses to fit their vision of righteousness.
In their telling, South Africa’s pluralism is chaos, gender equity is rebellion, queerness is a contagion and equality is persecution. JOY! Magazine, glossy and devout, baptises paranoia as prophecy and sells supremacy as salvation.
If we do not guard against this infiltration, we will find ourselves living in a South Africa that is hostile to those on the margins, people whose very existence already invites suspicion and dehumanisation. At worst, our constitutional rights could be under threat.
But even if that future never fully materialises, those already radicalised by this right-wing Christian agenda have become the gatekeepers of many people’s liberties and that alone should be enough to galvanise us into countering these movements before they decide who belongs and who does not.
Pontsho Pilane is a feminist writer, communications expert, and author of Power and Faith: How Evangelical Churches Are Quietly Shaping Our Democracy
For opinion and analysis consideration, email opinions@timeslive.co.za
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