CHAPTER 5 Faith-Based Organizations and the Challenge of Developmental Social Welfare in Democratic South Africa Ignatius Swart Introduction With the advent of democracy in South Africa during the early to mid- 1990s, favorable conditions would emerge for this country’s faith-based organizations to present themselves as constructive partners of the new African National Congress (ANC)-led 1 democratic state. Whereas this sector (faith-based organizations) previously found itself divided between opposing and supporting (albeit tacitly in some cases) the apartheid state, faith-based organizations across the latter spectrum of opposition and support would now be welcomed to join in the task of reconstruction and nation building. 2 Placing this statement in context, Isaac Mutelo, in his valuable discussion of the nature of religion–state relations in post-1994 I. Swart (B) Department of Religion and Theology, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: igswart@uwc.ac.za © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Glatzer et al. (eds.), Faith-Based Organizations and Social Welfare, Palgrave Studies in Religion, Politics, and Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31960-0_5 99