More than 300 white Christian leaders in South Africa have signed a statement rejecting U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that white people are being victimized there.
On Friday, Feb. 7, Trump signed an executive order “to address serious human rights violations occurring in South Africa.”
Trump accused the majority-Black country — once ruled by whites through apartheid — of a “land confiscation act to seize disfavored citizens’ property without compensation” which “blatantly discriminates against ethnic minority descendants of settler groups.”
He added: “As long as South Africa continues to support bad actors on the world stage and allows violent attacks on innocent disfavored minority farmers, the United States will stop aid and assistance to the country.”
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While conducting mass deportations of immigrants in the U.S., Trump said he will hold South Africa “accountable” for “rights violations” against white Afrikaners whom he called “disfavored minorities.”
Trump also criticized South Africa’s leaders for taking “aggressive positions toward the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military and nuclear arrangements.”
South Africa is one of the countries that has sought to bring international justice to bear against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the murders of 40,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
“As white South Africans in active leadership within the Christian community … we unanimously reject these claims.”
The white Christian leaders in South Africa said Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have it all wrong.
“As white South Africans in active leadership within the Christian community, representing diverse political and theological perspectives, we unanimously reject these claims,” their letter states. “The narrative presented by the U.S. government is founded on fabrications, distortions and outright lies. It does not reflect the reality of our country and, if anything, serves to heighten existing tensions in South Africa. It also detracts from the important work of building safer, healthier communities and addressing the complex history of land dispossession by white Europeans from the black African majority.”
In seeking to address the evil repercussions of the apartheid era, “one factor is the sustained resistance by many white South Africans to initiatives that seek to meaningfully address the economic and land ownership consequences of these systems of racial oppression. The resultant tensions thereof are now being weaponized for cheap political points in the USA.”
The statement also links apartheid in South Africa to slavery in the United States.
“Recalling our history where the Christian faith was used to justify the oppressive colonial and apartheid regimes tacitly and explicitly, we have watched in horror as political rhetoric in the United States of America has also drawn on the Christian faith in ways which dismiss the most basic Christian call to caring for the vulnerable, loving of neighbors, and working for a good society for all. Such distortions of Christianity have produced innumerable violences, and the justifying of such violences in the name of Christianity is something we condemn and reject as leaders of our faith.”
Sadly, South Africa remains plagued by violence but white citizens are not “disproportionate” in experiencing violence as Trump claims, the letter adds.
It is an “indisputable reality” that Black South Africans “continue to be subject to the worst excesses of violence and oppression. Genocide Watch has noted that while white South Africans make up around 8% of the population, they account for less than 2% of the murder victims.”
“While white South Africans make up around 8% of the population, they account for less than 2% of the murder victims.”
Trump’s action to stop humanitarian aid to South Africa “promises devastation for our communities,” the religious leaders claim. “In particular, the support being withdrawn from South Africa disproportionately affects the HIV community who rely on antiretroviral medication. South Africa has a significant number of people who are HIV+, and for whom access to antiretroviral medication is a matter of life or death. As pastors, we know them as members of our congregations and communities. As followers of the God of life, and of Jesus Christ whose ministry of healing has guided the work of the church over centuries, we must protest in the strongest possible terms where we see racial politics being weaponized in ways that will contribute to the early death for the poor and vulnerable, while serving the political agendas of the powerful.”
The South African signatories pledge to stand with “faith leaders in the United States of America who are called to be a voice for justice and peace in this turbulent time. … In the same way that churches were called to commit to united work for justice during the dark days of apartheid, we commit to supporting the prophetic church in the USA as it works for justice in the weeks, months and years to come.”
Authors of the letter were Cobus van Wyngaard, Unisa and Dutch Reformed Church of Pretoria, Gauteng; Craig Stewart, St Peters Anglican Church, Mowbray, Western Cape; Curtis Love, University of South Africa, theological ethics, Johannesburg, Gauteng; and Sarah Montgomery, Lifespring Community Church, Durban, KZN.
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