Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discuss the Episcopal Church’s response to the US administration’s demand that the Episcopal Church assist in resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa. They discuss the history and lasting legacy of apartheid in South Africa, as well as structural racism in the United States.
Transcript
DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010\. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
DDM [00:38]Today Elizabeth and I want to focus on the recent situation with the South African Afrikaans asylum seekers and the conflict that developed with the Episcopal Church.
DDM [00:51] Now before I start, let me say that this is a very personal issue for me on both fronts. I’m obviously an Episcopal priest here in the USA, but I’m also South African. I am white. My grandmother was from the Afrikaans Dutch speaking community and our family on her side were actually farmers.
DDM [01:14] So this is a very personal issue for me. But I also need to say that since apartheid ended, I have not felt so embarrassed to be a white South African as I do right now. Every time I meet someone and they immediately recognize the accent and they say, where are you from? And I’m like, South Africa, but I’m not a refugee.
MET [01:34] Oh, no. Oh, what a terrible situation.
DDM [01:37] It is. It’s because it’s become quite embarrassing.
MET [01:38] To deny yourself that way. I’m so sorry.
DDM [01:44] No, it’s okay. It’s just very embarrassing. So let’s unpack some of the issues. So 59 white Afrikaans, South Africans arrived in the USA this May, where they have been granted almost like an expedited refugee status.
DDM [02:03] They claim to be victims of racial discrimination. Their refugee applications, as I said, were fast-tracked as the USA government claimed that there is a white genocide taking place targeting white farmers. So I’d like to just unpack that statement a little bit. Firstly, white English and Afrikaans immigrants came to South Africa about 350-400 years ago and forcibly displaced local indigenous South Africans off of their land.
DDM [02:38] Now that movement continued right up until the establishment of the nationalist apartheid government in 1948\. This government then legally built the legal and social framework of apartheid that drew directly on Nazi policies and ideology. It was founded on racial supremacy and really brutally oppressed and murdered indigenous South Africans while legally, socially and economically enriching white communities over decades. This brutal apartheid regime eventually ended in the 1990s with the freedom of Nelson Mandela and the election of the first democratic government of South Africa in 1994.
MET [03:29] Can I interrupt you and ask a question? I know in my upbringing one of the things that people were like is “Oh well, you know, Nelson Mandela was in jail for terrorism or whatever.” What was he in jail for? What was the story of Nelson Mandela?
DDM [03:44] Terrorism.
MET [03:47] Yeah, I want to get this story out there because I think a lot of us were told “Yeah, well, context, blah blah blah.”
DDM [03:54] Yeah, it was interesting for me coming here how almost Nelson Mandela has been, excuse the phrase, whitewashed in the USA. Nelson Mandela was in, he was a freedom fighter, fighting for the liberation of his people. Nelson Mandela was part of a liberation movement. which was not a pacifist movement, it was a military movement and we had a whole armed military uMkhonto weSizwe and Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for terrorism charges for blowing up… for bombings. Civilian.
DDM [04:30] ANC was fighting for their liberation of the communities and for us resistance to oppression does not need to be pacifist. There’s no obligation to fight a violent regime with pacifism.
MET [04:45] So I think, oh my gosh, producer let’s make a note we want to do an episode on pacifism.
DDM [04:51] Yes.
MET [04:52] Talk about Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Okay, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.
DDM [04:56] No, absolutely, but I think you’re right. And I think it ties in with this whole issue of the white Afrikaans refugees, because I think there’s so much misunderstanding in the South African situation, and there’s been in some ways quite a retelling of the story to sanitize it.
MET [05:19] That’s so fascinating. I’m sorry, I did not mean to disrupt your narrative.
(crosstalk)
MET [05:31] Yeah, let’s keep going.
DDM [05:32] So from about 1913, so for like say 75 years in South Africa, black people were actually not allowed to buy or occupy land legally, which many people may not be aware of. So although black people in South Africa make up 80% of the population, white people only about 7%, white people still to this day own 72% of South African land and black South Africans only own 4% of the land. I mean that is just frightening. So although apartheid has ended, land and particularly farmland is still largely in the hands of white South Africans, while communities and families that were forced off their lands live to this day 30 years later still largely as landless people.
DDM [06:28] So this is the reality of what’s actually happening in South Africa. It’s a terrible injustice and it’s the ongoing legacy of apartheid. So last year in South Africa, now these are just statistics, pure statistics. Last year, about 40 people in South Africa were murdered on farms.
DDM [06:49] Now that number 40 is for all racial groups. That’s not just white people. That would be the murder of farm laborers. It would be, you know, if there’s a fight in a farm and somebody gets killed, 40 people nationwide were killed and that’s of every race group.
DDM [07:07] In 2023 it was 49, in 2022 it was 50. So these are annual figures of farm murders. Now compare that with the fact that every year about 27,000 people who are murdered in South Africa. And you can see we are talking about only a tiny, tiny percentage of murders in South Africa are actually farm murders.
DDM [07:36] And that tiny, tiny, tiny percentage is not of white people, it’s of every demographic group. So you can see that the claims of genocide against white people are just simply ludicrous from a factual point of view. The reality is white people still occupy over 60% of top managerial positions in South Africa, despite being only 7% of the population. White people still own the bulk of the land in South Africa.
DDM [08:08] The wealth disparity between black and white is actually worse now than it was under apartheid. The average black household in South Africa owns only 5% of what an average white household owns. 80% of South African’s wealth is still in the hands of 7% of the white population. So you can see in a way that in many ways, this country is still entirely skewed towards white supremacy and domination.
DDM [08:43] And so in some ways, something has to be done. And so for the South African government, that’s where they came and said that if land is owned, and it’s not being used or it’s been abandoned. Maybe a white family owned a whole bunch of South African land and then decided to immigrate and that land is now just simply sitting there. The government has said, and this is the legislation that they passed, that they may take that land without compensation if it’s not being used or it’s been abandoned for public use.
DDM [09:22] So, you know, it actually hasn’t been done, there hasn’t been a case of this actually being done, but it was a law that they passed, much like your public domain.
MET [09:31] I was about to say eminent domain. Yeah, this is not strange.
DDM [09:36] Eminent domain, there we go. There we go, it’s very much, it’s not unusual. But just like those wildly overblown claims of farm murders, this law was claimed by the White House as we saw in that press conference recently with President Trump as being a quote-unquote seizing of Afrikaans land without compensation, which of course it was not. And while we’re on that, let me just say that it was a bit embarrassing how the South African president was kind of thrown in that press briefing under the bus, but the images of the crosses Those were actually like a protest. They’re not actual graves.
DDM [10:19] It was simply that white farmers organized a protest to try to draw and whip up a media frenzy around this claim of white farm deaths. And so they had planted these white crosses all the way down these roads, almost like as a protest, right? It was a symbolic sign. So it was a little embarrassing, obviously, when on national TV in the US that was claimed to be actual graves of farmers.
DDM [10:46] They were not graves of farmers at all. And I think as well, a lot of the images that were being shown of farm murderers, some of them were actually in the Congo. So again, it was that overblown, you know, anything that happens in Africa is one nation, whereas they weren’t even South African murders, you know. So that was a bit embarrassing, you know, to see that.
MET [11:09] Okay. Oh, my gosh. I don’t even. Alright, so let me…
MET [11:16] I cannot speak to your experience as a South African, obviously. This is very personal to you. So instead of trying to talk about what’s going on in South Africa and what it means to be a South African, because obviously I can’t, what I will talk about is American legal procedure, like what this means.
DDM [11:39] Yes, yes. Interesting.
MET [11:40] And let me begin by just acknowledging that this sort of thing should be ridiculous by any standard. For example, the administration is trying to get rid of any non-citizen that says anything anti-Semitic.
MET [12:01] Okay, there’s a thousand things we could talk about how ridiculous that is, but whatever. Or the administration is trying to keep anyone who has ever said anything anti-Semitic out of the country. Now, anti-Semitism is defined completely by Trump and his associates, of course, except for these Afrikaners. There are plenty of examples of these quote-unquote refugees saying not just anti-Israel things, but straight-up bigoted things against the Jewish community and people.
MET [12:32] And I thought about sharing an example, but honestly it was so offensive I just couldn’t bring myself to read it. Some of the things that some of these Afrikaner refugees have said, about the Jewish community are just so vile.
DDM [12:46] And that in South Africa is this very unique way in which, remember, so much of the apartheid ideology comes from Nazi ideology.
MET [12:55] So when you said that, I was like, okay, that makes sense. But this isn’t held against this group of people the way that’s held against some other people. And I will say the difference is written on their faces. So what I mean by that is whiteness is entrenched in our law and educational system and penal system and all of these systems we’ve been talking about throughout this entire project: whiteness is built into it. With whiteness legally fixed into such foundational institutions like those, people of color face enormous difficulties in fighting things like systemic racism. So I want to talk about kind of, it’s a really big claim to be like, whiteness is systemic in the law.
MET [13:40] That’s something that an academic says, and you’re like, yeah, okay, well, that means something. But I want to, I’m going to back this up.
(crosstalk)
MET [13:49] I don’t want to be like, crazy academic who’s just like, oh, whiteness. So for a really obvious example, it’s helpful to go way back to the Scott v. Sanford opinion, which is more commonly called the Dred Scott case. If you remember your high school history classes, this is 1856, way back when, Dred Scott case.
MET [14:10] The Dred Scott case dealt with citizenship, specifically legal citizenship. The court concluded in 1856 that a free black person whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves was not a citizen within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States. So even if a black person was free, if their ancestors came as slaves, they were not a citizen. The court did not burden themselves with rationalizing any issues of morality or racism or historical ideas on race the way that an original intent reading requires today.
MET [14:50] To the majority of the Supreme Court, it was very simple. They decided that since African Americans were not regarded as citizens or members of the state when the Constitution was drafted, the special rights and immunities guaranteed to citizens did not apply to them. So this was like straight up Black people didn’t count when we wrote the Constitution. Black people don’t count now.
MET [15:14] The court saw the Scott issue as a very straightforward matter of whether the progeny of property is a citizen and therefore privileged to the legal right to sue or other legal rights. And the court claimed that the words people of the United States and citizens were interchangeable, but since originally black people were deemed, and this is not my words, an inferior class of beings, they did not fall into either category and were not protected by the Constitution in the same fashion as white citizens. Right, yeah.
MET [16:01] Good moment for us, right? Perhaps the most striking observation to come of this kind of rhetorical legacy is that race, according to the Supreme Court, is cognate with the law. And what I mean by that is from the beginnings of our nation with things like the Three-Fifths Compromise and following the legal reasoning through Scott and Plessy, which I’ll talk about in a minute, The court constructed a narrative in which race was not just a demographic or identity, it was a marker of property.
MET [16:33] And that’s really important to understand about American law. Race equals property. So just five years later, in 1861, the Civil War began. Two years later, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
MET [16:50] And two years after that, in 1865, the 13th Amendment radically changed the landscape of the United States by abolishing slavery. However, it was not until the 14th Amendment in 1868 that the Scott decision was truly nullified. The 14th Amendment proclaimed that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens and that the states can’t make or enforce any laws that abridge the rights of said citizens, primarily the rights of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
DDM [17:22] Oh, so that’s what the big issue nowadays is people being in the USA.
MET [17:27] Yes, absolutely. I’m 100% getting to that. You are absolutely right. It also explicitly states that no citizen can be denied equal protection of the laws. And this is where I was about to go with that. I will note, it is absolutely important that you pay attention to the fact that the current administration is trying to get rid of these rights guaranteed in this amendment right now. Where in 1865 the goal was to guarantee rights regardless of color.
MET [17:55] There is a concerted effort right now and nobody is hiding it to strip those rights for the same reason.
DDM [18:02] And again, it’s around race.
MET [18:06] I’ll be very judgmental if you’re not grossed out by all of this, you’re a bad person. So, The Scott decision, because of the Civil War and the amendments that passed, was neutered in a relatively short, if bloody, amount of time. Legal citizenship was no longer a question for African Americans born in the United States. Then there were these other cases that came through in 1872 that aren’t cited very much, the Slaughterhouse cases, they kind of reiterated this.
MET [18:34] The Slaughterhouse decision affirmed that, so random, the state of Louisiana did not have the right to create a monopoly that required butchers to work for a particular corporation as that amounted to involuntary servitude, which was unconstitutional. Now this seems really random, like what do butchers have to do with all of this? But what it came down to is you couldn’t force people to work. So this led to a transitional period in court opinion as illustrated by Plessy v. Ferguson. I know I’m taking you through a lot here, but I think it’s…
DDM [19:08] Fascinating.
MET [19:08] Right. The infamous Plessy case established that separate but equal doctrine that dominated America until 1954.
DDM [19:18] Oh, which was very much South African.
DDM [19:19] Right. So this should sound familiar to you.
DDM [19:22] Absolutely.
MET [19:23] The Plessy case did not create separate but equal as a practice, but affirmed that the practice was legal. In fact, The opinion spent a good deal of time discussing how segregation was already practiced throughout the United States, specifically in education.
DDM [19:41] And this is about a similar sort of period. I mean, in South Africa we were ’48.
MET [19:46] Yes. We’re simpatico right here.
DDM [19:47] Yeah.
MET [19:48] The court noted that, as was brought to their attention in the slaughterhouse cases, the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to establish the citizenship of black people, to give definitions of citizenship of the United States and of the states, and to protect from the hostile legislation of the states the privileges and immunities of citizens. Therefore, the question of legal citizenship was no longer an issue. What was at stake was whether the rights of citizens could be protected when those citizens were divided along racial lines.
MET [20:26] So I’m taking you through a long line of thinking here, but the reason I want to talk about this is because it is very important to see how race plays into the law. The court decided that separation does not automatically mean one party’s rights are being diminished. The court specifically argued that segregation was not a denial of due process or equal protection, and was not ready to accept any evidence to the contrary.
MET [20:52] So this is how we end up with a segregated country that says, oh, we’re really equal even though we’re separate. Okay. The reason I go through all of this philosophy of the court, at least the majority of the court right now, is because most people in the legal field today, and most people in the court today, would argue that the Constitution is or should be colorblind. And that is clearly, as I have just laid out, 100% nonsense.
MET [21:21] It has never been colorblind. Whiteness and melanin as property was written into the law from the very beginning with a three-fifths compromise. The law has never once in all of America’s history been colorblind. So when we pretend it is colorblind, we actually do a huge disservice to the people who it marginalizes.
MET [21:43] We ignore their plights. Race blindness or colorblindness does little to help race relations. If anything, it targets not the harmful effects of racism, but it completely obliterates any way of addressing those harms. It imposes a blanket identity on a group of people, which inevitably marginalizes those who do not conform to that identity.
MET [22:07] The idea behind this kind of blindness is that race should have no real significance, but it ignores the culture and the problems of a group of people and assimilates them all into one category, which inevitably is the majority. In other words, it eliminates the means to effectively battle racism by ignoring that racism exists. In this way, race blindness or color blindness, or however you want to talk about it, exacerbates the hegemony of white culture. It simultaneously declares race irrelevant while it prevents any step to achieve racial irrelevance.
MET [22:43] Understanding whiteness in the law, then, is crucial. Whiteness itself is self-evident and omnipresent, like whiteness is everywhere and it’s American and it’s dominant. In other words, people think of it as interchangeable with the idea of American and it’s the cultural yardstick for national identity. When whiteness is the norm, it is an invisible identity.
MET [23:07] So thinking in terms of whiteness in the law really illuminates the South African immigration fiasco.
DDM [23:12] Absolutely.
MET [23:13] The law is not just a code for us to follow, it constitutes our identity, and it constitutes us as white. So when we think about who can migrate to the US, and the Trump administration is taking this very seriously, There are migrants who can be us, white migrants, and those who cannot, migrants of color.
DDM [23:34] It’s almost like we saw the differentiation between how Ukrainian refugees were treated versus, say, Venezuelan or Mexican.
MET [23:42] This effort by the Trump administration is a continuing effort to bolster the whiteness of the law, by adding legal protection to white and specifically white supremacist immigrants and ridding the nation of non-white immigrants. The law is being used to code which immigrants are acceptable and therefore which immigrants are us. And right now that means we are white supremacists.
DDM [24:03] Yeah, 100% and that’s where the Episcopal Church now enters really the story because for the past 40 years the Episcopal Church has been really in a bipartisan partnership with the US government to help settle refugees. But since January, that program virtually stopped as obviously hardly any refugees have been coming into this country. Staff were laid off, funding like many departments became very uncertain. We all know the assault obviously taking place against many immigrant communities, the assault against the concept of churches as places of sanctuary and even sanctuary cities like our own Rochester, New York.
DDM [24:45] And so it’s in this context that the federal government reached out to the Episcopal Migration Ministry, informing them that because they receive a federal grant, they would be expected to resettle these white Afrikaans, South Africans that had been fast-tracked to be classified as refugees. Now the Episcopal Church has always focused on immigration. It’s deeply committed to helping people and families who are refugees and asylum seekers because as we looked in our immigration episode, that’s central to our faith to protect the vulnerable. However, The Episcopal Church is also deeply committed to racial justice and to truth.
DDM [25:29] And that’s where the problem comes in, right? Because, number one, there is no white genocide. There is no large murder of white farmers. There is no expropriation of their land and this white minority is still part of the wealthiest segment of South Africa which they have inherited through apartheid.
DDM [25:55] So that’s number one. Number two, the Afrikaner community in South Africa has consistently, and this is a generalization of course, but they have, as a general rule, consistently fought the dismantling of apartheid and any idea of a more equitable distribution of resources, particularly land. The Afrikaner community in South Africa continues to locate its identity in this separatist right-wing nationalist movement shaped by Nazism. Now, of course, you get some white South Africans that were part of the liberation struggle, but I’m talking about as a generalization.
(crosstalk)
DDM [26:34] And so for the Episcopal Church, which historically fought apartheid, to now assist in resettling this Afrikaner minority, who have been declared refugees within a few short months, while other refugees who have waited years to have their cases heard, have been deported, put into detention, sent to prison camps, or simply had their application processes stalled, leaving thousands now in limbo. To suddenly now begin to resettle these white South African quote-unquote refugees would be a betrayal of everything that our church stands for. And so the Episcopal Church at great cost said to the federal government that they would ethically not be able to do this.
DDM [27:19] And so they’ve officially ended their agreement with the US federal government. The Episcopal Church will no longer receive any funding from the government and will instead continue working with refugees and asylum seekers independent of the US government. So to watch I think one group of people who are not fleeing war, starvation, torture, be given such fast-track preferential treatment over others who fled the most unimaginable horrors or have been living in refugee camps for years under appalling conditions, I think is just absolutely horrendous. The obvious racism in this whole narrative is unmistakable. White South Africans are termed refugees, but everyone else with a different skin color is called an “illegal” or a “criminal.” South African white supremacists are welcomed with open arms, but professors or students who speak out against a US funded genocide in Palestine are being deported. And so once again we see so clearly that white lives are valued, but black and brown bodies and lives aren’t.
MET [28:30] All right, I’m going to tell you a story that sounds completely unrelated, as is my want.
DDM [28:35] Those are the best conversations.
MET [28:39] But it’s an example of something that reminds me of this. Okay. So I’m going to tell you the story of one of the most notorious Supreme Court cases of the 20th century, at least the last part of the 20th century. It was a case that at the time everybody knew about and had an opinion about and everybody was mad about it for one reason or another. It was one of those things where literally nobody was happy. The case was National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie in 1977.
MET [29:09] So the Village of Skokie, Illinois had a population of approximately 70,000 persons, of whom approximately 40,500 were Jewish, so very large Jewish community in Skokie. On March 20th, 1977, Frank Holland, the leader of the Nazi Party of America, informed Skokie’s police chief that the National Socialists intended to march on the village’s sidewalk on May 1st. So the Nazis were coming to Skokie.
MET [29:43] As a result of media attention and a number of phone calls allegedly made by Nazi Party members to residents with quote-unquote Jewish names, this planned demonstration became common knowledge among Skokie’s Jewish community. The District Court of Cook County conducted a hearing on a motion by the village of Skokie for a preliminary injunction. They wanted to see what they could do to get this regimented. One resident testified that a number of Jewish organizations planned a counter-demonstration for the same day with an expected attendance of 12,000 to 15,000 people and that the appearance of Nazi demonstrators could lead to violence.
MET [30:25] So the mayor of Skokie also testified that the demonstration could lead to violence, and the court entered an order barring defendants from marching, walking, parading, or otherwise displaying the swastika on their person on May 1st, 1977\. So they’re like, no, you can’t do this. You can’t have this march. The Nazi party applied to the Illinois appellate court for a stay of that injunction.
MET [30:53] So there’s a background, I’m not gonna get into court words, but basically there’s a back and forth between whether the Nazis can march on Skokie. And on appeal, the Illinois Supreme Court denied the petition for a stay. And the Nazi party filed an application with Justice John Paul Stevens, who actually referred this matter all the way to the Supreme Court. So it’s the Nazis versus Skokie all the way to the Supreme Court.
MET [31:18] And the court held that Illinois must provide strict procedural safeguards, including appellate review, to deny a stay for an injunction depriving the Nazi Party of protected First Amendment rights. The decision was complicated and it had a lot to do with procedure, but the ultimate end of the day thing is that the court decided in favor of the Nazis. Wow. Yes, they said the Nazis have their free speech right to march.
MET [31:47] Now, for what it’s worth, the march never happened. There was such a lead up and a hubbub to this. When it finally came down to it, the Nazis were like, just kidding, we can’t be here. So the march never happened, but the Supreme Court found in favor of the Nazis.
MET [32:01] And this was a kind of breaking point for the ACLU for a lot of people. They were like, I don’t know if I can support this anymore. But as you can imagine this made a lot of people mad. Because people love free speech, and then they see it in action and they’re like “Oh, I don’t like that.” Because there is free speech and then there is hate speech. Right, now I admit to being maybe problematically in favor of free speech in many ways. I’m May
DDM [32:34] Which if you don’t mind me interjecting, that was part of what the South African president was saying when Trump showed the video of Julius Malema, the minority party, singing the song of Kill the Boers, which was an apartheid kind of, again, symbolic slogan. But again, that was what the South African president was saying. You know, it’s that whole debate of free speech. We actually protect people’s right to say things, even if we disagree with them.
MET [33:08] That’s right. I think you and I have kind of talked briefly about this here and there.
MET [33:12] I’m a fan of protecting things that maybe other people wouldn’t be a fan of protecting. And that’s neither here nor there. But as many people in America find problematic, hate speech is protected here. And we can go into the whys and the wherefores of that sometime later if you want.
MET [33:30] But America has long protected controversial speech, and there’s a whole episode waiting to be done on the question of that. We do that much more so than other countries, especially European countries. But the question is, do we allow or do we help? And I think that is kind of at the heart of this issue.
MET [33:52] It is one thing to say people shouldn’t be allowed in this country. Once again, I can refer to speech law as an example, right? In the early 1900s, there were laws about things like if you harbored deviant political thoughts, you weren’t allowed into the US. Most people, like most decent people, disagree with keeping people out because of their ideas.
DDM [34:13] You know, when you apply for citizenship in this country, you have to say that you’ve never been a part of the Communist Party. I just wanted to let you know that.
MET [34:22] That’s left over from the 1920s.
DDM [34:24] It’s actually pretty frightening, but carry on.
MET [34:26] But most people disagree with keeping people out because of their ideas, but what about helping them? And I think this is the crux of the matter.
DDM [34:33] Or giving a platform.
MET [34:34] Yes, there is a huge difference between allowing and helping. And the Skokie case is kind of indicative of that. The court said you have to allow hate speech, but the controversy is how much do you have to help it? Does it need your protection?
MET [34:47] Do you have to guard it? What is an ethical response? What does equity require? And the Afrikaner situation is a bit more cut and dry in that sense, right?
MET [34:56] They may want to leave South Africa and come to the US. And most people would say if they have the means, you know, so be it. But the problem is not that they want to come here, though I think a lot of us would agree we have our fill of white supremacists. The problem is that we are helping them, and that shows favor. And this returns to the whiteness of the law. By blessing the Afrikaners, we are blessing their ideas, and that is a huge problem.
DDM [35:22] Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s why, for myself, I’m so proud of the Episcopal Church for saying, you know, we’re not going to be your religious window dressing of racism. You know, we’re not going to be your religious pipeline for dishonesty and apartheid-like policies. I think the Episcopal Church is really by making this action shown the truth really isn’t for sale and federal funding cannot be more important than the gospel of Jesus and for me that’s integrity you know that that really is faith and moral courage of which I think we need a lot more of right now in our world.
MET [36:02] Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was a very personal topic for us today. It really reached into some things that we hold near and dear to our hearts. We would definitely welcome some input on this one, so feel free to email us, and we hope you have a lovely week.
MET [36:23] Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prophet. find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM [36:52] Music by Audionautix.com
