Jenan Taylor
16 February 2025
White Christian leaders in South Africa have rejected recent claims of victimisation, violence and rhetoric against white people in South Africa made by the United States President Donald Trump and his government.
Based on these, and claims about the expropriation of land without compensation, Mr Trump ordered the immediate withdrawal of all US government aid to South Africa in early February, while the US secretary of state has refused to attend the G20 Summit there.
More than 300 white leaders from Anglican, Catholic, Dutch Reformed and other churches and theological schools around the country warned in a statement the sudden aid withdrawal, particularly health support, promised devastation for South African communities.
They said the USA was weaponising for cheap political points the tensions resulting from many white South Africans’ sustained resistance to efforts to meaningfully address the consequences of apartheid.
“As white South Africans in active leadership within the Christian community, representing diverse political and theological perspectives, we unanimously reject these claims,” the signatories said.
“We make this statement as white South Africans because these claims are being made about us and our experience in this place.
“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.”
Read more: Jesus, Trump and January 26
The signatories said the immediate and sudden withdrawal of aid, particularly of health support systems, would disproportionately affect the large HIV population whose members’ reliance on antiretroviral medication was a life or death matter.
“… we know them as members of our congregations and communities,” they said.
“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 leaders said they recognised their role in the country’s failures to effectively address the racial injustices of Apartheid and Colonialism. As white Christian South Africans they were recommitting to working for redress, restitution and healing.
They recalled South Africa’s history where the Christian faith was used to justify the oppressive colonial and apartheid regimes tacitly and explicitly.
The leaders paralleled this with current political rhetoric in the US that drew on Christianity in ways which dismissed the Christian call to care for the vulnerable, love neighbours, and work for a good society for all.
Such distortions of Christianity produced innumerable violences, and the justifying of these in the name of Christianity was something they condemned and rejected as faith leaders.
“While all South Africans have been personally touched by violence, the narrative of “disproportionate violence” aimed at white South Africans that President Trump is attempting to push negates the indisputable reality, for anyone living in South Africa, that black South Africans continue to be subject to the worst excesses of violence and oppression,” they said.
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