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When Desmond Tutu died in 2021, he was mourned throughout the Episcopal Church of America (ECUSA). No, he wasn’t an Episcopalian – he was, of course, the most famous and esteemed archbishop ever in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. But both Churches are part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and as I wrote in an obituary article, Tutu, during the years after the fall of apartheid, was a frequent visitor at the Episcopal Church Center on Second Avenue in New York, which he left, every time, with a hefty check to help cover not only his Church’s payroll expenses and its efforts to help the poor, but also his Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the purported goal of which was to help South Africa overcome the racial divisions of the past and forge a harmonious multiracial future.
In the ECUSA and throughout the Western world, a lot of people actually believed Tutu could do it. As far as they were concerned, the man was a saint. But, in truth, he was anything but. When the murderous monster Winnie Mandela came before his commission, he gushed about his profound love for her, she offered a lame quasi-apology, and he let her off with that. After 9/11, he was less upset at Al-Qaeda than he was at George W. Bush and Tony Blair for going into Afghanistan, and actually called for them to be tried as war criminals in The Hague. Still later, making crystal clear at last the extreme nature of his views on the Middle East, he sang the praises of Yasser Arafat and pushed the University of Johannesburg to break ties with Israel, which he compared to Nazi Germany. Before shuffling off this mortal coil, he put on the record his abiding hatred for Jews, whom he described as the very enemies of his, Tutu’s, God.
At the height of Tutu’s renown, as it happens, I was an active member of the New York diocese of the ECUA. I knew people at the Episcopal Church Center, and was aware of how star-struck they were when the guy visited them. At the time, however, I was less exercised about the handing over of diocesan funds to Tutu than I was about the diocese’s equally enthusiastic support for the post-Cold War Russian Orthodox Church. Not only was Tutu a frequent presence in the diocese in those days; so were high-ranking Russian clergy in their exotic robes and cassocks and cuffs. When I put money in the basket every Sunday, I did so in hopes that the money would go to help defray my own parish’s expenses. Instead, much of it was being sent to Second Avenue and from there to somewhere in Moscow. All these cash transfers made the folks on Second Avenue feel important. They gushed over their visitors from Moscow, and now and then some of them traveled to Moscow, where, I gathered, they were treated like kings. I didn’t like any of it. It got to the point where I loathed having to go to church, because I didn’t want my money going to the Russian Church. My 1998 move to Europe was a godsend, because it saved me from having to decide whether to leave the Church or not over this question.
To be sure, leaving the U.S. didn’t make me feel I’d entirely left the ECUSA. My emotional ties to it were still strong. Having kept my distance from organized religion during most of my young adulthood, I’d stumbled into Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in my early thirties only to find myself captivated by the beautiful music and rituals, the intelligent preaching, and, above all, the theology, about which I wrote the following earlier this year, “Anglicanism, to put it simply, is a version of Christianity that emphasizes the mystery of faith over the demand that adherents profess to believe a long list of dogmatic statements. It respects authority even as it utterly repudiates the concept of human infallibility. And it rejects Biblical literalism while firmly respecting reason and the individual conscience. It also believes that the act of worship should be beautiful, marked by stirring ritual and magnificent music.”
Of course, not every Episcopal church has lived up to those standards. Far from it. Checking out parishes in other parts of the country, I found the preaching to be inane and semi-literate; in other parishes – some of them in New York, others in blue cities on both coasts – I encountered pure left-wing politics. That was, note well, before the turn of the century; since then, alas, the ECUSA as a whole has drifted further and further leftward. The whole world got an earful of this, most recently, when Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop of Washington, took the occasion of the National Prayer Service on the day after President Trump’s second inauguration to read him the riot act from her pulpit, mostly on the subjects of transgenderism and immigration.
It was not an impressive job, to put it mildly. In speaking glibly of “transgender children…who fear for their lives,” Budde threw over a common-sense, biology-based understanding of gender that goes back to prehistoric times in favor of a cockeyed ideology that gained currency in the haut monde the day before yesterday. And her reduction of the category of immigrants to “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings” (and so forth) couldn’t have been improved on by the most privileged Malibu movie star. This was the ECUSA at its worst – rich and remote, at once snobbish and self-righteous, as convinced of its own goodness as of its own superiority. Not, admittedly, that the ECUSA has been alone in going full-bore progressive; all the mainstream Protestant denominations have headed down the same virtue-signaling route – including Muslim prayers in Easter services, that sort of misguided madness.
Which brings us to the ECUSA’s latest offense. In recent years, the black government of South Africa, notwithstanding Tutu’s much-acclaimed reconciliation activities, has been increasingly intent not only on stealing land from white farmers but also on committing acts of violence against them. In 2018, Lauren Southern made a harrowing documentary, Farmlands, about this crisis. It’s no exaggeration to say that in South Africa these days, white lives are in danger. Accordingly, President Trump, to his credit, has just allowed 59 white refugees from that country to enter the U.S. Videos of them were shown earlier this week, smiling and waving little American flags. The striking thing was that they were families – fathers, mothers, and small children – not exclusively military-age men, like so many of the so-called refugees who are pouring into Western Europe these days and who, until Trump was returned to the White House, were crossing the Rio Grande with Biden’s blessing.
Inevitably, however, the same media that are shedding crocodile tears over Trump’s deportation of Latin American gang members, rapists, child traffickers, and murderers are putting the word “refugees” into scare quotes when writing about these not-quite-five-dozen South Africans. Repulsively, cable-news anchors have intimated that simply by being white South Africans, these people have deserved any fate that their black countrymen might choose to mete out to them. The German news organization Deutsche Welle has dismissed the claim that white South Africans are in danger as a “far-right trope.”
And the ECUSA is going along with all this ugliness. For decades, under the umbrella of something called Episcopal Migration Ministries, it has helped the federal government to resettle refugees in the U.S. – including not a few of the dicey, dangerous characters whom the Trump administration is striving to remove from the country. But the white South Africans, apparently, are a bridge too far. Even as the South Africans were on their flight to Washington, D.C., breathing sighs of relief over their narrow escape from a government that considers them expendable, the ECUSA’s presiding bishop, the Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe, informed his flock in a pastoral letter that the ECUSA had been asked by the government to resettle these people, but that it could not, in all good conscience, do such a thing, and would therefore cease all such collaborative arrangements with the U.S. government.
Here’s how Rowe put it. “In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa,” he wrote, “we are not able to take this step.” Translation: the ECUSA is in too deep with the creeps who run its South African counterpart to risk doing anything to help white parents and their small children. Never mind that these people didn’t leave their farms in South Africa on a whim. They owned and worked land that in many cases had likely been in their families for generations, and that they’d presumably hoped to leave to their children and grandchildren. But they didn’t dare stay. They were living in a country ruled by blacks who hate white South Africans – but who love the money that they get from white Episcopalians in America. And so they’d left it all behind and started anew in a land where they hoped they could live in freedom and safety.
In short, Desmond Tutu may be dead, but among Anglicans on both sides of the pond, his nasty spirit lives on – his ugly lie of racial reconciliation, his profound contempt for whites and his easy forgiveness of butchery by blacks. May the South African families whom President Trump has welcomed into the United States live long, happy, and peaceful lives in a country that they already love. And may my once beloved ECUSA, which at this point has betrayed everything it used to stand for and has consequently been bleeding members for decades, get absolutely every last little thing that it deserves.
Sometimes I can be a lazy reader.
Not this time however.
Thank you.
This is what is hoped for the Roman Catholic Church. It becomes the ECUSA.
An evil hero of the left in Berkeley.
The world needs Thomas Edisons, the world needs Euclids, the world needs Ayn Rands, Isaac Newtons, Aristotles, the world needs PRODUCERS, not PARASITES like Tutu, Pope Francis, or that evil little creature Mother Teresa.
The world needs more capitalism and less Christianity.
Godless people like yourself need psychiatric help.
No. They need to talk to somebody with common sense
They need to be bitch slapped.
I have suggested that a number of times but THX seems to think he is just fine. Of course insanity has no reason, but it may have a goal. What that is has not been revealed to him yet.
The world absolutely needs way less THX and Objectivism. The truth for you is the world is not turning in your direction.
Sucks to be you. Bitter table for one. What’s it like to be a failure every day of your pathetic life, old man.
Thomas Edison was a scumbag who used real geniuses to enrich himself. He ripped off Tesla, who was a REAL genius.
Direct current was gay.
Thanks for yet another comment I can add to the file. I give you credit for managing to get something related to gay in the post.
Yes, you like that gay stuff, don’t you? And Edison DID rip-off the vastly superior intellect and work of Tesla.
THX will not sleep until every Christian church disappears from the globe.. Surely there must be a better way to occupy one’s time other than to profess high-school level rhetoric. He would have better luck tilting at windmills. It would at least be more entertaining. My advice is to stop obsessing over something that will very likely survive long after the rest of us are gone. Move on to something more productive.
Since THX has no actual skills other than reading books and copying/pasting a few quotes by Peikoff and Rand over and over, vacuous high-school level rhetoric is about the best we can expect.
Hey not-so-Intrepid,
Please comment once again about my skills and how I must be ashamed of my career. That was some desperate, but unintentionally funny stuff.
Any suggestions about what I should do with my three months off? (Here’s your opportunity for another gay joke!) Maybe I’ll re-read all of Sowell’s books so that I can reinforce my liberal bona fides. Maybe I’ll once again make The Vision of the Anointed assigned reading.
After a long career having to deal with liberal colleagues who detested my letters, essays, and postings, I’m a seasoned vet dealing with lame, evasive, fact-avoiding commentary. Does it look like I’m backing down?
Three months? Are you taking a trip on a gay cruise ship? “Hey Boys. Bottoms up!”
In a nutshell, yes. Well put.
Whenever someone is vaunted to unquestioned heights, based on few words (“She helped the poor!”, “He was a man of peace!”, “He fought injustice!”, etc), I’ve found they’re worshipped; not known.
¹Mother Theresa didn’t solve poverty. She got fame for wallowing in it.
²Gandhi had a good start, but a terrible end. Muslims crept in, slaughtered at will (& eventually ripped off a huge chunk of India), and Gandhi preached that they remain gun fodder.
³ Mandela should’ve been shot & his wife hung. He was trash while in jail, and a rancid grifter after (Oil for Food)
⁴ Desmond Tutu was just another punk I forgot about. Thanks to this article, I know the prick was worth forgetting.
The irony is the left’s frantic effort to make Trump remembered reciprocally as an evil, facistic tyrant worse than Hitler – a “known fact” explained in few words.
Mother Theresa never attempted to “solve” poverty. She practiced Jesus’ law of love. She saw Christ in the poor and the dying, and loved them as He loved us, by giving His life for us.
When a victim of bullying meets someone who they can bully they become the worst type of bully.
That’s what is happening in the western world and that’s what has been happening in South Africa for FORTY YEARS.
It’s about time they, the South Africans, grew up.
I expect that these five families WILL grow up… to be fine, engaged, contributing citizens of the US now they have the boot of slavery removed from their necks. I’ve been loosely following the Dutch white folks and their travails these past few years. Very sad… and I am pleased that at least this group may have a ar better chance at decent lives now they are here.
They shoulda left that guy in his prison on that island in the South Atlantic. I KNEW as soon as he landed back in Africa he’d be trouble by the boatload. I am sad to realise that was an accurate call.
Unfortunately the comments about this article are very disrespectful to billions of religious people who have made this world civilized and mostly peaceful.
You”,re right. Religious people abolished the slave trade and fought for laws against cruelty to children and animals. A disproportionate percentage of the people who risked their own and their family’s lives to save Jews from the Nazis were believing Christians, men and women wbo did justly and loved mercy and walked humbly with their G-d.
Back in the day I knew a couple of black Anglican priests from South Africa.
One was well and truly estranged from Tutu and straight up referred to him as a communist and a tool of Moscow, and could provide examples to back it up.
The other, in a different city in a different state, might as well have been an out and out communist because he was to the left, quite a bit to the left, of several other people I knew who were straight up Trotskyites. That one was a close friend and associate of Tutu, and hiding in Australia from the South African government of the day who wanted to put him in the cell right alongside Mandela’s.
I was reared in the Episcopal church 70 years ago. We now have two churches. One is the old large columned beauty and the other is a small country type building. Guess which one is the liberal cesspool. As a society we have forgotten the cultural building blocks of the nation. Sunday is for sleeping in and football and naps. It is a long way from a 3 thousand mile boat ride looking for freedom. Government is always corrupt but the church was in many ways an anchor keeping us in some sort of respect for good and hope for better. The corruption has won in both instances. I do not see a way out.
I was Episcopalian when they used the 1928 BCP. I left in much sorrow and many tears because of the apostasy there.
The institutional church stood in the gap between liberalism and sanity and was the last institution to fall. But fall it did, along with every other denomination. The real church, the body of Christ present in all believers past present and future remains, though very small and largely invisible.
Because the church was last to fall, it will likely be slow to recover. I do see some good signs here in the U.S. I have flopped around for many years now in various churches and denominations. All have gone astray to varying degrees, but there are priests and pastors now who are speaking the truth under much persecution from the liberal wing. They will receive a great reward, and we must pray for them and labor with them.
Yes, many Pastors are good guys. I know mine is.
Not saying anything about your pastor, Jeff, but liberalism has infected the church by requiring pastors to be “nice guys.” Within churches, that is known as being “winsome” and these pastors are often effeminate and ineffective. Liberalism has feminized the church in many ways, and women pastors – truly an oxymoron- are a symptom of it. If your church has a woman as “pastor,” then your church has no pastor.
Trump would have been totally justified to walk out of the service when the “female priest” was addressing him personally and berating him. She was not, and could not, wield that office and her words from the pulpit prove it beyond any doubt.
My Pastor is a gay black guy but I was down and out when I first got to San Jose and he was the only person who helped me, so I’ll always stand by him. Yes, he’s a lefty but his sermons are always uplifting. I’m not into that fire and brimstone stuff. One of my girlfriends is still scarred by sermons like that she experienced as a girl.
The Leftist have always targeted the grand buildings with lots of loot for subversion.
Sorry to hear that. Church is supposed to be a bastion against corruption.
My years in Christian ministry taught me to never trust the religious professionals (not pastors walking their flocks through years of life). The TuTu ilk are self serving distractions from the Gospel. See Al Sharpton for further evidence.
1,250,000 white Europeans were traded as slaves by the Ottoman Barbary pirates until the USMC stopped them in the early 19th century.
FYI
Al Sharpton was James Browns’ bag boy.
No, they merely stopped them raiding American shipping.
What finally stopped the Barbary Pirates was France getting fed up and invading and colonizing Algeria and Tunisia.
The book “White Gold :The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves is an engaging, informative story.”. At the corner of GotNuthin’ and Intrepid, that I read it and recommend it just reinforces that I have to be a liberal. .
Tutu was Disgusting. In 1989, when he was 58, he visited Israel and took the Israeli tour of Yad Vashem. His response? Jews should not only forgive the Germans, but beg God to stop them from committing the same atrocities that was done to them. What arrogant viciousness!
Or to use his religion’s phrase, he’s a “whited sepulcher”. Though to analogize his favored race, he’s a blackened tar pit.
The White South Africans are fleeing brutality and murder at the hands
of Blacks to safety in America. The Blacks are bent on revenge and
that is fine with the Most Reverend Sean Rowe – the Episcopal Church
of America’s presiding bishop – who has instructed his flock that they
cannot – in all good conscience – resettle these people.
What happened to ‘Revenge is mine sayeth the Lord”? Sounds like
Bishop Rowe and Archbishop Tutu are cut from the same anti-White,
anti-Christian liturgical cloth.
A very warm welcome to America to the White South Africans. Now
bring over all the rest.
Tell Tutu to go soak his head in a Unflushed Toilet Bowl
Yes, with plenty of piss, shit and blue Tidy-Bowl. He would’ve looked better with blue hair.
Actually he did the next best thing. Instead of Christian burial or secular cremation he opted for the new-fangled “liquidation” option in which the body is dissolved or hydrolysis with strong alkaline solution. One of the more “green” methods of disposing of human remains.
Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing. A church is the body of Christ not the secular Marxist representative on the earth. This church lost its way a very long time ago. The church is the representative of Christ on the earth not a secular group of misguided Marxists. There is nothing in this church that represents Christ, but it has sided with atheist communists. The leader of this church is unqualified progressive who cannot in “good conscience” accept white South Africans because his thinking is so diluted that he actually thinks he has the moral high ground. Main line denominations grow farther from God as the darkness replaces the light. Beware of this group.
Colonel Pienaar https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Pienaar had to deal with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Gentile_National_Socialist_Movement#:~:text=Greyshirts%20or%20Gryshemde%20is%20the,the%20movement%20as%20a%20whole.
You only have to look at the head of the Anglican Church, King Charles, reading muslim prayers as part of the celebration of Easter, to see that the fish rots from the head down. Previous heads of the C of E have denied the Holy Trinity and ignored the teachings of the Bible, in a stampede towards Woke. God help the C of E.
“When the murderous monster Winnie Mandela came before his commission, he gushed about his profound love for her, she offered a lame quasi-apology, and he let her off with that.”
I would not put it past Desmond Tutu, that he and Winnie Mandela were involved sexually during the “Struggle”.. It’s a cultural thing in South Africa.
Both were evil and Tutu was a British crown apologist and was knighted as was Nelson Mandela