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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 South 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.