Church elders rebuke Trump

– American religious leaders on Tuesday castigated Donald Trump for posing in front of a church holding a Bible after peaceful protesters were violently cleared from the surrounding area.

“It was traumatic and deeply offensive, in the sense that something sacred was being misused for a political gesture,” Washington’s Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde said on public radio station NPR.

The Republican billionaire, whose supporters include many evangelical Christians, used “the symbolic power of our sacred text, holding it in his hand as if it was a vindication of his positions and his authority”, she said.

The historic St John’s Episcopal church is across the street from Lafayette Park, which faces the White House and has been the epicentre of the protests in Washington

since Friday.

The church was defaced with graffiti and damaged in a fire during a demonstration on Sunday night.

On Monday, protesters were demonstrating there peacefully when law enforcement, including military police, used teargas to disperse them – clearing a path for the president to walk from the White House to the church for the photographs.

The protest was televised, and the backlash as the images spread was swift and furious.

“The protest at that point was entirely peaceful,” Budde said.

“There was absolutely no justification for this.”

Trump on Monday adopted a martial tone in a nationwide address he delivered just before the church visit, in which he threatened a military crackdown.