Churches Respond To Trump
was a new low,” Dr. Warnock said. “I had to wrestle with how do I characterize what he said without saying it.”
What emerged was a service that swerved between the past and the present, where Dr. Warnock accused Mr. Trump of trafficking in “hate speech” and described him as “willfully ignorant, racist, xenophobic.”
“I don’t know that he’s listening, and I don’t know that it matters,” Dr. Warnock said in an interview. “Even if Trump were to leave tomorrow, we still have to deal with the large segment of white evangelicals who voted for Trump. My battle is not so much with Trump as it is with Trumpism.”
Some say that Mr. Trump’s language is distracting from an important policy question and church leaders said that made his remarks all the more inexcusable. Words matter, they said, when they come from the mouth of the president.
“This is not a Confederate uncle that’s locked away in the attic,” said Thabiti Anyabwile, pastor of Anacostia River Church in Washington. “This is someone who is making policies, and he’s doing so from an openly racist point of view.”
He added: “It teaches us that our country is in peril. We are in danger of going back to those old policies.”
The pastor of Kuomba United Methodist Church in Kansas City, Missouri, was thinking of Mr. Trump as well. The Reverend Fataki Mutambala, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, told his congregants not to let President Trump’s words disturb them.
“Don’t be mad about the message that you received from Donald Trump,” said Mr. Mutambala, who came to the United States three years ago. “The respect that you receive is from God.”
American- born black church leaders were angrier. Mr. Anyabwile noted that today’s problems were rooted early in the nation’s history, and observed that in contrast to Germany after the Holocaust, the American South has not been forced to fully confront the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.
“Corners of the country could put their hands in their pockets, whistle and quietly shuffle off, as if the history was never theirs,” he said.
But that history can rear its head. “We are in the grips of the revenge of an American conscience that’s never repented of its racist history,” he said. “Things that were left smoldering, embers have caught a bit of wind from our current president, and from time to time we are seeing flashes of fire.”