White Guilt Overdrive: The Episcopal Church Quits Refugee Resettlement Business to Avoid Helping Hunted White South Africans
Religion News Service reports:
In a striking move that ends a nearly four-decades-old relationship between the federal (U.S.) government and the Episcopal Church, the denomination announced on May 12 that it is terminating its partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by President Donald Trump’s administration.
In a letter sent to members of the church, the Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe — the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church — said that two weeks ago the government “informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees.”
The request, Rowe said, crossed a moral line for the Episcopal Church, which is part of the global Anglican Communion that boasts among its leaders the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a celebrated and vocal opponent of apartheid in South Africa. …
The announcement came just as flights with Afrikaners were scheduled to arrive at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C., the first batch of entries after Trump declared via a February executive order that the U.S. would take in “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
This may be the worst form of White Guilt I’ve ever encountered — and I’ve mentioned that phenomenon often in these pages. I’ll get into more of those details below, but for now, let’s talk about the particulars of South Africa.
The ancestors of Dutch-speaking Afrikaners (or Boers) arrived in South Africa as religious refugees in 1652 — long before tribes such as the Xhosa that now dominate that country. Decades after white South Africans peacefully dismantled apartheid and granted full voting rights to all, Marxist and tribalist parties are targeting the Boer minority for persecution. As Trump’s executive order accurately reported:
In shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights, the Republic of South Africa (South Africa) recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 (Act), to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation. This Act follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.
Watch this mainstream political rally in South Africa, where the song of choice is the genocidal anthem “Kill the Boer”:
Yet the Episcopal Church is willing to give up millions of dollars in federal grants and hamper its global refugee programs to avoid crossing the moral red line of … helping white people, anywhere in the world, regardless of what is happening to them.
These are the hunted Boers the Episcopal Church thinks unworthy of protection from an openly hostile government. Few are old enough to have played any part in the wicked apartheid system that ended in the late 1990s.
BREAKING: First group of white refugees fleeing persecution (South Africa) have arrived in the United States pic.twitter.com/8Cbq4IIXVt
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 12, 2025
A New Cult of Antichrist: Instead of White Supremacy, White Guilt
Back to White Guilt. Let me be clear that in discussing it, I am distinctly not trying to fuel white tribalism, to encourage white Americans to engage in the kind of groupthink and un-Christian “partiality” that liberals routinely wink at among every other ethnic group on Earth (apart from Israelis). What offends me about the cult of White Guilt is not so much that it’s aimed at demonizing people who look like me as the fact that it’s ultimately aimed at dethoning Jesus Christ. It’s a whole new religion that steals Christian DNA to form a metastasizing tumor, kill the church, shatter our country, and drag souls into Hell.
Allow me to explain. Step into my time machine. Let’s go back to the dark, bleak, locked-down days of 2020, at the depth of the COVID panic. After blue-state governors had sent COVID patients into assisted living facilities to infect them, seniors died by the thousands in nursing homes, unvisited and unblessed by pastors, and were then disposed of as medical waste. Our churches were closed. Our kids’ schools were closed. The beaches (except in Florida) were for some reason closed. Political rallies and worship services were deemed to be “superspreader events” and therefore banned.
You know what was open for business, though? George Floyd riots, which the most jackbooted lockdown fascists gladly exempted from any pandemic restrictions. Why? Because, in the boilerplate phrase I saw in one mainstream media outlet after another, “Racism is a threat to public health.” Therefore gatherings that doubtless spread COVID while allegedly fighting racism were too important to ban. They were “essential” events, unlike the worship of almighty God.
Maybe that’s not entirely fair. George Floyd riots were in fact religious services of a kind, celebrating a “martyr” and performing the rites of a new, intolerant religion: the woke cult of White Guilt, which millions of well-off white people seemed eager to embrace as a replacement for the Gospel.
The New Pharisees, Virtue-Signaling and Scapegoating
White Guilt isn’t an exaggerated form of Christian moral concern, though it may have started that way. It’s not an overgrown form of noblesse oblige or an instance of magnanimity run amok. No, the Episcopal Church has shown that in fact it’s something much fouler. That church’s attempt to leave unarmed, peaceful farmers to be robbed, pillaged, and hunted because of the color of their skin confirms my bleakest assessments.
White Guilt is a post-Christian and anti-Christian cult that centers on self-aggrandizement and actually seeks to replace Jesus Christ as the scapegoat Who died for our sins with an ethnic group: white people themselves. I’ve already written extensively about this right here at The Stream, so let me unearth a few passages for you to reread in light of the Episcopal Church’s decision:
The Woke cult needs a Christ. Or least a Christ-figure. … It needs something vast and strong to take on the sins of the world, be “counted as sin,” rejected and despised. And then to actually, violently sacrifice itself, for the sake of world salvation. Only then then can it rise again by virtue of its purity and world-transcending goodness.
Only then can they save themselves from the evil their creed identified, the “total depravity” it sees pervading the earth. After this great thing has been condemned and killed, and then by its own efforts risen again to convert the world, they can feel safe actually worshiping it like a god. And incorporating themselves among its members, so they can be deified too.
The Woke church has chosen as its sacrificed, dead, and resurrected God … the white race itself, and the West’s historic institutions.
How do we know this to be true?
Whatever principalities and powers are driving them have taught Woke whites to hijack the figure of Jesus. And then to apply His unique characteristics to “whiteness” and whites. They look at whites collectively as a mystical body of Christ. That’s why they saddle it with unearthly, messianic expectations which they’d never ask of Han Chinese in China or Hutus in Rwanda. They demand that Swedes and Germans, in their own countries, detest their own culture and heritage. And fund their own dispossession by poor, assertive immigrants.
The Woke expect white Americans to live in unending shame for our ancestors’ conquest of this continent. Do they make similar demands of ethnic groups that conquered other continents? Does it even cross their minds to criticize Arabs for overwhelming dozens of nations and imposing Islam on a third of the world? Or operating a slave trade well into the 20th century, kidnapping millions of women sold as prostitutes?
Of course not. The Woke don’t expect such scruples of “lesser breeds without the law” (see Rudyard Kipling). They only impose the “white man’s burden” of self-sacrificial guilt as a kind of cross. One to be carried by a white savior, which they already secretly worship.
Who is the “white savior” that woke post-Christians worship instead of God?
Themselves.
The mirror is their sacrament, the approval of elites their blessed assurance and their beatitude. As Jesus said of the self-serving hypocrites He faced in His day: “They already have their reward.”
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.