[Episcopal News Service] Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe defended The Episcopal Church’s decision to end its federal contract rather than help the Trump administration resettle white South Africans in the United States, saying in a webinar that churches must reject the “moral compromise” that the administration has expected of other American institutions.
“I think the institutional resistance is now more important than ever,” Rowe said in the May 20 webinar hosted by Religion News Service. “The church may be one of the few institutions that will be able to stand up and to tell the truth along the way, not to fold to demands to continue to be asked to make compromises on our moral decision-making.”
The Episcopal Church and its Episcopal Migration Ministries had helped to resettle nearly 110,000 refugees since the 1980s though a bipartisan federal program. The church, however, has faced criticism this month from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump’s supporters for refusing to participate in the president’s expedited resettlement of Afrikaners from South Africa. Trump previously halted the resettlement of all other refugees, many of them fleeing war, persecution and natural disasters.
Religion News Service initially invited Rowe as a panelist to talk about the church’s participation in an interfaith lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from conducting immigration enforcement actions at houses of worship. After Rowe’s May 12 announcement that EMM would end its federal contract rather than resettle the small group of Afrikaners, the presiding bishop spent much of the RNS webinar responding to questions about that decision.
“What we’re talking about here is a real distortion of the facts and the truth,” Rowe said, referring to claims that the church is turning its back on white South Africans who feel persecuted by their country’s Black majority.
“In this case, it was fairly straightforward,” Rowe said. “We have a group of people [the Afrikaners] who are essentially the architects of apartheid. They are by no means persecuted. Certainly, times are difficult in South Africa, that’s for sure. But they don’t meet any definition of a refugee. And more importantly, they jumped the line.”
Trump, after suspending the United States’ 45-year-old refugee resettlement program, later reversed himself to make a narrow exception for these white South Africans, whom he said were “escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
Afrikaners, who number about 3 million people in a country of 63 million, formerly were part of the governing white minority under South Africa’s extreme racial segregation of apartheid, until its end in 1994 allowed newfound enfranchisement of the country’s Black majority. Afrikaner activists are now promoting a “completely false narrative,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said, by claiming that the government’s efforts to address lingering racial disparities amount to persecution of the country’s white minority.
Ramaphosa also pushed back against such claims in a meeting with Trump on May 21 at the White House, but Trump insisted on his version of Ramaphosa’s country, describing a South Africa that he said was plagued by widespread anti-white violence and stolen property.
Rowe also has lamented the harms that Trump’s executive order restricting all other refugee resettlement have caused for many of the millions of other people living in limbo and desperate for new homes in the United States after fleeing danger and hardships in their home countries, from Sudan to Vietnam. Rowe amplified those points in the webinar.
“We have people who helped our United States military, who are real patriots, Afghans,” he said, “others who are waiting to be resettled, people who are facing violence in Congo and all over, waiting in camps and dying every day.”
Instead, the Trump administration last week welcomed into the United States about 50 Afrikaners – “rather privileged people by the world’s standards,” Rowe said. After consulting with Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba of Southern Africa, Rowe and Episcopal leaders decided it was not worth participating now in the resettlement of the Afrikaners in the hopes of a future restoration of the broader refugee program.
“The problem with any kind of Faustian bargain like that is that the devil always wins,” Rowe said. “We knew that if we did this, we were going to be asked to do something else we couldn’t do. This was the line that we had to draw. And we’ll continue to do that. We’ll continue to tell the truth and be on the side of moral decision-making, and that’s what this is about. Just because the Trump administration and others have lost their way doesn’t mean the church has.”
Other webinar panelists included the Rev. Carlos Malavé, president of the Latino Christian National Network, and Liz Reiner Platt, director of the Law, Rights and Religion Project at Columbia Law School in New York. They joined Rowe to discuss some of the lawsuits that religious organizations have filed this year to contest other Trump administration policies, particularly those related to immigration.
Malavé’s organization is a plaintiff with The Episcopal Church and 25 other groups seeking to restore “sensitive locations” protections that the Department of Homeland Security previously had granted to houses of worship, before Trump took office in January 2025. The plaintiffs have argued that ending those protections from enforcement actions have hindered congregations’ efforts to welcome and minister to immigrant communities.
“We must, as followers of Jesus, be faithful to our call,” Malavé said. Christianity offers “a world view in which every human being is loved, accepted and cared for.”
Rowe agreed, adding that The Episcopal Church and other plaintiffs are “making pretty conservative arguments” based in constitutional principles of religious freedom, freedom of speech and the rule of law.
At the same time, The Episcopal Church has not joined a separate lawsuit contesting the Trump administration’s suspension of the refugee resettlement program. Rowe explained that the church needs to be strategic and “can’t be part of every lawsuit” but will continue to take faith-based stands as a “bulwark against injustice.”
“This is not about party politics. This is about moral decision-making,” Rowe said. “This is not about being a Republican or Democrat. This is not anti-Trump. … This is about our baptismal covenant and respecting the dignity of every human being.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.