The World Council of Churches has joined a chorus of voices condemning comments reportedly made by US President Donald Trump in which he described African nations as “s***hole countries”.
Mr Trump reportedly made the comments during a meeting in the Oval Office last week, referring to African countries and asking: “Why are we having all these people from s***hole countries come here?”. He also reportedly asked whether the US needed “more Haitians” and suggested the US bring in more people from countries like Norway.
Mr Trump later said on Twitter that while the language he used at the meeting was “tough”, “this was not the language used”. He has also since told reporters he was “not a racist”. “I’m the least racist person you have ever interviewed.”
Numerous Christian organisations condemned the reported remarks, with the National Council of Churches in the US describing them as “deeply disturbing”.
On Monday, the WCC released a statement which said the general secretary, Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, “voiced his support for churches in the USA and elsewhere as they made it very clear that expressions of racism are against the most basic tenets of Christian faith and ethics”.
“We call upon governments and heads of states to fulfill their responsibility to set high standards and promote mutual respect and care for the dignity of all, both in international relationships and in their own countries,” he said in the statement.
As a Norwegian, Rev Dr Tveit said he was particularly disturbed by mention of that country in the comments.
“As a Norwegian and as general secretary of the international fellowship of churches in the WCC, I don’t accept that my country – or any other country – is used in expressions to undermine the dignity of other people and other countries.”
In the US, among church bodies to have condemned the remarks are the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
“Regardless of the context, references of that kind have no place in our civil discourse and, if true, reflect racist attitudes unbecoming any of us, but especially a president of the United States,” said Elizabeth Eaton, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “Instead, we should be fostering a world where each of us sees every person – regardless of race, origin, ethnicity, gender or economic status – in the image of God and, therefore, worthy of dignity and respect.”
The reporting of the comments last week also prompted some discomfit among Mr Trump’s White House’s informal board of evangelical advisers with at least three distancing themselves from the President in the wake of the remarks.
Rev Samuel Rodriguez, a member of the unofficial evangelical advisory board and the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said that he believed the comments attributed the President “can best be described as wrong, inappropriate, and hurtful”. “Why? Because when God looks at these nations, He sees His children.”
– with reporting from Religion News Service
