WASHINGTON, June 3, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – 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 epicenter 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 tear gas 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
after the biggest civil unrest in decades.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been demonstrating their anger since
the May 25 death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man killed by
police in Minneapolis.
The gatherings have been largely peaceful, but some have degenerated in to
riots.
Other Episcopalian leaders denounced Trump’s visit to the church as
“disgraceful and morally repugnant.”
“Simply by holding aloft an unopened Bible he presumed to claim Christian
endorsement and imply that of The Episcopal Church,” bishops from New England
said in a statement.
On Tuesday the president and his wife followed up with a visit to the St
John Paul II National Shrine in the capital’s northeast, immediately
infuriating the country’s Catholic leadership as well.
“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would
allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that
violates our religious principles,” Washington’s Archbishop Wilton Gregory
said in a statement.
The pontiff, who died in 2005, “certainly would not condone the use of tear
gas and other deterrents to silence, scatter or intimidate them for a photo
opportunity in front of a place of worship and peace,” he added.