Nikki Haley criticized President Joe Biden for hosting a political rally at a church in South Carolina, calling the decision “offensive.”
Biden delivered remarks on Wednesday afternoon at a campaign event at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the site of a racially motivated mass shooting in 2015. In his speech, Biden denounced white supremacy and election denialism. He met with survivors and families of the victims of the shooting.
Hours later, during a town hall broadcast live on Fox News Wednesday evening, Haley — the former governor of South Carolina and a 2024 Republican presidential candidate — took offense to the setting of Biden’s speech.
“Mother Emmanuel Church is a sacred place,” Haley said. “For Biden to show up there and give a political speech is offensive in itself.”
The 2015 shooting took place during an evening Bible study at the church, when a 21-year-old white visitor entered and opened fire. Nine people were killed and a tenth injured. All of the victims are African Americans.
In an online manifesto, the shooter espoused racist and white supremacist motivations, including posting a photo of the Confederate flag.
In the aftermath of the shooting, then-Gov. Haley decided to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse, where it had flown for over 50 years.
Haley speaks about that decision frequently in town halls and interviews, relaying it as an example of her leadership. “I knew half of South Carolinians saw the Confederate flag as heritage and tradition. The other half of South Carolinians saw slavery and hate,” she has said on multiple occasions. “My job wasn’t to judge either side. My job was to get them to see the best of themselves and go forward.”
During a town hall in New Hampshire last month, Haley said the cause of the Civil War ”was basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” She did not mention slavery. Last week, when pressed about her comments during a live town hall on CNN, she backtracked, saying she “should have said slavery, but in my mind, that’s a given that everybody associates the Civil War with slavery.”
Biden condemned Haley’s comments during his speech in Charleston Wednesday, though he didn’t mention her by name. “Let me be clear for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War,” Biden said. “There is no negotiation about that.”
During her Fox News town hall Wednesday, Haley responded. “I don’t need someone who palled around with segregationists in the ’70s and has said racist comments all the way through his career lecturing me or anyone in South Carolina about what it means to have racism, slavery, or anything related to the Civil War,” she said.
As Biden stood at the podium at the beginning of his speech, he was given a standing ovation and chants of “four more years.”
When a video of the chants circulated on social media, Tim Alberta — a staff writer at The Atlantic — called the scene “wrong.” Alberta’s new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” critiques the evangelical church’s embrace of right-wing extremism.
“This is wrong — no matter the tradition, no matter the denomination, no matter the partisan flavor,” Alberta wrote. “My standard will remain the same: Stop using the bride of Christ as a political prop.”
Churches will become center stages for political events in coming days, as the Iowa caucuses — the official start of the 2024 Republican primary — are this Monday, Jan. 15. Dozens of churches across the state will be used as caucus locations, where voters will gather, deliver speeches and fill out ballots. Tens of thousands of Iowans are expected to participate in the Iowa caucuses, most of them evangelical Christians.
In the preceding days, organizations like Faith Wins will host “caucus training” events at churches across the state. The trainings, led by pastors, will encourage Iowans to vote in the caucus in line with “Biblical values.”