Of Immigrants and Refugees

After 57 years in Alaska, we pulled up stakes in 2012 and moved to the “lower 48.” It was hard leaving Juneau but easy to live in Seattle as we were closer to our children and Tammy’s family, in a job I loved, and enthralled with Pacific Northwest with all of its outdoor options and beauty. Plus, there were roads to drive and places to go.

Leaving was hard as I had family in Juneau, great friends that we would miss, and a lifetime of memories in the mountains and sea of that Great Land. Plus, there was that identity thing where being from Alaska brings a cachet that’s pretty unique and special.

Fortunately, my new job included trips to Alaska and every trip had a set routine. Outside of the workplace, I would stay with my dad, visit a favorite restaurant, hike at least one trail, and visit one friend. My restaurant circuit included Peter’s Oriental, a tiny unassuming part of the Nugget Mall just behind the airport. Their spring rolls were addictive along with the sauce they liberally poured over. Most people ordered the Teriyaki chicken or L4, but I always got a “L2 spicy level two.” Full of vegetables and with plenty of pork, its sauce was the highlight that kept me coming back again and again.

We knew the family behind Peter’s Oriental from the time they first arrived in Juneau. They had fled Vietnam as refugees once the U.S. backed out. Our church sponsored them and it didn’t take long before they became a flourishing part of our larger church family and our community as a whole.

Many churches across the country have similar stories to tell. Stories about refugees or immigrants they took in, nurtured, and helped get established in this new, strange land called America. Stories of virtue and of sacrifice, about followers of Jesus faithful to His words in Matthew 25:35: “for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Then There’s the Data
Today, white evangelicals are the religious group with the highest belief that immigrants threaten society (57%). Moreover, as the graph below shows, white evangelical Protestants are the least likely among all religious groups to say the U.S. has a responsibility to accept refugees (only 25%). All other groups more faithfully heed the biblical injunction to “welcome the stranger” with the religiously unaffiliated showing the highest level of commitment.

It Hasn’t Always Been This Way
America has a long history of populist and nativist tendencies and the protestant church’s participation in this history has been a mixed bag. European immigrants arriving in the 18th and 19th centuries encountered a severe backlash that was Protestant-infused. Their nativist fears included anyone Catholic and led to the formation of the populist and anti-immigration Know-Nothing Party. Immigrants that followed, often from China and other far east locales, continued to face opposition upon arrival. But this time was different with many evangelical leaders becoming immigration advocates as they pushed back on nativist fears.

This good news story of an immigrant friendly church continued into the 20th century. Protestant support for the large influx of refugees following World War 2 became instrumental to America’s cold war strategy. The church played a prominent role in helping refugee resettlement for those fleeing Cuba in the 1960s. They supported resettlement of immigrants from Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. When opportunities arose in the late 1980s to help undocumented immigrants become permanent citizens, evangelical churches led the way, drawing on scriptural commands to show hospitality and “welcome the stranger.” Such helping hands were seen as an imperative of the gospel’s call to help “the least of these my brethren.”

This support wasn’t just confined to “legal immigration” either. Evangelical writings in the 1980s didn’t address illegal status in a negative way. The Southern Baptist position in 1986, as given in their publication MissionsUSA, supported those sentiments by saying: “people in need should be shown the love of Christ, whatever their ‘legal’ status.”

Then Came The Culture War
The Apostle Paul wrote about the “war within” as a struggle between grace and our fallen nature. It’s an age-old struggle with a constant ebb and flow that is documented in the pages of history. A Christ-centric church can make a profound difference such as MLK’s advocacy of civil rights. But when the church loses that focus, like the Apostle Peter walking on water, it sinks into the abyss of that fallen nature.

The emergence of today’s culture war is destructive to the church because it takes our eyes off of Jesus. It changes deeply held values as it reshapes our identity into a syncretistic mixture of two kingdoms. It then brings new sensibilities through opening new doors that had previously held back that fallen nature.

Those new sensibilities transformed the gospel ethic of the church. By the 1990s a new vocabulary arose, peppered with phrases such as ‘rule of law’ and ‘law-breakers.’ Restrictionist voices grew loud. First Corinthians 13 became replaced by Romans 13. Calls to love your neighbor (of which “there is no other commandment greater”) bowed before calls of being tough. Nativism now formed the new moral high ground with the distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ all important.

Evangelicals became the core base of a re-emergent American populism. But this was a different populism, not driven by economic factors as one would assume, but by anti-immigration attitudes, opposition to affirmative action, Islamophobia, and preference for rough politics (as I have previously written about here).

What Went Wrong: Four Fatal Factors
The problem isn’t Christianity. It’s that other stuff, cultural stuff, we add to our faith. It changes its beliefs, changes its practice, and changes our gospel sensibilities. As Michael Gerson recently said in a meeting at evangelical Wheaton College, “People’s views on, say, immigration are not shaped by their theology, but by their class, their politics and their tribe.”

Moral Man Immoral Society
Reinhold Niebuhr in his iconic book Moral Man and Immoral Society observes that we are complex people, endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish urges. We yearn to belong, to connect with family, community, and likeminded others. Through that belonging, a “love your neighbor” ethic flows easily and we’ll give the shirt off our back to people in our group, even if we don’t know them that well.

But the mere nature of our societies will effect a change in our underlying values, opening the door to our fallen nature. They arrogate social privilege, putting the thumb on the selfish side of the scale. We develop intolerance and prejudice against the other side. We tolerate inequality and deny civil liberties to those without power. Our tribalism then ‘binds and blinds’ as our fallen, xenophobic, nature takes over.

Social Dominance Orientation and Right-wing Authoritarianism
The open doors of the culture war bring two of our innate tendencies into prominence. Those exhibiting Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) see the world competitively, a zero-sum world of winners and losers. Societal stratification is inevitable as neutrality is not an option. Power belongs to the victor, privileged through a profound struggle for dominance. And the world will find its rightful balance as long as “they the strong” take their rightful place at the top of the social ladder.

People oriented towards right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) crave social order and cohesion. They are hostile to change. They see outside social groups bringing instability and unpredictability, threatening the nature of society. They crave social stability through adhering to societal conventions and norms. They willingly submit to authorities they see as legitimate and favoring of traditional social norms and values, while sharing a common hostility towards those outsiders (e.g., immigrants) who are different.

Both innate tendencies provide an accelerant to harmful in-group/out-group behaviors but attack immigration differently. Those exhibiting social dominant orientation are provoked by successful assimilation as it threatens their dominant role. Right-wing authoritarians are provoked when immigrants don’t assimilate into the dominant culture thereby violating in-group norms and conformity.

Christian Nationalism
In a recent Christianity Today article, Paul Miller describes Christian nationalism as “the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists (CNs) assert that America is and must remain a “Christian nation”—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.”

To some, this might sound like one of those “self-evident” truths our country was founded on. But embedded in this political/theological/cultural framework are some dark underlying assumptions about race, nativism, and an ordering of society. I’ll be writing more about this in future blog posts but for now, let’s briefly look at some data.

CNs score high in SDO and 2.5 times that of someone who rejects CN. CN and RWA go hand in hand with CN as the dominant factor in predicting agreement with “People should be made to show respect for America’s traditions.” Collectively, these sensibilities drive consistent findings that show CN to be a significant predictor of anti-immigrant stereotypes, prejudice, dehumanization, support for anti-immigration policies, and belief that immigrants undermine American culture.

Yet, The Bible Says…
Even a cursory reading of scripture challenges the current anti-immigration views by many Christians today. The biblical call of ‘welcoming the stranger’ flows from a Micah 6:8 “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” lifestyle. Seeing others as made in the image of God removes all racial and ethnic barriers. A clear understanding of the cross compels us to see the Christ in our neighbor, whether in or out of our tribe. Recognizing that we too are “foreigners and strangers,” pilgrims on a journey to a heavenly city, we welcome the immigrant as fellow sojourners on this quest. For we are citizens of the kingdom first. That is our identity.

For if the God of the Bible shows particular compassion for the immigrant, even equating them with the orphan and the widow, and if the cross of Christ is designed to compel outreach across all peoples, then how much more should we as the people of God care for immigrants from other countries in our midst?

Faithfully Christian

1. Church Leaders Need to Lead. To wit: church attenders, according to Pew and PRRI surveys, report that less than 1/6th of their clergy ever openly discuss the subject of immigration in the church. The Apostle Paul didn’t shy away from addressing scriptural unfaithfulness in his letters and American clergy shouldn’t either.
2. Heed the plea of evangelical scholar Ruth Melkonian-Hoover: “there is an urgent need for evangelicals—leaders and laity alike—to fully apprehend the “moral components of the immigration issue—honoring the Biblical values of ‘welcoming the stranger,’ keeping the families together, considering the justice implications of migration nationally and globally, and acknowledging the conditions in other societies that lead to immigration in the first place,” as has been done before.”
3. Become citizens of Christ’s kingdom, and His kingdom only, mindful each day that our calling is “at the heart of the biblical narrative is the story of God bringing humankind to be the imago dei, that is, to be the reflection of the divine character, love, where we show the world what our God is like.”
4. Test yourself (2 Cor 13:5) for such attitudes as right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, populism, negative attitudes toward out-groups such as Muslims and immigrants. Better yet, develop friendships across tribal divisions and become accountable to them about such attitudes.
5. Test yourself on your theology, carefully considering the underlying tenets of Christian Nationalism. Recognize that CN is, in the words of Tim Keller, idolatrous, and its ethos means the death of Christian witness.
6. Take practical steps to close doors that distort our focus. Like unplugging from partisan media and other amplifiers of the culture war, following my mother’s constant admonition of Philippians 4:8 – “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”