Lux Lucet

Ruth and Naomi Leave Moab, 1860, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872).

Last week we concluded our look at the immigration proposals of the two major presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

In summary, Donald Trump gets some things right – he understands that immigration policy should be conducted with a view to benefiting the American people and has called for the end of birthright citizenship – and he gets some things wrong – the border wall and E-Verify, the latter of which amounts to a call for a national ID card.

Hillary Clinton on the other hand, her immigration platform is an unmitigated disaster. Not only does she promise amnesty in the first 100 days of her presidency, but she has no proposal to prevent a future massive inflow of immigrant welfare cases. But it’s worse than that. If Hillary gets her way there she intends to increase the welfare giveaway by allowing immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, to buy into Obamacare, a taxpayer subsidized health insurance system. She also wants to make it all but impossible to deport the parents of anchor babies.

But as important as it is to examine the immigration proposals of the presidential candidates, it is also important to remember that they did not spring into existence out of thin air. They are the product of intellectual discussions that have been taking place, usually not in the public eye. The purpose of this post is to examine the immigration proposals of various groups that have influenced the thinking and the actions of both government officials and the American people on subject of immigration.

But more than that, it also is my intention to critique the various immigration proposals in light of Scripture. In my view, none of them fully square with the Scriptures. The main reason for this being that the immigration theorists did not begin with what the Bible teaches about immigration, but began their thinking somewhere else. To put it another way, those who have written about immigration to date have not been Scripturalists.

The Roman Church-State

I discussed the Roman Church-State’s immigration program at some length in Part 2 of this series, and do not intend to repeat myself here. But I would like to flesh out the discussion with a few additional points.

When studying anything Roman Antichrist has to say on the issue of immigration, it is imperative for Protestants to understand that Rome has a very different world view from what they do.

Even if they have not thought about it deeply, most Protestants tend to think in terms of the Westphalian sovereignty when it comes to international relations. Westphalian sovereignty is the technical name for what most Americans would call foreign policy common sense. One definition of this term reads,

Westphalian sovereignty is the principle of international law that each nation state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers [including all external religious powers], on the principle of non-interference in another country’s domestic affairs, and that each state (no matter how small) is equal in international law (Wikipedia).

Westphalian sovereignty is just the Biblical principle of MYOB applied to international relations. It became the came into existence with the Protestant victory over the Romanists in the Thirty Years’ War which concluded in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia.

Rome has never accepted Westphalian sovereignty and has spent nearly 400 years attempting to overthrow it. Rome’s opposition to Westphalian sovereignty is easy to understand, as it allows no room for the pope to meddle in the internal politics of nations.

In the opinion of this write, it is Rome’s opposition to Westphalian sovereignty together with its unholy desire to create a new, global Holy Roman Empire that lies behind its advocacy for mass immigration, migration and refugees.

The Roman Church-State’s globalist scam, in the opinion of this author, works as follows.

First: Flood the target nation with immigrants, Roman Catholics if possible, but any sort will do. This is exactly what is underway in the US and Europe. And making this happen is of such importance to Rome that the pope recently took direct control of the Church’s migration bureaucracy. According to Reuters, “Francis will ‘temporarily’ take personal charge of migration because ‘there cannot be a service for integral human development without paying particular attention to the phenomenon of migration.’ ”

Second: When the citizens of the target nation complain about the economic and social costs of the mass immigration, lecture them on their lack of Christian charity.

An effective tool to this end is twisting Scriptures to argue that welfare immigrants/migrants/refugees are simply doing the same thing that Joseph did by taking Mary and Jesus and fleeing to Egypt. Another tool is to bring up verses from the Old Testament about caring for the stranger, all the while ignoring the fact that those verses refer to acts of private charity, not tax funded welfarism.

Charges of racism can be effective as well.

The effect of all this scripture twisting propaganda is that it allows the pope to preen as a champion of the poor and oppressed, while sticking the target nation’s taxpayers with the bill. Nice work if you can get it.

Third: Wash, rinse, repeat. Continue the above process until the power of the electorate in target nation has been broken by the economic and social burden of caring for millions of welfare immigrants/migrants/refugees and by the huge, new, imported voting bloc loyal to Rome.

Fourth: Ultimately incorporate the formerly sovereign, now bankrupt, socially fractured and ungovernable target nation into a new globalist empire with the Antichrist Roman Church-State running the show.

One implication of the above is that the actual immigrants/migrants/refugees themselves are, as much as anything, victims of the Mother of Harlots. I do not mean to suggest that they are in all cases blameless, but it is the globalist cabal, and in particular the original and greatest globalist of them all, the Antichrist papacy, which has by far the greater sin.

Referring to Satan, the apostle Paul wrote that “[W]e are not ignorant of his devices.” But for far too long, Evangelicals have been ignorant of the immigration devices of the Antichrist Roman Church-State. It is high time for this situation to end.

Liberal Protestants – The SJW Religious Left

Romanists are not the only religious group to hop on the immigration bandwagon. Liberal protestant Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) certainly make their voices heard as well. For an example of their work, let us first turn to Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA).

On its website under the topic heading Immigrants and Refugees, ESA opens its immigration discussion by smearing Americans with the charge of, you guessed it, racism,

For a country that prides itself on its immigrant past, on welcoming those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the United States as a whole [with the possible exception of ESA members] is surprisingly – and persistently -xenophobic [xenophobic is simply Greek for racist].

It’s an easy thing to find fault with any nation. Certainly the US in no exception. On the other hand, if the US is filled with so many horrible, hateful people, why is it that America is still the world’s most popular destination for immigrants?

According to this article cited by The Huffington Post,

The U.S. is by far the largest destination for immigrants, with more than 45.7 million living in the country, according to the UN…Considering the U.S. has one the (sic) the highest per capita GDPs in the world, at nearly $50,000, its appeal to immigrants is fairly straightforward.

That’s right, tens of millions of immigrants can’t wait to come face racist abuse in the United States of Xenophobia.

Given Americas long history of welcoming the stranger – in the Biblical sense, not in the Romanist, SJW welfarist sense – it is outrageous for the ESA to presume to lecture Americans as it does. But that doesn’t stop them.

ESA has gone to the trouble of producing a group study guide on immigration titled As the Citizen Among Us: Loving the Immigrant as Ourselves. Since the document is 30 page long, I won’t attempt to cover all of it. But there are a few things that stand out even upon a cursory review.

It is, as is the case with so much “Evangelical” scholarship, unoriginal and derivative. By that I mean there appears to be little of nothing in the study guide that could not just as easily been written by a prelate of the Roman Church-State. Take, for example, Appendix A: The Immigrant’s Creed found on page 27. It reads in part,

I believe in Jesus Christ, a displaced Galilean, who was born away from his people and his home, who fled his country with his parents when his life was in danger…

This argument for immigration – the argument that taxpayer subsidized mass immigration is a Biblical requirement based on the Joseph taking Mary and Jesus to Egypt – is lifted straight out of Exsul Familia, the 1952 apostolic constitution by Pope Pius XII.

Here’s a brief quote from Exsul Familia for comparison,

The émigré Holy Family of Nazarth, fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil (Rev. Guilivo Tessarolo, Ed., The Church’s Magna Charta for Migrants, 23).

So, both the liberal protestant SJWs and the Romanists both agree that the flight to Egypt is model for the sort of taxpayer subsidized, mass immigration/migration going on in Europe and the US. But is it? As a little consideration shows, this is far from the case.

For one, when Joseph and his family went to Egypt, they were fleeing, not from one country to another, but to a different provinces of the Roman Empire. Since both Judea and Egypt were under Roman rule in the First Century AD, what took place was more akin a family moving from Ohio to Kentucky rather than international migration.

Second, it is a bit of a stretch to compare the movement of three people to Egypt to the millions of individuals pouring into Western Europe and America. The scale isn’t remotely the same.

As a follow up point, if one wanted to find a Biblical migration on the scale of what is happening now in Europe and the US, he would have to look to Exodus, where the entire Hebrew nation emigrated from Egypt. From the Biblical account, the only time the Hebrews took anything from anyone during their 40 year journey was when they plundered the Egyptians at God’s direction. Other than that, God himself provided for the people, who took nothing from any of the surrounding nations.

Third, there is not so much as a hint in Scripture that the family of Christ went on the public dole while in Egypt. The Bible doesn’t tell us how God provided for them, but given the strong position the Bible takes against government welfare, we can be sure that the Egyptian provincial government wasn’t support Jesus’ family from taxpayer funds.

But for all that, both the Romanists and the liberal protestant SJWs seem to think that the flight to Egypt somehow justifies government handouts to immigrants and refugees.

Another commonality linking the immigration positions of ESA and Rome is the charge of “Xenophobia.” As with ESA, so too with Strangers No Longer,

[M]any person who seek to migrate are suffering, and, in some cases, tragically dying; human rights are abused; families are kept apart; and racist and xenophobic attitudes remain (2).

Given the hectoring, self-righteous tone of both ESA and Rome, one could be forgiven for surmising that, in both cases, the organizations view mass immigration as a sort of divine punishment to be visited on the American people. It’s almost as if they say, “because you’re such a deplorable basket of racists, we’re going to foist mass, third-world immigration on you, and force you to pay for it; if you complain, you’re just going to get more of it; the beatings will continue until moral improves.”

Summary and Conclusion

The immigration stance of the liberal protestant SJWs differs little from that of the Romanists. Both hold the American people in contempt, calling them xenophobes. Both twist the Scriptures to make their for mass immigration. Both confuse the Bible’s commands for private charity with government welfare. Neither respects the rule of law or private property.

Given that neither the Romanists nor the liberal protestants believe the Gospel of Justification by Faith Alone, it is unsurprising that they would take the unbiblical stance they do on immigration socialism. Western Civilization, the system of constitutional capitalism in place in the West since the time of the 16th century Reformation, is the product of the widespread preaching of, and belief in, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Take away Justification by Faith Alone, and you take away limited government and private property with it.

Lord willing, next week I would like to look at what conservative protestants have to say about immigration.

To be continued…