Lux Lucet

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

Last week we looked the immigration stance of both the Roman Church-State and the liberal protestant Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), and found that they were largely similar. In fact, the language used by the liberal protestants was substantially the same as that used by Rome, showing that the liberal protestant scholarship is in this case, as in so many others, unoriginal and derivative.

Both the Romanists and the liberals charge the American people with racism. Both the Romanists and the SJWs believe in mass, taxpayer-subsidized immigration. Both groups base their immigration platform, at least in part, on a twisted interpretation of Matthew 2:13-21, the account of Joseph taking his family and fleeing to Egypt to escape the murderous Herod.

That the Romanists and the SJW liberal protestants would get is wrong was not a surprise to me. Both groups begin with a faulty view of Scripture, which in turn leads them down the wrong path when formulating their teachings on immigration.

Immigration and Evangelical Conservatives

Instead of looking at the liberals and Romanists, this week I would like to look at what Evangelical conservatives have to say about immigration. Do Evangelicals do any better when it comes to stating a Biblical view of immigration? The short answer to this question is: perhaps they do a little better, but not much.

Several problems plague the Evangelical approach to immigration.

In the first place, it’s hard to find any explicit, well-developed statement on immigration written by conservative protestants. The only systematic attempt to address immigration by a conservative Christian group, at least as far as this author is aware, was a resolution put out by the Southern Baptist Conference (SBC) in 2011.

A few other conservative groups, or at least groups that are viewed by much of the public as conservative and Biblical, have discussed immigration. The Gospel Coalition, Focus on the Family, and the National Association of Evangelicals all have issued various articles and statements on immigration.

In the second place, much of the work done by conservative Evangelicals is compromised by ecumenism. For example, the Evangelical Immigration Table is an Evangelical immigration reform group. Speakers at the group’s official launch in 2012 included Southern Baptist Richard Land and notorious social gospeler Jim Wallis of Sojourners. Any Evangelical group that begins by including the likes of Jim Wallis is bound to come to unbiblical conclusions, regardless of what issue it attempts to tackle.

In the third place, the Evangelical conservative immigration statements are full of logical blunders – question begging, false dilemmas, appeals to pity and lack of precise definitions.

Fourthly, Evangelicals who study immigration often fail to ask the right questions. For example: What is the proper role of government? How does one become a citizen? Where can one turn to find the answers to these questions?

Fifth, the same sort of contempt for the legitimate concerns of Americans found among the Romanists and SJW liberal protestants is also found in the immigration writings of many Evangelical conservatives.

Sixth, when it comes to their immigration vocabulary, as with the SJW liberals, so with the conservatives, who often fall into the trap of borrowing the language of the Antichrist Roman Church-State.

On Immigration And the Gospel

At its 2011 convention in Phoenix, Arizona, the SBC issued a resolution titles On Immigration and the Gospel (IAG). Since this statement was issued by a large, conservative Evangelical group, it makes a useful place to begin our look at Evangelical thought on immigration.

The statement appears to be an honest attempt to grapple with the sticky problem of immigration. For that, the SBC deserves credit. On the other hand, since the resolution is plagued by many of the problems I have identified above, ultimately it fails to provide Biblical guidance for Christians on how to think about immigration or provide practical steps on how to resolve this long-running issue.

The resolution itself consists of fifteen premises in cast in the form is “Whereas” statements followed by eight “Resolved” conclusions. While time and space do not permit a commentary on every line of this resolution, several items stand out as worthy of special attention.

The first fallacy evident in IAG is its acceptance of the notion, first put forth by Rome in Exsul Familia, that Jesus Christ lived as an immigrant and a refugee and, further, that the experience of Jesus’ family serves as a model for addressing immigration/migration/refugee issues today.

IAG reads, “Our Lord Jesus Christ lived His childhood years as an immigrant and refugee.” As I pointed out in last week’s post, there are several problems with this understanding.

1. Both Judea and Egypt were provinces, administrative districts, of the Roman Empire in the first century. As a result, the family’s flight to Egypt is more akin to a someone moving from one US state to another rather than the sort of international migration that Rome and the SBC have in mind. One may still argue that Joseph and his family were refugees, but given Rome’s explicit, and the SBC’s implicit, demand that refugees be given public assistance, it is fair to conclude the Bible’s definition of refugee and that used by Rome, and the SBC are quite different.
   
2. Exsul Familia glosses over the immigration barriers created by the hugely expensive modern welfare state. The Bible does not tell us how the family was supported while in Egypt. But given that Scripture is everywhere hostile to the idea of the welfare state, necessary inference requires that we understand that they did not go on the public dole.
   
3. The scale of the flight was in no way comparable to modern migrations. In the case of Joseph and his family, there were three persons involved. Today, the scale is millions if not tens of millions.
   
4. Further, there is a much better example in Scripture of a mass exodus of people on a scale comparable to modern migrations, which, oddly enough, is detailed in the Book of
   Exodus. This would seem to be much better starting point for a discussion of how to handle immigration/migration/refugees that the account in Matthew.
   

So eager are some in leadership positions in the SBC to promote the immigration arguments of the Roman Church-State that prominent Southern Baptist Russell Moore, apparently deciding to out Romanist the Romanists, was moved to declare in an article, “our Lord Jesus himself was a so-called ‘illegal immigrant.’ ” And this, in spite of the fact that Scripture says nothing about Jesus’ family breaking any immigration laws. It is extraordinary how unhinged Christian leaders can become when discussing immigration.

Second, as with Rome and the SJWs, the SBC adduces the Bible’s commands to show compassion to the sojourner and alien among us. While it is true that Christians are to show compassion and charity to those in need, Christian charity is always and everywhere a matter of private persons giving of their own money, goods, time and expertise.

What the SBC resolution ignores is the enormous strain taxpayer-subsidized immigration puts on public services. Federal mandates require that emergency rooms treat patients regardless of their ability to pay. Who picks up the tab for the medical bills of indigent migrants? The Federal government also mandates that schools educate children regardless of the immigration status of their parents. Who pays the bill for this?

The answer is that the public does, either through higher medical bills or higher taxes. This is not private charity in the Christian sense. This is government forcibly taking money from one person and mandating that it be given to another. In short, it is theft. But neither the SBC, nor Rome, nor the SJW liberals acknowledge this problem.

A third problem with the SBC resolution is that it fails to address the issue of birthright citizenship. As US law is currently interpreted, any child – with a few exceptions – born in US territory is automatically granted American citizenship, regardless of the immigration status of the mother. These children, known as “anchor babies”, are eligible for public assistance.

The scale of the anchor baby issue is huge. Writing in the National Review, Ian Tuttle observes that the total number of anchor babies born in the US annually is between 350,000 and 400,000; that “as of 2010, four out of five children of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. were born here – some 4 million kids;” that the inflation-adjusted cost of supporting an anchor baby born in 2013 until his eighteenth birthday is $304,480, much of which will inevitably be passed along to the taxpayer.

The anchor baby issue was known, or should have been known, to the SBC at the time IAG was drafted. As such, it is inexcusable that it was not addressed as part of the resolution.

Fourth, IAG calls for securing the border, but does not define what this means. Donald Trump would argue that this means building a wall. Hillary Clinton might say it means making sure every person crossing the border from Mexico is handed a brand new EBT card. Simply invoking the mantra of a “secure border” is meaningless unless the term is defined.

Fifth, along with Rome and the liberal protestants, the SBC feels the need to lecture Americans about racism. Charges of nativism, bigotry, racism and xenophobia are the great red herring of any discussion about immigration. Yes, they do exist and are, to use the language of IAG, “inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ.” But charges of this sort, aimed as they are exclusively at Americans, ignore the fact that many immigrants, migrants and refugees have these attitudes as well.

Take, for example, the religious bigotry displayed by Dahir Ahmed Adan, the 20-year-old Somalian refugee who went on a stabbing spree in a St. Cloud, Minnesota mall. Before attacking his victims, he asked them if they were Muslim.

Summary and Conclusion

It had been my hope that conservative Evangelicals would offer more Biblical solutions to our immigration problem than the Romanists or the liberal protestants. Unfortunately, the principle difference between the Evangelicals and the former two groups is relatively slight. While the conservatives put a more explicit emphasis on saving faith in Christ and tone down the SJW talk, their arguments are, on the whole, not that much different.

The real scandal of the Evangelical mind is that so many scholars who claim to believe the Bible write and speak in ways that are little different from groups they ostensibly oppose. It is high time for Protestants to state a Biblical doctrine of immigration that is actually Biblical. This, Lord willing, we intend to do.

To be continued…