Southern Border Migrants: What would Jesus do?

I mean that as an actual, serious question. 

This is a RFP, a request for posts from Christians. 

A Pew poll from last year is making the rounds. Apparently the group of Americans least sympathetic to migrants at the southern border are people who identify as evangelical Christians.

Some observers are snarky about it, calling it hypocritical, delighting in poking a stick at a political rival. Some serious, self-identifying Christians say that their faith and the words of the Bible mean that Christians must do more, and see the poll as cause to speak up, engage others in doing more to demonstrate compassion.

The Pew poll of May, 2018, showed that Americans were split on the question of whether or not Americans had a responsibility to accept refugees to the US, with 51% saying we did have a responsibility and 43% saying we did not. White Americans are split almost exactly evenly, with 48% saying yes and 46% saying no.

The big divide was among religious affiliation. Only 25% of white evangelicals thought we had a responsibility to accept migrants, 43% of mainline Protestants did, 50% of Catholics, and 65% of the religiously unaffiliated did.

I have my own thoughts about how to interpret this. 

I may be dead wrong.

Click for the poll

1. Split-arena campartmental thinking. In everyday life people have a suite of cultural, psychological, and political beliefs with which they operate, and then another mental arena for religion. Old and New Testament calls to feed the hungry, and welcome the sojourner are church thinking, not real-life thinking. 

Leviticus 19:34 says "The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the foreigner as yourself, for you were foreign in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Matthew 25:35 says "I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me."

My presumption is that people divide their minds, between their everyday lives and religious life, rendering to Caesar practical thinking, politics, and how to answer a poll question on whether one needs to to care for a Central American migrant. Real life is practical; religious thinking is theoretical.

My sense is that people do not feel a huge contradiction. They divide their thinking between two realms, so can hold both sentiments in mind simultaneously, but compartmentalized.

2. Strong in-group identification. Trump located and articulated the ethno nationalist beliefs of a great many Americans. Obama's presidency, combined with high immigration numbers from Latin America and Asia, combined with Islamic identity and terror events, combined with leftist victories on normalization of homosexuality and transgender behaviors all created a sense of panic and desire to circle the American wagons by many tradition-oriented Americans. They felt their values and culture were under attack by outsiders. 

Left language exacerbated the problem

Left Democrats were not simply caught flat footed by this feeling. They exacerbated it. They elected Barrack Obama. They celebrate diversity joyfully, not quite realizing that the non-college white social conservatives perceived this as implied criticism, as an attack on them. The rainbow didn't actually include them, they felt. Democrats did not allay those fears. "Black lives matter" was OK, but "All lives matter" was not. Democrats did not say they were anti-white, but in 2016--and now--they are still stoking those fears. 

Reparations talk does not feel like justice to many white Americans. It feels like prejudice against them, and injustice.

They felt they were dissed, considered deplorable. 


In that context, they consider the migrants from Latin America to be invaders, not victims. So, mentally, it is easy for an observant, sincere evangelical Christian to distinguish between the duty of compassion and the example of the Good Samaritan versus the everyday real world reality of protecting the faith from outsiders. Victims you help. Invaders you resist. 

Those outsiders--dark skinned, possibly infiltrated with  dark skinned Middle East Muslims--are defined as unwelcome invaders. Trump's language and behavior keeps that frame of mind intact. Good Christians defend the faith and tribe when they resist the migrants.

Maybe I misunderstand. Let me hear from Christians on this.

I can imagine at least two different points of view.  One would be from people who I would consider to be left-Christian, possibly people from a Unitarian or Congregational or other Mainline Protestant or Catholic perspective, many of whom I am guessing would consider that there is a positive Christian duty to welcome migrants, even if it is inconvenient and expensive. Doing good isn't always easy, after all.

The other would be from practicing evangelical Christians, who might share both their own thoughts, plus how they would interpret the poll results. 

Send those comments to me directly: peter.w.sage@gmail.com.  I will curate them a bit and use them in future posts.