Your huddled Masses: What would Jesus do?

No one wrote me to say Jesus would build a wall.

     "If we can start by recognizing the humanity and needs of 'the other', it will go a long way towards our faith being realized within ourselves."

               Judith Edwards, retired minister in the United Church of Christ

Muscular Jesus

Some Christians are liberals, some Christians are conservatives. Both try to be moral, as they see it. Morality for liberals mean two things: be fair and avoid being cruel. Morality for conservatives are those two, plus others: loyalty to the home team, respect for authority, and avoiding outside impurities or invasion.

The migrant issue falls right along the political fault line. It makes sense that liberals, including Christians, might have an orientation toward empathy for poor migrants and refugees and be open to sharing America with them, and therefore feel the Old and New Testament direction to provide welcome to the stranger feels moral. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Conservative Christians, though, have a kind of conflict. Their morality calls both for avoiding cruelty and protecting against adulteration by an impure or dangerous outsider. Trump calls them hoards, with rapists, drug dealers, and Muslim terrorists hiding within those masses, of the wrong people from shit hole countries.

A political conservative wrote this blog saying every Christian will fall short of emulating Jesus because humans are weak and have faults. There was a "practical and humanistic" realm and a heavenly kingdom realm, and one would inevitably fall short of the other.  "Just because some dogmatic radical American 'evangelicals' are politically motivated or are using the public pulpit to express their views does not mean they are necessarily following Biblical teaching." He disagreed with evangelical Christians who had become too politically aligned with Trump.

What should a Christian like him do regarding current migrants  Ultimately, he wrote, what is ultimately moral and Christian is unknowable. "As we all know, belief in, or an understanding of God can not be explained logically or be understood through erudite didactic reasoning. I believe God is controlling this country and Obama and Trump both were elected for reasons only known to Him."

A political liberal wrote this blog and addressed the same issue of "compartmentalizing" between faith and practicality, but she starts with a premise, that we ought to demonstrate "caring behavior" even though the problem is far beyond any one person to solve. In the face of an overwhelming challenge, faith creates a journey, she wrote, with questioning and uncertainty, and the answers to moral quandaries were personal. Her own words are below in the Guest Post.

This blog received a dozen comments. No one voiced a short direct answer on my question what would Jesus have us do regarding our borders. No one wrote me arguing for a pugnacious, muscular, America-first Trump style Jesus. Nor did anyone say borders were morally wrong and un-Christian. A pattern emerged. Readers told me faith involved mindful contemplation of the question of what Jesus would do. Faith took place within themselves.

Here is the comment by Judith Edwards, a retired minister in the United Church of Christ.  I have edited and reduced her submission.

Guest Post by Judith Edwards

Judith Edwards

First of all, I definitely agree that the majority of our denomination, and especially the leadership and clergy, do believe we have that Christian duty to welcome migrants, even when inconvenient or expensive.  

You referred to one example from each the Hebrew and Christian scriptures of our Bible. Expanding the one from Matthew is Matthew 25:34b-36, in the story where Jesus says (NRSV), “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

This is a prime example, though there are many in both the Hebrew and Christian Scripture sections of our Bible, of what we believe is expected of us as followers of Jesus. And it’s not an “exclusive” list of examples.  This is a parable, a story to guide our behavior towards each other… towards all, not just his followers.  If one wants to limit what he says to those who claim Christianity, or even “belief in God”, then that reference (“you that are blessed”) is in regards to the one exhibiting — or not exhibiting — the caring behavior.  The ones to whom they are expressing care could be anyone.  So we feel that this calls on us as Jesus’ followers to welcome as Jesus welcomes — and as we would presumably welcome Jesus.

I think our biggest limitation in acting as Jesus calls us to do is not compartmentalizing.  It’s a sense of helplessness. . . . We do what we can on a one-on-one basis. In Jesus’ time, they didn’t have the communication or travel options we do. In a way, we know too much.  It’s not just those folks in our neighborhood, our town, our state. It’s the world. We believe we are to be, in effect, the “hands of God” on earth.  “They’ve got the whole world in their hands.”  Many of us are now more comfortable with saying that we’re “followers of Jesus” than “Christians”, since we don’t feel that a more vocal form of Christianity represents us.

When we pray, we believe we need to do more than think or say words. And yet, sometimes that’s all we have. Our call to help and protect those in greatest need becomes so wide that most of us feel our efforts to be lost in the tide of the fear of “the other” from so many. When people who have more conservative views hear us sound critical of them, they may miss the fact that we’re also critical of ourselves, for not finding ways to do more. 

As far as that “compartmental thinking” and “in-group identification”, I’d like to suggest a thought that comes from psychology.  I spent two years in a doctoral program for Community-Clinical Psychology. What I found that was particularly interesting was research on (Christian) “religious orientation”.  

For years there was research distinguishing two orientations: Intrinsic, Extrinsic, and Questioning. Intrinsic orientation was the relationship to their faith that was related to that faith directly, the things that faith taught. The Extrinsic was for other ways a church person found value in the church, like being a proper member of the community. Questioning was an orientation towards “faith” and “church” as something related to learning, personal growth, taking responsibility for their own actions.  

A major focus of related studies were about prejudice and religious orientation. When appropriate experiments were done for the two orientations, it was found that the Intrinsic orientation related more to lower indications of prejudice, and Extrinsic to higher. But when the researcher made the “discriminatory choice” less obvious, they were both about the same.  The people who wanted to be “good” were more comfortable with a discriminatory (and non-hurtful, by the way) choice, when they didn’t had an alternative reason for their choice.

Adding in Questioning — they consistently exhibited less prejudice in the experiments. When the choices were about different races, the Intrinsic folk seemed to feel their religion told them not to exhibit prejudice, and so tried not to. The Questioning folks exhibited minimal prejudice. Their faith was not in a “church” or a specific direction from the faith group. It had to do with their asking questions about their faith and their responsibility in their faith.  

In many UCC churches, we say “No matter who we are, or where we are on life’s journey, all are welcomes here.”  For Communion, it’s “Everyone is welcome at the table: believers, seekers, and doubters.” Though of course there are a range of beliefs within our denomination and any individual congregation, we’re rather heavy on “Questioning”. That allows us to be minimally judgmental about differences, less likely to judge others. This rather naturally allows us to think of all those “different than ourselves” to be no more to be feared than we would fear others in our own “in-groups”.

We care about safety. We care about “law and order.”  We are as diverse in our degree of being practical about policies and processes as any other group. We don’t need a lot of walls.

It’s hard for me, even as one trained in both psychology and religion, to be terribly sympathetic to people who took their discomfort as more important and needing to be catered to than other folks’ lives, fairness, justice.  Change happens.  I think we all tend to be bothered by changes, even if they’re not serious, because they’re comfortable for us.  But change is also a challenge that helps us grow as people.  And if we can start by recognizing the humanity and needs of “the other”, it will go a long way towards our faith being realized within ourselves.