Xenophobia is not a Christian value

How do we treat the immigrants among us?

Photo by David Peinado: https://www.pexels.com/photo/children-standing-next-to-borderline-wall-13396516/

(A five-minute read.)

Over the course of my writing career, I’ve had two Op-ed pieces published by my cities’ newspapers. They were both instigated by similar contexts.

The first one was back in 2015, published by the Bangor Daily News, responding to candidate Trump’s call for a “Muslim ban” in the US. The second one was last week, published by the Portland Press Herald, and entitled, “Xenophobia is not a Christian value,” responding to President Trump’s immigration rhetoric and the ways that could potentially lead Jesus-followers into xenophobic attitudes.

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to or not, but I figured I’d just quote this latest piece in its entirety for my newsletter this week, especially since some people are getting “paywalled” when they try to read it (I emailed the Press Herald for clarification about me republishing it here, but I didn’t get a response).

So here it is:

On his first day back in office, President Trump enacted sweeping orders that made good on his continued promise to secure the southern border and rid the country of unwanted immigrants. These policies and actions ranged from canceling the flights of over 1,600 refugees from Afghanistan who were cleared for asylum in the U.S. to seeking to end birthright citizenship for some born in this nation to suspending the refugee resettlement program.

While the majority of Americans still affirm the idea that America should be a nation that welcomes immigrants, an increasing number—from both sides of the aisle—also express support for “common sense” measures that take a reasonable approach to immigration reform.

However, President Trump, perhaps more than any other previous president, has parlayed these “common sense” concerns into a whole political platform, seemingly scapegoating one segment of society, and fomenting fear against them, in the pursuit of consolidating power.

What concerns me more than anything else, as a pastor who tries to align myself with the ways of Jesus, is how fellow Christians have allowed such rhetoric about immigrants to influence the way we relate to, think about and treat these fellow children of God.

Simply put, xenophobia is not—nor has it ever been—a Christian value.

Indeed, the witness of the Bible—in both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament—points to the obligation to love and care for the foreign visitor. The writers of Scripture repeatedly admonished God’s people to treat them with dignity, respect and compassion, remembering that they, too, were visitors in a strange land.

Similarly, the Torah elsewhere noted that God “administers justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner, giving him food and clothing. Therefore love the foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.”

Such an attitude was carried forward into the New Testament as well, perhaps even intensifying this obligation. Jesus thus spent much of his ministry seeking to widen the ethnic circle, conversing with Samaritan women, healing Canaanites and marveling at the faith of Romans—all things which would have been anathema to many of his followers who didn’t embrace the vision of their holy scriptures.

Perhaps most poignantly, when the Apostle Paul, the great disseminator of the Jesus message, wrote to his protégé, Timothy, explaining the qualifications for church leaders, he indicated that leaders must be what most English versions translate “hospitable.” Only the word “hospitable” is the Greek word philoxenos, which literally means a “lover” (philos) of the “foreigner” (xenos).

The point in all this is that wherever love of the immigrant is absent, there Jesus is absent—and true Christianity isn’t taking place. Indeed, not only has xenophobia never been a Christian value, love of the immigrant has been part and parcel of the Jesus-message and story.

This was partly what made the Jesus movement so revolutionary in its earliest days. As the eminent New Testament scholar N. T. Wright has pointed out, Christianity was an experiment in something that had never been done before in the history of the world: “a single community across traditional boundaries of culture, gender and ethnic and social groupings.” For the earliest Christians, Wright further explains, the Messiah had “one family, not two,” and “to deny this [was] to deny the gospel itself, to suggest that the Messiah did not need to be crucified.”

Simply put, where the spirit of Jesus is, there exists love, compassion and care for the foreign visitor.

This isn’t a call to a specific immigration policy, or to borderless nations. Those types of discussions are above my pay grade. This is simply a call to examine the attitude with which we pursue those policies and, more importantly, the attitude with which we treat our fellow children of God.

Besides the fact that I will never understand the editorial policy to get rid of “Oxford commas” (which is, I think, par for the course for most news outlets), I was incredibly delighted, humbled, and grateful for the responses I received from both those within my Portland community (including a number of my neighbors), as well as my broader relational network. Many people seemed to be genuinely thankful that a Christian leader, however tiny my sphere of influence may be, would raise these concerns.

One thing I did want to clarify, which one person brought up, is that I’m not necessarily accusing anyone of “xenophobia” just because they may or may not support or reject any particular immigration policy.

Again, this piece wasn’t about policies; this piece was about attitudes. But with very limited space for an Op-ed, I couldn’t nuance it as much as I normally would.

With that said as well, I also recognize that policies do shape attitudes—and not simply vice versa. So that’s why policies do matter, and why we need to be ever mindful of their potency.

Much more could be said about this topic (I had actually originally written a longer piece on this topic for my newsletter, but then suddenly realized that I should just submit a shorter Op-ed to the Press Herald instead), but I’ll leave it at this for now.

My great hope is that Jesus-followers would continue to embody God’s love toward all, especially those among us who are the “least of these.”

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Shawn is a pastor in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational and embodied expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.