Growing up I was taught the good American work ethic. The type of work ethic that made men do hard things early in the morning. The type of work ethic that made you finish a job before you left. The type of work ethic that made the elder men in the community smile and feel like maybe the world does still have a few good men left.
This work ethic was taught by way of teaching us in a grounded context what a meritocracy is.
Meritocracy is the social fabric America was claimed to be built on. It is the structure of a society that believes a person’s status(whether financial, class, or in terms of power) can be achieved or harmed based on a person’s merit(their personal ability to attain those things).
You may have learned this as a child. You met a kid at school who had an allowance given to him by his parents. So you use common sense and make the connection for yourself.
My parents+ Me= I get paid
You then being the smart child you are approach your parents oneday in the kitchen and tell them that Carter gets an allowance and you believe you should too.
Your parents respond by first laughing in your face. And then proceeding to quiz you on why exactly you believe you should get paid for existing.
Your parents and you eventually work out an agreement. If you can do a few extra chores around the house every week, then you can get $5. You agree.
The lesson you just learned there was that in that family structure, in order to get what you want you had to earn it.
And many of us were taught this same lesson in a variety of ways. A lot of what I believe is the good American spirit in our country is one that causes us to be a bit of a dreamer and pragmatist at the same time. Meaning, because of the uniqueness of our country and the messaging we have communicated to us from a very young age we are all encouraged to dream big, to become whatever we want to be, and we are told to not just dream it but to make it happen. To do the hard work, give the time and be consistent and eventually your dreams will likely pay off.
But there is a conversation that has been happening more recently that I believe exposes that as American’s we maybe do not always believe in a meritocracy. And our way of dodging our hypocrisy is by attacking people based on a part of their identity that they cannot control.
Immigration and H1B Visas
Immigration is the process individuals from foreign countries go through to migrate(move) from their homeland into ours.
There is a legal process that they should to submit to. This legal process keeps track of how many citizens we have in our country and what we’re getting into with letting this certain individual in. But the process has been broken for quite some time.
And it’s really easy to make blanket statements that if you came across illegally, you should not be allowed to stay here. But blanket statements often miss in reality.
I watched in real time as a cousin of mine who was brought here shortly after her birth illegally, fought to gain citizenship. It truly did not matter how many people we had in her corner the process sucked. It was not her fault. Her whole life she had lived as an American, that’s all she knew. Yet, for many people, the fact that she was illegal, devoid of her trying to become legal meant that she was a problem. This messaging would be communicated to her time and time again.
Imagine with me, what that does to a child who based on their identity, they are treated as unwelcome. Their title from a very early age(think two years old) is that they are a crime.
There’s a ton of nuance we could parse out but the reality is, immigration is a human problem. At least, as Christians it should be.
There’s no reason we cannot have walls or a legal process as a country. That’s what countries do. But what Christians do is not always in line with a countries objective.
As a Christian first, when we approach this conversation we have to be smart. We have to be diligent. And we have to understand there are real people who are affected by the outcomes of this conversation and despite the recent trend to say “empathy is a sin”. Being a cold hearted, unloving, inhospitable follower of Jesus is also a sin. Claiming one ditch as you abandon another does not make you righteous, it makes you a human. And as a human, who follows in the way of Jesus, the aim is always to repent of our mistakes and course correct where we need to. The road is narrow, meaning those ditches are close and easy to fall into. So beware.
Now as we shift our focus back to this idea of a meritocracy where individuals can either pave the way for their success or demise, the reason this idea of a merit based system is so important to the immigration conversation is because up until recently, that’s exactly how this conversation went.
For decades, immigrants were told they did not deserve handouts. And much of the pushback for why immigrants should not come to America was because they were coming expecting a handout. The critique was that people from all of these other third-world like nations seen the richness America had to offer and wanted to exploit it.
But then something interesting happened.
Those immigrants were not getting the handouts. They were working hard. In some cases, even harder than the natural born citizens. Many of these immigrants took more pride in the United States than the people who had lived here for generations.
What actually ended up happening was many immigrants seen this supposed bar(standard) America had for them, and they rose to the occasion. These people had come from countries where moving to America cost them family ties, education status, economic stability, and yet were willing to risk it all, put in the hard work and prove themselves in the merit based system that they too belonged here.
But here comes the next problem for our foreign neighbors.
There is this program for immigrants that they can apply for and essentially play the lottery on getting picked to be apart of the American workforce. This program grants you an H1B Visa giving you permission based on your resume to come to the States and work.
More recently this program has been coming under pressure from the current administration. The argument is that these immigrants coming here through the H1B Visa program are stealing American jobs from American people. And there is a specific argument made against this program particularly because of the large percentage of these H1B visas that are granted to people from India.
Now we supposedly live in a culture where 79% of people are largely for immigration1 according to a Gallup pole conducted in 2025. The percieved backlash against immigration is because people are coming in who do not respect our country, or hold to the same values, or are freeloading. The Gallup study also highlights that the increase interest in positive views on immigration were previously lower due to rising concerns based on Biden’s border influx but Trump’s administration’s very aggressive stance has swung many people back to a more positive view on immigration.
But just in this case of the H1B Visas, the positive stance has come under scrutiny. The people applying for H1B’s work above and beyond hard to even get a chance at hitting this immigration lottery, their Visa is dependent on their work, the very fact that they are coming over here is largely attributed to the respect they have for our country and they tend to be pretty conservative.
What this ends up posing as a question for us is: why has the news and the current administration made immigration such a top of the line topic of conversation in our politics?
My guess is that it’s because the elites fail to see the people they claim to serve as real people. Real people can be moved by the words of another. And when you keep making claims that there is this influx of people coming in who hate you and want to poison your country in order to see it’s demise, then obviously with that argument you are gonna start going on the defense.
This method of rhetoric is called “dehumanizing”. When you dehumanize you take the humanity away from another person or you go one step further and demonize which means you attribute the worst intentions to that other person. With this you have the perfect recipe for conjuring up a worthy enemy to rally people to fight against.
The problem is as Christians, Jesus’ way of dealing with our “enemies” is not the way the current administration would have you deal with your enemies.
And as Christians there is clear instructions on how you are to deal with the outsiders(people from foreign lands). My aim, is not to break down immigration law. I’m not a politician or a legal expert and frankly, neither are you(probably). But I do have a Pastor’s heart and urge to follow Jesus in every sphere of my life. And with both of those combined I feel the need to speak into this area and at the least set a foundation for how Christians in this country should approach the immigration conversation.
Multi-Ethic Kingdom of Foreigners
The family of God starts off with a clear breaking of ties. Yahweh(the God of the Bible) calls Abram(the father of the big three religions) to “go from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”2 This language of leaving everything you’ve known can be easily glossed over when we take the humanity and real world circumstances out of our reading of the Bible. But this is a clear example of God doing this work of pulling people away from what they’ve always known to a life with God. Abram is not the first example of an immigrant in the Bible but he is an immigrant by the call of God to leave his land and his family in order to go to another land.
Our faith system is built on a historical figure who understood the immigrant’s journey. Now you may feel tense at this moment as I call Abram an immigrant. You may feel like “Austin, you’re just using woke language to prove a point.” But I’m not. An immigrant as we mentioned at the beginning our conversation is someone who leaves their land to move to another. This is exactly what Abram is called by God to do and the Bible picks this theme up again later in the New Testament.
The author of Hebrews plays on this theme of the people of God living in a place that is not their home: For this world is not our permanent home; we are looking forward to a home yet to come.3
The author of Hebrews is highlighting this experience that many people go through of being a pilgrim, a traveler of lands, a person on a journey from one destination to the next to describe what the experience of a follower of Jesus is like in this world.
The immigrant story is closely tied to the story of our faith because our faith was demonstrated throughout the pages of Scripture by people who were living in the margins of their world. Our Bibles are not birthed from a place of privilege, though you will see examples of privilege throughout the pages. Our faith rather comes from people who were often cast out, overlooked, discarded as lesser than. But this is the very people God will bring into his family.
When Abram is called by God, God promises him a family. God makes a covenant to install Abraham as the father of many nations, more numerous than the stars. The way that happens is not through bloodline. But rather through the open ended table that God sets up through the line of Abraham by way of Jesus Christ.
And we see glimpses of God building this family of his through the line of Abraham by showing grace to the outsider or welcoming in the stranger.
Early on in Abram’s covenant relationship with Yahweh, they set this practice of circumcision. This practice was unique to the family of Abraham. It set them apart from the world around them by giving this outward sign of this covenant Abraham and his family would have with God.
In Genesis 17 Yahweh approaches 90 year old Abram and says: “I will set up my covenant between me and you, and I will multiply you greatly.”4 Expansion of Abram’s family is in sight. This covenant was never meant to be isolated or small, but instead it would be distinct and growing. And that line “multiply you greatly” signifies that the kind of growth that will happen with Abram’s family is not going to be in the way people would ever expect.
Yahweh continues his declaration of this covenant with Abram in the following verses:
As for me, here is my covenant with you: You will become the father of many nations. Your name will no longer be Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I will make you the father of many nations. I will make you extremely fruitful and will make nations and kings come from you. I will confirm my covenant that is between me and you and your future offspring throughout their generations.5
Vince Bantu in his book ‘A Multitude of All Peoples’ speaks about why Constatine in the Roman Empire wanted to adopt Christianity. And he makes this argument that the reason why was because Constatine wanted to broaden his reach. Vince says: “One of the most appealing facets of Christianity was its universal appeal.”6
Christianity from its very conception( and I’m not talking about the Jesus movement) was built on Yahweh identifying a certain people as His own in order to reach widely. Where most religions would focus on a certain tribe, Yahweh sets the vision early on that this relationship he is building with humanity is one that will transcend cultural barriers and ethnic lines.
What better way to do this than by calling an immigrant, someone who can understand living in a land not their home, to begin this work of building a multiethnic Kingdom.
Yahweh does not just stop there though by casting a vision for Abram now turned Abraham. Instead Yahweh gives instructions to Abraham about how to begin building this diverse family of God.
“As for you, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations are to keep my covenant. This is my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you, which you are to keep: Every one of your males must be circumcised. You must circumcise the flesh of your foreskin to serve as a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations, every male among you is to be circumcised at eight days old—every male born in your household or purchased from any foreigner and not your offspring. Whether born in your household or purchased, he must be circumcised. My covenant will be marked in your flesh as a permanent covenant. If any male is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that man will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”7
Abraham’s covenant with Yahweh will not only include his offspring, but also the foreigners living within his or his children’s household. These foreigners will be adopted in to the family. And though the ramifications of this adoption will not be seen right away, it will have a transformative effect on the issue like slavery for generations to come.
In fact this is why in the New Testament, Paul writes a letter to a slave owner named Philemon about his runaway slave named Onesimus who had just experienced the life change of the gospel. Paul sends this runaway back to his master, which may sound problematic to our modern ears at first. But that’s only until you hear how Paul instructs Philemon to deal with his runaway slave.
Paul in his letter says:
I am sending him—who is my very heart—back to you. I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for the gospel. But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would not seem forced but would be voluntary. Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever— no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord.8
The gospel changes our relationships with others in a way that flips the social orders that we live in upside down. Once Onesimus becomes a brother to Philemon, the relationship has to change. You don’t keep a brother in chains. You invite him to the table. You work alongside of him, not over him. Paul is inviting this slaveowner to not only embrace the gospel effect on Onesimus but to also let that Gospel affect himself(Philemon) as well.
This is again why Paul the Apostle has this line in his letter to the church of Galatia. In this letter Paul is writing to a church who is being divided on ethnic lines(Jew vs. Gentile). And Paul will not have it be so.
Paul says: So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.9
Paul brings the work Jesus has done at making Jews and Gentiles children of God in connection to that covenant we seen earlier that Yahweh made with Abraham. Paul specifically says that these Jew and Gentile believers are “Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”
What we are seeing here is the broadening of the Kingdom reaching some fulfillment but not all. We will not see all until this image in Revelation 7:9 appears of people all tribes, tongues and nations are gathered together as a united family of God.
But we do see this theme of Yahweh instructing and Himself welcoming the outsider into the family.
In Leviticus 19 in a weird mix of rules that Yahweh is giving to his newly formed people coming out of their time in Egypt, He says: ‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.10
Tony Evans commentating on this passage says: “When the Lord commanded his people to love their neighbors as themselves(19:18), that included the alien as well as the native-born among [them]. They were to love [them] …for [once the Israelites] were aliens in the land of Egypt(19:34). Therefore, they were to consider the foreign-born peoples among them as their own brothers and sisters- and treat them accordingly.”11
Rich Perez in his book ‘Mi Casa Uptown’ writes about this “love thy neighbor” type of hospitality we are supposed to demonstrate as believers to these outsiders. After quoting Romans 12:13 which says: seek to show hospitality.(ESV) Perez continues by defining what this word hospitality means.
The word hospitality is made up of two Greek words. The first is philo, which means “deep sibling-like love.”…The second Greek word is xeno, which means “stranger.” That’s where we get the word xenophobia, the fear of strangers. When God is thinking of hospitality, the first person he has in mind is not our friend or people with whom we are familiar. He’s thinking of the stranger, the person with whom we not familiar.12
Matt Chandler adds a little more helpful insight into what this type of hospitality the Bible speaks of looks like:
Hospitality is to give loving welcome to those outside your normal circle of friends. It is opening your life and your home to those who believe differently than you do. Make dinner with these people whom God has placed near you a priority. Invite them into your life so that you might know them, engage them, love them, serve them and walk alongside them through a broken and shattered world, witnessing to them of the love of the One who died to invite them to his table.13
Jesus gives us the best examples of what this type of hospitality looks like that welcomes the strangers or the enemies in our lives to the table.
In John 4 we have a story about Jesus purposefully going through Samaria to get to Jerusalem. And while he is in Samaria, Jesus runs into a Samaritan woman at a well. Now many of us when we have heard this story told in church find ourselves being told to focus on the sins of this woman as being the stark point of the story. But another layer to the story that often goes overlooked is the Samaritan/Jew clash that is also taking place.
Jews and Samaritans did not live peacefully. In fact, it was seen as very dangerous for a Jew to walk through Samaria not only because Samaritans were seen as unclean(especially women) but because Samaritans were seen as the enemy. Someone not to be trusted. The very idea of Jesus, a Jewish man, voluntarily walking through the city of Samaria and even staying there for two days(John 4:40) was unheard of.
But then again, this was the mission all along. The mission God established for his people in Genesis with Abraham, was that through Abraham, the family of God would be a blessing to all the nations.
The way Yahweh uses Abraham’s family to be that blessing is by raising up this King who understands living in a land not your own. Not only was Jesus the Son of God, incarnated as a human man two thousand plus years ago. But Jesus and his family also had to leave their homeland in order to survive.
Matthew records this narrative of young Jesus and his family fleeing for safety in Egypt because of Herod’s quest to kill any potential King being raised up among the Jews. Jesus in modern terms is what we would call a refugee.
A refugee is someone who is fleeing for safety from their homeland into another. This is not voluntary removal. This is an act of desperation. This is what happens when a dad sees the danger coming to his family and seeks to fulfill his role as a protector. Jesus understood living in a land not your own because he had no other option.
But he’s not the only one.
Thomas Oden writes in his books ‘The African Memory of Mark’ that John Mark(the author of the gospel of Mark), was an immigrant from Africa. John Mark’s family were Jews from Cyrene(Upper Africa), of the tribe of Levi. Originally they were from Palestine. But during the wars of the Macabbe’s, many Jews dispersed for safety concerns and landed in two specific places. Those two being Alexandria and Cyrene. John Mark’s family landed in Cyrene. They still held onto their Jewish heritage, but they were African Jews. Meaning for John Mark, he understood again this feeling of living in a land not your own.
John Mark would go on, along with his mother to be some of Jesus’ first followers and to write the oldest of the Gospels. In fact, Matthew and Luke are credited as pulling a lot from John Mark’s telling of the life of Jesus. And later on after Jesus’ resurrection, John Mark would find his way back to Africa to share the good news of this multi-ethnic Kingdom in such a way that Saint John Mark is a pillar to the continent of Africa. The first Christian school was established because of John Mark’s efforts.14
The list could go on and on. Let me quickly highlight in as brief as I can a few other notable mentions to help you see who these characters in our Bibles actually are.
- Joseph(Genesis 37-50) is an abandoned brother, turned slave, turned prisoner of the Pharaoh but eventually helps his family migrate to Egypt(the continent of Africa)(Genesis 45) because of his eventual status in the land.
- The Israelites have lived in Egypt for 400 years by the time Moses comes onto the scene(Note, that’s longer than America has been a country so this is arguably home now for them). When God calls Moses to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised land, we are talking about a very large people group migrating from one land to another. The Israelites categorically fit the description of what a refugee is. The Israelites are a displaced people, trapped in slavery to a Pharaoh who has a history of genocide to his advantage. These are people who understand fleeing the only home they ever knew in order to live a better life somewhere else.
- Ruth who is from the land of Moab(Gentile) moves with her former mother-in-law Naomi back to Naomi’s homeland(Bethlehem). Ruth not only was the wife of Naomi’s son, meaning they had an interracial marriage, but she was a foreigner when she moved back with Naomi. She was the outsider, immigrant in town from the land where heathens come from.
Again the list could keep going, but the point is, our Bibles are full of marginalized people groups. The Bible is full of people traveling from one land to another, whether it’s for safety concerns making them a refugee or simply God calling them to another land making them an immigrant. The people in our Bibles are on the move.
Recognizing this does not make a liberal, or woke, or reading the Bible with a leftist’ lens. It makes you honest about who these characters were. The irony I believe is in how quickly we put people today into categories on whether they are natural born citizens or immigrants, illegal or legal, or refugees, or asylum seekers. Yet if we read our Bibles through that same lens we would walk away with the majority of people finding their way into these categories.
But my point in this piece is not to just highlight who the characters in the Bible are. It’s not to just show the radical nature of the hospitality Jesus calls us to.
There is actually strong words given to God’s people or other nations based on how they treat others.
God’s Judgement Against the Unjust
In one of the twelve minor prophets we meet the prophet Amos. In Amos’. own words describing himself, he says: “I’m not a professional prophet, and I was never trained to be one. I’m just a shepherd, and I take care of sycamore-fig trees.“15
But during the time of Amos, Israel was doing well under the reign of Jeroboam II. This military ruler brought a lot of wealth into the nation but he also brought in a lot of evil.
Yahweh uses this humble prophet to call out the sins of the people around him. In Amos 2:6-8 we get a glimpse at the sin Israel has fallen into:
“The people of Israel have sinned again and again,
and I will not let them go unpunished!
They sell honorable people for silver
and poor people for a pair of sandals.
They trample helpless people in the dust
and shove the oppressed out of the way.
Both father and son sleep with the same woman,
corrupting my holy name.
At their religious festivals,
they lounge in clothing their debtors put up as security.
In the house of their gods,
they drink wine bought with unjust fines.(NLT)
It turns out Israel has taken advantage of the poor. Israel who understand the weight of being enslaved are now selling people into slavery. They have went from being crushed under the Empire to becoming the Empire.
What I believe is important to note is that God has a specific care for the people on the margins. He judges nations on how they treat the poor, the marginalized, and for our topic of conversation the foreigner.
In the last of twelve minor Prophets, in the book of Malachi, we see God judge Israel again. Israel’s response is to claim that God is unjust and that he lets the evildoers rise in prosperity while they suffer for doing what is right.
This sentiment is relevant to us because we all have felt that way at some point or another. In fact, some of this language I believe shows up in the conversation white conservatives are having right now.
Many white conservatives are feeling empowered to stand up because they feel like they have been neglected by our country as a whole for a good bit of time now. As the country or culture seemed to focus on the disparities targeted towards black and brown people, white conservatives have argued that they now have been overlooked. They have been cast aside.
And maybe there is truth to that. It is very possible that while you are focused on putting a fire out of one house, you end up neglecting another fire starting up at the house down the road.
But Yahweh’s response to Israel’s cry that he has been unjust is important for this conversation.
Yahweh says:
“Look! I am sending my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. Then the Lord you are seeking will suddenly come to his Temple. The messenger of the covenant, whom you look for so eagerly, is surely coming,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.16
Yahweh says “don’t worry. You guys all want justice right? Don’t worry, the day of the Lord(the day of Justice) is coming. And I know how eager you all have been to see that day!”
But I love what Yahweh does next. He continues:
“But who will be able to endure it when he comes? Who will be able to stand and face him when he appears? For he will be like a blazing fire that refines metal, or like a strong soap that bleaches clothes. He will sit like a refiner of silver, burning away the dross.17
The Day of the Lord is coming, but who honestly will be able to get by Yahweh without confronting the injustice they have committed? You may feel like you have had injustice done to you. You may be right. But neglecting your responsibility to own your injustice that you committed against another person, does not validate you. It does not let you off the hook.
How we treat others matters. And the big point I want to close this section on is what Yahweh says next:
“At that time I will put you on trial. I am eager to witness against all sorcerers and adulterers and liars. I will speak against those who cheat employees of their wages, who oppress widows and orphans, or who deprive the foreigners living among you of justice, for these people do not fear me,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.”18
God is going to judge Israel based on how they have treated the foreigners living among them.
How are we treating the foreigners living amongst us?
Whether legal or not, how we treat people matters in the eyes of God. Legally the woman caught in adultery should have been stoned to death, but Jesus tells those law lovers to check themselves first.
From older to younger they start walking away.
Grace has an interesting affect on people. We are all offered grace. We are all shown grace. We do not all realize when grace is at our door.
I learned in high school that grace is getting what you do not deserve. This defintion profoundly changed my life because suddenly as a teenager I learned I could not interact with people the same way I had always done.
Grace requires me to not be so quick to pin point what people based on their actions deserve. Instead it pushes me to remember how the God who loved me, died for me, and raised me to newness of life is calling me to extend this same grace to others.
This applies in every area of our lives. Even how we view politics and specifically how we deal with foreigners.
Prophetic Witness
You may be wondering why on earth did I want to tackle a subject like this. It’s because as Christians in the United States I sometimes get the feeling that we forgot how to live in this world but not be of it. It’s hard to go against the grain when going with the grain is so easy. It’s hard to speak truth when talking points are filtered to you through the algorithm everyday.
But I believe as Christians, we have a unique role to play in political conversations. I believe the Bible can shape our worldview in ways we may not have realized or appreciated.
Knowing how much of God’s heart throughout the pages of Scripture went towards those people who would be classified as immigrants or refugees should at the least cause us to pause and be slow to speak.
And if we are quick to speak about anything in these conversations it should be that we are quick to highlight that all people, regardless of where they come from are made in the image of God and deserve to be treated as such.
We started this conversation off breaking down the H1B visa problem. The problem being that the pushback against these legal immigrants is that they are taking American jobs away from American people.
Making sure American’s have jobs in this economy matters. I’m for that, I’m with that.
But I believe our culture both inside and outside of the church has fallen into the trap of taking these people who are at the center of these conversations and using them as pawns for bigger schemes.
We see this in the case of the talk about Haitian immigrants eating pets that both the President and Vice President pushed. There were no credible claims to back the statements our presidential leaders made as NPR has pointed out.19 What we learn from this situation is that when you want to rile people up, you have to create fear in them. And what’s gonna make people more afraid than by targeting objects that people truly care about. Something like pets.
Or another example is the recent treatment the current administration has been giving the Somali’s in Minnesota. If you are unfamiliar, around the 1990’s Somali was in a civil war causing many to flee as refugees. These Somali’s found job opportunities at a meat packing plant and word would spread to other’s from that region creating an influx of Somali’ immigrants to Twin Cities, Minnesota. Trump has recently made this particular group a target in his cross hairs. The Somali’s are practicing muslims and have even found representation in congress by way of Ilhan Omar. Now what we end up having in this situation is rather complicated. The Somali’s are estimated to be about 80,000 in number in this area of the country meaning that’s a rather large population of a single demographic group of people from another country with arguably a religion that has not always been looked at as favorable within our own country. Questions about assimilation for these Somali’s have rose to the surface as it can be difficult to say the least to assimilate 80,000 people in one given area. Understandably, at that point, the culture can easily bend more to the Somali’s persuasion. But the other side of this equation is how these Somali’s get represented by a president and more recently Vice President who claim to represent Christian values.
Rudyard Kipling has a poem titled “We and They” to which his poem ends with this stanza:
All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, and We
And every one else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by(think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They!20
Part of tribalism is convincing ourselves and others that we all have good intentions. We are all here for a good purpose. The world would largely work right if people bent to our wills and ways. The part you have to convince yourself of in tribalism is that there is another group, another tribe who does not have good intentions. This other group is labeled “they”. You only point at them, you do not get close to them. You only criticize them, you never appreciate them. In order for tribalism to work well, people have to be split up. And the quickest way to split people up is by labeling some people good and some people evil. And though we will often guard ourselves from using these explicit terms, the way sin works is that it manifests itself in sneaky ways to convince you that how you feel is not actually really wrong as long as you do not say your true feelings outloud or in the most honest way possible.
Trump has threatened to strip these Somali immigrants of their legal protections and referred to them as garbage. Trump has claimed that the Somali’s are fraudulent people and that they have stole billions from our country.21 The irony in this is all relevant. Trump, the man who has recently made more money in his time as President than he ever did as a businessman is suspicious. Not to mention the shell companies he has helped his sons make a profit on22 at tax payer’s expense that ‘The More Perfect Union’ has documented or the crypto scams his family has pushed covered by the BBC.23 At best we have a fraudster pointing a finger at other fraudsters. And at worst we have a fraudster pointing fingers at a group of people who have been displaced from what was their families homes for generations, got jobs in the U.S. and are now being labeled as what is ruining this country as if a single city or twins has that potential.
My point in all of this is to display the tactic of turning people from other places into “other”. This is a strategy. Rome did it with the Jews, the Jews did it with the Samaritans, the United States does it with immigrants. The goal is all the same. Power.
Empire’s love power. Empire’s love control.
Have You Become Part of the Empire?
One of my all time favorite books that I find myself coming back to is Scott McKnight and Cody Matchett’s ‘Revelation for the Rest of Us’. This book is a commentary on the book of Revelation broken down in terms of a play. There is a playbill describing the characters you will see throughout St. John’s letter. There is history explaining how the Bible’s most controversial book was interpreted over the years and what I believe the authors do very well is help us trace this imagery of the character of the Empire throughout the pages of Scripture and how the Empire had begun making its way into the church, hence why John is having to write this letter to the seven churches.
The church at the time in Revelation(in the first century) had lost its way. They were being infected by the culture without even realizing it. The authors say this: “Aligning with Babylon(Empire) turned the church into an agent of empire; put differently, the church surrendered its calling to the powers of the empire.”
Christians in the United States have historically voted differently. Not all vote republican, not all vote democrat, some vote for a third party, and some just do not vote at all. And in more recent years, the Empire has convinced manny Christians to get in line. To make America first priority. To buy into the Empire’s way of dehumanizing and deporting people made in the image of God. To declare war on these people groups because if we do not then the enemy will win. One of the more common lines I have been hearing is that specifcally in regards to muslims, they are our enemies because they cannot help but to view us as their enemy.
Muslims in particular have a religious reason to label us as enemies and eventually take the West out or Christians in particular. This rhetoric has given rise of figures like Pete Hesgeth(Secretary of War). A. man who looks back at the crusades and gets tattoos honoring the blood bath that they were as a good.
But what church history has taught me is that the church loses when it fights like the world. The church loses when it becomes Empire.
And to add on to that, Christ calls us to something profoundly different than the world. Christ’ relationship with his enemies was to act in a way that I believe many of us are scared too.
We are scared because it’s uncomfortable to “talk things out”. We are scared because it’s inconvenient when people don’t “do as I say.” We are scared because we believe weakness has been our problem for far too long.
Weakness was never a problem, apathy was. Apathy does not invite your neighbor to dinner. Apathy does not step across boundary lines and loves on the enemy. Weakness is vulnerable. Weakness lay itself bare. And the weakness Christ call us to is vulnerable for the sake of others. The weakness Christ calls us to lays itself bare for the life of others. 2 Corinthians 12:9-11 says:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.(NIV)
We started this conversation off by explaining a bit about the H1B Visa program and how in a country claiming it was built on merit, it is denying the merit from others. The way you take other people’s good efforts away from them is by labeling them as garbage or fraudsters. You have to turn them into your enemy.
As Christians, this is an area where we desperately need to remember who our allegiance is to first. Our allegiance first is to God. The One who told us to put our merit to the side because it was like “filthy rags”24 and instead in grace placed his merit in front of the Father on our behalf so that we might live in a land not our own.
The Christian story is an immigrant story, and you may feel like I’m turning Christianity woke but in reality you may have just turned Christianity into the Empire. Christians don’t operate in a binary world. Good and evil are not labels we easily place people into because they are labels we wrestle with ourselves.
The pilgrim’s journey for a christian is going from our old life to new life. From the city of Destruction to the Celestial city as John Bunyan described it.
We are Kingdom people and our Kingdom is not of this world. Which implies we do not operate like the world. We do not buy into the lies of this world. We do not grasp for power like this world. We do not fight our enemies like this world.
People are made in the image of God whether they come from Somalia, Iraq, or the United States. How we treat others matters. It is all part of the story God is telling throughout history. Our faith is birthed in the no man’s land of wanderer’s from this place to the next.
Our approach to this subject should resemble that.
- https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigration-abated.aspx ↩︎
- Genesis 12:1 CSB ↩︎
- Hebrews 13:14 NLT ↩︎
- Genesis 17:2 CSB ↩︎
- Genesis 17:4-7 CSB ↩︎
- Vinca Bantu in his book ‘A Multitude of All Peoples’ (pg. 15) ↩︎
- Genesis 17:9-14 CSB ↩︎
- Philemon 12-16 NIV ↩︎
- Galatians 3:26-29 NIV ↩︎
- Leviticus 19:33-34 NIV ↩︎
- The Tony Evans Bible Commentary (pg.163) ↩︎
- Mi Casa Uptown by Rich Perez (pg. 143-144) ↩︎
- Take Heart by Matt Chandler (pg. 102) ↩︎
- The African Memory of Mark by Thomas Oden is a good resource on Mark’s relationship with Africa ↩︎
- Amos 7:14 NLT ↩︎
- Malachi 3:1 NLT ↩︎
- Malachi 3:2-3 NLT ↩︎
- Malachi 3:5 NLT ↩︎
- https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113140/vance-false-claims-haitian-migrants-pets ↩︎
- Rudyard Kipling’s poem “We and They” which was quoted in Constantine Campbell’s book ‘Jesus V. Evanglicals’ ↩︎
- https://www.npr.org/2025/11/22/g-s1-98867/trump-terminating-protections-somali-minnesota ↩︎
- https://youtu.be/8RmetXulhdI?si=DBAL1LO4k63Ug5Kf ↩︎
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgmv98ez3zo ↩︎
- Isaiah 64:6 ↩︎
Leave a comment