Religious groups increasingly advocate liberalized immigration
policies for the U.S. — ones that pursue a more compassionate
alien legalization process. The National Council of Churches, the
Episcopal Church bishops, and United Methodist agencies want
virtually open borders. The National Association of Evangelicals
has endorsed legalization. Most recently, the Southern Baptist
Convention endorsed legalization while also calling for border
enforcement.
This all comes at a bad time for God-fearing Alabama. The
state — with its 120,000 illegal immigrants — has followed
Arizona with a strict new policy, which Alabama’s governor boasts
is the “strongest
immigration bill in the country.” A local United Methodist
bishop, meanwhile, contends that it’s the “meanest immigrant
legislation bill in the nation.”
Presbyterian Church (USA) clergy Kay Campbell, an editor
and reporter for the Birmingham News, recently
reported for the liberal website Red Letter Christians
about a religious demonstration against Alabama’s law. Once an
English teacher at a Miskito Indian village to victims of
Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, Campbell wrote of her
former students: “I wondered if they’d grown up to fight with the
Sandinistas that would attempt to return democratic rule to their
land. I wondered if they’d grown up to sneak into America (there
being no legal line for penniless, unskilled laborers) so that they
could send money back to their little sisters living in the
traditional one-room cabins still built on stilts despite the
distance from their traditional fishing grounds.”
Of course, these wonderful Sandinistas who tried to
“return democratic rule to their land” were notorious for their
persecution of the Miskito Indians, not to mention their overall
Marxist-Leninist attempts to impose a Soviet-backed police state in
Nicaragua during the 1980s. Campbell wondered if
illegal immigrants should be “any less able to cross borders for
opportunities than corporations,” and in so doing proved that
reporters even in Birmingham can be left-wingers.
Some of Alabama’s United Methodist clergy, in conformity
with denominational policy, have prominently denounced the new law.
“The purpose feels like intimidation and meanness,”
Birmingham-based Bishop Will Willimon told the local newspaper,
citing “frustration,” “disappointment [and] embarrassment.” He
complained: “One of the most nefarious aspects of this law is it
appears to criminalize Alabamians in the act of being helpful and
compassionate,” citing the law’s prohibition against knowingly
giving a ride to illegal immigrants. “One thing our church is
hoping to show our Spanish-speaking friends is that this law is not
in our spirit,” the Bishop said. “We want the world to know that
this does not represent the best of Alabama.”
It’s doubtful that Alabama state troopers will be swooping
down on church volunteers feeding or giving doctor-rides to illegal
immigrants. But the United Methodist Church, like most of the
Religious Left, officially rejects any immigration restrictions.
Any border enforcement is commonly derided as “militarization.” And
illegal immigrants are routinely likened to the Holy Family fleeing
to Egypt, or Abraham searching for the Promised Land.
Bishop Willimon and other Methodist clergy have sent an open
letter to Alabama’s governor denouncing the immigration law. Citing
Martin Luther King, they declared that Christians have a “moral
duty to obey just laws, [and] they also have a moral duty to
disobey unjust ones.”
They admitted the law’s supporters are “well-meaning
individuals” with “valid concerns” about “unemployment in this
fragile economy” and state expenses for health care, police, fire
protection, and education. But the Methodist clergy insisted the
law “contradicts the essential tenets of the Christian faith.” They
cited Old Testament sojourners, the Good Samaritan, and St. Paul’s
rejection of distinctions among Christians. “We believe that God’s
call for the United Methodist church is to be a church for ALL
people, to be in ministry to ALL people,” they declared.
The government’s vocation is very different from the church’s,
as fuzzy-thinking religious critics often forget. St. Paul affirmed
the state’s police and military responsibilities to protect its
people. Bishop Willimon, formerly the dean at Duke University’s
prestigious chapel, is a pacifist neo-Anabaptist who rejects
traditional Christian understanding of the Apostle’s teaching.
Insisting that the state must behave like the church in offering
unlimited hospitality to all people is untenable, of course. It
also contradicts traditional Christian understanding of the state’s
divinely ordained duties. Alabama’s laws may or may not have flaws,
but its religious critics don’t seem to offer serious arguments
against it.
