At Christmas time, should the Nativity story be interpreted as a
tale of solidarity with illegal immigrants? Some religious voices,
anxious to push some version of liberalized immigration policy as a
Christian imperative, describe Jesus and the Holy Family as the
most premier of illegal immigrants.
One recent blogger for the
Progressive Christian Alliance even crafted a novelette called
“Christmas Undocumented: Anunciación” about a pregnant 14-year-old
girl named Ave who is smuggled across the Texas border so she can
get to her boyfriend in Alabama. First, she visits her cousin
Isabella in San Antonio, who “leaps” for joy when hearing about the
pregnancy. Only the first installment of the story has been
released, but presumably Alabama’s new immigration enforcement law
will affect young Ave, her boyfriend, and the new baby.
A recent
column for the National Catholic Reporter similarly
posited that Mary and Joseph, with Baby Jesus, were akin to today’s
illegals by “seeking posada, or shelter” but finding no
room at the inn. “The Christmas season should remind us of how Mary
and Joseph and the baby Jesus also represented migrants and
refugees who were rejected like today’s immigrants,” the columnist
suggested. “What if those we turn away today include Mary, Joseph
and Jesus?” A cynical commenter responded: “What if the illegal
aliens we reject are Herod or the soldiers who crucified
Jesus?”
A blogger self-described as
“A
Unitarian Universalist Minister in the South” has
laid out his case for Jesus and Holy Family as illegal immigrants.
“Shortly after his birth, we read that King Herod orders the
killing of the innocent, all children under the age of two,”
explained the Unitarian, who now pastors in the immigration battle
zone of Alabama. “So Jesus and his parents become fugitives under
the law and flee once again this time to Egypt. Jesus is now an
illegal immigrant with a criminal record.”
Ostensibly Jesus’ illegal status continued even after Mary
and Joseph returned from Egypt “not to Bethlehem where Jesus is a
legal resident but to Nazareth,” where “Jesus grows up as an
illegal alien where he takes the job of carpenter away from other
Nazarenes.” According to the Unitarian minister, if the Nativity
story happened in today’s Arizona, “Sheriff Arpaio would seek to
arrest Joseph and Mary, throw them into Tent City, where Mary would
have had her baby with little medical attention.” In this scenario,
Jesus would be an “anchor baby.” And Joseph may have a dream
directing him back into Mexico, though the “trek across the Arizona
desert is as treacherous and dangerous as the trek from Bethlehem
to Egypt.”
The imagined view of Jesus as illegal immigrant is not
limited to liberal Unitarian Universalists. Earlier this year, a
prominent Southern Baptist seminary dean
wrote that “our Lord Jesus himself was a so-called ‘illegal
immigrant.’” After all, Mary and Joseph had fled, “like many of
those in our country right now, a brutal political situation,” and
“sojourned” in Egypt. Young Jesus “spent his childhood years in a
foreign land away from his relatives among people speaking a
different language with strange customs.”
Yes, but which Egyptian immigration laws did Mary and
Joseph violate when they fled there to protect the Baby Jesus from
a murderous King Herod? Neither Scripture nor non-canonical sources
reveal any such violations. Joseph, Mary and Jesus remained in
Egypt until Herod was dead, when they settled in Nazareth. They
were essentially temporary religious refugees who fled
persecution.
Besides, if both ancient Judaea and ancient Egypt were
under the Roman Empire, was moving from one to the other an act of
“immigration,” much less “illegal”? In his 2009 book
The Immigration Crisis: Immigrants, Aliens, and the Bible,
James Hoffmeier of Trinity International University near Chicago
wrote that the Holy Family en route to Egypt likely would have
passed several Roman forts, some of whose ruins have recently been
discovered. At these forts, “Joseph undoubtedly had to stop and
obtain permission to enter Egypt.”
No, there’s no historical reason to believe that Joseph,
Mary and Baby Jesus were ever illegal immigrants to Egypt or
anywhere else. They temporarily were refugees from murderous
religious and political persecution. Unlike the Holy family, most
illegal immigrants come to America seeking higher wages, not
fleeing persecution. Unlike the Holy Family, most illegal
immigrants come to stay, though hundreds of thousands every year do
in fact return home.
Faith dictates that churches offer their ministry and
message of redemption, embodied in the Nativity story, to all
people, including illegal immigrants. But there is no covert
message within the Christmas narrative offering specific policy
guidance on U.S. immigration law. The temptation to extract
politics out of the Nativity account should be resisted. Perhaps
the most infamous example was the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1992
Democratic Convention speech comparing Vice President Dan Quayle to
murderous King Herod. The birth of Baby Jesus was significant
enough by itself that it needs no political sloganeering to amplify
its importance.
