SPECIAL PRÉCIS ON THE BIBLICAL VIOLENCE OF MAGA’S IMMIGRATION POLICIES: “NO DISTINCTIONS!” – (WITH VIDEO)

1. THEOLOGY

SCRIPTURE. “There is [now no distinction in regard to salvation] neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you [who believe] are all one in Christ Jesus [no one can claim a spiritual superiority].” – GALATIANS 3:28, AMP

KEY TERM: “ALL!” ‘Pas’ [πᾶς]: “Refers to any, every, all [of some group]; includes the central idea of oneness, a totality or the idea of ‘The Whole.’” NOTE: “The Greek word ‘pas’ is an adjective that conveys the idea of totality or completeness. It is used to describe all-encompassing or collective concepts, often translated as ‘all,’ ‘every,’ ‘whole’ or ‘entire’ in English. In the New Testament, ‘pas’ is frequently used to emphasize the inclusivity or universality of a statement or command.”

QUOTATION 1. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” – THE COMMITTEE OF FIVE (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston), The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

QUOTATION 2. “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! … Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’” – EMMA LAZARUS, The New Colossus, 1883; edited

COMMENTARY. “This verse continues the proof that ALL Christians are, in the fullest sense, “sons of God.”’ Galatians 3:27 showed why this was so; the present verse shows that there are ‘no exceptions, no inequalities.’ All Christians alike, no matter what their race, status, or sex, stand on the same footing of sonship before God.

There is a Unity or Solidarity in the Christian Body. What is true of one is true of all. Greek.—The spread of the Greek race through the conquests of Alexander, their ubiquitous presence, and the use of the Greek language as a universal medium of communication, led to the name ‘Greek’ being applied to all who were not Jews. ‘Jew and Greek’ is intended to be an exhaustive Division of the Human Race, just as ‘bond or free,’ ‘male and female.’

This verse marks the immense stride made by Christianity in sweeping away the artificial distinctions which had been the bane of the ancient world, and prevented any true feeling of brotherhood springing up in it. Christianity, at one stroke, established the brotherhood and abolished the distinctions.” – CHARLES ELLICOTT, An Old and New Testament Commentary for English Readers, 1878, 1897; edited

1. TEACHING

In 1991 as a ranking professor at Regent University, I drafted a position paper on American Immigration Policy co-authored by then-retired United States Army Major-General Jerry Ralph Curry, a decorated combat veteran, Army Aviator, Paratrooper, and Ranger who served his country both in the military and as a Presidential political appointee. We began the piece with:

“America is a Nation of Immigrants.”

In that light, permit me to begin by making TWO DISTINCTIONS OF EQUALITY that is clearly mapped out by the Passage under consideration today.

1. ‘All human beings are “Born Equal.’” At birth, all people of whatever race, origin, or social status are ‘Equal’ in the Sight of their Creator. While not always “born free” as in Western democracies, human beings are absolutely ‘Equivalent’ according to the Law and Grace of God.

“For God shows no partiality [no arbitrary favoritism; with Him one person is not more important than another].” – ROMANS 2:11, AMP

• All true Christians are “Born Again” into membership in the Body of Christ.’ In point of fact, the Divine Birthright of Equality is all the more true for followers of the Messiah. For them to become caught up in conflicts over Status or Doctrine is to betray the One who called them into service in the first place.

“Some people may contradict our teaching, but these are the wholesome teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. These teachings promote a godly life. Anyone who teaches something different is arrogant and lacks understanding. Such a person has an unhealthy desire to quibble over the meaning of words. This stirs up arguments ending in jealousy, division, slander, and evil suspicions. These people always cause trouble. Their minds are corrupt, and they have turned their backs on the truth. To them, a show of godliness is just a way to become wealthy.” – 1 TIMOTHY 6:3-5, NLT

THE REAL STORY. Thus, as we make the necessary Transition to American Immigration Philosophy (more than Policy), we cannot objectively do so without first carefully considering our Foundations in the Scriptures, the United States Constitution, and not unimportantly, our Cultural History and Tradition that drinks deeply from those first two American Wells.

To begin to accomplish this, I turn now to an excellent Historical Review by DR. WALT HUNTER (Harvard, University of Virginia), professor of 20th- and 21st- century literature and chair of the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University. Hunter is fiction and poetry editor for The Atlantic. His essay is titled, appropriately:

“The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty,” published in The Atlantic, January 16, 2018 (edited). We shall use this, alongside the Scriptures and our Constitution, as A TEMPLATE by which to assess the current American Immigration Policy advanced by President Donald Trump.

• OPEN. “The words of Emma Lazarus’s famous 1883 sonnet ‘The New Colossus’ have seemed more visible since Donald Trump’s election. They can be found on the news and on posters, in tweets and in the streets. Lines 10 and 11 of the Poem are quoted with the most frequency—“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—and often by those aiming to highlight a contrast between Lazarus’s humanitarian Vision of the Nation and the President’s racist rhetoric.”

• RACISM. “After reports that Trump had described Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as ‘shithole countries,’ the former FBI director James Comey tweeted a bit of the sonnet, along with his interpretation of its meaning: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” This country’s greatness and true genius lies in its diversity.’”

• TRADITION. “A little like Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ published in 1916, ‘The New Colossus’ is one of those poems that is constantly rediscovered and recontextualized. Whether the popularity of ‘The New Colossus’ is a consequence of the Poem’s timelessness, its curious forgettability, or its ‘schmaltzy’ sincerity, writers, readers, and politicians resurrect Lazarus’s Sonnet to speak directly to a Present Moment in which anti-black racism, xenophobia, immigration bans, and refugee crises define the terms of U.S. and European political discourse.”

• AUTHORSHIP. “The story of the poem’s creation has circulated almost as widely as the lines of Lazarus’s Poem. The Jewish Lazarus was a prolific writer in multiple genres, a political activist, a translator, and an associate of late-19th-century literati—including Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell. She wrote the Sonnet, after some persuasion by friends, for an auction to raise money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. But the details of the poem’s production and of its author’s biography do not fully capture The Conditions under which the Poem emerged, conditions that help to explain the poem’s message to its immiserated masses.”

• CONTEXT. “‘The New Colossus’ emerges at a Pivotal Moment in history’. The year before Lazarus’s Poem was read at the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition in New York, in 1883, the Chinese Exclusion Act became the first Federal law that limited immigration from a particular group. Though set to last for 10 years, various extensions and additions made the law permanent until 1943. The year after Lazarus’s Poem was read, the European countries met in Berlin to divide up the African continent into colonies. ‘The New Colossus’ stands at the Intersection of U.S. immigration policy and European colonialism, well before the physical Statue of Liberty was dedicated. The Liberal sentiments of Lazarus’s Sonnet cannot be separated from these developments in geopolitics and capitalism.”

• VISION. “What the Poem does, through its shifts in figurative language from comparison to personification, is just as important as what it says explicitly. Rather than standing guard, or extending open arms, the ‘Mother of Exiles’ [Statue of Libery]—a gendered, racialized figure—cries out with its ‘silent lips.’ The difference, then, is not only in what this Colossus represents—its liberal values of hospitality, diversity, and inclusion—but also in the speaking figure that the Poem creates. The Sonnet ends by compelling its readers to hear this invitation. It is a response that anticipates the Cries of Affliction that it knows are coming.”

• LAMENT. “The philosopher Simone Weil argues that the impersonal cry of ‘Why am I being hurt?’ accompanies claims to human rights. To refuse to hear this Cry of Affliction, Weil continues, is the gravest injustice one might do to another. The voice of the Statue in Lazarus’s Poem can almost be heard as an uncanny reply, ‘avant la lettre,’ to one of the slogans chanted by immigrants and refugees around the world today: ‘We are here because you were there’ [Eric Williams]. The Statue’s Cry is a response to one version of Weil’s ‘Why am I being hurt’ that specifies the global relation between the arrival of immigrants and the expansion of the Colonial System.”

• CONCLUSION. “‘Lazarus’s Poem begins by repudiating the “Greatness” to which Comey summons the Poem as witness.’ It continues with a Denial of Nationalist Narratives that are based on historical claims of ancient possession: ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ What might be more important than the values that the New Colossus speaks—ethical claims to rights, liberty, and hospitality that, despite their reiteration, have hardly succeeded in preventing the worst violence of the late 19th and 20th centuries—is ‘The Silence’ that the Poem refuses. And to hear this Silence is to read the Poem’s Sonnet as voicing ‘A Cry’ that those who passionately recite its words, from Pelosi to Comey, as well as those who violently deny them, might well train themselves to hear.”

1. IMPLICATIONS

I am here rather intensely reminded of a Scripture that we too often relegate to the Ash Heap of Christian cliché: “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also”– JAMES 2:26, NKJV

American theologian, clergyman, fierce abolitionist, temperance advocate and author ALBERT BARNES drives a stake straight into the heart of our HyperGrace, Do-Nothing American Gospel as he comments on this crucial doctrinal truth: “So faith without works is dead also – There is as much necessity that Faith and Works should be united to constitute True Religion, as there is that the body and soul should be united to constitute a living man. ‘If Good Works do not follow, it is clear that there is no true and proper Faith; none that justifies and saves.”’ – Notes on the Old and New Testament, 1884; edited

THE IDEA. Especially in our Nation’s present Hour of Unprecedented Crisis, we cannot simply be faithful churchgoers, tithers, and all around nice folks. No! No! We must take proper Biblical Action if we are to become Salt and Light to a clearly dying culture and people.

Rather, as true members of Christ’s Body we are to propose Biblically Grounded Ideas to offer to the culture as a Repository of Wisdom and Healing, in this case, to our Immigration Crisis.

Therefore, to conclude our conversation, I offer the following SEVEN PROPOSALS tendered by the Leaders of the Evangelical Immigration Table in their summary article titled: “Evangelicals Urge 119^th Congress, Trump Administration, to Reflect Biblical Principles in Immigration Policy Agenda” (January 7, 2025; edited).

• Ensuring secure, orderly national borders by investing in the personnel, infrastructure and technology necessary to halt unlawful entries, intercept drugs and other unlawful substances and manage lawful entries in secure and efficient ways.

• Creating a solution for Dreamers to apply for permanent legal status and citizenship.

• Facilitating orderly, lawful immigration processes, consistent with President-elect Trump’s recent statement that “we want people to come in … but they have to come in with love for the country. They have to come in legally.”

• Sustaining the U.S. refugee resettlement program, which allows the U.S. to offer safety and religious freedom to those persecuted for their faith, as well as to those persecuted for other reasons.

• Prioritizing immigration enforcement efforts on individuals convicted of serious violent offenses or who otherwise pose a credible public safety threat, rather than utilizing limited resources to remove individuals who have resided in the United States for many years without committing any serious criminal offense, many of whom are members of local churches and have U.S. citizen minor children.

• Continuing to respect longstanding guidance that limits immigration enforcement in “sensitive locations” such as church services and ministry sites, out of respect for religious freedom, as the government should not take actions that would have the effect of scaring people from attending church.

• Establishing a restitution-based legalization process for individuals in the country unlawfully, who would pay a fine and meet other qualifications.

They close with the following Statement to our Political Leadership: “As a new Congress is sworn in and President-elect Trump returns to the White House, Evangelical Churches face a great deal of uncertainty about how policies will shift and how those changes will directly impact the people to whom we minister. We’re asking both the Congress and the Administration to clarify their plans and to commit themselves to these policies, rooted in Biblical Principles, that would ensure security while keeping families together and treating all people humanely.”

CODA. After scouring the Internet for two full days in the attempt to find a Biblical Critique of the Trump Immigration policy agenda and finding none, beloved, I offer the following remarks as Conclusion by DR. KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ, professor of history at Calvin College. Writing as a liberal Christian scholar, her insights are nonetheless significant to our discussion as troubling for thought.

Her essay is titled, “Understanding White Evangelical Views on Immigration,” published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Spring/Summer, 2018; edited).

“‘What factors shape how White Evangelicals approach the Question of Immigration?’ On the one hand, the Bible, and Christian Tradition, have a lot to say about loving the stranger and caring for the foreigner. There is a universality within the Christian faith that ostensibly cuts across tribe and nation. Indeed, a strong Christian case can be made for extending a ‘Radical Hospitality,’ for permeable borders, and for a compassionate approach to immigration …

‘Presently, the Key Threat Evangelicals perceive is the Threat of Terrorism, and, in the minds of Evangelicals and despite much evidence to the contrary, immigrants and refugees are linked to terrorism.’ Immigration activists working in Faith communities have noted an increase in this tendency following the election of Trump. Those working in refugee resettlement have found that, when speaking with Evangelicals, they must give much more attention to the finer points of how refugees are screened and vetted before being allowed into the United States …

‘In this regard, it’s hard to be optimistic.’ It is incredibly difficult to disrupt a cohesive Worldview of this sort, particularly one that is inherently suspicious of opposing views and is fueled by a Victimization Narrative, one backed by a multi-billion-dollar spiritual-industrial complex, and one that has direct and exclusive avenues of communication to hundreds of millions of eager consumers … ‘It will take a concerted effort to offer Competing [Christian] Narratives that might open communities of Faith up to rethinking immigration in light of the Biblical Call to welcome the stranger and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.”’

THE COMPETING NARRATIVE. “Learn to do right! Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, and correct the oppressor. Defend the fatherless, plead for the widow … Then the King will say to those at His right hand:

‘Come, you blessed of My Father [you favored of God and appointed to eternal salvation], inherit (receive as your own) 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 brought Me together with yourselves and welcomed and  entertained and lodged Me, was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you visited Me with help and ministering care, I was in prison and you came to see Me.’” – ISAIAH 1:17; MATTHEW 25:34-40, AMP

These are the very Words of our Messiah to all His people, beloved. Obey them, or do not obey them. For as always: ‘The Choice remains entirely with you.’  

Selah.

MEDIA

YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/MIK8ZgG5r4M