OPINION:
Last week, the National Association of Evangelicals published its monthly newsletter, whereby it heralded the Christmas season not by celebrating “joy to the world” but by repeating its annual Yuletide claim that because Christ was a “refugee,” all Christians are obligated to welcome all immigrants (regardless of status) into our country, our towns and our neighborhoods.
How are we to do this? How exactly are some 60 million American evangelicals purportedly represented by the National Association of Evangelicals to welcome the “sojourner” and “foreigner” in our midst? What practical steps does the association suggest we take?
Well, rather than create its own action plan, the National Association of Evangelicals provides a link to a recently published statement by The Wesleyan Church, a denomination of approximately 500,000 North Americans, as an example of what the Christian position should be on immigration.
What does this Wesleyan document say? Well, first, it is a not-so-thinly veiled homage to some of its leaders’ decades-old infatuation with neo-Marxism rather than simple biblical truth.
Frankly, they don’t even try to hide it.
For example, this church’s official statement on immigration is laden with references to “systemic” this and “systemic” that, as well as the overt and intentional use of the word “equitable” rather than “equal” to describe its desired outcomes.
This is the language of critical race theory more than that of Orthodox Christianity, and biblical believers should be wary of it. It’s a nomenclature that comes straight out of the Frankfurt School handbook and reflects the writings of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse more than it does traditional Christian beliefs regarding individual responsibility and conservative morals.
If you have a sense of deja vu right now, there’s a reason. We’ve been here before. All this talk of blaming the oppressor rather than focusing on ourselves, of redistributing things equitably rather than on the basis of hard work and merit, is little more than a kissing cousin to the liberation theology that left-leaning evangelicals such as Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis popularized in the 1970s.
This worldview has always been much more about “social justice” than personal salvation. It is a quasi-Christianity that always leads to division rather than unity, blame rather than personal confession, and the worship of government more than God.
Because of its neo-Marxist roots alone, American Christians should reject the National Association of Evangelicals/Wesleyan statement on immigration. If that doesn’t convince you, there are several other reasons to discard this line of thinking.
First, this statement repeatedly ignores the fact that the Bible never excuses illegal immigration or expects any country or nation to tolerate it. (Spoiler alert: There is absolutely nothing in Scripture that suggests that Mary, Joseph and Jesus crossed any borders illegally. It’s just not there.)
Second, it consistently conflates immigrants who honor the law with those who don’t. In fact, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Wesleyans seemingly draw no distinction between the two as they presume to scold those of us who do see the difference.
Third, the statement completely ignores the elderly, the poor, the widows, the children and the women who are being victimized even as we speak by a tsunami of illegal vagrancy sweeping across our nation.
What about them?
What about the working-class folks in Springfield, Ohio, Central Los Angeles, South Chicago, Aurora, Colorado, or Minneapolis who can’t even leave their front yards, walk to their local grocery stores or take their kids to a community park because literal armies of illegals now overrun their entire neighborhoods?
What about children who are being trafficked and abused by the hundreds of thousands? What about the young women who live in fear of being harassed, if not outright raped?
What about the elderly retired couple who still live in the 1,000-square-foot house they bought in what was a nice neighborhood in the 1950s but is now overrun by tent encampments, drugs, violence and crime?
What about all these people — these millions of law-abiding, blue-collar American citizens — who have had to sacrifice their safety, home equity, neighborhoods, schools, streets and ways of life on the altar of virtue-signaling liberal Christians who live in their upscale suburban communities, sleeping soundly at night behind their double-locked doors?
The bottom line is that the National Association of Evangelicals and its proxy, the Wesleyan Church, are wrong. Nothing in the Bible tells a nation to ignore lawlessness and criminality at the expense of its own people. My goodness, just read the book of Nehemiah. The entire thing revolves around building a wall for a reason.
Legal immigration is a wonderful thing. Illegal immigration is not. Ignoring the difference is cultural suicide.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.
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