5\/10\/2010 – Mark D. Tooley –
\nThe old Religious Left has long championed virtual open borders and slammed national sovereignty as idolatrous. Now the new Evangelical Left is chiming in with its own sentimentalization of illegal immigration, identifying Jesus Christ Himself as an illegal immigrant.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are exiles who follow an alien, undocumented, migrant Messiah,\u201d insisted Debra Dean Murphy, a religion professor at United Methodist affiliated West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her recent column was carried by Jim Wallis\u2019 Sojourners and illustrates the merging thought of old Religious Left and new Evangelical Left. Probably neither Jesus nor any other ancient Jew, or anybody else in the ancient world, had birth certificates. Jesus did have a legal father, Joseph. The Nativity Story famously reports that Jesus\u2019 family lawfully returned to Bethlehem, the place of Joseph\u2019s birth, to comply with a census. Jesus came from a lawful, Torah following Jewish family that seems to have lived in the same Nazareth except for their sojourn in Egypt to escape King Herod. There is no reason to think Joseph and Mary, with the infant Jesus, were in Egypt illegally. Nor did they remain there as refugees beyond necessity, after which they returned home. So it\u2019s not clear how Jesus could be an \u201calien, undocumented, migrant Messiah,\u201d except as the contrived icon for Religious and Evangelical Left immigration activists.<\/p>\n All Christians would readily agree that illegal aliens, with all humanity, bear God\u2019s image and merit lawful and decent treatment. But humanitarianism does not necessarily equal anarchically and endlessly open borders nor an automatic amnesty for all who cross the border illegally, much less the glorification of illegal immigration. The Religious and Evangelical Left sometimes practice a form of political antinomianism, asserting that rules are unimportant and only politically correct sentiments and intentions bring salvation.<\/p>\n Christian ethics, rooted in Jewish teaching, have for millennia taught lawful orderliness and warned against social anarchy. With Jews, Christians have traditionally understood their faith in God entailed reasonable obedience to civil authorities, except in the most egregious and idolatrous interference with faithfulness to God. But the Religious and Evangelical Left have decided that civil law should not really matter in cases of immigration. \u201cThe dominant narrative\u2013the one about illegality, rule of law, blah, blah, blah\u2013is persuasive because it provokes and exploits the one emotion that has driven American politics since 9\/11: fear,\u201d Professor Murphy opined. \u201cWe\u2019re told by critics and commentators that Americans have never been so angry, that our public discourse has never been this strident and dangerously uncivil\u2013all the red-faced name-calling, the ugly race-baiting, the shrill, snarky meanness.\u201d Do expectations of border security and immigration law enforcement necessarily equal \u201cshrill, snarky meanness?\u201d For the Religious and Evangelical Left, evidently so.<\/p>\n In contrast, recently I attended a ceremony at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. honoring \u201crighteous gentiles\u201d from the Netherlands who courageously hid Jews and other potential victims of Nazis in their church during the German occupation. The church sexton, Hendrik Pleijsier-van Burden, along with his wife Neeltje Alida, with the pastors and others in the church, were guided by their Christian faith to protect Jews, Dutch resistance fighters and German Army deserters, all of whom faced likely execution if captured. In such an extremity, Christian ethics certainly affirms resistance against a genocidal occupying power. As a child, my own native northern Virginia was filled with thousands of new Vietnamese immigrants who fled communist occupation after Saigon\u2019s 1975 collapse. President Ford had resettled 130,000 Vietnamese who had served the U.S. during the war and who had escaped newly reunified and communist Vietnam, where they faced death or internment. A church in my neighborhood adopted a Vietnamese family. Church and state rightly welcomed refugees who had sided with America and who needed protection from a murderous enemy.<\/p>\n Strangely, the Religious and Evangelical Left give little specific attention to today\u2019s political and religious refugees who flee communist and Islamist regimes. The implied disapproval of such anti-Western governments does not comport with the Religious and Evangelical Left narrative that the U.S. is the world\u2019s most oppressive power and responsible for most political and economic suffering. For the Religious and Evangelical Left, the U.S. is the original cause for global poverty and therefore is obligated to offer automatic sanctuary to any and all who want to move here, legally or illegally.<\/p>\n Traditionally across the centuries, immigrants to America have seen their opportunity as a privilege. Undoubtedly many still do. But the religious U. S. champions of virtual open borders insist that immigration is not a privilege but an entitlement that the U.S. universally owes the world. According to Professor Murphy, any resistance to unlimited immigration just illustrates \u201cAmericans\u2019 deep-seated xenophobia,\u201d which was \u201ccarefully cultivated since the 9\/11 terrorist attacks,\u201d and \u201ccrucial in rallying the country to support two insupportable wars.\u201d Darkly, Murphy fears that a \u201cphrase formerly associated with interrogators of the Third Reich\u2013\u2018let me see your papers\u2019\u2013will now enter the lexicon of law enforcement in Arizona,\u201d thanks to its new immigration law. \u201cJesus\u2013in the guise of the brown-skinned \u2018other\u2019\u2013will be asked for documentation he doesn\u2019t have.\u201d<\/p>\n Adding to this theme of deifying illegal immigration, Professor Col\u00f3n-Emeric at Duke has preached that \u201cThe Church is a van full of illegals crossing the border to travel to the true north, up, the kingdom of God, because as [Saint} Paul says, \u201cour citizenship is in heaven.\u201d Jews and Christians, in the tradition of Abraham, do understand their faith as a pilgrim journey through a strange land. But probably neither the Patriarch nor St. Paul would equate the quest for salvation with celebrating the willful violation of immigration law.<\/p>\n HT: FrontPageMag<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 5\/10\/2010 – Mark D. Tooley – The old Religious Left has long championed virtual open borders and slammed national sovereignty as idolatrous. Now the new Evangelical Left is chiming in with its own sentimentalization of illegal immigration, identifying Jesus Christ Himself as an illegal immigrant. \u201cWe are exiles who follow an alien, undocumented, migrant Messiah,\u201d … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[72,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leftism","category-religious-left"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMurphy cited Edgardo Col\u00f3n-Emeric, director of Hispanic Studies at Duke University\u2019s Divinity School in North Carolina: \u201cJesus did not have a valid birth certificate. Mother\u2019s name: Mary; Father\u2019s name: unknown. In fact, Jesus had no papers in his name, no title deed, no rental contract. Nothing. \u2018Foxes have dens, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.\u2019\u201d She further quoted Col\u00f3n-Emeric: \u201cChristians who do not recognize Jesus in the illegal do not know Jesus.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n