Mark Tooley, President of The Institute on Religion and Democracy, cautions Evangelicals in their advocacy for immigration reform.
Matthew Soerens, of World Relief, offers a response.
Thinking About Immigration: should the church support amnesty?
Matthew Soerens, co-author of Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion & Truth in the Immigration Debate, writes about why the government and church should take different approaches to amnesty. What do you think?
Even as popular opinion—and the opinions of a growing number of Members of Congress—seems to be shifting in favor of immigration reform legislation, the American public is still very much wary of the idea of amnesty. The concept is so unpopular that population control groups seeking to dramatically reduce immigration levels apply the term as an epithet to any sort of legislation that would include the possibility of undocumented immigrants ever becoming lawful residents, even proposals which would require undocumented immigrants to pay a significant fine (by definition, not the free grace of amnesty) and earn permanent legal status through a probationary process lasting a decade or more.
Breaking Bad
This piece was originally published at Patheos on April 12, 2013.
Evil has many faces. However, we sometimes forget this truth and are taken by surprise. The award-winning show, Breaking Bad, helps us see how complex evil can be. The series is about a high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with cancer and turns to making crystal meth out of desperation to try and provide a financial safety net for his family long after he is gone. He gets caught in an ever-complex web of evil that catches you by surprise. I am not addicted to crystal meth, but I am addicted to this show because it provides a fascinating account of the multi-faced reality of evil.
One reality check that hits you in the face when watching the show is that good people can make really bad decisions based on trying to do the right thing for those they love. Their bad decisions get the better of them and they go from bad to worse, breaking bad.
Another reality check that hits you in the face when watching the show is that bad people can do really good things to cover their evil. Their good actions get the better of others who can get conned into providing cover for evil to flourish.
One more reality check that hits you in the face when watching the show is that evil can appear very beautiful. We have all seen pictures of the faces of people who have done crystal meth for a long period of time, but somehow or another it doesn’t keep people from making, selling, buying, and using it. Money and thrills are immediate when you own it. Everything’s interesting when you use it. You might not ever imagine that somehow meth will also break you in the end. After all, evil so often appears invincible.
I am not sharing specifics about Breaking Bad because I do not want to spoil it for you, if you haven’t watched it. I encourage you to watch it. It is better than any sermon I’ve heard or given on the identity and potency of evil and its impact. Far from offering ideology-framed homilies that lead us to see everything in black and white, it offers us reality in all its colorful complexity, absurdity, urbane inhumanity, and sheer horror. There is no moral to the story. The story is the moral: watch out for evil; it’s various masks are staring each of us in the face.
Illegal Questions, Part II
This piece was originally published at Patheos on April 11, 2013.
It is off-limits—illegal—in some circles to look at the faces and listen to the personal stories of undocumented workers. Many in these circles fear that if you move it beyond faceless, nameless policies, you will make exception after exception. On this view, the claim is made that you should never base laws on exceptions, so you ignore the exceptions. But the exceptions have faces and names, wives and husbands, children and parents, fears and hopes, just like we do.
Jesus’ answer to the question—“Who is my neighbor?” (in Luke 10)—is not intended for generic policy position papers, but for each of the people who cross our paths. In Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about monumental doctrinal themes like transcendence and the grand omnis of orthodox theology. Regarding relationship with God and our framing of these categories, he writes: “Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable—that is not authentic transcendence—but our relation to God is a new life in ‘existence for others’, through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation…” (Letters and Papers from Prison, Touchstone edition, 1997, p. 381).
Speaking of “the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation,” Jesus does not tolerate the religious scholar’s attempt to justify himself in Luke 10 by raising the question, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29) Jesus’ answer suggests that the question is off-limits to Jesus, even illegal in view of the scholar’s intent to distance himself from taking responsibility for his neighbor. Jesus then tells the scholar who had come to test him on the essence of the law and its requirements for gaining eternal life (Luke 10:25) a story in which religious leaders like himself failed to care for their neighbor, who was within their reach in a given moment and situation. While it may have been ceremonially illegal for the religious leaders in the story narrated in Luke 10 to care for the man beaten and robbed and left for dead, Jesus does not let them off the hook. Only the seemingly illegal and immoral Samaritan fulfilled the law by acting mercifully in the moment (Luke 10:30-35).
We can live the entirety of our lives according to transcendental and legal policies that leave people dying on the road, but fail to care for the transcendental reality of the illegal person lying there before us. Such systems of justice will not judge us, but the transcendent Jesus who is dying on the road as the discounted exception to our rule will.
Thinking About Immigration: short film “A New Dream”
Our friends at G92 put together this short film called “A New Dream”. They say…
Immigration is a hot topic right now. But if all you see are the stories in the news, its easy to presume that those represent the majority of immigrants. It’s when you actually have personal relationships with immigrants that you begin to realize some of those stereotypes might not actually be accurate.