Christ’s Church has a perennial interest in distinguishing divine commandments from merely human precepts (Matthew 15:9). The Christian’s conscience should not be chock full of man’s precepts and empty of God’s mandates. Incessant media consumption since the smartphone’s advent has made the availability of human precepts in op-eds, “think pieces,” and short-form, vertical videos on TikTok, Instagram, and their like all far greater than ever. All that text and all that video tell us how to think and what to feel and how to be, and the Word of God is neglected, especially since it is usually read as a book, a declining medium in the smartphone era.
Nowhere is the confusion of divine commandment for human precept more obvious than in political controversies. The existence of controversy is nothing new, and if we were without controversies in church or state, we would be in the new heavens and the new earth. What’s new is how much information about the controversy a person may have long before or entirely without the counsel of Scripture. We are like kings of Israel with many, many counselors all around us day and night, but without any knowledge of the Word of God. The predictably chaotic and wrathful outcome of this state of affairs was evident during COVID and has reappeared with the upheaval in the American regime that the second Trump administration has created.
Since at least the end of the Second World War, American churches have been formally engaged in the US immigration process. For Lutherans this was first the resettlement of displaced Lutherans from eastern and central Europe in the United States, a care for the brother who would otherwise have lived under Soviet or some other Warsaw Pact communist tyranny. The endurance of those institutions for promoting immigration long after the flush of immigration from postwar Europe led in time to the resettlement of other nations from other places in the world through the Lutheran churches–Southeast Asian allies of the United States during our conflicts in Indochina in the 1970s and 1980s and the creation of Minnesota’s significant Somali population in the 1990s.
One could have made a case for the resettlement of Lutherans from Europe to the United States. They would be persecuted for their religion if they remained in what became the Soviet Union and its satellites during the Cold War, and their emigration to America made possible their freedom to worship God according to the dictates of their consciences. This is an especially sympathetic portrait to most confessional Lutherans, whose ancestors did not come to the United States all that long ago, seeking the liberty to be confessional Lutherans since their homeland in their minds forbade them that liberty.
Yet even such sympathetic cases of immigration rest upon state policy. If a Lutheran somewhere in the United States finds his coreligionists’ plight sympathetic, is the American government under any obligation to admit those coreligionists into the United States or speed their path to citizenship, much less the enjoyment of the manifold financial and social benefits of being an immigrant in our own time? No, it is not. The Church may have a sense of duty to her own, but the state is not bound to have the same sense of duty. The Church may want to help her own in another country, but the state does not need to make helping those Christians in another country easier for the church by bringing the foreign Christians into their country. If the state should decide to admit Christian refugees, that is its free decision.
As the state does not need to feed my children, but I do need to find food for my own children, the state does not need to admit anyone into that state whom I may find sympathetic, likable, or desirable, whatever my reasons for finding them to be so may be. For example, I believe it was right for the United States to resettle its very loyal Southeast Asian allies such as the anti-communist Vietnamese, the Hmong, and the Montagnards after the end of our war in Southeast Asia because we had become their protectors in war, they had staked their lives on helping our war effort, and we should not have requited their valor and loyalty with abandonment to the Vietnamese communists. That is my political rationale, but I am not permitted to say of that rationale, “thus saith the LORD.” Any Christian is free to disagree with me and to seek a different policy in the American government toward our allies in Indochina. Your conscience is not bound by my political judgment nor my conscience by your judgments.
How much more is this true when the political questions at hand today concern the immigration of large numbers of non-Christians to a country with plenty of native-born non-Christians already in need of the gospel? How much more is clarity needed, since the amount of money now permanently available to church-adjacent agencies (such as Global Refuge, formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services) is vastly greater than in resettlement efforts of earlier decades?
In the shift from the admission of coreligionists to the admission of Muslims or others, there are primarily two lines of argument that appear again and again to convince Christians that it is their duty to hold to a certain immigration policy, and that this policy is the only truly Christian policy: 1) the immigrant and especially the refugee is a sojourner whose treatment is laid out in Scripture, and 2) to desire a more restrictive immigration policy or to close one’s state borders entirely is un-Christian. We will take these lines of argument in their turn to prove that the Christian is not required by God to support any particular immigration policy, and the chief danger of a modern Christian and of the modern church is confusing what their smartphones tell them for what the Word of God says.
Many have argued that the immigrant to a modern nation-state is a sojourner, such as ancient Israel also contained (Exodus 22:21). The largest problem with that assertion is that the duties required of ancient Israel are not the duties required of a modern nation-state, other than what in the law of Moses agrees with natural law. A modern state need not have a class of Levites or specific food laws or a tabernacle, since Christ is the end-point for the law of Moses. A modern state’s laws must agree with the law of nature, as Abimelech knew that he should not have Rebekah for his wife once he learned that she was already the wife of another man, Isaac, though Isaac lied about their relationship (Genesis 26:9-10). The nations have God’s law written on their hearts sufficient to practice justice in some measure. A modern nation-state is not necessarily composed of former sojourners as was ancient Israel (Exodus 23:9), and the assertion that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” and should thus have an open immigration policy is a historical assertion with a political thrust, not a scriptural argument. One can debate what a “nation of immigrants” is and whether the United States is one, but one cannot use the law of Moses to make the Christian captive to one’s immigration preferences and politics.
Even if one concedes such regulation and allows the law of Moses to determine immigration policy, one notices that the sojourner is not a modern immigrant to a Western nation-state with a high standard of living. The sojourner, a man temporarily in Israel and passing through on some time scale, whether he remains for a time and departs or whether his children return to their father’s land of origin, is to be treated fairly and to be allowed to join Israel’s worship if he so chooses. He is not permitted to blaspheme Israel’s God (Leviticus 24:16). The sojourner should not be taken advantage of since his position in Israel is necessarily precarious; in Leviticus 19:10 he is left the same gleanings as the poor man because he presumably has very little. The Israelite should be considerate, as he must also be to a poor man or an indebted man. He is not voting in any Israelite elections or enjoying Israelite state benefits or sending large remittances to his country of origin through Israelite financial payment systems on the strength of the Israelite shekel. The requirement concerning the sojourner is a requirement of fairness, not of preference for the sojourner or to bring the sojourner’s entire extended family into Israel.
The analogy between the sojourner and the immigrant breaks down because it is neither scripturally nor logically sound. Fairness to the sojourner is not a certain required immigration policy in the state or support for that policy by the Church. Fairness to the sojourner is not all that a modern immigrant seeks. He seeks by and large greater wealth in the United States and comes here because however difficult life in modern California or Florida may be for him, it is better for his pocketbook than life in Somalia or Ecuador. No one can blame him for wanting to improve his lot in life, but no one can require the Americans to make sure that his lot in life is improved through immigration to America. Americans are free to bring him over to improve his lot, and Americans are free to tell him, “No, thanks.” Christians are not free to require Americans to fund agencies whose purpose is to bring in as many immigrants and refugees as possible.
In the service of an open legal immigration policy or a disregard for governmental regulation of immigration at all, including the acceptance or at least winking at illegal immigration, the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) is most frequently used across many agencies’ websites, denominational overtures, and other paraphernalia of this debate. If the nations are coming to the United States and desire admission, we stand in the way of the gospel if we deny them admission. They will now be our neighbors and can be evangelized here much more readily than if we had to go to Somalia or Ecuador or wherever their homes may be. This confuses the direction of the Great Commission. Jesus did not command the apostles to bring many people into Galilee or to change the makeup of the predominantly Jewish lower Galilee or the predominantly Gentile upper Galilee regions. Instead, He commanded the disciples to go out to the nations and share their lives there with them in their homes, eating what they ate and speaking and living as they spoke and lived, exactly the thing Paul is so eager to do in Christ’s mission (1 Corinthians 9:20).
The mandate of Jesus to preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15) is not a political mandate rearranging the world’s borders or nations or languages. It is a mandate for the Church to translate that gospel, as at Pentecost, into the world’s languages so that all the nations may hear. The nations need not come to a central place, whether Jerusalem or some American suburb with a higher standard of living than where they were born. The Church needs to go out to the nations and preach the gospel to them wherever they live. It has no requirement to bring as many people into an ostensibly wealthy place. The Church’s ministers travel with the gospel. Paul desired to go to Spain as quickly as possible. The Church does not require the nations to travel nor its members to support the nations’ migration into or out of anywhere. Since the gospel is portable, the nations do not need to move.
The need to move nations is a political prerogative of government. The American government may find it expedient to resettle no refugees for the next decade, or in the American system of government, the voters and other decision-makers may resolve that mass immigration was a benefit they’re tired of going without. Whatever the case and whatever the wisdom of those decisions, the Christian does not need to confuse God’s commandment to preach the gospel to the nations with the political prospect of a certain level of immigration to the United States. This is a subtle version of the mistake of seeing the modern United States, modern state of Israel, or other modern states somewhere in Daniel or Revelation, as dispensationalists do. The Church is God’s Israel (Galatians 6:16), not the United States of America, so there are no specific promises or commandments about the nations incumbent upon the American government. It is free to accept vastly more immigrants than it does–preferring none and allowing all, it is free to accept no immigrants, or it is free to prefer certain nations, income levels, or professions in its immigration policy. The debate about whether and how to regulate immigration is a matter of human judgment and prudence. Is mass immigration beneficial to the native population of a country? What about a points-based system of immigration? All of these are political questions to be resolved through a country’s political processes. The ministers need not pronounce everyone’s duty from the pulpit on such matters.
During COVID there was often great sternness about one’s duty to obey the government when it set regulations about divine worship. Romans 13 was invoked, quoted, and stretched to cover any regulations in any city, county, state, or country, and dissension from the ideas and dictates available on everyone’s smartphone was swiftly cried down. However, Romans 13 actually teaches that it is the government’s duty to punish wickedness and reward goodness (13:3-4), not to regulate divine worship, which Jesus Christ Himself regulates in His holy Word. His regulations always avail and suffice for His Church. He is King, and we must bow–even governors and county executives and presidents–to His prerogatives.
During the second Trump administration there is no such great sternness in the Church about obeying the government’s dictates concerning immigration, although in this case its prerogatives are much clearer. The government cannot decide when to administer the Lord’s Supper and how it should be administered. The government must decide what its laws are and who is breaking them and how to punish lawbreakers. I don’t note the lack of sternness in the Church to decry it. The Church is not a public-relations agency and need not agree with or disagree with everything occurring in the state and covered in the media, but the difference in tone is notable because the Church has been taught for years through what it funds and how evangelism is discussed that mass immigration is more moral, in fact, more Christian than no immigration. This was never true and has not become true through propagandistic repetition, emotional exhortation, or any other means.
Should America’s immigration policy change radically, perhaps even back to the mostly absent regulation of the Biden administration, the Church would need to evangelize the nations wherever they are. Even without such a change, even if all immigration to the developed world ceases, the Church in the United States, Canada or any other Western nation already has plenty of native-born pagans to evangelize from now on. It does not require the importation of unbelievers to have work to do in its own country, not to speak of sending as great a percentage of missionaries to other nations–as the South Koreans do, who send an enormous percentage of missionaries abroad while having a very restrictive immigration policy at home.
If a Christian disagreed with the immigration policy of the Biden administration, let him fight that out through America’s political processes to have it changed. He would not need to preach from the pulpit or require in a synodical convention that everyone agree with him on the ills of mass immigration. If a Christian disagrees with the immigration policies of the Trump administration now, let him fight that out through local, state, and federal government. He need not require his synod or his congregation or his minister to condemn what the Word of God does not condemn.
The stakes of silence in the Church when Scripture is silent are much higher than the resolution of current political controversies because the effect of requiring what God does not require is much greater than the temporary strife of today’s problems. The angst and stress of current controversy comes and goes, painful at the time but mostly forgotten later. However, the precedent for a church or a synod or an individual Christian of teaching the conscience from some other source than Scripture is set and quickly engulfs God’s commandments. Once we allow the teachings of men to subsume and replace God’s commandments, we may allow anything. Once our smartphones teach us more than the Bible, we may be taught to obey or to think or to feel or to denounce anything. If we are the world’s mouthpieces, we will not speak for God.
