What if Christians start with the church as their society? What if discussions about migration start with migrants’ perspectives? And what if those who want to learn to love their neighbors as themselves look to migrants to teach them? These starting points will make all the difference for the church and for civil politics, for mission and for questions about undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States and Afro-Caribbean migrants in the United Kingdom.
This is how I respond to Alastair Roberts. In his piece that initiates this conversation, he makes the case beautifully that after Abram and Sarai oppress their Egyptian servant Hagar, they must experience being slaves in Egypt themselves before they can be raised up and delivered. Then Roberts writes that unlike Lot whose hospitality fails in a place of violent inhospitality, Israel is formed after the pattern of Abraham, who entertains visiting angels, and after the pattern of Sarah, whose womb is made fruitful. These are delightful indications of why God’s people might be blessed and saved through showing hospitality. I also affirm Roberts’ case that Christians are committed to the particularity of the neighbor rather than to the abstract individual of modern liberalism.
But in other ways, Roberts and I differ. In response to him, I propose three shifts in perspective. First, I propose that as Christians “our society” is God’s people, Israel and the church, before it is British society, American society, Colombian society, or anything else. In Roberts’s piece, he speaks of “our society” in a way that places him and his readers in British, American, or Western society first. Only in his final paragraph does he turn to the church as a “new international solidarity,” but the church remains the “hope of new life” for “our societies,” for societies like Britain or the United States. Rather than treating their nation-states as their first societies, as Roberts does, I think it is all-important that Christians to turn to the church from the start as “our society,” as their first society. Only as the society that shares in Christ’s body and blood do we Christians move out to consider Britain, Europe, or another nation or cultural group as “our society” in a secondary sense. As a result, before asking, “What effect does the presence of this migrant community have on our nation?” it is right to ask, “What effect does the presence of this migrant community have on the membership and mission of the church?”
Second, I propose a shift to consider the perspectives of migrants and not only the perspectives of settled communities. Roberts’ piece falls prey to a blind spot that reviewers (1, 2) point out about my book, God and the Illegal Alien: United States Immigration Law and a Theology of Politics, namely, that it deals with questions about migration primarily from the perspective of settled communities. Like the use of “us” to indicate Britain or the West as our primary society, Roberts’s use of “us” indicates a starting point among settled people when he speaks, for example, of “the corrosive effects of multiculturalism [that] have left us without an ‘us’ to extend hospitality to any other group.” Roberts’ observations and his questions would be different if he took more time to consider the perspective and the voice of migrants, to consider what readers who are migrants make of his concerns for Western societies. For example, when he writes, “The people who routinely gain from mass immigration are large corporations and liberals,” I think as a migrant: Don’t migrants themselves gain (and lose) the most from mass immigration?
Third, I propose a shift in how to interpret the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). I agree with Roberts that the parable emphasizes encounters with people we actually run into, that it calls us to make neighbors and form new bonds, and that it calls us to create neighborhoods. But before the parable does these things, it presents Jesus’ shocking claim that the way to learn how to follow God’s ways is to imitate the strangers we as hearers like the least – and not only to imitate those strangers as they love us, but to start by receiving their love and mercy. The parable puts us hearers in the place of a Jewish person who is saved by a Samaritan. To the Jewish legal expert who speaks to Jesus, a Samaritan would be the last person to hold up as the one who upholds the chief commands of the Law, loving his neighbor as himself and thereby loving God. Thinking of Samaritans as ethnically impure people who worship God in the wrong way, this lawyer can’t stand to say the word “Samaritan” in response to Jesus’ question, “Which of these . . . proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (v. 36, ESV). For readers in other times and places, too, it is hard to hear that following in the way of Jesus starts by accepting mercy and love from a member of a despised ethnic group whose worship is false. As I read it in chapter 6 of my book, for Americans this might mean that to walk in God’s ways starts by recognizing the love they have from undocumented women and men who have built their houses, mowed their grass, and cooked their meals while fearing going to the police if they are wronged. Only after recognizing this love can the settled community love in return.
These three shifts of perspective – to the church as our society, to migrants, and about the Good Samaritan – lead to different judgments, first about the church. Questions about what is good and right start in a different place. Judgments that start with “our” town, city, or country and with myself as a member of a settled community might start by asking, “What is the effect of immigration on our settled community?” or “What kind and level of immigration is beneficial to our country?” But judgments that start with the church and are open to migrants’ perspectives might start by asking, “What is my contribution to the church of Jesus Christ where I have migrated?” or “What does the presence of migrants in our neighborhood mean for our ministry as a church?” Practical judgment oriented toward action might start by considering studies like Jehu Hanciles’ Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West. As Hanciles argues that “every Christian migrant is a potential missionary” (p. 6), he charts over seventy African immigrant churches in US cities and their common commitment to America as their mission field. Studies like his direct attention away from concerns about declining Christian practices in countries like the United States, concerns that put the nation first. Studies like Hanciles’ point out that migrants are often missionaries, that migrants are revitalizing church life in many countries, and that Christian migrants have a unique potential to spread good news to settled communities and fellow migrants of all faiths or none. From church- and migrant-based perspectives, migration is not a sign of decline but of new hope.
Second, the shifts of perspectives I have described make a difference for earthly politics. As the life of the church spills over into considerations of civil authority and government, as living waters of worship refresh cities and countries, our practical judgments change. Taking Roberts’s advice that we attend to actual neighbors and neighborhoods, and following Tisha Rajendra’s argument that justice concerning immigration concerns responsibility for relationships, there is room for moving many steps past battles about -isms into history, legislation, and stories. In chapter 5 of my book, I document how a 1965 turn to abstract equality and away from neighborliness was precisely what made it possible for so many millions of neighboring Mexicans to count as unlawfully present in the United States. Congress replaced a 1924 immigration system that was funded by scientific racism, yet gave special privileges to Western Hemisphere countries, with a system that treated each nation equally, allotting Mexico the same number of visas as countries on the other side of the world. Still, men, women, and children continued to move from Mexico to the United States, though largely outside of legal categories, and it became possible for the community that the law called “illegal aliens” to grow into the millions. In the book, I argue that the United States could become a better neighbor to Mexico by attending to the two countries’ shared history. The US could become a better neighbor at the least by lowering barriers that keep those who legally reside in the United States from being neighbors with without legal residence. Churches, in turn, can be at the forefront of acknowledging mercy from neighbors and becoming neighbors across divisions between Mexicans and Americans, legal and undocumented.
A similar story can be told about the United Kingdom and its former colonies in the Caribbean.[1]Here a Christian emphasis on loving neighbors and not on autonomous individuals can leaven difficult conversations about migration by pointing to relationships between groups and countries that are linked as neighbors. After centuries in which Britain subjected Black bodies to capture, forced migration, forced labor, separation from family members, and further violence, Afro-Caribbeans migrated to Britain from 1948 onward in the Windrush generation. Yet just as the British Empire was dissolving and Britain’s use of other countries was declining, Acts of Parliament in 1962, 1968, and 1971 restricted immigration from formerly colonies unless prospective immigrants could demonstrate that they, their parent, or their grandparent had received their British subjecthood in the UK. While a white Caribbean whose grandparent had become a subject in Britain could migrate to Britain, a Black Caribbean whose grandparents had been born British subjects in Jamaica could no longer migrate to Britain. Just as British use and abuse of Black bodies was coming to an end, a shrewd piece of legislation limited Black subjects of Her Majesty from moving to Britain. Here there is a different story from one that starts with concerns about Britain on its own.
Here the story is not just about the degree to which elites benefit or working-class Britons have restricted job prospects because of the arrival of men and women from some other place. Nor is the story just about maintaining British institutions or Christian values within Britain. There is a longer story about neighbors and about twisted relationships between them. It is within that history that Britons and Afro-Caribbeans today interact, not in the myopia of one nation’s present. If those of us who live in the UK are going to receive the promise that “you will love your neighbor as yourself,” we are going to have to recognize that various of us have profited from, enslaved, or killed our neighbors’ ancestors and decimated their cultures. And to learn to love our neighbors in the face of this history, we do not only need good political institutions and social trust. We need a savior – a savior who comes to us as a neighbor, unexpected.
Dr. Robert W. Heimburger is an immigrant to Oxford, England, from Birmingham, Alabama. He is author of God and the Illegal Alien: United States Immigration Law and a Theology of Politics, published on Cambridge University Press. He is Associate Chaplain with the Oxford Pastorate, Coordinator of Developing a Christian Mind at Oxford, Associate Researcher with the Faith and Displacement Project at the Seminario Bíblico de Colombia (FUSBC), Editor of IFES Word & World, and Chair of the Theological Advisory Group for IFES (the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students). You can contact him at robert.heimburger@oxfordpastorate.orgor follow him @robheimburger.
[1]See Robert W. Heimburger, ‘Immigration Law: A Theological Response’, Theology, forthcoming, September 2019.
What if Christians start with the church as their society? What if discussions about migration start with migrants’ perspectives? And what if those who want to learn to love their neighbors as themselves look to migrants to teach them? These starting points will make all the difference for the church and for civil politics, for mission and for questions about undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States and Afro-Caribbean migrants in the United Kingdom.
This is how I respond to Alastair Roberts. In his piece that initiates this conversation, he makes the case beautifully that after Abram and Sarai oppress their Egyptian servant Hagar, they must experience being slaves in Egypt themselves before they can be raised up and delivered. Then Roberts writes that unlike Lot whose hospitality fails in a place of violent inhospitality, Israel is formed after the pattern of Abraham, who entertains visiting angels, and after the pattern of Sarah, whose womb is made fruitful. These are delightful indications of why God’s people might be blessed and saved through showing hospitality. I also affirm Roberts’ case that Christians are committed to the particularity of the neighbor rather than to the abstract individual of modern liberalism.
But in other ways, Roberts and I differ. In response to him, I propose three shifts in perspective. First, I propose that as Christians “our society” is God’s people, Israel and the church, before it is British society, American society, Colombian society, or anything else. In Roberts’s piece, he speaks of “our society” in a way that places him and his readers in British, American, or Western society first. Only in his final paragraph does he turn to the church as a “new international solidarity,” but the church remains the “hope of new life” for “our societies,” for societies like Britain or the United States. Rather than treating their nation-states as their first societies, as Roberts does, I think it is all-important that Christians to turn to the church from the start as “our society,” as their first society. Only as the society that shares in Christ’s body and blood do we Christians move out to consider Britain, Europe, or another nation or cultural group as “our society” in a secondary sense. As a result, before asking, “What effect does the presence of this migrant community have on our nation?” it is right to ask, “What effect does the presence of this migrant community have on the membership and mission of the church?”
Second, I propose a shift to consider the perspectives of migrants and not only the perspectives of settled communities. Roberts’ piece falls prey to a blind spot that reviewers (1, 2) point out about my book, God and the Illegal Alien: United States Immigration Law and a Theology of Politics, namely, that it deals with questions about migration primarily from the perspective of settled communities. Like the use of “us” to indicate Britain or the West as our primary society, Roberts’s use of “us” indicates a starting point among settled people when he speaks, for example, of “the corrosive effects of multiculturalism [that] have left us without an ‘us’ to extend hospitality to any other group.” Roberts’ observations and his questions would be different if he took more time to consider the perspective and the voice of migrants, to consider what readers who are migrants make of his concerns for Western societies. For example, when he writes, “The people who routinely gain from mass immigration are large corporations and liberals,” I think as a migrant: Don’t migrants themselves gain (and lose) the most from mass immigration?
Third, I propose a shift in how to interpret the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). I agree with Roberts that the parable emphasizes encounters with people we actually run into, that it calls us to make neighbors and form new bonds, and that it calls us to create neighborhoods. But before the parable does these things, it presents Jesus’ shocking claim that the way to learn how to follow God’s ways is to imitate the strangers we as hearers like the least – and not only to imitate those strangers as they love us, but to start by receiving their love and mercy. The parable puts us hearers in the place of a Jewish person who is saved by a Samaritan. To the Jewish legal expert who speaks to Jesus, a Samaritan would be the last person to hold up as the one who upholds the chief commands of the Law, loving his neighbor as himself and thereby loving God. Thinking of Samaritans as ethnically impure people who worship God in the wrong way, this lawyer can’t stand to say the word “Samaritan” in response to Jesus’ question, “Which of these . . . proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (v. 36, ESV). For readers in other times and places, too, it is hard to hear that following in the way of Jesus starts by accepting mercy and love from a member of a despised ethnic group whose worship is false. As I read it in chapter 6 of my book, for Americans this might mean that to walk in God’s ways starts by recognizing the love they have from undocumented women and men who have built their houses, mowed their grass, and cooked their meals while fearing going to the police if they are wronged. Only after recognizing this love can the settled community love in return.
These three shifts of perspective – to the church as our society, to migrants, and about the Good Samaritan – lead to different judgments, first about the church. Questions about what is good and right start in a different place. Judgments that start with “our” town, city, or country and with myself as a member of a settled community might start by asking, “What is the effect of immigration on our settled community?” or “What kind and level of immigration is beneficial to our country?” But judgments that start with the church and are open to migrants’ perspectives might start by asking, “What is my contribution to the church of Jesus Christ where I have migrated?” or “What does the presence of migrants in our neighborhood mean for our ministry as a church?” Practical judgment oriented toward action might start by considering studies like Jehu Hanciles’ Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West. As Hanciles argues that “every Christian migrant is a potential missionary” (p. 6), he charts over seventy African immigrant churches in US cities and their common commitment to America as their mission field. Studies like his direct attention away from concerns about declining Christian practices in countries like the United States, concerns that put the nation first. Studies like Hanciles’ point out that migrants are often missionaries, that migrants are revitalizing church life in many countries, and that Christian migrants have a unique potential to spread good news to settled communities and fellow migrants of all faiths or none. From church- and migrant-based perspectives, migration is not a sign of decline but of new hope.
Second, the shifts of perspectives I have described make a difference for earthly politics. As the life of the church spills over into considerations of civil authority and government, as living waters of worship refresh cities and countries, our practical judgments change. Taking Roberts’s advice that we attend to actual neighbors and neighborhoods, and following Tisha Rajendra’s argument that justice concerning immigration concerns responsibility for relationships, there is room for moving many steps past battles about -isms into history, legislation, and stories. In chapter 5 of my book, I document how a 1965 turn to abstract equality and away from neighborliness was precisely what made it possible for so many millions of neighboring Mexicans to count as unlawfully present in the United States. Congress replaced a 1924 immigration system that was funded by scientific racism, yet gave special privileges to Western Hemisphere countries, with a system that treated each nation equally, allotting Mexico the same number of visas as countries on the other side of the world. Still, men, women, and children continued to move from Mexico to the United States, though largely outside of legal categories, and it became possible for the community that the law called “illegal aliens” to grow into the millions. In the book, I argue that the United States could become a better neighbor to Mexico by attending to the two countries’ shared history. The US could become a better neighbor at the least by lowering barriers that keep those who legally reside in the United States from being neighbors with without legal residence. Churches, in turn, can be at the forefront of acknowledging mercy from neighbors and becoming neighbors across divisions between Mexicans and Americans, legal and undocumented.
A similar story can be told about the United Kingdom and its former colonies in the Caribbean.[1]Here a Christian emphasis on loving neighbors and not on autonomous individuals can leaven difficult conversations about migration by pointing to relationships between groups and countries that are linked as neighbors. After centuries in which Britain subjected Black bodies to capture, forced migration, forced labor, separation from family members, and further violence, Afro-Caribbeans migrated to Britain from 1948 onward in the Windrush generation. Yet just as the British Empire was dissolving and Britain’s use of other countries was declining, Acts of Parliament in 1962, 1968, and 1971 restricted immigration from formerly colonies unless prospective immigrants could demonstrate that they, their parent, or their grandparent had received their British subjecthood in the UK. While a white Caribbean whose grandparent had become a subject in Britain could migrate to Britain, a Black Caribbean whose grandparents had been born British subjects in Jamaica could no longer migrate to Britain. Just as British use and abuse of Black bodies was coming to an end, a shrewd piece of legislation limited Black subjects of Her Majesty from moving to Britain. Here there is a different story from one that starts with concerns about Britain on its own.
Here the story is not just about the degree to which elites benefit or working-class Britons have restricted job prospects because of the arrival of men and women from some other place. Nor is the story just about maintaining British institutions or Christian values within Britain. There is a longer story about neighbors and about twisted relationships between them. It is within that history that Britons and Afro-Caribbeans today interact, not in the myopia of one nation’s present. If those of us who live in the UK are going to receive the promise that “you will love your neighbor as yourself,” we are going to have to recognize that various of us have profited from, enslaved, or killed our neighbors’ ancestors and decimated their cultures. And to learn to love our neighbors in the face of this history, we do not only need good political institutions and social trust. We need a savior – a savior who comes to us as a neighbor, unexpected.
Dr. Robert W. Heimburger is an immigrant to Oxford, England, from Birmingham, Alabama. He is author of God and the Illegal Alien: United States Immigration Law and a Theology of Politics, published on Cambridge University Press. He is Associate Chaplain with the Oxford Pastorate, Coordinator of Developing a Christian Mind at Oxford, Associate Researcher with the Faith and Displacement Project at the Seminario Bíblico de Colombia (FUSBC), Editor of IFES Word & World, and Chair of the Theological Advisory Group for IFES (the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students). You can contact him at robert.heimburger@oxfordpastorate.orgor follow him @robheimburger.
[1]See Robert W. Heimburger, ‘Immigration Law: A Theological Response’, Theology, forthcoming, September 2019.
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