Yet another state, populated largely by people who consider themselves Christians, has apparently criminalized Christian behavior toward illegal immigrants.\u00a0 At least according to the Associated Press which says in an article published in my local newspaper June 10 that Alabama\u2019s new immigration law makes it \u201ca crime to knowingly give an illegal immigrant a ride.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s the AP saying that, not me.\u00a0 If you think that\u2019s mistaken, please prove it.<\/p>\n
Many Americans have developed very nasty attitudes toward illegal immigrants in recent years.\u00a0 Supposedly they are hurting the U.S. economy by taking jobs away from American citizens.\u00a0 Yet, by many accounts (and I have witnessed this first hand) many who despise illegal immigrants and blame them for high unemployment gladly hire them to do their yard work and repair their roofs and fences and pay them in cash.\u00a0 Many experts continue to argue that most of the jobs done by illegal immigrants are ones very few Americans want to do or will do.<\/p>\n
Several states, mostly in the South, have recently passed laws criminalizing humanitarian aid to illegal immigrants.\u00a0 True, some of these laws (perhaps all of them) contain exceptions for government regulated humanitarian organizations and for emergency responders.\u00a0 However, where does that leave the average Christian who feels called by God to reach out and help an illegal immigrant in need?\u00a0 Jesus said that insofar as people offer a cup of cold water to one of the least of these his brethren they have done it to him and insofar as they have refused to do it for the least they have refused it to him (Matthew 24).\u00a0 Does anyone really think Jesus didn\u2019t mean illegal immigrants by \u201cthe least of these my brethren?\u201d\u00a0 I hope not.<\/p>\n
I can see nothing in these attitudes and laws except a contemporary form of scapegoating\u2013one of the oldest forms of sin in humanity.\u00a0 Theologians and philosophers such as Rene Girard have explored this phenomenon extensively and proved beyond doubt to me, at least, that we humans and especially Christians need to be attentive to its pervasive influence in all\u00a0human societies.<\/p>\n
Human societies seem always to have some group(s) the majority regard as the source and container for evil and they irrationally heap scorn, ridicule and rejection on them because, inexplicably and irrationally, it makes them feel better.\u00a0 We all know that phenomenon in middle school and many of us experienced it.\u00a0 It is the phenomenon underlying that of bullying now finally getting so much attention.<\/p>\n
But it isn\u2019t limited to adolescents.\u00a0 Mature, supposedly rational, adults also engage in such behavior.\u00a0 We all know about how Hitler and the Germans made the Jews scapegoats after WW1 in Germany.\u00a0 But anti-semitism isn\u2019t limited to that place and time.\u00a0 Jews have perennially been made scapegoats in societies around the world.\u00a0 So have African-Americans, American Indians, Muslims\u00a0and homosexuals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We Americans love to point out scapegoating in other countries\u2013especially Christians in Muslim countries and elsewhere where they are in the minority.\u00a0 We read with justifiable horror about albinos in parts of Africa being singled out for bad treatment and sometimes even murder.\u00a0 Now we read about certain children in some African countries being identified as witches and ostracized, tormented and sometimes killed for absolutely no reason other than scapegoating.<\/p>\n
The mechanism of scapegoating is relatively simple even as it is irrational and therefore finally beyond explanation.\u00a0 People seem to need someone other than themselves to blame for their problems, so they choose people among them that seem alien, foreign, other, strange, and heap abuse and sometimes ritualistic killing on them.\u00a0 (There was something horrifyingly ritualistic about lynchings of African Americans by the KKK.)\u00a0 Such abusive treatment of the strange \u201cothers\u201d somehow releases a pressure inside the scapegoaters and makes them feel better for a time.\u00a0 It does nothing, however, to solve society\u2019s real problems.\u00a0 It\u2019s a completely false solution to real problems.<\/p>\n
Scapegoating seems to be a universal human behavior and is usually linked with tribalism\u2013the irrational identification of a particular affinity group as superior to all others and yet threatened by all others so that it needs aggressive protection from others.\u00a0 This combination is a combustible compound that helps explain the otherwise inexplicable such as WW1 and many other wars.<\/p>\n
Postmodern thinkers such as Girard and Levinas are helping Christians (and others) discover this evil within themselves and their societies.\u00a0 We Christians could and should have discovered it through Jesus, but sometimes it takes an outsider to point out something we should have known all along.<\/p>\n
According to these men and their Christian interpreters, a major task of Christians in our postmodern world is to identify and root out of ourselves the horror of the \u201cother\u201d and dedicate ourselves to the welfare of the \u201cother\u201d (the stranger, the alien, the weird ones among us).\u00a0 Sometimes it takes something visual and dramatic to bring the lesson home.\u00a0 When I saw the movie \u201cThe Visitor\u201d I was gripped by a new understanding of how we in America are making illegal immigrants our scapegoats and how just knowing an illegal immigrant can change one\u2019s perspective entirely.\u00a0 I urge you to watch it.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, the hero of the story (not a particularly noble one, but one that gradually discovers his inner nobility) would be a criminal in some states because of his humanitarian behavior towards illegal immigrants.\u00a0 He is a college professor who finds an illegal immigrant couple living in his New York City apartment.\u00a0 (The movie never explains how a college professor can afford a NYC apartment as a second home!)\u00a0 He kicks them out, but then realizes they are homeless and invites them to stay with him temporarily.\u00a0 Eventually he comes to love them and works tirelessly to help them gain legal status.\u00a0 When the government agents very coldly return the young man to his home country in the middle of the appeals process, without even notifying his family, the college professor has a breakdown.\u00a0 He knows that this young man will be tortured if not killed in his home country which he fled because his father was a leading dissident.\u00a0 Because of a technicality he was denied legal immigrant status.\u00a0 The \u201cVisitor\u201d is the college professor, not the illegal immigrant and his girlfriend.\u00a0 He visits \u201cthe others\u201d and gets to know the beauty of their culture and music and their humanity and eventually resigns his faculty status (or takes a leave of absence) and spends his days playing his deported friend\u2019s drums in a park.<\/p>\n
What is especially tragic in the current flood of anti-illegal immigrant behavior and legislation in America is its complete lack of humanity toward illegal immigrants.\u00a0 States have now taken to fighting against them by making people, Christians and others, who would extend basic human help to them in their need criminals.\u00a0 I can see nothing in these laws other than sheer scapegoating; these laws are expressions of hatred for the \u201cothers\u201d among us and toward those who would dare to help them.<\/p>\n
When we discover that it is no longer socially acceptable to scapegoat one group, we turn our scapegoating behavior toward a group it is acceptable to hate, demean, ridicule, marginalize and harm.\u00a0 It seems necessary for us to have such \u201cothers\u201d and to act towards some of them so.\u00a0 It makes us feel better.\u00a0 We feel like we are solving problems we don\u2019t know how to solve.\u00a0 But, of course, scapegoating doesn\u2019t really solve anything.<\/p>\n
Now, I am not opposed to laws regulating immigration or even to deporting illegal immigrants.\u00a0 What I am opposed to is criminalizing humanitarian aid to them while they are among us.\u00a0 That is simply unchristian.\u00a0 What would Jesus do?\u00a0 Without any doubt at all he would give a ride to a tired, hot, foot weary illegal immigrant walking many miles to work in order to feed his family.\u00a0 Without any doubt at all he would give shelter to an illegal immigrant mother and her children.\u00a0 Without any doubt at all he would give food to a hungry illegal immigrant family.\u00a0 Yet, these supposedly \u201cChristian\u201d legislators and governors sign laws that criminalize Jesus\u2019 behavior.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to hear that these laws won\u2019t be enforced against Christians or others who help illegal immigrants in these ways.\u00a0 Unless the laws contain explicit exemptions for such behavior (and to date I have not seen that they do), we can assume that they MAY SOMEDAY be enforced against people who do them.\u00a0 Whether they are enforced or not, they make felons out of people who simply do what Jesus would do.<\/p>\n
I cannot think of any clearer case for Christian civil disobedience.\u00a0 Jails should be full of Christians in those states!\u00a0 Or at least legislators should be flooded with phone calls and letters and e-mails angrily demanded that they amend these laws to de-criminalize individual humanitarian aid to illegal immigrants.<\/p>\n
Because these things I am saying are so crystal clear theologically to any thinking Christian, I can only attribute the passing of these laws by people who call themselves Christians\u00a0to scapegoating.\u00a0 What possible harm can be done to society by giving a ride to an illegal immigrant?\u00a0 And even if such could be shown to do some little harm to society, the good it does to Jesus (remember what Jesus said) overrides that IF we consider ourselves in any sense a Christian culture and society (as do the states that have so far passed these laws).<\/p>\n
Now, flame away as ye will.\u00a0 But all I want to know is DO YOU KNOW OF EXEMPTIONS IN THESE LAWS that would not criminalize individual acts of humanitarian aid to illegal immigrants?\u00a0 The Associated Press apparently does not.\u00a0 I have not seen explicit such exemptions in the versions of the laws I have read on line.\u00a0 AND\u00a0HOW DO YOU WHO SUPPORT SUCH LAWS\u00a0justify their de facto criminalization of behavior\u00a0Jesus commanded of his followers?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yet another state, populated largely by people who consider themselves Christians, has apparently criminalized Christian behavior toward illegal immigrants.\u00a0 At least according to the Associated Press which says in an article published in my local newspaper June 10 that Alabama\u2019s new immigration law makes it \u201ca crime to knowingly give an illegal immigrant a ride.\u201d\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n