Daily Wire influencer and abuse-victim doxxer Megan Basham begrudgingly allows that Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, but then says, “Ah, but who is my neighbor?” Surely there are limits to our obligation to love others, right? Limits that oblige us to love some people more than others, or love some people but not others?
In the context of spreading lies about FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene, Basham writes:
I’m reminded of Matthew 15:24 when Christ tells the Canaanite woman — “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
We see how Jesus ministered to his people first. As the woman humbly sought the “crumbs” of mercy that fell from Israel’s table, Jesus praised and rewarded her faith.
But he did so while indicating that his first priority was to the “house of Israel.”
This story from Matthew’s Gospel is a Jesus story and, as we’ve noted here before, in a Jesus story, you never want to be the person asking “Who is my neighbor?”
Jesus’ repeated insistence on love without limits and love without boundaries is so outrageously impossible that we find the question irresistible: Love our neighbors, yes fine, but … ahem … who is our neighbor?
The question, as always, is an attempt to find a loophole or an escape clause. Whenever we ask “Who is my neighbor?” what we really mean is “Who is not my neighbor?” or, less tactfully, “Can’t you please just tell us that there’s somebody we’re allowed not to love?”
Basham is so desperate to find such loopholes and boundaries that she turns that story from Matthew 15 upside down and inside out, perverting and inverting it into the opposite of what its conclusion makes clear: No such loopholes or boundaries exist.
I am reminded again of Dave Gushee’s term, “boundaries of moral obligation.” That’s a central concept in his study of The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, a fearfully challenging book that examines those exceptional people who passed the greatest, and clearest, moral test of their time by risking their own lives and safety to rescue those marked for death by the Nazis.
What did these righteous Gentiles have in common? What traits can we identify as predictors of who would or would not, in the moment of truth, actually love their neighbors? Depressingly, nothing stands out. Not religious devotion. Not education. Not social standing.
The one thing Gushee found that separated the righteous from the compliant majority was their refusal to seek “boundaries of moral obligation.” Those who were certain that such boundaries existed — those who imagined the world, as Basham does, to consist of concentric circles of diminishing obligation — exempted themselves from the obligation to rescue the outsiders and outcasts.
Basham’s perversion of that Gospel story is also a perversion of centuries of Christian teaching about the meaning and nature of the unbounded, universal moral obligation at the heart of our faith. Whether we speak of this in terms of “subsidiarity” or “sphere sovereignty” or “mutuality,” the idea is always the same: Our roles and particular responsibilities may be differentiated and shaped by location and relationship, but our obligation is universal. As the scripture says, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Inescapable.
I’m reminded, again, of this Gallup poll of American citizens from January, 1939 — two months after Kristallnacht had made the genocidal intention of the Nazi regime evident to the entire world:
The question reads: “It has been proposed to bring to this country 10,000 refugee children from Germany — most of them Jewish — to be taken care of in American homes. Should the government permit these children to come in?”
Only 30% of Americans said yes. 61% said no and 9% had “no opinion.” There was no taxpayer expense here to transport the children or to house or feed them. It was simply a question of whether or not the government should “permit” these children to find refuge from the Nazis trying to kill them.
And two-thirds of Americans said “No.”
That’s what comes of seeking and inventing “boundaries of moral obligation.” That’s what comes of asking, “Yes, but who is my neighbor?”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In