When Putin Spoke the Truth: Immigration, American Responsibility, and the Face of God

I hate it when my enemies are right. But it’s time to set our national ego aside and listen to one of our enemies.

Vladimir Putin spoke the truth last week about the Middle East’s immigration crisis. Many in the U.S. will think his statement is a verbal attack on the United States. It is. But instead of getting defensive, we need to listen to his critique. Putin stated about American foreign policy in the Middle East,

…is about imposing their own standards, without taking into account the historical, religious, national, cultural features of these regions. This is primarily a policy of our American partners.

I hate to say it, but Putin just nailed it. If Americans want to know just how complicated the immigration crisis is in the Middle East, we must take a long hard look at ourselves and listen to Putin’s words.

After 9/11, the United States implemented the “War on Terror.” One strategy of that war was to capture and kill Saddam Hussein, one of the world’s cruelest dictators. The stated goal was to spread democracy throughout the Middle East. But the “War on Terror” and the execution of Hussein only created more instability throughout the region. We discovered that imposing democracy upon other nations isn’t very democratic. It’s actually a form of American imperialism.

Imposing democracy in the Middle East didn’t work. In fact, it created a power vacuum where terror groups like ISIS could thrive. American violence in the region cultivated more instability.

Saddam Hussein imposed a semblance of order in Iraq. He kept order through violence. The United States didn’t like the order he kept through violence, so decided to impose order through our own violence. You remember “Shock and Awe.” Yeah. That showed ‘em.

Well, violence is a language that everyone speaks. So, after we Shocked and Awed them, they Shocked and Awed us with mass beheadings. Because belief in violence as the way to solve problems is not uniquely American, civil war broke out in Syria. And why are so many attracted to ISIS? The terrorist group offers an avenue for people to channel their despair in a violent rage against Western imperialism.

I have no love for ISIS, Saddam Hussein, or Bashar al-Assad. And Putin, while he’s right that American foreign policy in the Middle East has done great harm to the region, needs to deal with his own demons.

But Putin’s demon is our demon, too. That demon’s name is violence. And we worship at its feet. Putin’s truth is that a foreign policy (including his own!) that imposes its own standards upon others is doomed to fail because it is rooted in violence.

The United States has a lot of soul searching to do. We are not solely to blame, but our policies have contributed to the immigration crisis. Our policies are responsible for over a million dead Iraqis and the over 4 million Iraqis who have become refugees as they flee from hopelessness. We bear responsibility for that crisis.

The answer is not more violence. Nothing will change until we change how we relate to each other. The violence we sow is the violence we reap. Because the United States bears responsibility for much of that violence, we must now take responsibility to change the way we relate to other nations.

The call to transformation is rooted in the biblical witness of hospitality. Jews, Christians, and Muslims each claim Abraham and Sarah as our spiritual parents. Their divine mission was to carry out God’s plan that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

The divine plan is not to impose our lifestyle upon others. That arrogance leads to violence. Rather, the divine plan is to bless all the families of the earth through hospitality. The Bible makes many progressives uncomfortable because it is brutally honest in telling the truth that God’s people sometimes fail to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. Quite often, the United States has been a curse to the people of the Middle East. We can no longer hide from that truth. We need to own it. Not because we’re self-loathing Americans, but because we need to seek the truth in our complicity with the world’s problems.

Many U.S. politicians would have us live in fear of immigrants, but I’m sick of fear. Our problem is not immigration; our problem is the politics of fear. Fear spreads like a contagious disease. It leads to the idolatry of national security.

God does not respect the borders that we create. God’s kingdom has no borders. Our borders are based on fear, scarcity, and exclusion. God’s kingdom is based on love, abundance, and hospitality.

Do not be seduced by the politics of fear and scarcity. We don’t have to live in fear. God is calling us to open our borders and our doors to our immigrant sisters and brothers.

After all, the ancient Jews were conquered and forced to sojourn in foreign lands. The Bible recounts the horror of conquest and the pain of being strangers in a strange land. Slavery in Egypt is the principal example of being strangers in a strange land. That’s why Deuteronomy 10:19 gives the command, “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.”

The Bible calls us to have empathy for immigrants and to show them hospitality – in line with Deuteronomy, Leviticus calls us to love them as we love ourselves. God is with the sojourners, the homeless, and all immigrants. In the face of the immigrant, we see the very face of God. The immigration crisis challenges us with a moral question that should haunt us: How will we treat the face of God?