This is a guest post by regular commenter Finn McCool
This very question has been percolating in my mind for many years now. I am a middle-aged man and I have never heard a sermon preached in any church which did not at least tacitly affirm the standard liberal view; i.e. that all discrimination is sinful. You may be wondering if I have any standing that would qualify me to speak on such a delicate subject. Well, I can tell you that I am an ordained presbyter, with orders in one of the conservative “alphabet soup” Anglican groups (e.g. ACC, ACNA, APCK, REC, etc.). I have an M. A. in Theology from a conservative, evangelical seminary, and I have been employed as a Bible instructor in a small Christian high school for close to ten years. I teach the Bible for a living, and in working through the scriptures I am daily reminded that the Triune God of the Bible is far tougher than the Unitarian god in whom “we trust” as Americans.
I will argue that it is not only possible for a Christian to discriminate (against people), but it is also necessary for a Christian to discriminate. But in order to justify my assertion (one that most of us have never heard affirmed from any pulpit), I first need to lay some scriptural foundations. So let’s begin near the beginning with the famous text from Genesis 11:1-9—The Tower of Babel.
Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Of course, this event takes place after the flood, and after the Lord had pronounced his somber verdict—“The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” (Gen. 8:21). Hence the flood did cleanse the world of its egregious sinners, but the sin principle; original sin; concupiscence; the flesh; all of these roughly synonymous terms still applied. Nobody had to train Noah’s son Ham to be a dishonorable perv; it just came naturally to him (and to us as well. I’m in the Augustinian/Lutheran/Calvinist tradition, so my Orthodox brethren need to bear with me). And when David confesses in Psalm 51, “in sin did my mother conceive me,” he may as well have been speaking for all humans save Jesus. (You R.C.s may excuse Mary, too.)
Okay, so what does any of this have to do with the Tower of Babel? The point I’m trying to drive home is this: When the people of Babel said, “Let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves”, they were a united and fallen humanity. Notice that in the Genesis 11 passage there is no overt mention of any deity. They were a united people, conjoined to one another through original sin, seeking an autonomous existence apart from God, and they had a secular goal—“let us make a name for ourselves.” Read superficially, the Lord’s response makes it appear that he is afraid of the people. He says, “Now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” However; God is not afraid of them. He is afraid for them.
Do you remember P. J. O’Rourke’s famous quip—“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys”? Well, that’s what a sinful and purposefully united human race is; they are drunk and dangerous and for their own safety they must have their “keys” (i.e. their unity) taken away from them. That’s why a kind-hearted cop tells the drunken frat guys to shut up and go home. It’s for their own good.
And it is good, it is necessary, it is ordained by Yahweh himself that sinful mankind be separated by language, by race, by custom, by culture—and by tangible borders. Yes, all humans everywhere are naturally united by our common humanity. But this is a fallen humanity, and though our dispersal over the face of the whole earth is an example of God’s judgment, it is also an instance of his common grace. (For some reason that old Offspring song just popped into my head—“You gotta keep ‘em separated.”)
You may object to this, saying, “Father McCool, that doesn’t sound very spiritual. Doesn’t the New Testament say, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”? Friend, you’re right. The New Testament does say this (in Galatians 3:28). But notice that this is only true for those who are in Christ. Jesus is the unifying person, and principle, whereby we can lawfully and joyfully associate with the Other. After all, how else could the Tsarnaev brothers have had any real or sufficient common cause with Christian Americans? Tamerlan and Dzokhar did seem to like boxing, and girls, and soccer, and Mercedes-Benzes, and Dzokhar even enjoyed smoking the green bud (making him a very good Amerikan indeed). But these sorts of concrete particulars cannot overcome the legitimate boundaries which the good but tough God has given us. The Tsarnaevs are of a different language, nation, race, culture, and creed. And granting them and their worthless family access to America was utterly foolish and un-biblical. In fact, modern liberalism is tantamount to a satanic, rebellious reversal of God’s gracious judgment against Babel. Galatians 3:28 was written to Christians, and the redeemed are all adopted into God’s family (with Christ as our elder Brother). If you remove Christ from the equation you throw away the new humanity in Christ and throw us back into the old humanity that is united in Adam. And it’s precisely because of Adam’s sin that we need to keep the “unity” of man as rebel to a minimum.
If I’ve not proven my point, consider an example from the New Testament. In the book of Titus, St. Paul is writing to the bishop of Crete, his friend Titus. In chapter one he says,
To Titus, a true son in our common faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Savior. For this reason I left you in Crete, that you should set in order the things that are lacking, and appoint elders in every city as I commanded you…(vss. 10-13) For there are many insubordinate…whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole households, teaching things which they ought not, for the sake of dishonest gain. One of them, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true (emphasis mine). Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith.
In this passage we see St. Paul dealing with real people as they are. Paul is telling Titus that generally speaking, the people of Crete are violent, lying, overfed pigs. And forgive me for putting a few words in Paul’s mouth, but I can imagine him also telling Titus, “Look, man, if a true-to-form Cretan tries to sell you a piece of land, you mustn’t believe a thing he tells you! After all, you know how those guys are! You live in Crete.”So Paul begins with a theological principle (the fact of original sin), and with this principle as a key component of his interpretive grid he evaluates all things. He knows that the Christians of Crete, whom Titus ministers to, are brothers and sisters in Christ. But even the redeemed among them have many years worth of social pathology to overcome. They need help, and only a strong man with both eyes wide open to the Cretan temperament will really be able to help them. Remember—Paul says these sharp things about men in the church. Unity in Christ is real—we are members of Christ’s body and co-heirs with him of his kingdom. But in the meantime, while we are waiting for the Parousia, we must retain a hearty respect for the boundaries which God has established. If I don’t know a man’s faith, and I don’t know a man’s record of performance as a citizen, it would be the height of presumption and folly to give him a room in my house and access to my wife and kids. And if this is so in the microcosm of my own oikonomia, it is by extension also true of the macrocosm of American life. Chechens cherish their own Islamic culture of the honor killing and the vendetta. I as a Christian gentleman know this about Chechens, and while I can affirm the goodness of taking the gospel to Chechnya, I cannot, in good conscience, affirm the goodness of allowing un-converted Muslims into my own country. I discriminate against Muslims because I am a Christian.
Here is a little something extra for you Kipling fans:
The Stranger
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
Wise words from a wise man.
The Orthosphere 
May I recommend The Thinking Housewife Post:
Why We Must Discriminate
http://www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2009/07/why-we-must-discriminate/
Hmm, interesting. But I was just wondering: where does the Good Samaritan fit into all of this?
Weird that a Christian would quote Kipling over the great many Bible passages that quite explicitly say the opposite, eg Leviticus 19:34:
But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
Or to put it bluntly: anyone who takes the bible seriously is a stranger on this earth, and thus obliged to welcome strangers as the passage states. Attempts to exclude are both cowardly and pagan in the worst sense, in that it is glorifying your tribe over universal truth.
Proper hospitality does not require actively promoting foreigners to come into one’s land. This is an argument against modern multiculturalism, the underlying “principles” of which can only be identified as satanic.
The verses by Kipling are, however, highly relevant to the argument from the story of Babel, whereas the rule from Leviticus is much less so. McCool’s point is that there can be no perfect brotherhood of mankind because all men are not, in fact, brothers (spiritual or biological). Many of them are more like distant cousins. As CaseyAnn says, the verse from Leviticus tells us not to persecute the strangers who happen to live among us, but it does not tell us to forget that they are strangers, increase the population of strangers, or adopt their strange ways. In fact the whole purpose of Leviticus, as I understand it, is to draw a very bright line between the Israelites and the other peoples of Canaan.
It’s not glorifying one’s tribe over universal truth. It is trying to maintain a cohesive society by generally excluding those with incompatible, unassimilable world and life views. Or to be blunt, it is common sense applied, as opposed to rejecting and abondoning the good sense God endowed us with.
The passage you cite speaks of the stranger as living in a strange land among people who are strange to him, or not like him. How you glean from that that we’re to “welcome” strangers into our land indiscriminately is beyond me. All we are to do according to the passage is to treat them kindly and not oppress them when we find them residing among us. But they are still strangers, in a strange land, living among people not like themselves. The passage says nothing of inviting them in to live among us and allowing them to corrupt our culture.
It does say to love them as yourself. Now, I do not think that means that we should invite the world and increase the population of strangers but to love those that are here. Not to assimilate for God would have never accepted the Israelites taking up pagan ways, but those Canaanites that do assimilate to the Israelite Nation are no longer strangers.
a. morphous,
You said, “Attempts to exclude (the stranger) are both cowardly and pagan in the worst sense, in that it is glorifying your tribe over universal truth.”
The 4th commandment includes these words, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy…On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals,
nor the alien within your gates.”
(I culled out the last bit for emphasis). In this commandment, God himself tells the Israelites to discriminate against those who would profane the Sabbath while they were within the borders of Israel. If there were strangers in the land they were to be treated gently and fairly–but there was no question of the stranger living by his own set of rules. There was one normative Law for the land of Israel, and if the alien did not want to live by that Law then he had better just stay in his own country. After all, the penalty for working on the Sabbath was a whole lot nastier than being called “a coward and a pagan.” I am neither of those things, thank you very much.
The problem here is liberalism. We don’t have a normative Law in this country. We need one. If America were truly a Christian land, we could safely allow people such as the Tsarnaevs into our country as resident aliens. At the first sign of acting up they would be put on the plane back to Chechnya post haste.
I guess I admire your zeal for Christian truth, but I really think that you are mis-applying it to this situation.
Notice too that I said we “could” safely allow strangers into the country, if and only if we were an expressly Christian nation. But even then we would not be obligated to do so. In fact, I still don’t see the upside to having Muslims here, in any circumstance.
Of course we have the de facto reality of a bazillion aliens, legal and illegal, already in this country. And the powers that be have already told us how to deal with them; “Thou shalt love them more than thou lovest thyself.”
More like, “Thou shalt love them and despise thyself.”
I don’t agree with the mass immigration or the self-hate. But I think that it is possible to see some strangers who are trying to make themselves not strangers but kith and kin. I think that we should extend a hand to those men and women and love them as we love ourselves.
Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.
If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.
Therefore it is a sin to “welcome the stranger” when the stranger in question is not a Christian. Obviously this applies to Mohammedan immigration, as well as to any refugee resettlement practices, which in the U.S. tend to be disproportionately of Mohammedan background.
I don’t understand your statement of being in the Augustinian/Lutheran/Calvinist tradition. One of those is not like the others. Augustine is one of the major influences of Orthodox/Catholic doctrine/tradition, the other two not so much.
Phil G, I thank you for your comment. But if I’m not mistaken, many died-in-the-wool Orthodox folk don’t even call him St. Augustine; in their estimation he is Blessed Augustine. The Orthodox do not believe in the doctrine of Original Sin, they do not believe in the concept of inherited guilt, and they just don’t like Augustine very much. They don’t affirm Mary’s Immaculate Conception because they think it is an unnecessary formulation; after all, they do not affirm that she even had a potentially inherited sin nature with which to contend. For the Orthodox, baptism simply washes away ones inherited mortality; from an Augustinian/Lutheran/Calvinist standpoint, we inherit far more than mere mortality from Adam and Eve.
On the relevant point of Original Sin and its effects, I contend that Augustine, Luther, and Calvin are all peas in a pod.
From that narrow definition I can agree. I’m not an expert on Orthodoxy, but I am Catholic and Catholics definitely do believe in the doctrine of original sin. I’ll have to do some research as I find it hard to believe the Orthodox do not.
Great to see someone writing about this. Discriminate has become a dirty word in our pluralist society. To discriminate is to discern and stands in counter-distinction to racism. Unfortunately ideological agendas have hijacked this differentiation and used both words interchangeably – more proof of the power hungry elite dumbing down the FREE in Christ citizen.
Won’t God be discriminating at the time of judgement?
Neither the Bible nor the Constitution are suicide pacts. In the public sphere, a component of holiness is working towards a just and ordered society. That is not achievable by overwhelming the prevailing culture with hordes of people incompatible with that culture. On a small scale these immigrants can be and should be assimilated into the prevailing culture. Unfortunately the secular elite have all but stamped out religious and particularly Christian cultural influence and have embraced a damaging multicultural cosmopolitan standard that is breaking down order and trust in our society and is harmful to the success potential of those that come here.
Until we can sort out our destructive approach to assimilation, we need to dramatically reduce immigration and slow down the rush to legalize those immigrants, mostly poor Mexicans, who entered and live in this country illegally.
Much of what is being touted as fair and compassionate are really fronts for groups seeking to exploit pools of new dependent voters or cheap labor. The underlying motives of this immigration bill are extremely cynical.
Well, one needn’t read very far in the scriptures to run across incidents in which, in spite of the host society’s best efforts to treat strangers as their own kith and kin, the strangers in question began to form jealousies and apprehensions toward their hosts, and ultimately to make trouble for them. I’m thinking of Hagar as one example. And we all know what Abraham was forced to do in her case.
But what about the few that don’t hate you and feel envy? What about those people? Should they be lumped as strangers even if they’re trying to assimilate? I know that in this culture, assimilation is worse, but what if they’re assimilated to us? I mean what about the question of the Natives? They belong here and are still strangers but some come off the reservation and assimilate to White Christian society. Or atleast they did back in the day.
I’m not saying we should exclude everyone; I’m saying that as a general rule it is best to exclude most. I admit of the exception. Although I agree with the commenter above who suggests that we should place a moratorium on immigration to the U.S. until we get a better grasp on what is happening to our culture. It is my belief that we are doing everyone involved (ourselves and immigrants) a disservice by essentially placing no restrictions on immigration to this country. A man said to me about a year ago concerning illegal Mexican immigrants that they are “very family oriented.” I replied: “Give them a few years in the U.S. and they won’t be.” He conceded the point without argument. 🙂
Dear Svar,
I appreciate your taking the time to think of an excellent example. Here is a modern example from my small town. Our local gas station is run by a Muslim man from Yemen. He rents a small house here in town with his wife and small child. He is kind to customers, he works long hours, and is a model citizen. One of my co-workers (a fellow teacher) had been hoping for a chance for his high school son to learn Arabic. My colleague approached the Muslim gas station guy and asked him if he would teach his son Arabic. He jumped at the chance, and my buddy is paying him for the lessons.
In this case, the Yemeni man is here in our small Southern town, and he is not plugged in to any larger Muslim sub-culture. Most of the white folk are at least nominal Christians, and the young black men are either Christians or are so fond of drugs and drink that they have zero interest in becoming Muslims. As far as I know, my gas-station acquaintance and his family are the only Muslims for miles. In this case, he and his family are absolutely within the boundaries of those whom scripture protects as “strangers or aliens.” For me to be anything but kind to this man would be totally unacceptable. I am a Christian, and I know that he is trying to behave as a good American (though I don’t think that he is a citizen). In fact, knowing my colleague it won’t be long before our Muslim acquaintance will hear all about Christ and the gospel message.
But what if fifty or sixty Yemeni Muslims were brought in to town, and they wanted to build a madras just like they had back home, and wanted to force the local grocery store to sell only halal meat, and announced evening worship with a muezzin’s blast from a tall minaret? Would this situation be good for anyone? I argue that it wouldn’t even be good for our gas station guy, because it would only throw him back into his old tribalism. He is doing well in our town as a resident alien, and the locals treat him well. But it is only within these very narrow parameters that I can condone such American largess.
to Svar (continued),
The Native Americans are of course a special case. They are a vanquished people, and we had better treat them fairly or we suck, hardcore. Anything that I wrote in the article was in no way meant for the Indians–when I think about how America has treated the natives, I actually am filled with shame.
@ Terry Morris and Finn McCool
Thank you gentlemen! I have no disagreements at all.
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when I think about how America has treated the natives, I actually am filled with shame.
Do tell… Someone had to win. Wasn’t it the good guys? How about in Rhodesia? Did the good guys win or lose there? Or is it too early yet to tell?
Our Natives are nothing like African blacks. Of course they were savage and brutal but so were the white settlers. I do believe that they must be treated with respect and either left alone or, if they want to become one of us, met with open arms. I know white people with native blood, with mixed race parents. And look at the Metis. They look white but act native.
Indeed, but that does not account for the sense of “shame” reported by McCool, who (presumably) never hacked an Indian to death in his life… at least one that didn’t have it coming.
The white settlers brought civilization and presented an opportunity for the natives to rise up out of their savage ways. Many did, others chose to fight. Civilization prevailed, thank God! Were there atrocities committed by both sides in the process? Absolutely. Does that totally invalidate the spread of civilization? Absolutely not.
I completely agree. But I do believe that some natives did have a decent civilization like the Sioux as prominent paleoconservative Chilton Williamson Jr. believes. But I believe that Christendom should have prevailed and I still believe in assimilating and Christianizing and Europeanizing the natives.
Svar@ This point may be pedantic, but the Sioux were not a “civilization.” We need to separate the normative and positive meanings of the terms “civilized” and “savage.” In the positive sense, “civilized” societies are simply those with sufficient agricultural surplus to support separate castes of warriors, priests, administrators, and craftsmen. These folk tend to live in cities, so urbanization is often taken as a key measure. The New World civilizations of in Mexico and Peru were, indeed, civilized in this sense, but the peoples north of the Rio Grande and Salt Rivers were not. This is not to say that they didn’t have some admirable qualities, or to deny that “civilizations” can be extraordinarily savage and brutal.
When I read accounts of encounters between “civilized” and “savage” peoples, I am struck by the recurrent theme of what we might call a “breakdown of understanding.” Things usually start amicably enough (e.g. Thanksgiving dinner), but then soon break down into acrimony (e.g. King Philip’s War). There seems always to be an initial tendency to overemphasize the “brotherhood of man,” and a subsequent descent into mutual incomprehension and violent conflict. In other words, when we mix savage and civilized peoples (positive sense), both sides descend into savagery (normative sense).
At the risk of reductionism, I’ll venture to say that this comes down to the much higher level of abstraction in the civilized mind. This is evident if we look at the mutual incomprehension of Natives and Americans over property rights. It is evident if we look at the very different ways that civilized and savage peoples understand time. I suppose life in a complex society (i.e. civilization) literally selects for abstraction since one has to relate to many individuals to whom one is not biologically related. To the savage mind, this is incomprehensible. And to the savage mind trapped in a civilization, it is unendurable.
Lest I be accused of chauvinism, I will mention that we traditionalists are taking up the rear in the long march toward civilization, since we oppose a social order completely abstracted from biological kinship. Personally, I would not be insulted if a liberal called me a semi-savage. But this brings me to my basic point, which is that segregation is the best way to cope with human diversity. The segregation of Natives on reservations was not well managed, but there was nothing wrong with the basic idea.
Let me change that. There was one thing wrong. Natives who could cope with civilization and its abstractions left the reservations and assimilated, and those who were left behind were the sad cases we see today at Pine Ridge and Window Rock. And what this suggests is that the reservation boundaries should have been nearly impermeable in both directions.
JMSmith, I just mentioned it because Chilton Williamson Jr, a paleoconservative writer I admire, called the Sioux a civilization. I suppose what he meant to say was that they were savages with very admirable qualities. In the recent words of Thomas Fleming, “you must be a good barbarian before you can be civilized”. These Natives are better suited to be civilized than someone from a civilization that clashes with us, like a Muslim.
Look, I have no problem with de facto segregation or the Indian reservation system, but for those Natives and foreigners that wish to assimilate to us, let them join us. That is all I say.
You guys are broaching a truly deep and broad subject concerning the Indians: in some ways they were treated very badly by whites; in others not s’much. I’ve never thought too highly of the efforts of whites to, essentially, “save them from themselves.” I mean specifically of the effort to include them as fourteenth amendment U.S. citizens, which has finally materialized so that there is no more “Indian Sovereignty” no matter what Indians (natives) might like to think to the contrary.
I can’t go along with dual citizenship in any event, because to me personally dual citizenship means nothing more or less than dueling loyalties, when you boil it all down. (Full disclosure: I have a Choctaw Indian roll number. I don’t use it, but it is there. My parents enrolled me when I was a child. My children are “eligible,” but not enrolled.)
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Discrimination is merely truth – sifting the good and the bad.
But it cannot be an excuse for denying the humanity of people (we can give smallpox infected blankets to the heathen? Or poison the water supplies in the middle east?). Nor for excusing the sin within our midst. I think the two are related.
We refuse to see evil on our doorstep, or act as if it is important. So we either find bogeymen aliens that we can take peccadilloes and inflate them into capital punishment abominations or we treat them as “one of us” since we don’t want to condemn sin. Both are equal errors if the opposite.
A human being had their head hacked off in the UK, and outside of the abortion clinic a different one, and adult soldier did too. Many innocent human beings were killed by dismemberment in Boston, and a little ways away from the abortion clinics there was this pressure-cooker-bomb that did much the same thing.
The devil is the most alien being in the universe. And there are those of everyone’s ethnic groups who serve him instead of God including your ethnic group.
Agreed. We have enough evil people of our own who commit violent acts because they feel marginalized or whatever, without inviting more of them here from alien cultures to commit even more violent acts and atrocities.
That is your point, right?
The God ordained ethnic separation after Babel, was a QUARANTINE measure to prevent the easy spread of wickedness from one culture to another. If you examine racial prejudices, you’ll quickly notice that many of them have a FACTUAL basis in the other culture’s besetting sins. Thus the natural human tendency to ethnocentrism, helps people resist certain evils — “Don’t do that…..*THEY* do that….”
There are 3 ways of responding to these barriers, 2 of which are wrong.
1) The Racist approach: Keep them in place forever, and treat the ethnic Other as an eternal Other. This is a good default for personal and national safety, admittedly, but if Scripture is true it cannot be the final answer. The “Good Samaritan” was a despised ethnic Other, a half-breed, in the eyes of the Israelites… yet Jesus used him as a shining example of virtue to his Jewish audience. There’s a reason.
2) The Liberal approach: Break down the quarantine barriers, spread the infection, and let all cultures sink to the lowest common moral denominator. You end up with a total cesspool, of course. Anyone who resists, even for the noblest reasons — such as, to preserve his own culture’s characteristic virtues against the multicultural filth, for example — is dismissed as a “racist”. [Please note, the Liberal approach is slightly more wrong than the racist approach, which is why liberals hate racism so much: they secretly know the racists have a point.
3) The Christian approach. Christian missionaries are “doctors” who can cross the moral quarantine lines because they have THE CURE. With strong Christian faith, and its attendant cultural fruit, on BOTH sides of the line, there is no longer any reason to maintain the quarantine. This is the antithesis of multiculturalism: this means, there is ONE Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one universal moral standard… to which all races, cultures, and languages are invited.
There are other approaches as well.
Your approach three, while true for the first sentence, veers off into dangerous territory with the second. Even if all of Mexico were to be converted to my preferred denomination of Christianity, I still would want a well-maintained border between us. They are too different from us—culturally, ethnically, linguistically—for any pre-Rapture lack of “quarantine” to work.
Perhaps I misunderstood your point, however.
But… were they so converted, they would have as much respect for our culture and boundaries, as we would for theirs. The border could be left open, and visitors could freely pass, yet neither culture would be in danger.
Ask yourself: Would a true Christian illegally immigrate? Would a true Christian, having legally immigrated, defiantly refuse to adopt the language and (as far as faith permitted) customs of the new country?
Sorry, that was a reply to Wm. Lewis | June 10, 2013 at 4:31 pm.
I see you’re speaking in ideals. Were it possible to have a society in which laws were not necessary because all men were self-governing and aligned towards the good, then yes. open borders would be fine.
We do not live in such a world, and will not until the Second Coming. So what do we do until then?
Good fences make good neighbors. The lesson of Babel still holds true: we are divided into different nations because this is how God wants us to be. We ought to respect His will.
Were it possible to have a society in which laws were not necessary because all men were self-governing and aligned towards the good, then yes. open borders would be fine
Don’t be silly — I was not speaking of a society of angels. If men were angels, government would be unnecessary, and yet, All Powerful.
In the real world, it’s not necessary for men to be angels for things to work reasonably well. I’t’s only necessary for the great majority of mankind to be a lot better than they currently are. If most people are moral, it’s a lot easier to enforce the law against the few that aren’t. If most people are immoral, law becomes unenforceable.
Good fences make good neighbors….
True — but also… Good neighbors are more likely to respect fences.
I’m certain you mean well, but reality simply does not—and will not ever—comport with what I hear you saying.
Here’s a pertinent link to The Thinking Housewife: Catholic Bishops Who Promote National Suicide.
Reblogged this on FOR GOD AND COUNTRY.