Compassion Versus Security

The largest obstacle to resettling refugees in North America is our own fear. It is a fear that comes from news stories about Arabs and Africans—sometimes migrants, usually not—killing Westerners on the street or in shopping centers. It is a fear propagated by politicians of many stripes and affirmed in stereotypical Hollywood portrayals. Everyone needs a villain. Refugees are easy targets.

The generic fear of refugees is not baseless.

But it is largely misinformed and always unbiblical.

It is misinformed because the plain truth is that refugees are not villains and monsters. They are people like me and you, and the vast majority are incredibly decent. It is misinformed because the vetting process for refugees to enter the United States is already extreme. (See Chapter Eight for details about refugee crime rates and the American vetting process.) It is misinformed because it frequently comes without regard for refugees’ actual beliefs, actual values, actual desires, actual families, and actual lives.

The fear of refugees is, like most phobias, irrational. That does not mean it is not a genuine fear, but it means it is not a fear we can justify without the continued spread of misinformation.

The fear of refugees is also unbiblical. Numerous times in God’s Word we are told to, “Fear not” (Deut. 31:6; Josh. 1:9; Psalm 27:1; Psalm 118:6; Is. 35:4; Is. 43:1; John 14:27; Rom. 8:15; 1 Pet. 3:13-14; 1 John 4:18). Matthews tells us, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28).

As Christians, we are not only told not to fear, but we are given a beautiful alternative—to trust, to hope, to love neighbors and enemies. We dare to believe Jesus looked not with fear, but with sincerest love at his persecutors; that he spoke and ate joyfully with prostitutes, centurions, and tax collectors; that he saw the image of his Father in his betrayer. And how much safer in the world’s eyes are refugees than most of them!

Fear is also unbiblical because it prompts further sin in us. For every refugee that is welcomed into North America, the temptations of xenophobia, racism, and discrimination threaten to rise up within us. Refugees, especially of olive skin, are too often lumped into the same category as jihadists. Fear colors migrants as economic plagues and cultural troublemakers. Our trembling at potential villainy has made so many probable friends into presumed foes. And so fear is part of the sinister plot to disrupt the harmony of humanity, to prosper the reality of death and violence and oppression, and to tear people away from the light of God within the other.

Security Is Not Bad

Many who are made fearful by the prospect of poor foreigners living in their midst do not call it “fear”. The most common rationalization—and sometimes a legitimate one—for the rejection or restriction of refugee resettlement is not a desire to protect wealth or maintain a national identity; it’s the desire for security. Such fear has played into a history of prejudicial policy, from early British settlers’ reluctance about German migration into the colonies and 19^th century “Indian removal” policies to the Chinese and Japanese exclusion acts and suspicions about Jewish immigration in the years leading up to WWII.

To be clear, safety is not unchristian. Being strategic, even cautious, is not antithetical to the gospel. The Lord wants to bless people with good gifts and good lives. (He also wants to bless refugees with the same things, and might use us to do it!)

There is a temptation for bleeding-hearts, which I can sometimes be, to endorse the grand idea that all refugees should be welcome everywhere. The idea of a borderless, utterly free world, is beautiful, but it may also be foolish. There may be no such a thing as bad compassion, but there is naïve compassion. As much as I would prefer to ignore it, there are real problems with a limitless approach to the world’s refugees.

It is perfectly reasonable to want refugees to be vetted before entering our countries. If a refugee fails a credible screening process because he is deemed too dangerous, it is not wrong to disallow him from entering our country. There is such a thing as the legitimate prevention of migration, both for the government and for the Church.

And, once resettled in a third country, there are laws and powers (sometimes corrupt themselves) that can be Christianly enforced for the security of all people. Certainly, if and when the sojourner breaks the law in our countries, there are legal consequences—just as there were for sojourners in ancient Israel.

By welcoming refugees, we are not welcoming lawlessness—because refugees are not lawless and because our land is still a land of laws. We are not welcoming danger—because refugees are not dangerous and because our land is still one that protects.

Our security measures, laws, and vetting procedures are not bad. In fact, they can be very good.

As long as all our vain efforts at security are not turned into idols.

Security Is Not Everything

There is a problem with our ravenous, insatiable love of safety. It easily becomes a lust for invulnerability. It leads us to a platform of opposition to resettlement, which is too often built on a foundation of misinformation, propagated in misrepresentation, and justified by fear and the desire for so-called security. Worst of all, our love of safety is often given higher place than the gospel of Christ.

Let us not be conquered by our own need for security. Let us not give in to fear. Let’s acknowledge the heavy dark that is at the root of these idols.

Much of our clarion call for security is, at bottom, a manifestation of masked prejudice, nationalism, and Islamophobia. It is simply not Christian, nor very rational, to admit that the risk that one in 50,000 Syrian refugees is a terrorist bent on murdering Americans, justifies banning them all. This equation is hardly an oversimplification for the mental gymnastics that have become the fear-rooted American routine.

I have worked with refugees for years—Arabs, Africans, Asians, South Americans; black, white, brown, and every shade in between; Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and atheists—and never once have I felt endangered by them. I’ve felt annoyed. I’ve felt upset. I’ve felt sad. But never have I felt fear.

This is not to say there could never be a natural reason to fear—but just because fear is natural doesn’t mean it is good. And even if fear arises, it can never be allowed to dominate our decisions because fear is not from God.

We don’t need to be afraid, because God is good. We don’t need to be afraid, because the capital ‘C’ Church is invincible. We don’t need to be afraid, because refugees are no different than us in our humanity and our need for refuge. And, most practically, we do not need to be afraid, because the massive majority of refugees are not a danger to your survival or the survival of our countries.

But—brace yourself—even if our survival were at risk, even if refugees were as irredeemably dangerous as our depraved imaginations have led us to believe, that would not be a reason to neglect our precious, beautiful responsibility as followers of Christ.

“Survival—” a Lebanese pastor and professor once told me regarding the flood of Syrian refugees into his country, “—survival is not a Christian value. What is a Christian value is loving your neighbor and all your enemies.”

And here I will risk saying another thing that some will find crazy.

I believe North America should welcome refugees.

Many.

Thousands.

Tens of thousands.

Hundreds of thousands.

I believe they should be vetted and, once approved, welcomed warmly into our country. I believe the Church should be the first to welcome them, meet them at the airport, bring them food, house them, clothe them, help them find education and employment, and befriend them.

And here’s the other thing I believe. If one refugee, or two, or three, turn out to be extremists that somehow fooled the entire global refugee-screening system, and they ultimately carry out an attack that kills five Americans, or ten, or twenty—well, I still believe that welcoming the hundreds of thousands of other refugees who are perfectly decent neighbors was and will continue to be the right thing.

The true and beautiful thing.

The gospel thing.

Put plainly: it is our Christian joy and duty to welcome the stranger even if doing so makes us less secure.

Desiring security is not wrong. Desiring the Kingdom even when it is dangerous is better. In that light, the Church can acknowledge resettlement is a real risk and a real challenge, but it is a risk worth taking. It is a challenge from which no Christian can shy away.

The temptation to fear, the ease of it, and trumped-up justifications for it, will always be with us. But Jesus showed the better, harder way. And all our pretty, safe, and golden idols were crushed beneath the cross of Christ—the cross where God spread his arms to welcome those who nailed him there.

The Command of Compassion

Our bent toward fear and our idol of security harms our souls. It also harms others’ bodies.

Thousands of refugees are lost at sea each year, caught between a violent, desperate world they had to leave and a selfish, suspicious world that does not enable safe passage.[1] Thousands more die in unlivable conditions around the globe, and because of abuse and negative coping mechanisms that are the result of helplessness on the run. Increasing border security and a growing tolerance for brutality inevitably makes it harder for refugees to move between countries.

Fortunately, the Church and its universal call to compassion is transnational.

Gospel compassion is not the alternative to fear or our lust for security. Gospel compassion is what the Church is called to in the midst of our fear and in answer to our lust for security.

As the Church reflects the Kingdom—and ever more becomes the Kingdom—it adopts the supernatural qualities of love, mercy, peace, welcome, and compassion. If we have the Spirit, we are gifted the desire for such things and the power to attain them. We can be close to the least. We can become the least.

God calls us to wear compassion as a garment, tangible, visible, warming (Col. 3:12). We are also fortified to mimic God, repeating his compassionate and comforting deeds after him (2 Cor. 1:3-4). Remember the absoluteness of the compassion Christ had on us, not when we were decent and safe and knew the culture of heaven, but when we were still sinners. Remember his sorrow for us in our hurting, his empathy to know our needs and temptations, and his utter compassion to overcome our suffering and estrangements.

If we reject those who are suffering and leave them in their tribulation—especially if we do this for the sake of our own comfort—shame on us. The command of compassion in God’s Word and in the life of Jesus is obvious. If we truly believe we, the Church, are intended to follow Christ in all his ways, how can we not also follow him in his care for strangers, even those who seem unlovable?

Because it is the way and word of God, compassion is not foolishness—not to those who are being saved. Compassion is not contrary to commonsense. For the Christian, they are the same thing.

The Church’s prioritization of compassion does not mean we have not thought long and hard about safety. We all have friends and families and communities that we don’t want to see jeopardized by the thoughtless introduction of terror. But at day’s end, empathy and kind-heartedness must always take precedence over convenience and the often-distracting instinct for self-preservation.

Those overly concerned with their own security—or even the security of their families or neighborhoods—sometimes like to excuse calls to compassion as faux piety, as platitudes spoken by Christian hipsters, elites, intellectuals, and a generation unaware of its own privilege. Such critiques are not all wrong. Espousing some Christian ideas—pacifism, ecumenism, mercy, welcome—can become a luxurious abuse of the gospel if we don’t really mean what we are saying.

That is why we must not only preach compassion, but practice compassion.

If we are calling the Church or a Western government to take in more refugees—as I am and believe we all should—our simultaneous challenge is to look for the refugees who are already among us. We need to step into their lives and help them, love them, care for them as much as we claim to care about the refugees bleeding and crying and struggling on our TV screens. Then we can ask for more and practice our love further.

We aren’t compassionate because it’s cool. We aren’t striving for fearlessness because it is trendy. We live into these things because they are good and beautiful and because Jesus showed us how. Compassion is not a lifestyle. It is not a command for some and a suggestion for others. It is total and for all.

And therein lies the difficulty.

The catch of calling for a Churchwide or even a governmental posture of compassion and welcome is that we too as individuals must incarnate that compassion. It is not consistent to tell the State Department to bring in more refugees if we would not also welcome them into our neighborhood and, for some of us, even our homes. It’s easy for many of us, including myself, to talk a big compassion game, especially from the comfort of my chair behind a nice desk in a roomy Chicago apartment; it’s harder to live it out. But that is our call.

The Body must do compassion, and so too the body parts. The Church is composed of Christians, so the Church cannot welcome refugees if Christians—you and me—don’t do it too.

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[1] Fortress Europe said at least 8,256 people died trying to cross European borders between 1988 and 2006. Thousands more were lost at sea. In the years since, drownings have sky-rocketed.