For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. – Ephesians 6:12
Refugeeism is not the disease; it is a symptom. A symptom of an international order of injustice and a culture of death. Such culture finds its precedence and its mandate in the deep-core realities of oppressive politics, unjust economic policies and structures, social discrimination, and spiritual warfare.
As the refugee problem worsens across all continents, the Church must answer with more services, more cash, and more charity for displaced persons. Such solutions do not require much imagination. They are not, however, sufficient or eternal solutions. Aid will not save us.
This is no denunciation of aid. Cash and supplies are needed desperately. We should not be altruistic purists who critique financial assistance to refugees as something cold and distant. Despite what the critics say, a great many problems in this world can be solved by throwing money at them. Refugeeism, however, is not one of them. The problem of displaced persons is not solely or even mainly an economic one—it is a problem of dehumanization, of mass homelessness, of natural and national disasters.
Beds, blankets, food and water, medicine and aid workers can be paid for with donations from churches or governments. Even homes can be bought. But homelands cannot be purchased, nor can classism, racism, or religious discrimination be erased with many-zeroed checks.
As such, more resources and more resettlement are not the final or greatest answers. If the Church is forever trying to meet the demands of a fallen world, it will only ever be giving more and more, beyond the capacity of human institutions to supply. No matter how much more aid we give, what does it matter if, tomorrow, there are more refugees than there were today, and public sentiments toward them only grow more disgruntled?
The greater role of the Church, beyond prayer—which is always the first work—is advocacy and action toward systemic change. We need to be champions for the weak and voiceless, and we need to seek to change laws, cultures, and prejudices that create refugees in the first place.
The Church is not God. It cannot save the world. Its aid efforts, resettlement programs, and all its compassion is not enough if it doesn’t recognize the root causes behind the reality of refugeeism. All the Church can do is be the hands and feet of Jesus anointed by the oil of the Spirit. That means giving and sending, it means sharing and sheltering, and it means resisting and reforming systems that do not reflect the heart of God.
Root Problems
The deep delinquencies of our world go down as far as sin itself. The Church, when it is truly the Church, is sin-resistant. And what are the sweeping depravities that must be resisted? They look many ways. Unjust laws. Prejudice. Pitiful education. Human rights abuses. Environmental degradation. Unlivable wages. Oppression of women.
Because the names of oppression are as numerous as the powers and principalities in our world, I will draw attention to three categories of oppression that spur refugeeism. Of course they are intimately connected. The Church’s job is to resist and reform oppressive structures wherever it finds them—even within the Church itself.
Political Oppression
In the 21st century, the family is the undergirding unit of society and the State is the overarching one. The State, however, has a tendency toward wild corruption. A greedy, hair-brained corruption that creates vulnerable, uprooted people and debases the families it claims to support.
Even democracies fall victim to the establishment of unjust laws. How much more authoritarian states? The Middle East has some of the world’s most beautiful constitutions, but nice words have not solved their refugee problems.
The legality of oppression is deeply rooted in these debased political systems. Inadequate and inaccessible education. Police states. Arms races. Unchecked and unbalanced executive powers. Bought parliaments. The absurd strength of lobbyists. Cronyism. Outright segregation. Unholy theocracy. A total lack of transparency. Laws to restrict movement. Erasure of free speech and free conscience. Second-class citizenship and dhimmi status, codified or not.
Our political reality is not signaled only in its open love of war, but also in more shadowed coercive government. Monopolies of power—power that favors some and oppresses others—are possibly the greatest cause of refugeeism in our age.
Perhaps the most significant manifestation of political oppression—and what I would assert is among the leading contributors to refugeeism—is the total militarization of our countries, economies, religions, societies, and world. In 2015, the world spent nearly $1.6 trillion on militarization.[1] The United States spends nearly six hundred billion alone, at the same time as it donates millions to aid organizations around the world. This is cognitive dissonance on a worldwide scale. Saudi Arabia spends nearly 14 percent of its GDP on militarization. China and Russia are rapidly raising their defense budgets. From 2004 to 2014, 20 countries more than doubled their military expenditures.[2]
Despite what some politicians say, more weapons does not make the world safer. Deterrence logic has (thus far) prevented nuclear war, but traditional and guerrilla warfare has boomed. As police forces around the globe continue to militarize, as martial law and threats of violence try to tamp popular resistance, actual violence increases. And as violence increases, so does displacement.
Among my friends in Syria, the threat of conscription into the armed forces is as compelling a reason to flee as the shelling. Arms sales have been on the rise since 9/11.[3] Chemical and biological weapons, illegal under international law, are used not only by terrorist groups by also by internationally-recognized regimes. Indiscriminate weapons like cluster bombs and mines are a feature of war. Even the West is warming to the use of torture.
In Syria and Iraq, America gives guns. Russia gives bombs. Iran and Saudi Arabia give guns and bombs and fighters. Britain and France and the Gulf States and pretty much everyone is giving ammunition. Switzerland—dear, dear Switzerland—gives weapons too. It’s a problem because more weapons on the ground means more bullets in the air. Many of those weapons find their way into hands that were not intended. The Taliban and Osama bin Laden got their weapons fighting for “the good guys” against the Soviets, and we know what they did with them. The Islamic State took the lion’s share of the Iraqi army’s Coalition-provided arsenal when they stormed the armories of Mosul. Not only are extremists turning our weapons against us and our allies in the Middle East and Africa today, there is no telling who they might aim at twenty years after the present smoke clears. Weapons trade hands, but they rarely disappear.
Perhaps more importantly, this global arms dealing pastime isn’t only unhelpful, it’s utterly contradictory to our more noble policies. How can we preach peace but sell war? What does it say when we try to legislate for stability and coexistence by passing out instruments for chaos and ethnocentrism? What sense does it make to flood Syria with weapons at the same time as we want to stem the flood of refugees? These are not unrelated phenomena. They are the opposite pulls of the very same tide.
Corruption, unjust laws, and militarization—the toolkit of oppressive political powers—are uprooting people every day. They will kill many of them. And they threaten every single one of us in one form or another, marginalized people most of all.
Economic Oppression
Closely linked to political power is economic power. Governments control trillions of dollars and the reigns of global financial policy. Corporations, too, have the power to spur subjugation and compel people to run for their lives.
The first decade of the third millennium was marked in large part by globalization—though that is already succumbing in many places to an even more repressive nationalism. Globalization is in many ways good. The Kingdom of God is globalized. But because earthly, temporal globalization grew at the command and under the manipulation of corrupt powers, it was not an entirely good growth.
Wages in many places around the world have stagnated. Capital and technology have increasingly moved across borders, but laborers have not been granted anything close to the same freedom. Debt among undeveloped countries comes at startling interest rates, which drives exclusionary policies toward their citizens, especially in areas like healthcare and education. Subsistence-level and two-dollar per day life is still the reality for hundreds of millions of people. The gap between the wealthiest and poorest within countries and on an international scale has never been wider. Such dissonance naturally leads to violence as citizens strike back against regimes, foreign workers, and the upper class. People will only tolerate their economic marginalization for so long before they resist, and they will only resist peacefully for so long before they resist violently.
Relatedly, governments and tycoons conduct economic warfare, much of which is aimed at foreign regimes, that ends up hurting and displacing the proletariat. Embargoes on material resources, including foodstuffs and medical supplies, readily uproot. Sanctions and boycotts are part of the arsenal of the elite to conduct economic war. The violence is not as obvious as drone strikes and missiles, so the effects too are underreported. But we need look no further than the degradation of persons in the oft-overlooked Third World to recognize the horrendous cost in lives and livelihoods of material deprivation.
While not always linked, environmental degradation and disaster is commonly a compatriot to economic harassment. As environmental conditions deteriorate, predator markets like to sweep in, especially into poor and undeveloped areas with few regulations on trade. Such tactics can have brutal effects on farmers and small business owners as they are forced to compete with international corporations. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, cottage industries and local entrepreneurs in former satellite countries were overwhelmed with the influx of transnational companies that have gravely harmed their personal economics.
Today, subsaharan Africa is turning more and more to desert. South America is being deforested. Pollution is dirtying the air, the water, the woods. Drought and famine, rising seas and temperatures, environmental mayhem drive millions from their homes. It is not always financially beneficial to protect the environment—at least not in ways as obvious as international contracts and big Christmas bonuses—but if money is not stewarded for the stewardship of creation, we will only see an increase of migrants cast out by economic and environmental crises.
Ethnoreligious Oppression
At a social level, discrimination breeds rejection and dispossession. Such discrimination is often reflective of national policies, if not mandated by them. When people feel like untouchables, and when that feeling is legitimated by oppression from the political infrastructure, it is little wonder they take flight. Such was the fate of so many of our own ancestors in the West. They fled Europe because of abuse not only from their governments, but also from their neighbors. Abuse because of their ethnicity, their cultural milieu, the specifics of their doctrine, their thoughtlife. That sentiment is equally felt today, though less in Europe and more in the places that are hemorrhaging refugees.
In combat with globalization and multiculturalism, many around the world are reverting to nationalism. Rooted in ethnicity and creed, a society of nationalism—in the Arab world, in Southeast Asia, and in the West—leads inevitably to the marginalization and eventual displacement of minorities that can’t or won’t check all the right boxes. While the relationships between man and the State and between man and God should lead to the prospering of society, it has frequently led to the ruin of relationships between man and man. In the last few decades we have seen Serbs and Bosnians, Hutus and Tutsis, Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims extremists and Yazidis, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Sinhalese and Tamil, Dinkas and Nuers, Ronhingyans and Rakhines, black and white and brown, Shia and Sunni, Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu—we have seen them all kill and uproot each other.
To be sure, much of this violence is birthed in national infrastructure, but much of it is also hid within tribal histories and individual hearts. The lingering effect of colonialism and imperialism, of tribal conflict and denominational distrust, it has made violence between families and communities a cultural tradition. Children are taught to hate. Converts are brainwashed to segregate. Much of the time, we choose our own ghettos.
Such mindsets foster human rights abuses. Such culture oppresses those who have less opportunity to speak for themselves. That is why most refugees are women and children. And why the more we build up the barriers of ethnicity, race, national identity, gender, age, class, and religion, the more we will dispossess people not only of their homes and those identities, but of their lives.
[1] SIPRI. SIPRI Military Expenditures Database. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. 2016.
[2] The Economist. “Arms and the Man”. April 15, 2014
[3] SIPRI. International Arms Transfers. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. 2016.
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