SUNDAY DEVOTION: A Big Beautiful Wall

The recent escalation on the Texas/Mexico border has reignited a debate in Christian circles about migration, refugees, and walls. Some outspoken Christian leaders have been proclaiming the view that enforcing a border is immoral, that Christian charity requires opening our national doors to anyone who wants to come in, no questions asked.

This post by the self-described “pastor of empathy” is one of many examples:

Not coincidentally, many of the same Christian leaders who demand we open the borders also demand the Church be more accepting of things like transgenderism and go along with the tenets of critical race theory.

Many others work with refugee resettlement agencies that have a financial incentive to maximize the number of refugees the US takes in.

Then there are the atheists and agnostics who don’t believe in Scripture at all, but try to use your belief to manipulate you into supporting their political position:

At the heart of this belief is the idea that Christian morality requires not only loving everyone, but loving the stranger more than your own family, community, and nation. These moralizers demand that you show more partiality toward a stranger than your own child.

They want you to believe that every single person crossing our southern border is a poor innocent refugee, and that allowing them to go free within our borders is the compassionate thing to do. Neither is true.

Meg Basham explains how the left has redefined the word “refugee” to play on our compassion, but only a small percentage of those illegal migrants who are investigated actually fit the legal definition:

American Christians have always been generous, opening their homes to the poor and afflicted and their wallets to support missions and relief abroad. Yet allowing millions of unvetted migrants to cross our southern border is not compassion, but suicide. Giving money to a homeless beggar is one thing, but bringing him into your home where your children sleep is terminal foolishness.

Encouraging this migration is also dangerous to those who really are looking to escape violence for a better life. Coyotes take advantage of people who think paradise awaits across the Rio Grande, treating women and children horrifically. Once inside our borders, the Biden Administration has been facilitating human and even child trafficking. Paige Willey, former Trump Administration official and current communications director for Texas AG Ken Paxton, explained it well and in gruesome detail a few years ago.

Contrary to the idea that Christian charity requires opening our borders with no questions asked, Scripture instead recognizes the need to take care of our own first. After instructing Timothy on how to show charity for widows, the Apostle Paul wrote:

But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

1 Timothy 5:8 ESV

An even more striking example is the Book of Nehemiah, which tells the story of the Jews who returned from the Babylonian exile rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem:

Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.”

Nehemiah 2:17 ESV

If keeping people out of your country was sinful, why is there an entire book of the Bible lauding the construction of a wall? Was Nehemiah being racist against the Horonites and the Arabs and the other tribes surrounding Jerusalem, in the same way that Russell Moore said that Trump’s wall was a sign of racism against Hispanics?

Whereas the Berlin Wall was built to keep East Germans from escaping the horrors of Communism, Trump always described his wall as having a “big beautiful door” for people to come through legally. Walls do not cut people off from each other, rather they establish a system of controlled interaction. The Roman Emperor Hadrian did not build a wall in England simply to keep out the barbarian Picts, but to establish control over his frontier and allow trade and migration to take place in a regulated fashion.

Good fences make good neighbors. We do not enforce borders and build walls because we hate those on the outside, but because we love those on the inside. Many of the same people who decry Texas putting up razor wire at Eagle Pass had no problem with the razor wire surrounding the Capitol after January 6.

The push to accept mass migration by both leftists and the wolves in sheep’s clothing on the right is part of the same globalist great reset ideology that says human beings are fungible tokens, identical gears that can be swapped in and out of a great machine that produces GDP. Everything that makes us unique —our ancestry, heritage, culture, traditions, beliefs —are made meaningless in this brave new world.

Stephen Wolfe wrote a great essay in the wake of Brexit about how Christians need not give in to open borders and infinite migration, and is very much worth reading to counter that narrative.

Don’t allow yourself to be gaslit into believing that it’s wrong to protect your country, your community, and your family.