Sheltering Strangers
Phobias are irrational fears, fears
that are unreasonable but have become so strongly embedded that they
precipitate acting-out or avoidance behaviour as if the feared danger
were real. Flight phobics, for instance, will stay at home, avoid
traveling to see a family member overseas even though air travel is
statistically far safer than auto travel. A young Canadian man will
walk into a mosque and shoot 18 people, 6 of whom will die. Many
Christians are somewhat fearful about admitting refugees to our
country and communities, but if that fear should escalate to “acts
of harassment or violence,” according to Elghawaby, the word
Islamophobia would apply.
A
motion in the Canadian parliament to study and propose deterrents to
Islamophobia and any
other discrimination based on religion drew considerable debate; some
opposition members felt that the motion shouldn’t use the word
Islamophobia, but
should address all discrimination based on religion equally.
Civil
war, violent insurgencies and hunger have resulted in massive
migrations of people recently; the resulting chaos has predictably
raised apprehension and even Islamophobia in the Western World. A
dilemma has arisen for many Christians: knowing that the gospel
strongly urges kindness and hospitality to strangers, a reluctance to
do so in this case requires that actions or inactions that neither
support nor encourage such hospitality have to be rationalized. Call
it cognitive dissonance,
as a psychologist would, but a refusal to be hospitable when
motivated by fear or phobia has to include an admission that in
this case, our role as servants
of Christ in a shattered world will be set aside for
not-in-my-backyard reasons.
Some
have implied to me that the fact
that Islam is a false religion—not
to mention dangerous—is
relevant in this case. Come on. Every
religion except yours and mine
is false, otherwise why would we cling to ours and reject others?
Duh. The Mennonite refugees who flooded into the prairies in the
1870s, the 1890s and the 1920s were exceedingly threatening to the
existing citizenry. These German-speakers wanted to settle in
homogenous blocks (ghettos?), wanted to run their own schools and had
negotiated a guarantee that if Canada were ever at war, they wouldn’t
be called upon to help defend it. And they clung tenaciously to
customs and language in a country where English and French were the
established linguas franca.
Why are we letting these people in??
A rethinking in the
Christian Church about what the separation of church and state
means in light of the gospel today is way overdue. If we say that we
serve a higher master than kings and governments, that we inhabit a
kingdom founded by Christ, how can we then revert to patriotism and
xenophobia when our nation state is reported to be threatened? How
can we so easily forget that boundaries and borders are all
artificially drawn and that all of humanities’ home for the
duration of their lives is planet earth, much more-relevantly than
are Canada, USA, Venezuela, New Zealand, Yemen or Turkestan? Unless,
of course, we adopt the “God Bless America” or the “Make
America Great Again” or the “God keep our land, glorious and
free” or “Deutschland Über
Alles” mentalities as our own.
It’s where many
Christians in the West have gone wildly astray, turning themselves
from Christians-residing-in-America, for instance, into
Americans-attending-church. In that scenario, greatness of
country is easily equated with God’s favour; a heresy of
such proportions that even the election of a narcissistic demagogue
who promises to make the country great again is applauded in
churches.
Ideally, our
discussions around the refugee crisis should also tackle more
fundamental matters, like the causes of refugee crises, for
starters. The saddest part of all this is not that we’re hesitant
and afraid about being generous to refugees, the saddest part is that
there are people out there who are forcing others to flee their homes
in search of safety. Through unfair trade practices, interference in
others’ affairs, profiteering supported by military might, colonial
subjugation and exploitation, etc., we have built the conditions for
hatred and despair brick by brick.
And then profited
doubly by selling arms to the belligerents we’ve created. It’s a
scenario that’s been replayed time and again in human history.
Sheltering refugees
is clearly a Christian’s and any humanistic movement’s privilege
and duty. To do so without exerting what influence we can against
the reasons for the desperate migrations seems a little like repeatedly putting out pails to catch drips instead of fixing the leak in the roof. It gives the idea of “wrestling against principalities and
powers” a whole new ring. (Ephesians 6:12)
“In Him the distinctions
between Jew and Gentile, slave and free man, male and female,
disappear; you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians
3:28, Weymouth New Testament)
"At
the root of all war is fear." Thomas
Merton
"Every
war is against the world and every war against the world is lost."
Alice Walker
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