Sheltering Strangers

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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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