Dear Vice President Vance

A pastoral letter about the theological contortions behind Christian nationalism

“That’s why we don’t want low-wage foreigners coming in and undercutting the wages of American workers. We want normal Americans to be able to live a dignified life, and I think that’s a very, very Christian concept.”

~ JD Vance interview on The Ingraham Angle

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Dear Vice President Vance,

I don’t want to impugn your character, and please correct me if I’ve misread you, but in your interview with Laura Ingraham, it sounded like you attributed your frustration with “low-wage foreigners” to your Christian faith. I mean, I heard that right, didn’t I? Because the first thing I thought about was how exactly did you do a serious reading of the Gospels and come away from that experience mistaking Jesus of Nazareth for Stephen Miller?

I’ve been thinking about those comments in light of your conversion to Catholicism and the way your Christian faith shapes your thinking about immigrants. I’m not a political strategist or an economist. I’m a pastor who’s spent much of his life helping people wrestle with the Jesus they encounter in the Gospels, as opposed to the one they meet in the culture. One of the things I’ve learned over that time concerns how easy it is to persuade ourselves that Jesus has endorsed conclusions we’ve already made up our minds about. This feels like one of those.

I suspect that one of the things you learned, going through RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults), that is, catechism class for big people, is that we all read Scripture through a particular lens. We don’t approach our faith without any preconceptions, since they’re layered so deeply within us that we could never excavate them sufficiently to understand ourselves.

No, when we start wandering around Scripture, we drag all of our baggage with us: our fears, our loyalties, our prejudices, our assumptions, and our hopes for what we’d like to see the world become. All of which is to say, everyone interprets Scripture according to biases, most of which are so transparent to us that we never even suspect they’re there.

I know I’m not on the same theological plane as the Pope (though, sidebar: a Pope from Chicago is pretty badass, you’ve gotta admit), but I have a difficult time imagining Jesus speaking about any of God’s children, immigrant or otherwise, and allowing the words “low-wage foreigners” escape his lips in reference to them, especially in contrast to “normal Americans.”

Regardless of where we draw the boundaries of God’s concern, Jesus is forever trampling all over them, trying to get to the people the rest of us left behind. Time after time, the “disposable” people everyone else has learned to ignore wind up being ushered to the front of the line, where the VIPs usually congregate. Jesus keeps embracing the people you just implied are a problem for our country to solve, rather than new neighbors whose dignity should inform our immigration policies.

Your comments made me think maybe I ought to write.

I take it as read that someone will object, saying that I’m calling for open borders. But thinking that our first reaction to immigrants shouldn’t be, “Get out of here, ‘low-wage foreigners,’” doesn’t commit me to any particular set of immigration policies. It only means that whatever policies we come up with, if we’re going to publish memoirs about our faith, I believe those policies shouldn’t make Jesus weep. My theological antennae start getting really twitchy when the language of following Jesus starts making the stranger sound like a burden to be managed before it teaches us to see the stranger as our neighbor to be loved.

It’s no great hermeneutical insight to observe that Christians have always been tempted to read Jesus through the priorities of the empire they’re living under. One of Rome’s parlor tricks was to instill the value of order over mercy. (”If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country... “) And in its desire to get a foot in the political door after Constantine, Christendom often taught the church to mistake power for faithfulness.

Seriously, as people trying to follow Jesus, should our reflexive response to the prospect of new neighbors be, “Don’t let anybody who wasn’t born here touch our stuff?” If I’m over-simplifying here, please feel free to jump in. But if we claim Jesus, shouldn’t our reflex be to ask, “How can we best love the people God sends to us?”

If the Gospels are any indication, it takes a pretty deft hand to get Jesus’s compassion to sound irresponsible. Call empathy a sin. Convince people that only danger and mayhem lie beyond the border of hospitality. If we do it enough times, we can even start to convince ourselves that Jesus approves of our pet bigotries.

I don’t imagine this letter will change your mind (or even that you’ll ever see it). But my vocational responsibilities require me to say the truth about what the Gospels make it increasingly difficult to avoid: Christianity has lost the through line whenever it teaches us to resent the stranger while simultaneously reassuring us that Jesus doesn’t like “those people” either.

So that’s my prayer for both of us. May we honor the God who embraced the humility of becoming one of us, so that all of us might know we have an advocate. And when the Gospel calls us to share the same space with the people we’ve been taught to fear, may we have enough humility to embrace them as God does.

Because Jesus has a habit of walking into the middle of people that the folks in power tell us to steer clear of. The question is whether we’ll follow him, or keep steering clear.

(I suspect your RCIA director will back me up on this.)

Grace and peace,

Derek