Empathy Isn’t Treason

Sometimes “wokeness” is just reading the Bible with your eyes open

Photo by Miko Guziuk on Unsplash

Some Christians keep warning me about “wokeness” like it’s an embarrassing rash. But sometimes the only “woke” thing that’s happened is that somebody opened the Bible and didn’t immediately slam it shut when they bumped into something inconvenient.

John Piper posted Leviticus 19:34: “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Clearly not a policy memo or midterm talking points for woke libs. It’s scripture talking about moral memory, about God saying: “Never forget what it felt like to be vulnerable ... and don’t you dare build a society that feeds on somebody else’s vulnerability.”

And the response to Piper’s reminder was, well, clarifying.

Because the pushback wasn’t mainly, “How do we apply an ancient text in a modern nation-state?”

That would be an honest question.

Nope. A lot of the pushback was panic: invasion, replacement, theft, demographic doom, lions, and tigers, and bear ... Oh my! The stranger becomes a threat almost reflexively. We start treating our neighbor like an enemy, while empathy gets treated like treason.

For those of us trying to be faithful, that ought to bring us up short.

Not because we can’t talk about borders, laws, or logistics. We can. We should.

But because fear has a particular odor. It always has. And when Christians start talking about immigrants the way Pharaoh talked about the Hebrews, well, we don’t need a PhD to recognize that somewhere along the way we’ve lost the plot.

Here’s the old trick: take a command that feels painfully clear, “love the stranger.” Then, start redefining “stranger” until it means somebody who already agrees with us, who assimilates quickly and quietly. You know, the kind of “stranger” who doesn’t change the soundtrack in the grocery store or make our politics harder and our pews less predictable.

In other words, it’s an attempt to have one’s theological cake and eat it, too.

Leviticus grounds this command in identity: “For you were strangers in Egypt.”

Now, that’s not sentiment; it’s a reminder about identity. God says that any community formed by liberation should be allergic to cruelty.

If God got you out, you don’t get to turn around and become somebody else’s Egypt.

For those trying to follow Jesus, the stakes get even higher. Jesus doesn’t let us spiritualize this away. Remember? “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”

Not “I was a stranger, and you agreed with me.” Not “you demanded my documents.” Not “you felt comfortable around me.”

You welcomed me.

The question isn’t whether a country has the right to enforce laws. The question is what kind of people we become when we enforce them. And when we do enforce them, are we telling the truth about those who bear the image of God, or are we telling ourselves stories that make harming them feel justifiable?

Because once “love the stranger” starts sounding like “liberal propaganda,” what we’ve really learned is this:

Notwithstanding the protestations that will inevitably arise, some of us don’t want the Bible. We want a Bible-shaped permission slip to keep stoking our fear of people God loves.

And I’m done letting fear do Bible study instead of doing it myself.

⸻

https://churchleaders.com/news/2214231-john-piper-social-media-immigration.html

https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/on-immigration/

https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/great-replacement-explainer