Article

Church and state

Creed

Politics

8 February 2024

6 min read

The Church and the State need to disagree on asylum seekers

Politicians don’t always get how church and state relate, but both have a vital and different role to play when it comes to immigration. Graham Tomlin explores the age-old tensions between clerics and politicians

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A woman dressed in a blue suit sits at a table talking and gesticulating with her hands.

Then Home Secretary Suella Braverman, answer to a parliamentary committee, December 2022.

House of Lords, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As we all know, Suella Braverman thinks the church is aiding and abetting bogus asylum seekers. The case of the Afghan migrant Abdul Ezedi, who carried out an acid attack on a woman and her children and reports that residents of the Bibby Stockholm barge were attending churches nearby has added fuel to the former Home Secretary’s charge that churches are naively supporting the asylum claims of immigrants to the UK. Everyone on the right of British politics seems to have weighed in to the issue, from Nigel Farage to Priti Patel, Robert Jenrick to Melanie Phillips. Now, even the left has joined in. Keir Starmer has indicated he would close loopholes for those who falsely claim conversion if he becomes Prime Minister (quite how he will do that is not explained).

I feel personally invested in this story. When I take confirmation services as a bishop, quite regularly these days, among the list of candidates, there will be Iranian or Syrian refugees who have apparently become Christians, waiting in line among the 12-year old schoolkids, the new parents who want spiritual help in bringing up their children and the elderly man approaching death who realises he needs do something he’s been putting off for years.

I have confirmed several Iranian refugees. I can’t look into their heart, or even my own to guarantee all of them were genuine converts. Yet I have seen their desperation to escape an oppressive regime, and although some may have started out coming to church to improve their chances of asylum, in the process some of them at least, have found, to their surprise, real faith. Several that I know have gone on towards ordination in the Anglican Church. If that is a ploy to get past the immigration system, it does seem to be taking things a bit far.

It’s hard not to think the attack on the church is some kind of retaliation for the bishops’ opposition to the government’s Rwanda scheme. But underneath this argument there are deeper issues at play.

The wrath of God is more severe than the wrath of Suella. And the generosity of God is wider than the Home Office.

This dispute is in reality another outbreak of the age-old tension between the Church and Caesar. In the early years of the church, Roman emperors never really understood Christianity and thought they could use it for the purposes of the Roman Empire just like they were used to doing with the pagan cults.

Yet the Christians had other ideas and higher loyalties. As Augustine put it, the loyalty of the church is ultimately to the City of God rather than the earthly city. And in time, they developed a careful understanding of the way the church related to the state.

So when it comes to immigration, the church will always take a different approach from the state. St Paul, in the very early years of the Christian Church, wrote: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you.” In the very foundations of the Christian faith was this idea that even though we humans were moral and spiritual vagabonds, God has extended us a welcome into his presence. So woe betide any Christian who failed to welcome others into their fellowship if they wanted to join.

If the Christian life was a matter of imitating and displaying God's ways in the ordinary business of life, then hospitality became one of the core Christian virtues. As one early Christian writer put it: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it." To risk offending an angel - a messenger of God – was a bad idea. The wrath of God is more severe than the wrath of Suella. And the generosity of God is wider than the Home Office.

Now of course such hospitality could be abused. The New Testament also has warnings about naively welcoming scoundrels who speak falsehood and lies: "Do not receive into the house or welcome anyone who comes to you... for to welcome is to participate in the evil deeds of such a person." So, the early Christians were told to be on the lookout for fakes, just like clergy today. Walk down a street with a dog collar and you are a magnet for people telling you that they have lost their wallet and could you give them the train fare to visit their dying mother in Newcastle. With their doctrines of sin and the deceitfulness of the human heart, vicars should know more than most that not every claim to charity is genuine. Yet that dose of realism always took place in the context of a presumption to welcome. To think the best of people not the worst. To give people the benefit of the doubt.

The state on the other hand has a different role. Later political theology developed more nuanced ways of putting it, but it goes back to St Paul’s claim that civil authorities are “God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” It is their job to be suspicious, to investigate fully, to winkle out fake claims and to set proper limits, while tempering justice with mercy and be willing to welcome the genuine person in need. And wisdom is found in the tension between the two. It was always a mistake for the church to act like the state, being overly suspicious and critical. It was equally a mistake for the state to act like the church, being overly optimistic about all claims to asylum or innocence.

So, when asylum seekers turn up at church asking to be baptised, the local vicar should not act like an agent of the state, assuming they are all bogus, just wanting to fiddle the system. She must act out of loyalty to her faith which tells her to welcome the stranger. The immigration officer on the other hand, whether he happens to be Christian or not, has to play it differently. Of course, there needs to be proper scrutiny of people's application for asylum - that's why we have an immigration system and quite right too. But vicars are not immigration officers. Their job is not start out by doubting motives but to act out the welcome of God, even if it draws the ire of the Daily Telegraph. This is the way that church and state should work together, one reminding the other of the Kingdom of God - a whole different way of life where welcome and grace takes centre stage. The other, conscious of the human tendency to deceive, being rightly cautious.

Suella's problem is, at root, a theological one. She hasn't understood the way Christian faith works. She hasn't understood the relationship between the church and the state. And let's be honest, sometimes in the past, the Church has tried to play the role of the state as well, which is equally a mistake. There is an inevitable tension in this relationship, where sometimes the church will believe the state is being too harsh, or the state will believe the church is being too soft, as we have seen in recent times. But it's one of those creative tensions where each side needs the other.

Perhaps in other, wiser ages, we understood this delicate balance between church and state, and the careful work that went into defining their relationship. Maybe it's time to recognise the role that each plays, not just for the sake of a healthy social life, but for the sake of those people who come to our shores desperately seeking a new life – whether with good motives or bad.

Article

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

9 July 2024

6 min read

When America presses in on you

A returning American feels the heat generated by contesting ‘realities'.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A runner passes a church and a flag in an America suburb, under billowing clouds.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

There’s a man. Running. My eyes snap into focus. Time slows - I catch his pace. Then, my eyes start widening. An odd feeling. Being forced into it. Seconds stretched out into minutes. Taking in more, looking for more, looking down that sidewalk, on a street corner in New Jersey.

Before? I was sitting there. In the backseat of my Uber. Winding our way through New Jersey. And I’m sitting there, tired, mindlessly scrolling my phone until that moment. He’s there running.

And I see him. T-shirt. Running shorts. And I’m sitting. And—a nervous flash—he’s running. Why?

And my eyes adjust, widening, scanning, checking detail, and I’m almost seized. My mind shaking itself, coming online, no more automation. My consciousness catches up: “you’re in America,” I tell myself.

Right. I’m not in Scotland. And that man is running. Here in New Jersey. In America. And I’m talking back to myself in this silent car. I’m watching him run. I’m asking why am I slowing this down? And—it flashes—“running from what?”

And I catch up to myself. To what I was trying to say, that people in America run from shooters, too. A wave crashing, sitting in the back of the Uber, and look. Now I’m really looking. Not forced. But naming. There’s other pedestrians passing him, walking. Slowing. On the other side of the street— no fast movement. No screaming. No pops.

I start breathing. I didn’t know I stopped. He’s out jogging. The automated safety check ends. The tranquility of tyranny resumes. I’m sitting in the back of an Uber. I make a note. Be more alert at the train station.

—

People ask me how the relocation back to America has been. And I don’t know what to tell them. There’s a wide gap between the visceral sense of it all pressing in on you, and more common—but also abstract—analysis.

The experience of coming back has been oddly particular. I lived in Scotland for three years, and most of it was spent studying America. From that distance, the broad strokes of American life, the larger trajectories and dangers of our shared political decisions and religious extremism, well, they’re a bit clearer.

But coming back, America presses in on you. And the only way of talking about that, maybe, is specificity. Kerouac was always good at articulating this. His America wasn’t the rise of the military industrial complex in the 50s. It was the road, the gas station on the way from Denver, it was jazz, the dim doorways of San Francisco bars. I’m thinking of Kerouac, but also Langston Hughes. Poets and artists who in their own time, held a mirror up to America, helped us move from the “I” to the “we” as Steinbeck said.

We’re all asking a version of “what’s wrong in America?” (And, do keep asking.) But to ask that question often assumes the broadest strokes, the ones that are most clear from a distance. Which means they are, in one at the same time, the most abstract.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.”

Asking after democracy, after the election, and the increasingly nebulous “the church” — I’m convinced that answering “what’s wrong in America?” in the biggest of terms is leading me to (wrongly) believe that responsibility lies among the gargantuan free-floating concepts which we use to narrate our world. As if solving the “crisis of democracy” is a conceptual problem. When in reality, it is concrete, and involves more than coalition building or political activism.

Why more? Because the choices Americans have made over the last 10 years originate from imaginations which limits the scope and scale of what is possible. This is what I mean by “America presses in on you.”

Coming back to America has made this clear. I’m more aware than ever that we can produce good answers and generate compelling analysis about America without ever asking in what way these answers or analysis are sharp enough, concrete enough to puncture the bubbles of social reality in which people choose to live and in some cases are forced to live.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.” They press in on us all in their own way.

In some cases, they dull our senses. We say, “as long as our Amazon deliveries continue, as long as the streaming services work.” In some cases, they don’t just press in on us, but press down and perpetuate injustice. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, “where are the responsible ones?”

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes.

Do I care about democratic machinery? Yes. Am I concerned about whether or not the church is, in fact, the church, and not a gear in a partisan machine? Yes. But I’m increasingly convinced that responsible living in the American situation becomes most clear, most evident as we consider the large in terms of the small.

Responsibility emerges with attention paid to the concrete and intimate. January 6 is the subject of my dissertation. But before that, in the months leading up to January 6, I was a pastor just 40 miles from DC. For me, January 6 was a local event. That particularity, that specificity, is a window into a concrete responsibility.

And now, back in this same community, I found myself distracted in a church this weekend. The man in front of me raised his hands in worship, revealing a revolver hanging on his belt. What America is this? But also, what Christianity is this?

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes. And I wonder what it will take to break the spell of our most cherished illusions, of a certain type of freedom — one that tells us it is Christian to raise our hand in surrender to a god who we say is loving enough to save the world, but seemingly not strong enough to deliver us from our evil.

In the end, perhaps it’s best to say that it’s been proof of a good ruining. After all, we’ve experienced nothing short of a conversion, a move closer towards peace, towards hope, that unsettles all our strategies of security and comfort underwritten by violence and oppression. This is the kingdom of Heaven. Something Jesus announced that continues to unsettle and disrupt the likes of T.S. Eliot who put it well in Journey of the Magi:

We returned to our places, these

Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old

dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods

I should be glad of another death.