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.

Explainer

Creed

Weirdness

1 May 2024

4 min read

Those unexpected angel stories

Shedding a strange light on a disenchanted world.

Graham Tomlin

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

An almost abstract image with overlays of colour over a group of people standing.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

Unlike Robbie Williams, who sings about them, sometimes I preach about angels. When I do something always happens – people start telling me their own angel stories.

There was the one a soldier friend told me. During an army climbing expedition to Mount Kenya, one of his team had fallen to his death from a sheer rock face. Caught up in the drama of the moment, my friend found himself stuck on a ledge, unable to move up or down, paralyzed by fear and frustration. Suddenly, in an inaccessible part of the world, where they had seen no-one for days, on a mountain where they were the only registered group present, a climber appeared out of nowhere, moved onto the ledge where he was standing, tied a rope into his harness, lowered him down the rockface to safety before disappearing up the face never to be seen again.

Or the story of a pastor who got into trouble in an airport. A stranger walked by and asked if he could help, and remarkably fixed a seemingly intractable problem. The grateful passenger took a selfie of himself and the stranger, but when he looked at the phone later on, there was a picture of himself, grinning into the camera, with his arms around… nothing.

Why do so many stubbornly believe in angelic beings, when a materialist view of the world laughs scornfully at the idea as a bit of pre-modern superstition?

These are not just modern stories. In the second century, a young man called Justin from Asia Minor was working his way through the various schools of Greek philosophy. One day, he was walking along the beach at Ephesus, wondering, as young people have always done, about the meaning of life in general and his own life in particular, when a mysterious old man came alongside and joined him in conversation. As they walked together, the old man spoke about the philosophers and how none of them were quite able to answer the deepest mysteries of life. He advised Justin to read the Old Testament prophets, before disappearing into the distance. Justin did so, became a Christian and went on to become one of the greatest early theologians of the Church and one of its early martyrs for the faith – hence the name he is remembered by today - Justin Martyr.

Was it an angel? Or a real, yet mysterious old man? Are angels real? And if so, what is the point of them? Surveys tell us that 30 per cent of British people believe in angels. In the USA that figure rises to 70 per cent. Why do so many stubbornly believe in angelic beings, when a materialist view of the world laughs scornfully at the idea as a bit of pre-modern superstition? After all, the cynic might say all these stories can be explained - these were just ordinary people who turned up unexpectedly.

The encounter opened the eyes of the person in the story to another realm, a world unseen yet just as real as the seen.

The word angelos in Greek simply means messenger – and it can mean either a human or an angelic one. In the Bible, angels don’t usually appear with glowing white clothing and wings sprouting from their shoulder blades. When they come to people with a message, they often appear in the guise of ordinary people. In fact, it’s often hard to tell whether you have been visited by an angel or just another human.

The point, therefore, is not so much about the angels, but about the message that they bring. They tend to turn up when there is something particularly important to announce, something like the birth of Jesus, when an angel appears to the young Mary to tell her the news that she will give birth to the Son of God, her, and then quite a few of them turn up to sing to the shepherds, an indication that something big was happening.

In each of the stories above, the encounter opened the eyes of the person in the story to another realm, a world unseen yet just as real as the seen. An inexplicable encounter with what just might have been an angel has the capacity to open our eyes to the fact that the world is bigger than we often assume – that as Hamlet says to his dull, practically minded friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The Nicene Creed, the classic summary of Christian faith, speaks of God as the ‘Creator of all things seen and unseen’. We are all used to what we can see, yet some of us only have space in our world for things that can be seen, touched or measured. Yet there are surely those unseen realities – things we cannot see or measure, like love, compassion, holiness, miracles, God and - yes – angels.

A random sermon on angels elicits hushed stories that people feel almost embarrassed to speak. Such mysterious experiences are far more common than we realise, as Dan Kim points out elsewhere on this site. Yet these experiences are not an end in themselves but are perhaps a way of God getting our attention when we refuse to listen to more ordinary approaches. These experiences open our eyes to a dimension of reality that is as real, if not as visible as the one we deal with every day – and become a gateway to a journey of discovery of an unseen world alongside the seen, that sheds a strange but welcoming new light onto a disenchanted world.