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

Church and state

Creed

Monsters

6 October 2025

4 min read

Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

The PayPal founder’s obsession with the Beast is nothing new

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

An AI montage show a black and white school at the centre of a red and yellow circular grid upon which are the San Francisco skyline and map.

San Francisco Antichrist.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Sometime between 95 and 110 AD, a Christian called John the Evangelist (it is said) wrote about ‘the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming, and even now is now already in the world.’

Fast forward two thousand years, and the Antichrist is back on the agenda, this time via Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir (a data analytics company) and the first external investor in Facebook, who is currently offering his thoughts on the “politics of the Antichrist” in a four-part lecture series in San Francisco.

Thiel previously said, in an interview in 2024, that he thinks that if the ‘Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time.’ By Armageddon, he means the destruction of the world arising, for instance, from nuclear war, bioweapons, climate change, or AI. And in that interview, Thiel referenced an instructional documentary film from 1946: One World or None. Its thesis is that the answer to atomic warfare is to have the nations of the world unite. According to Thiel, such a global government would be the most insidious danger of them all. ‘The slogan of the Antichrist,’ he said, is ‘peace and safety’, which ‘resonates’ in ‘a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon’. So, the promise of perfect peace is a false one: it would lead only to a one-world totalitarian government.

We have been here before. On 13 January 1814, at one of thousands of services of national thanksgiving to celebrate the Peninsular Army’s entry into France, which heralded the end of the Napoleonic Wars, The Venerable Joseph Holden Pott, the Archdeacon, ascended the pulpit in the St Martin-in-the Fields Church on Trafalgar Square in central London. There had, he said, never been a ‘fitter moment’ to encourage ‘patriot zeal’ ‘on sound and righteous principles’, which he expounded for his flock. Jesus Christ was ‘a true patriot’. First, he loved the place of his birth and the people around him; then, he demonstrated love for the whole world. The ‘spirit of true Patriotism regards the good of other Countries as connected always with its own.’ However, one’s home country always come first.

Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon, who rose to power on the wave of revolutionary unrest in France, was cast by the ruling elite in Britain as the Antichrist. Protestant Britain was depicted as the new Israel, which would deliver Europe from all its woes. With the risk of political Armageddon in their own country, the establishment reasserted the importance of religion to the nation state.

The politics of the Antichrist will always tend to have traction, but the risk is that the response to the belief that the Beast is rising out of the sea, to use the image deployed in the Christian Bible, will be just as destructive: a religious revival that is all about reactionary politics or remembrance of things past.

Thiel’s take on history is that it its linear, angled toward the End Times. His thought is cyclical, collapsing in on itself, in that it is a tired trope that has been used before. For instance, it has been used during the Napoleonic Wars, and it is not guaranteed by a strong faith that can move mountains, which is arguably what the world needs more than anything else.

Saint John meant, by the ‘spirit of the Antichrist’, ‘every spirit that does not acknowledge’ Jesus Christ as Lord. And soon after, the early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria, who sold Christianity in a competitive marketplace, wrote about the ‘sects both of barbarian and Hellenic philosophy’ that unlike Christ ‘each vaunts as the whole truth the portion which has fallen to its lot’.

The risk with Thiel is that he is simply validating unchecked ‘tech’ taking over the world. It is also sectarian that Thiel’s thoughts, for all their seemingly counter-cultural boldness, are often expressed in the shadows. His remarks in his current lecture series in San Francisco, for example, will go unrecorded. They are speculative in their nature.

By contrast, those writers who lived through the first half of the twentieth century, which Thiel sees as a turning point in the politics of the Antichrist, flaunted their wares in public, with incisive clarity. They spoke of the way in which the spirit of Christ transcends time and all other ideology, like Clement of Alexandria in the first century.

One such writer was C. S. Lewis, who wrote an article ‘On Living in Atomic Age’ (first published in 1948), in which he exhorted us not to exaggerate ‘the novelty of our situation’. We were always going to die, irrespective of the politics of the world around us, and as ever our mission is to better ourselves by turning to Christ. We should not assume that we alone can save the world. But Peter Thiel sounds he like does.

So, we still have much to learn from the Christians from the early church. Saint Paul wrote to Christians in Thessalonica warning them not to be deceived by the Antichrist, who ‘sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.’ And anyone encountering Peter Thiel’s (or indeed any one’s persons) political ideas would do well to remember that.

The PayPal founder’s obsession with the Beast is nothing new.

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