So Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron have done a deal on migrants. One in, one out. The EU might yet block the plan, and it may fail as many have before it. The Conservatives’ Rwanda idea never got off the ground. Will this one? Labour hail it as a breakthrough with the French agreeing to take back some migrants for the first time. The right-wing media complain this is a drop in the ocean and will make precious little difference.
What interests me is the role Christianity plays in this debate, invoked as it is on both sides of the argument.
On the right, the argument runs like this: Britain is (or used to be) a Christian country. It is now in danger of being overrun by people who do not share that faith, or the values that are rooted in Christianity. Therefore, we must put a rapid halt to excessive immigration, especially migrants from conservative Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia or Pakistan. If we don’t, we will see the UK change dramatically and lose its distinct Christian identity.
So, in a speech last year, Reform leader Nigel Farage claimed that “Judeo-Christian values” are at the root of “everything” in Britain. These values, he said, were that “the family matters, the community matters, working with each other matters, the country matters.”
I’m sure they do. Christianity has shaped the character of the UK over centuries. And there is undoubtedly a sense in many places, especially more deprived ones, that communities have changed and are becoming unrecognisable from what they were. The chattering classes in Hampstead and Chipping Norton are hardly likely to feel the pinch, yet Bradford or Burnley can feel very different now than they did 50 years ago.
Yet it’s hard to identify Farage’s values as distinctly Christian. Many Muslims would claim much the same, and it would be difficult to describe his list as an adequate summary of the message of Jesus. ‘Judeo-Christian values’ are often identified on the right as being the same as ‘British values’, which are defined by the UK government as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.” It’s hard to imagine anyone getting crucified for preaching that.
Yet Christianity is also used on the left. While he was Labour Leader in 2019, Jeremy Corbyn invoked Jesus in a call to welcome migrants: “The refugee crisis is a moral test. Jesus taught us to respect refugees. He himself said 'welcome the stranger…’ And the Bible says, 'the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born'.
He had done his homework. It’s a better account of the teaching of Jesus. Yet on the left, the welcome of the refugee is often part of a wider and deeper value of ‘diversity’ as a good in itself. Multiculturalism, the kaleidoscope of cultures found on many high streets with Indian, Thai, Italian, Moroccan restaurants, or the image of kids from different countries and religions happily running around a school playground is a beloved trope of secular progressive liberals.
The trouble is that it is not how it feels to many in parts of Luton or Leicester. The residents of Hampstead and Chipping Norton can embrace multiculturalism because it does not fundamentally threaten their way of life.
“The ebbing away of the faith is greeted with barely a fraction of the passion which accompanied Brexit.”
Embracing strangers is easier if you have a settled place to welcome them into. A home where the family gets on well, where the parents are united, the kids are content, is much more likely to be able to welcome in unknown guests with a proper curiosity to learn from them. A family full of tension and bickering is unlikely to welcome the stranger at all, as the newcomer will strain existing tensions even further.
As theologian Oleg Dik writes: “A society which loses a sense of shared broad and strong identity is unable to welcome a stranger…. What makes us different is enriching only as long as we are all aware that we have something uniting us. In the absence of a uniting bond, difference turns out to be threatening.”
The vision of the left – of diversity as an end in itself, held together only by a loose idea of tolerance or secularity which no-one thinks is worth dying for, threatens to erode the ties that bind us, as it gives no clear centrifugal core that can hold us together.
Christianity doesn’t give you an immigration policy. Both left and right can claim some legitimacy in the Christian narrative. However, what Christianity does provide is a community that offers a moral schooling centred on the worship of Jesus, as the one who shows us the true shape of human life, the necessity of self-sacrifice, not self-indulgence as the key to a functioning communal life, and the sacred value of each person - beliefs which, in turn, can welcome the stranger into a secure and confident home.
These things have, over centuries, seeped out from their intense core in the Christian Church into wider society. Arguably today, they are being eroded ironically more by secularism than by Islam.
The real problem of our time is not mass immigration (as the right would have it) or the failure to fully open borders (for the left). It is the widespread erosion of Christian faith.
As historian Bijan Omrani puts it: “Christianity’s disappearance is being accepted with little consideration or debate. The ebbing away of the faith is greeted with barely a fraction of the passion which accompanied Brexit.” Now this may largely be the fault of the church itself, a failure of courage about its own message, and appearing like another social lobbying group for various causes rather than a community centred on the worship of Jesus. But it's also down to the swathes of middle class, educated Britons – like Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn - who like to claim the name of Jesus when it suits, and who live off the cultural heritage of Christianity without investing into its future by going anywhere near a church.
A good immigration policy needs the compassion that welcomes the vulnerable stranger. Yet it also needs a strong united community with a shared set of values, to welcome them into. Left and right may use Christianity in their rhetoric. But both miss something vital - that Christianity has to be practiced not just argued over.
A renewed Christianity might be the saving of both right and left - or at least offer a deeper and richer narrative than either can offer on their own, one that provides a strong core that can holds a society together, yet also welcome the stranger as a gift and not a threat.
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