I was reading last night about the opposition to the poor Irish and Germans that immigrated in the middle of the 1800’s. When the next wave of immigrants came, the Irish and Germans were accepted and considered “White” so they could oppose the next wave. At the time, acculturation was the concern but it worked itself out over a generation or two. The thing I’m still working through is how to overlay the nativism against these European catholics in the 1800’s vs the Muslim and Hispanic immigrants of our time. I’ll grant that there’s a difference (and even a potential danger) between modern Muslim immigrants and the Irish & German catholic immigrants but I haven’t worked out how Christians ought to think about and work through acculturation vs assimilation. I have some thoughts but they’re not fully formed yet.
Europe is not the United States. As of this year, half of the Viennese students in first grade cannot speak German w/Muslims making up 41% of students there. But immigrants in the U.S. are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. So what’s the problem? Don’t U.S. Christian nativists want the return of Christendom?
This theme is across Scripture:
When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)
None of us are good at obeying this, but there it is. Let us repent.
I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me. -Jesus
We all have many ways of reading this and justifying our rejection of delimiting the meaning of “stranger,” the “naked,” the “sick,” and the "imprisoned” in such a way as to reject Jesus’ warning, but we will answer to Him one day.
As I’ve often said through the years, I believe in laws guarding the borders of nations as well as the enforcement of those laws when the laws implement and defend something approximating true justice. Further, I abhor the lawlessness of President Biden’s open borders and have long warned that Democrats’ immigration policies are another way of accruing electoral victories here in our country.
But I also have long pointed out that America’s population growth which is now mostly due to immigration, and also the continued increase of immigrant populations’ influence across our nation, are the result of our own people’s refusal to obey our Lord’s Creation Command to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.
Whatever any of our contemporary nativists mean by seeking to bring back what they call “Christendom,” it is precisely those of white, Western European, Trinitarian Christian descent who, across Europe and America, have rebelled against God in the matter of the fruitful womb, while being overtaken by Muslims who still are obeying God’s command (which He gave to all men in the Garden of Eden prior to the Fall).
The best way forward in the midst of Europe and America’s serious immigration problems is for Christian peoples to repent of our rebellion against God in our own churches, homes, and marriage beds.
Here’s good context for debates over U.S. immigration policy. As general population goes up, so does immigrant population. But by percentage, some ups and downs, but mostly similar.
Calvin’s helpful comments on this text which are pertinent to the nativist movement among young Christian men, today:
SCRIPTURE:
Leviticus 19:33-34: When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.
JOHN CALVIN:
The people are commanded to cultivate equity towards all without exception. For if no mention had been made of strangers, the Israelites would have thought that, provided they had not injured any one of their own nation, they had fully discharged their duty; but, when God recommends guests and sojourners to them, just as if they had been their own kindred, they thence understand that equity is to be cultivated constantly and towards all men.
Nor is it without cause that God interposes Himself and His protection, lest injury should be done to strangers; for since they have no one who would submit to ill-will in their defense, they are more exposed to the violence and various oppressions of the ungodly, than as if they were under the shelter of domestic securities. The same rule is to be observed towards widows and orphans; a woman, on account of the weakness of her sex, is exposed to many evils, unless she dwells under the shadow of a husband; and many plot against orphans, as if they were their prey, because they have none to advise them.
Since, then, they are thus destitute of human aid, God interposes to assist them; and, if they are unjustly oppressed, He declares that He will be their avenger. In the first passage He includes widows and orphans together with strangers; in the latter He enumerates strangers only; yet the substance is the same, viz., that all those who are destitute and deprived of earthly succor, are under the guardianship and protection of God, and preserved by His hand; and thus the audacity of those is restrained, who trust that they may commit any wickedness with impunity, provided no earthly being resists them.
No iniquity, indeed, will be left unavenged by God, but there is a special reason why He declares that strangers, widows, and orphans are taken under His care; inasmuch as the more flagrant the evil is, the greater need there is of an effectual remedy.
He recommends strangers to them on this ground, that the people, who had themselves been sojourners in Egypt, being mindful of their ancient condition, ought to deal more kindly to strangers; for although they were at last oppressed by cruel tyranny, still they were bound to consider their entrance there, viz., that poverty and hunger had driven their forefathers thither, and that they had been received hospitably, when they were in need of aid from others…
Moreover, it must be observed that, in the second passage, they are commanded to love strangers and foreigners as themselves. Hence it appears that the name of neighbor is not confined to our kindred, or such other persons with whom we are nearly connected, but extends to the whole human race; as Christ shows in the person of the Samaritan, who had compassion on an unknown man, and performed towards him the duties of humanity neglected by a Jew, and even a Levite.
Abt our president’s naming habits, a quote by Alexander Pope 2b remembered/repeated:
“Who builds to God and not to fame will never mark a building with his name.”
Matt. 24:12 “Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold.” Our Savior’s words are a warning, not a promise (as many of the omniscient nativists would hope).
On immigration policy, some thoughts:
- When I suggested on one Christian FB page that Somali immigration was a challenge, but also an opportunity for the Gospel, I got a torrent of abuse for my trouble. But I also learnt that in Minnesota, Ethiopian Christians (who share ethnic and cultural affinities with the Somalis), have seen the opportunity for the Gospel, and found ways of reaching out. So it can be done.
- Immigrants often arrive in or with large families, but the British evidence is that those families then have family sizes about the national or white average, unless they are quite poor. When in Rome and all that …
- Modernity is as corrosive of at least some Muslim commitment as it has been of Christianity. So, while you have some people calling for jihad, you have other Muslims taking on the values of the secular culture without perhaps realising it. E.g. there are now support groups for gay Muslims in the major UK centres, or so I’m told. The picture for Muslims in Britain is, in my judgement, a fairly nuanced one.
Excellent, and thank you. This is similar to Pastor Von Hagen’s testimony concerning the refugees who largely make up the congregation he serves in Germany.
The fear of God and repentance are absent from pastors’ preaching today. Here’s a helpful antidote: On Repentance (Bullinger’s fourth decade, second sermon) - Warhorn Media
Most things in Scripture are simple, straightforward, perspicuous. Take as an example the fact that, across the book of Acts, individuals didn’t repent and believe and get baptized. Heads of households and their households did. Take, for instance, the female head of household, Lydia. The exceptions prove the rule, and a travelling eunuch is the exception. Credobaptists are wrong.
And I have no regrets being joined to them within the Church. If love covers a multitude of sins, it should also cover a multitude of errors. Many of both of them are mine.
When reformed protestants make up less than one percent of the U.S. population, it’s time to work together across the division of waters. That we may be one.
You can go green, or you can go to war, but you cannot do both. You cannot fight a war of attrition if you have deindustrialised your economy to satisfy an environmentalist religion that treats empirical evidence as heresy. It is complete madness
On that basis: Russia could fall apart first?
I don’t think you read the article. He addresses Russia’s capacities. Love,
Here again is the reality abt U.S. immigration through the years. We have always been a nation of immigrants. You may want to stop that. Have at it, but don’t misrepresent history
Some posts aren’t for discussion, but simply to state one’s convictions. After spending hours reading articles built around a few gotchas trotted out to further the neocon smear of Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan as anti-Semites, I left this under one socials post of that ilk.
Sorry, but I am not going to engage the argument here. Rather, I merely aim at registering my judgment on the matter for those wanting to know it.
* * *
All the above is a smear of Sobran. I read him from 1979 until he died. He was a fierce advocate of the First Amendment, and as such refused to submit to the small-minded world of guys whose literary contributions specialize in gotchas.
Imagine what these slanderers would do to the associations and words of Jesus, given the chance.
What none of these men ever mention during their smears of Sobran is that the neocons who pressured Buckley and others to call Sobran and Buchanan anti-Semitic could never manage to oppose the slaughter of tens of millions of little babies. Necons had few principles that strayed into moral and immoral.
Jesus is a Jew and my Messiah.
Because none of the men continuing to smear Joe Sobran as anti-Semitic today ever present Joe in his own words, I reproduce here one of the essays they would use as an exhibit for the prosecution of Sobran. It’s clear to me this essay will confirm the charge to a number of my readers, but that says much about them and nothing about Sobran.
Let me add that anti-Semitism, like White Supremacy and Cretan deception, does most certainly exist, and is evil. It is known by its full-throated animus, which Sobran displays freedom from here and almost always in his writing.
* * *
The Church and Jewish Ideology
(Reprinted from SOBRAN’S, May 1999, page 4)
The prevalent Jewish myth today is not the founding myth of Abraham or Moses on Sinai, but the story of Jewish persecution. In our time the Jews are defined less by ancestry than by “anti-Semitism,” which is cited for many purposes, including the legitimation of the state of Israel. Most Zionists no longer claim that God gave the Holy Land to the Jews; instead they contend that the Jewish state is necessary as a haven for world Jewry.
According to this modern myth, the Jews are in no way responsible for their own unpopularity from ancient times. What, then, is the source of such persistent hostility to this fundamentally innocent people? Why, the Catholic Church, of course!
Many Jewish scholars find the seed of anti-Semitism in the Gospels of Matthew and John, where the Jews are depicted as engineering the Crucifixion, with the assistance of Romans who “know not what they do.” Some Jews have even demanded that the offending passages be deleted from the Scriptures, not realizing (or caring) that Christians regard their holy books as off-limits to human editing. Others persist in blaming Pius XII for failing to condemn Nazism more strongly for its persecution of the Jews of Europe. The Catholic Church in particular has been targeted as the historic matrix of anti-Semitism; and unfortunately, many churchmen have accepted the role of defendant against accusers who will never acquit the Church or drop the case.
In recent years the Vatican has tried, as far as possible, to appease Jewish objections. The Second Vatican Council, mindful of Nazi crimes, proclaimed that today’s Jews don’t share the guilt of the Jews who conspired to murder Christ. Pope John Paul II has been especially eager to cultivate good relations with the Jews, even making an unprecedented visit to a Roman synagogue a few years ago. He has gone so far as to name Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List as one of his favorite films — though it contains scenes of nudity and simulated intercourse.
In this spirit, the Vatican last year promulgated We Remember, a statement of repentance for the failures of the Church and the mass of Christians during the Holocaust (or Shoah, the Hebrew word that has become current lately). Its theme was that “erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament” have contributed to anti-Semitism; and that the Church, though never a party to persecution, should have done more to oppose the “unspeakable tragedy” of the Shoah, which “can never be forgotten.” The statement also affirmed the Church’s “very close bonds of spiritual kinship with the Jewish people” and the “Hebrew roots of [Catholic] faith.”
Many Jews resented the statement’s exculpation of the Church for the Shoah itself. The document distinguished sharply between regrettable Christian attitudes toward the Jews throughout European history (it made no reference to Jewish attitudes toward Christians) and the virulent nationalist and racialist anti-Semitism that arose in the nineteenth century. Predictably, a Jewish historian has rejected this distinction.
In an article in the April issue of Commentary, “The Pope, the Church, and the Jews,” Robert S. Wistrich, professor of modern Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, attacks We Remember for defending Pius XII and for minimizing the Church’s guilty role in fostering anti-Semitism through the ages. Wistrich belittles Pius’s efforts to protect Jews as not only insufficient but lacking in “moral courage.” As for the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic ideologies, they “presupposed a cultural framework that had been fashioned by centuries of medieval Christian theology, ecclesiastical policy, and popular religious myth.”
This is nothing new for Commentary, which has previously carried articles blaming Christianity itself for the Holocaust. Wistrich doesn’t cite, though he might as well have, the charge of the Jewish scholar Jules Isaac that “the permanent and latent source of anti-Semitism is none other than Christian religious teaching of every description, and the traditional, tendentious interpretation of the Scriptures.” Isaac’s work and influence helped shape the Second Vatican Council’s statement about the Jews.
By such reasoning as Wistrich’s, it would be easy to blame the Jews for bringing persecution on themselves. After all, they have been unpopular not only in Christian countries, but in pagan and Muslim lands. Cicero, Tacitus, Juvenal, and other Roman authors inveighed against them. They have repeatedly migrated to Christian countries and have been repeatedly expelled, for reasons that have usually had little to do with theology — though the obscene blasphemies against Christ and his mother in the Talmud, unique in religious literature, besides reflecting oddly on Jewish demands for Christian tolerance and for the cleansing of offensive passages in the Gospels, have done nothing to endear the Jews to Christians.
Wistrich mentions none of this. Nor does he mention one of the principal incitements to anti-Semitism in this century: Jewish participation in Communism, with its terrifying persecution of Christians. Where is the corresponding statement of Jewish leaders repudiating and repenting the Jewish role in a cause whose crimes dwarf those of Hitler? Did major Jewish spokesmen or organizations condemn Communism as it devoured tens of millions of Christians? Did a few brave Jews in the Soviet Union and the other Communist-ruled countries act, at personal risk, to shield Christians from arbitrary arrest and murder? Even today, how many Jews condemn Franklin Roosevelt for his fondness for Stalin, as they would condemn him if he had shown the slightest partiality to Hitler?
Further, might the Talmudic imprecations against Christ and Christians have helped form the Bolshevik Jews’ anti-Christian animus? Did the Talmud help form the “cultural framework” for the persecution of Christians, and for the eradication of Christian culture in America today? If so, will Jews make an effort to expunge the offending passages from the Talmud? How many rabbis speak of their “spiritual kinship” with Christianity?
The answers to these questions are only too obvious. The Jews, with honorable but ineffectual exceptions, judge Christians by a standard that doesn’t seem to apply to themselves. Or rather, their single standard is “Is it good for the Jews?”
As shepherd of the Catholic Church, Pius XII was bound to be guided chiefly by the question “Is it good for the Church?” He was not a Jewish leader, after all, but a Catholic one — a somewhat neglected point in these controversies. His first duty was to protect the Church amid the madness of a world war, knowing that its deadliest enemy was not Nazism but Communism (which, with American assistance, conquered several Catholic nations in Eastern Europe by the war’s end). He did what he could to protect Jews and others too, and the most eloquent testimony to his efforts is the conversion of Israel Zolli, chief rabbi of Rome, to Catholicism. Zolli even took the baptismal name Eugenio in honor of Pius, who was born Eugenio Pacelli; he would hardly have done this if he had seen Pius as indifferent to the persecution of Jews.
Yet Wistrich complains that “in confronting the Shoah, Pius XII’s chief concern was less with the ongoing annihilation of the Jews than with the interests of the Church.” Think of that: a Pope putting the Church first! Nowadays even the papacy is to be judged in terms of Jewish interests. Self-absorption can go no further.
It’s some consolation that even the treacherous Roosevelt is now being criticized for doing too little to save Jewish lives. Jewish critics argue that he might have ordered the bombing of railroads leading to the concentration camps. But the chief effect of such a practice would surely have been to starve the camps’ inmates.
The smear of Pius XII — and of the Church — persists, and will no doubt continue indefinitely, in the endless campaign to make Christianity and anti-Semitism synonymous. Wistrich barely acknowledges that the diplomatic Pius may have feared that a more explicit condemnation of Nazism would have backfired not only against the Church, but against the Jews themselves. Besides, if papal condemnations of Communism had failed to deter the persecution of Christians, how could Pius expect papal animadversions against Nazism to be any more efficacious?
Even American Jewish groups refrained from denouncing the Shoah during the war, for fear that speaking publicly about it might do more harm than good. This policy of silence has resulted in bitter recriminations between American and European Jews, but it has discouraged few Jews on either continent from blaming Pius for saying too little.
The prevalent attitude of Christians toward the Jews has been (and remains) not so much hatred as fear. The Acts of the Apostles tells how the early Church was forced to take various precautions “for fear of the Jews.” Few deny, or doubt, that this is historically accurate; the tolerance recommended to Christians has never been a salient trait of the Jews themselves, when they have held power. On the contrary, the state of Israel is based on an ethnic supremacism that would be roundly condemned as anti-Semitic if it were enforced against Jews by gentiles. Yet most Jews hotly resent any suggestion that Zionism is “racist.” (A United Nations declaration to that effect was eventually repealed in response to American pressure.)
In intellectual life, Jews have been brilliantly subversive of the cultures of the natives they have lived amongst. Their tendencies, especially in modern times, have been radical and nihilistic. One thinks of Marx, Freud, and many other shapers of modern thought and authors of reductionist ideologies. Even Einstein, the greatest of Jewish scientists, was, unlike Sir Isaac Newton, no mere contemplator of nature’s laws; he helped inspire the development of nuclear weapons and consistently defended the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Jews have generally supported Communism, socialism, liberalism, and secularism; the agenda of major Jewish groups is the de-Christianization of America, using a debased interpretation of the “living Constitution” as their instrument. When the Jewish side of an issue is too unpopular to prevail democratically, the legal arm of Jewry seeks to make the issue a “constitutional” one, appealing to judicial sovereignty to decide it in defiance of the voters. Overwhelming Jewish support for legal abortion illustrates that many Jews hate Christian morality more than they revere Jewish tradition itself. This fanatical antagonism causes anguish to a number of religious, conscientious, and far-sighted Jews, but they, alas, are outside the Jewish mainstream.
Today, in American politics, journalism, and ecclesiastical circles, fear of Jewish power is overwhelming. This is most obvious in the dread of incurring the label “anti-Semitic,” in the way Christians shrink from calling this country “a Christian nation” (a phrase that enrages Jews), and in the groveling before Israel that has become a virtual requirement for anyone who aspires to high office. Nobody dares to point out the obvious, that Israel is inimical to the principles Americans profess to share; nearly everyone in public life pretends that Israel is a model democracy and a “reliable ally” of the United States, despite repeated episodes of Israeli spying and betrayal against its chief benefactor. Israel has not only refused to return the documents stolen by Jonathan Pollard; it continues to press the U.S. Government for his release from prison. In fact Israel exemplifies most of the “anti-Semitic stereotypes” of yore: it is exclusivist, belligerent, parasitic, amoral, and underhanded. It feels no obligation to non-Jews, even those who have befriended it.
Most Jews regard conversion to Christianity as the ultimate treason to Jewry and resent Christian attempts to convert them; never mind that for Christians, concern for the salvation of souls is the highest charity next to the adoration of God. In Jewish eyes, such charity is next door to persecution. Jews for Jesus, a convert group, is especially execrated among Jews, and in Israel Christian proselytization can be punished by law under various pretexts. (Even giving a copy of the New Testament can be construed as a “bribe.”) Yet Christians, who may not claim a nation of their own, are taxed to support the Jewish state.
History is replete with the lesson that a country in which the Jews get the upper hand is in danger. Such was the experience of Europe during Jewish-led Communist revolutions in Russia, Hungary, Romania, and Germany after World War I. Christians knew that Communism — often called “Jewish Bolshevism” — would bring awful persecution with the ultimate goal of the annihilation of Christianity. While the atheistic Soviet regime made war on Christians, murdering tens of thousands of Orthodox priests, it also showed its true colors by making anti-Semitism a capital crime. Countless Jews around the world remained pro-Communist even after Stalin had purged most Jews from positions of power in the Soviet Union.
Clearly, it is futile for the Church to try to mollify a hatred so ancient and so deep as the Jewish animus against Christianity. Despite all the sentimental rhetoric to the contrary — such as pious nonsense about “the Judaeo-Christian tradition” — Judaism and Christianity are radically opposed over the most important thing of all: Jesus Christ, who commands us to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, and to love our enemies, which does not mean mistaking them for friends.
This is not to suggest that true friendship can’t exist between Jews and Christians as individuals. And there is much about the Jews, an immensely talented people, that a Christian can honor and delight in. But any concord based on lies, evasions, and partisan propaganda is false and should be rejected. We Remember is an honorable attempt to vindicate the honor of the Church. If only it had dealt more frankly with the real history of Jewish-Christian relations!
[For more of Joseph Sobran: http://www.sobran.com]