Commentary

IN 2016, PEOPLE of faith in the city of Billings, Mont., gathered to call for their community to get more involved in resettling refugees. With growing violence, persecution, and strife around the world and a record number of people forced to flee their homes, this community had the heart to help.

But the closest refugee resettlement office in the state was in Missoula, a 345-mile road trip west on I-90. The United States traditionally requires refugees to be resettled with families and relatives or close to these resettlement sites, which help new arrivals land on their feet and access needed services. For Billings — and for many other like-minded communities across the country — it was a logistical challenge to participate in the work of welcome.

Earlier this year, that changed. On Jan. 19, the Biden administration launched Welcome Corps, a new initiative giving everyday Americans the opportunity to sponsor refugees. Groups of at least five can now apply to form “private sponsorship groups,” which are responsible for welcoming refugee newcomers into their communities. These groups agree to assist in providing initial housing; as well as support access to health care, school enrollment, and employment opportunities; and otherwise engage directly in the life-changing work of refugee resettlement.

IF MARY AND JOSEPH were living in Missouri today and had to make their own shelter after the innkeepers turned them away, Jesus would be greeted by police officers instead of shepherds. Why? In January, Missouri initiated a new statewide law criminalizing homelessness. The law (and similar laws in several states) is based on template legislation from the Cicero Institute, a right-wing group that peddles legal schemes that limit effective solutions and strip support from people who can’t afford a place to live. If Moses and his tribe were wandering in Tennessee, a law that went into effect in July — supported by Cicero — allows for felony charges for pitching a tent on state-owned property.

Across the country, politicians are passing laws that penalize our neighbors who can’t afford a place to live and who must sleep, shelter, and conduct other life-sustaining activities in public. We have seen the results of those laws at the local level when city councils come up with ineffective — and plain bad  — ideas to deal with homelessness. Now there is a well-funded, coordinated push to raise those bad ideas to the state level.

I KNEW ALMOST immediately it was bad news.

“Maria was separated at the border from her auntie,” my friend said in a phone call. “We don’t know where she is. Her auntie was sent back to Mexico and we think is being held by a drug cartel. They separated them under Title 42.”

I felt sick. Four-year-old Maria (not her real name) and her aunt were fleeing violent circumstances. They arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border to exercise their legal right — protected by both international and U.S. law — to request asylum, as other members of Maria’s family had done prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2020, everything changed. The Trump administration, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), invoked a rarely used subsection of public health code called Title 42 to close U.S. borders to asylum seekers and unaccompanied children under the guise of preventing the spread of COVID-19. It made that decision against the advice of many public health experts, including some within the CDC, who agreed there was no public health rationale for a ban on asylum seekers as a group. Though the border remained open to truckers, temporary workers, students, and others, border agents turned back asylum seekers to Mexico or their home country.

RISHI SUNAK'S ASCENSION in October as British prime minister sparked celebration among some as he became the United Kingdom’s first nonwhite and non-Christian leader. Yet, this evolution comes with some awkwardness. The Church of England is an “established” church in which both monarchy and government play official roles. Sunak’s religious identity remains irrelevant for leading Parliament, but his status as a practicing Hindu would seem to impinge on his ability to discern which Anglican priests are best suited for leadership roles within the church hierarchy.

Raising this concern is not an argument that all prime ministers must be Christian — the U.K. rightly has no religious test for the role, as Sunak’s elevation demonstrates. But his ascension reveals a problem with not fully separating church and state. The Church of England now finds itself with a non-Christian in the ecclesial hierarchy. The roles of the monarch and prime minister in church affairs are in modern times more ceremonial than substantive, but Sunak reveals the problem with the entanglement both in principle and in practice.

JUST AS FOR 50 years Ohio was a bellwether for presidential elections, since 2011 North Carolina has become a testing ground for Far Right legislation aimed at controlling federal election administration. In his book Indecent Assembly, author Gene R. Nichol says North Carolina is now “a laboratory for extremism.”

In September, the Supreme Court included on its docket a Republican-backed case out of North Carolina that pits voters against a state legislature that seeks to greatly increase its power over elections by limiting the ability of the state judiciary to review the actions of the legislature. This could potentially unbalance the fundamental checks and balances essential to a functioning democracy by giving one body total control over a function of government.

While the specific case of Moore v. Harper deals with whether the North Carolina state Supreme Court has the power to strike down state legislation that produced illegally gerrymandered voting districts, the federal Supreme Court will deliberate on whether the U.S. Constitution’s election clause, the primary source of constitutional authority to regulate elections, prevents a state judiciary from ordering a state legislature to comply with federal election laws.

WHAT MAKES THE parable of the good Samaritan so iconic and powerful? There’s a lesson about helping others in need, sure. But as Jesus taught a few chapters earlier, everybody helps those in their inner circle or who can pay them back (Luke 6:32-34). No, the point of the good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:25-37) is that really “loving our neighbor” looks like tangible service, at some cost to ourselves, even when it’s someone outside our ethno-religious group. “Good Samaritans” are the sorts of people Jesus wants to present to the world to say, “These are my representatives.”

These days, there’s tremendous concern about the rise of “white Christian nationalism,” and with good reason. I’ve spent nearly a decade documenting the impact of this ideology—the belief that America has been and should always be for “Christians like us”—on Americans’ political views and behaviors. The results are alarming. But one potential risk of our being genuinely concerned about the real threat of Christian nationalism is that young Christians can feel like any political participation is tainted or suspect—we wouldn’t want to be Christian nationalists, after all. On the contrary, Christian political involvement can be a tremendous witness when we think about what it means to be good Samaritans today.

Americans who subscribe to white Christian nationalism think in terms of in-groups and hierarchies. They believe their group made the nation prosperous and that their cultural and political power is being threatened by ethnic and religious outsiders, such as immigrants, Muslims, secular persons, LGBTQ persons, and those who challenge the racial status quo like Black Lives Matter. Because of this, the political goals of white Christian nationalism are fundamentally anti-pluralist and anti-democratic. The goal isn’t to include more voices; the goal is power for “us.”

RUSSIAN THREATS TO use nuclear weapons in its war against Ukraine have made clear that the world urgently needs an inclusive, reality-based plan for nuclear safety: the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Faith communities have long recognized the moral depravity of these weapons and the unacceptable humanitarian consequences their use would pose.

People of faith have worked with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) to establish the first comprehensive international treaty to ban nuclear weapons, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). In June, the 61 states parties (nations) and 86 signatories of the treaty convened in Vienna for their first meeting since the treaty came into legal force in January 2021. Key topics of discussion were adding signatories to “universalize” the treaty, implementation, and reinforcement of norms against nuclear weapons. The meeting was critical to advancing key articles of the treaty, particularly assistance to victims of nuclear weapons and testing, remediation of contaminated environments, and setting deadlines for the elimination of nuclear weapons for nuclear-armed states that join the treaty.

As Alexander Kmentt, the Austrian president of the Vienna conference, put it, universalization means not only encouraging new ratifications but also “promoting the arguments on which the treaty is based, namely the humanitarian consequences of and the risks associated with nuclear weapons.”

In August, parties to another international nuclear weapons treaty, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), are gathering in New York.

A YOUNG GIRL sits on her father’s shoulders at a women’s soccer game in California, where fierce women play on the field, wise women own the professional soccer club, and women on the U.S. national team just won the right to be paid equally. The father locks eyes with Abby Wambach, a veteran in the fight for equal pay and a winner of two Olympic gold medals and a World Cup title. The father points up to his daughter and shouts to Abby: “This is the only world she’ll ever know.”

It’s commonplace for institutions to fail to honor a woman’s worth—from rulings in domestic violence cases to recent decisions from the highest courts that restrict reproductive options. But the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team is not common. And they are not used to losing. The team, which has won four World Cups and four Olympic gold medals, is considered the world’s best women’s soccer team, and yet the players’ efforts to be compensated fairly have been an uphill battle for decades. For instance, under the most recent collective bargaining agreements, a player on the women’s team, according to The Washington Post, would earn about 89 percent of the compensation U.S. men received for a series of exhibition games. That disparity was true in 2018 and 2019, when the U.S. women won the World Cup and the U.S. men failed to qualify for the tourney.

HISPANIC CULTURES ARE profoundly relational. Family is family whoever they are, whatever they believe, and whatever they have done. Family also includes people who are not blood relations; being family is a way of life. Being family means that the suffering of our daughters and our mothers, our sisters and our cousins, matters. Our relationship with God also matters to us, and how we see and sense the voice of God influences our choices.

So, what does this all mean when it comes to abortion?

Whether or not Hispanics fight to affirm Roe v. Wade, our fundamental perspectives may not fit neatly into the two sides of the debate. While some values are shared across generations, they are differently weighted in ways that impact political decisions, creating a family dialogue that is profound and deeply emotional.

A core precept of liberation theology in Latin America, and its evangelical cousin misión integral (holistic mission), is the power of place and position in determining perspective. While it is not possible to talk about a single “Hispanic culture,” given the broad diversity of the Hispanic community, there are common experiences and values between various Hispanic cultures that impact the way that we see the moral, scriptural, and spiritual issues in the abortion/choice debate.

The following formative experiences and values have significant impact for many of us.

Seeing God in babies. I remember when I was a pastor of an English- and Spanish-speaking congregation trying to
explain to the English-speaking members why we let children run around the church freely, appreciating their playfulness. On a deeper level, I remember explaining why we would take in a distant cousin’s child to live with us without a moment’s hesitation. In traditional Hispanic Catholic circles, the figure of Christ as a child is one of the most popular depictions, along with Madonna and child images. There are many Hispanic people who are deeply troubled by abortion. If we can’t know the exact point at which cells become a baby, many Hispanics would feel like we should approach the question with fear and trembling.