Baby Immigrant Jesus and the God Who Builds Border Walls

Those who picture the Christ Child as an illegal alien, or any kind of immigrant, need a good dose of sulfur and salt.

“Dear Lord baby Jesus, lyin' there in your ghost manger, just lookin' at your Baby Einstein developmental videos, learnin' 'bout shapes and colors. I would like to thank you for bringin' me and my mama together, and also that my kids no longer sound like retarded gang-bangers.” - Ricky Bobby

I bring up Ricky Bobby, because despite no one accusing him of being a theologian, his doctrinal acumen is equal to that of say, Russell Moore’s, who famously referred to Christ as an “undocumented alien” on CSPAN back in 2013. Our Pulpit & Pen article touched on his claim back then, and so did an article from Joseph Spurgeon (both links have since been broken by time).

And as much as I want to follow the Polemics’ Manifesto #1, in not beating dead horses just because the devil resurrects bad ideas already defeated, it doesn’t hurt to maybe kick the dead horse, just once to make sure it’s really dead.

JESUS AS A WETBACK

Christmas time is “Jesus was an illegal alien” Season, in which people who don’t really believe in Christ play along for a few days, if for no other reason, they can celebrate an idol of their own imagining. For example, picturing Jesus as a “brown-skinned Palestinian and illegal alien” is usually the idol on parade by those who, any other time of year, treat Jesus like something between Buddha and Bigfoot.

Of course, nobody would have said Jesus had “brown skin” until only recently (the historic term is “Olive Skinned,” but given that both Jews and Arabs have variant skin tones from their mutual ancestors from Turkey and Iran in the Levant (some even had blue eyes), there’s no way to assign him a melanin count.

And, Jesus was certainly not a Palestinian. Palestine was a district of Syria, first referred to as such by Herodotus in the 5th Century BCE. Jesus, however, was from the district known as Judaea. While Bethlehem is in the non-country of Palestine currently (in Israel), calling Jesus “Palestinian” for this reason would be like calling ancient Eskimos “American Citizens” just because Alaska was annexed in 1867.

Pope Francis, who’s a gay Communist is ever there was one (that is not an insult; it is an assertion), made the headlines this Christmas Season for endorsing an idol of the Baby Jesus on a Palestinian Keffiyah (a cloth that Palestinians wear on their head to note their Palestinian-ness) on display at the Vatican.

But as of late, much of the imaging (or re-imaging) of Jesus is predicated upon the popularly held notion that Jesus was a refugee. Russell Moore didn’t start this fable, but he certainly helped pass it along back when he as taking money from George Soros to push illegal immigration through the Evangelical Immigration Table.

What I personally think is funny is that PolitiFact, in a rare moment of clarity, officially ranked the claim that Jesus was an undocumented immigrant as false.

It’s unknown if Russell Moore ever got the memo.

Just kidding, we do know. And Russell Moore did not get the memo. He wrote in 2023…

I'm amazed when I hear evangelical Christians speak of undocumented immigrants in this country with disdain as "those people" who are "draining our health care and welfare resources." It's horrifying to hear those identified with the gospel speak, whatever their position on the issues, with mean-spirited disdain for the immigrants themselves.

This is a gospel issue. First of all, our Lord Jesus himself was a so-called "illegal immigrant."

Of course, undocumented immigrants certainly are those people who are draining our health care and welfare resources. We might forget that FEMA was broke by the time it cut paltry checks to the victims of hurricanes in North Carolina and Florida, largely because FEMA’s budget was tapped to provide housing to illegal aliens.

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So far as our healthcare system is concerned, illegal aliens cost the U.S. taxpayers 16.2 billion dollars under the Biden Administration, or just under 5k per head…annually. Russell Moore doubtfully is “amazed” at these statistics. I presume he’s only amazed that evangelical Christians still have a mind of their own rather than being told what to believe by Christianity Today.

NO, JESUS DID NOT PARTICIPATE IN TACO TUESDAYS, SOROS CARAVANS, OR GO TO A QUINCEANERA.

But, was it not true that Jesus’ family were refugees that had to flee to a different country to avoid political persecution? And because it pre-dated migration documentation, couldn’t he be classified as “undocumented,” despite how meaningless the term would be in a historic context?

Jesus was a resident under the Roman Empire, like Mary and Joseph. Although they weren’t citizens, they were nonetheless residents of the empire. Here’s a map of the Roman Empire in Jesus’ day.

Note that Egypt is a part of the Roman Empire. From 30BC to 395AD, Egypt was a proud member. And you wouldn’t call someone who moves from Kentucky to Tennessee a migrant. In fact, back when I helped prepare SBC church camps for Hurricane Katrina victims, we were scolded by FEMA for referring to them as “refugees.” They were evacuees, they insisted. “Refugee” implies foreign citizenship, they told us.

So in order for Jesus to have been an illegal immigrant, he would have had to have been an immigrant to begin with, and he was not.

And the end of the story is not usually recalled by Russell Moore and his friends among the Open Borders elite. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph went back home as soon as they could.

So many other facts are also mis-stated. It wasn’t a political persecution, but a personal one. Herod was trying to kill him personally. And the bulk of today’s migrants to the U.S. are not political refugees any way. They’re “economic refugees,” also known as “poor people from terrible places who want to live here.”

Running from poverty because Mexico or Honduras has a corrupt government and incompetent leadership, is not the same as running from a king sending hitmen after you (especially when you bring the poverty with you).

THE CLAIM OF MIGRATION STATUS IS LIBERATION THEOLOGY

The sin of this, of course, is idolatry. Russell Moore and others have adopted what is known as Liberation Theology. Liberation Theology was created during the Cold War by South and Central American evangelicals in a partnership with Jesuits (almost all Roman Catholics in that region are of the Jesuit order) as a way to embrace Communism without giving Communists a reason to kill them.

The milieu of all this was their fear that Russia would win the Cold War, as they had already taken over Cuba, and they would eradicate Christians. This is because, in a Marxist scheme, there is no room for God, because government is god, and Commies have always slaughtered Christians. These Quisling cousins of ours, so close to Christianity and yet so far, invented the novel notions of Liberation Theology to say, “See. We get your Communism crap, and look, it doesn’t contradict our theology. So please don’t kill us.”

I know what you’re thinking at this point. My grasp of history and fantastical, straight-forward telling of the narrative is so compelling I need a podcast for it, but Shane Gillis has already done that. I do like to tell tales that are simple, and easily understood. Cutting through details is my forte, mostly because I don’t have a James White brain to digest them all anyway.

Theologically speaking, Liberation Theology views the cross as a failure (which James White, despite his massive brain, could not grasp a few years ago, when Francis said “the cross is a failure” and he insisted Francis didn’t mean what he said). Jesus, you see, was a failure, they claim. Jesus was a down-and-out, impoverished child who came from a non-nuclear family and identified with whores and fentanyl dealers. He couldn’t even get through life without getting himself killed. Therefore, Jesus would totally be down with Communism, because its goal (but never its outcome) is to help the poor and marginalized.

Instead of preaching a theology that demands conformity to Christ, Liberation theologians craft idols to make Christ conform to men. This idea, of Christ as Liberator and Christ as Commie King, spread to the United States and took the form of Black Liberation Theology. In this deviation, the story of Moses’ liberation of the slaves of Egypt is the gospel, and Jesus a purely moral example.

Anyway, because Russell Moore is a pinko, this resonates with him and he is happy to do the work of Pope Francis, insisting that Jesus was clearly something he is not. And if this makes you sick to your stomach, please be aware that others have claimed Jesus was “trans” (because he transitioned to a glorified body), that Jesus was non-binary (because he was both God and man) and that Jesus was full-on African black. Like, darker than under the bed black.

The orthodox believer is not upset at picturing Jesus as poor, or from a non-traditional home (on the caveat he lived with a legal guardian who was not his dad), or “Middle Eastern” (if you want to be bizarrely unspecific for no reason whatsoever), or dark-skinned (compared to us honkies). No, we are upset at people crafting idols from their imagination and calling it “Jesus,” breaking the 2nd and 3rd Commandments all in one go.

THE GOD OF BORDER WALLS

It is a bizarre thing indeed to reject Christian Nationalism on one hand, and then demand the government shape its border policies based upon Biblical narratives. For the hundredth time, I’m not a Christian Nationalist on doctrinal grounds, but I’m also not a big fan of double standards.

Whenever its time to promote open borders or welfare policies, suddenly everyone wants to use the government to enforce what they believe to be Biblical commands. But if you proposed a law against homosexuality, they would lose their minds.

As illegal immigrants are literally setting fire to women on the subway and as migrants to plowing through a crowd of Christmas celebrators, we need to turn to the Bible to determine what God really believes about secure borders.

An entire book of the Bible is about building a border wall per God’s orders and weaponizing it (Nehemiah).

God himself gave the clear national borders of Old Testament Israel, and enacted penalties for its invasion.

God drew distinctions between Jewish citizens and “sojourners” who were only traveling through (not settlers), and he even drew distinctions between Jewish citizens and Gentile legal and permanent residents. Specific laws and requirements were given for each of the three separate resident statuses, applied to all three distinctly.

God, after all, has put walls around Heaven, and there will be walls around the New Jerusalem.

When evangelicals like Russell Moore see American citizens raped or killed by migrants, or see cars plowed through streets in Germany by migrants, but doubles-down on his Liberation Theology idol-graving, there is perhaps no better way to say, “God does not love you, and neither do I.”