A guest essay on Scot McKnight's newsletter, with a physician's account from Minneapolis, responds to aggressive ICE enforcement. It argues that the enforcement is cruel, unjust, and at odds with Jesus' command to love, and that leaders who claim Christ while brutalizing others bear bad fruit. It urges Christians to respond with love, advocacy, prayer, service, and peaceful protest, citing the biblical call to love the foreigner.
Reviewed
Its text teaches none of the positions Doxa lists.
US citizens are being detained and legal immigrants deported, so fears of detention and deportation among citizen and immigrant families are well founded.
The author would physically block a road to prevent the seizure of a friend's daughter, though she hopes it never comes to that.
Current US immigration enforcement is abusive, brutal, and cruel, and its fruit does not reflect Jesus' call to love one another.
Top political leaders believe their power is God-given and that any exercise of it is God-blessed, but political power and military might are not signs of righteousness.
Love for one another is the defining mark of Jesus' followers, so leaders who brutalize others bear bad fruit, and Christians should discern this through the Spirit, fellow believers, and the Church's historic teaching, even though judging another's faith is not their place.
Christians without political power should still respond to unjust policies by contacting representatives, praying, learning, donating to frontline churches, standing with affected loved ones, serving neighbors, and protesting peacefully.
The nation has a legacy of injustice that Americans often want to deny and that Christians should study.
ICE agents killed Renee Good and then blocked medical aid for her, and ICE has used brutality and chemical agents against peaceful neighbors and protesters in Minneapolis.
ICE agents and their supporters dehumanize women and minorities with slurs and derogatory labels, and "othering" people makes it easier to treat them as deserving abuse.
A physician's duty is to care for every patient without bias from creed, ethnicity, politics, or any other factor, as the medical oath commits.
Christians are called to love the foreigner living among them as themselves, and should respond to immigration enforcement with love rather than hate.
Christians should pray that national leaders will end the inhumane treatment of neighbors of color and the military-like occupation.
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