COMMENTARY Christian leaders condemn the anti-immigrant crackdowns in states like Florida — but they result from the same spirit of severity so many faith institutions have helped to create.
It’s impressive to hear Christian leaders questioning the Christianity of the immigration crackdowns raging in red roosts like Florida and Texas.
That is, it’s impressively ironic.
Whatever you think of the immigration cruelty that leaders like Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis get a kick out of performing, the reality is that it spills from the same piñata of severity so many faith institutions here have helped to fill.
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For starters: The cancellation of women’s reproductive rights. The demonization of the LGBTQ community. Or, at least on the evangelical side of things, the vilification of Black Lives Matter as “anti-God” (to quote the antediluvian hatemonger Pat Robertson, who died this month).
For Christian clerics to give full-throated amens to that kind of spite — but then decry anti-immigration policies that threaten a large swath of their vital Latino flock — is to make the line between compassionate and cynical, devout and disingenuous, blurrier than Isaac’s eyesight.
That dogmatic double standard struck me last week when Roman Catholic Archbishop Timothy Broglio, during an Orlando meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops he heads, criticized DeSantis as well as GOP Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Broglio called their anti-immigration stunts — like recently flying (perhaps illegally) dozen of South American migrants from the U.S. southern border to Democrat-led California — “problematic.”
It was a softer echo of Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski’s response last year to DeSantis, when the governor said it was “disgusting” to compare today's unaccompanied migrant children to Cuban youths who came in the 1960s escaping communism. Wenski rightly called DeSantis’ denigration of 21st-century migrant minors “a new low in the zero-sum politics of our divisive times.”
Wenski’s rebuke foreshadowed the condemnation Latino evangelicals have been hurling at the new Florida law DeSantis championed, taking effect July 1, that punitively targets undocumented migrants. “Our pastors,” the Florida Fellowship of Hispanic Bishops and Evangelical Institutions said in March, “will not stand for this.”
Counter-rebuking the pulpiteers
DeSantis the newly minted presidential candidate, of course, cares less about these churchly chastisers than he does about the anti-immigrant Trump voters he needs to poach. Still, as a Catholic myself, I can see why he counter-rebukes the pulpiteers, as he did when his office tore into Wenski.
What DeSantis, Abbott and every MAGA politico out there are telling the bishops and pastors is this:
“You gladly signed up for America’s political right wing in order to see your divine private creeds rammed into worldly public policy — and that’s exactly what America’s political right wing has done for you. But guess what? Branding migrants as job-stealing, social benefits-sucking criminals is also part of that American political right wing you’re now blood brothers with.
“You don’t like that? Tough.
“You’re the ones who implored us to legislate your legally specious belief that human life starts at conception, and make it all but impossible for a desperate woman in Florida — or for a raped 10-year-old girl in Ohio, if you had your way — to obtain an abortion. We got Roe v. Wade overturned for you, even though an ample majority of Americans, including Catholics, supported keeping the1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion intact.
“You’re the ones who warned us that homosexuals and transgender persons are affronts to God — “groomers” preying on our kids — and therefore need to be stigmatized out of schools and other public spaces. We pushed the don’t-say-gay and don’t-do-drag bills for you, even though almost three-fourths of Americans support gay marriage.
“You’re the ones who convinced us Black Lives Matter is a “socialist,” family-destroying movement. We’re eradicating “woke” subversion like Black history curricula for you, even though most Americans hold a favorable view of BLM’s racial justice aims.
“You’re the ones who, because we run interference for your fundamentalist agendas, look the other way when we unconscionably make America more awash in high-powered guns or disparage life-saving vaccines.
“And now you have the hypocritical temerity to whine about our treatment of migrants?”
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gives us another way to look at this. For decades, America’s conservative Christian crusade has breathed life into the career cruelty of Republicans like DeSantis and Abbott.
Now it finds the monster it’s helped create to be “problematic.”
Or as the Bible tells us, you reap what you sow.
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