Migrants, Elites, and the Church

Peggy Noonan argues in a recent column that “Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status.”

On the other hand, “those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions.”

The two have different fears, and the fears of the elites don’t amount to much: “Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract.” By contrast, “normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular.”

In short, “The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.”

Here is a grand example of the limits of taking the nation-state as the unit of analysis. For Noonan, the “elites” are the wealthy governing of America; the “normals” are working and middle class Americans. If we take the church as the unit of analysis, things look quite different in two fundamental respects.

First, the church does have elites but, in the best of cases, these elites aren’t isolated from the struggles and anxieties of normals. On the contrary, the vocation of the ecclesial elite – the “spiritual” – is to bear the burdens of normals, humbly and modestly (Galatians 6:1-2). Decision makers in the church don’t disdain normal people because they’re called to serve normal people, as servants of the servants of God. (I acknowledge that this is an ideal, and that many pastors through the ages have regarded their flocks with disdain.)

Second, within the church, the fears and anxieties of the normals are not treated as virtues. “Do not be anxious,” Jesus says; “perfect love casts out fear,” says John. This isn’t because elites consider their flocks to be constituted by small-minded bigots. It’s because the elites are training the normals to be living out of the gospel. 

Now, when immigration is viewed from this perspective, things look very different. Immigrants may indeed be threatening in various ways, but they also constitute a mission field, a field for sharing the love and mercy of Jesus. Ministry to immigrants has its dangers, but Christians – elites and normals – are called to endure suffering for the sake of the gospel. 

In such concrete ways, the church proves to be a new social formation, living according to the good news, God’s city in the midst of the nations.