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Fear and Faith in the Kin‐dom: New Explorations in the Theology of Migration

2015; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/moth.12150

1468-0025

Robert W. Heimburger,

Contemporary Christian Leadership and Education

Whether in Qatar, Britain, Colombia, or the United States, people on the move are among the most vulnerable members of our societies, and injustices against migrants demand a response. Yet these men, women, and children are more than sites of need: migrants also come bearing gifts. Encountering migrants or undergoing migration pries open facile assumptions about whom we belong to and whom we are responsible to. In turn, they are pictures of God's wandering people and of the triune God who makes a home with us. Despite the fact that migration offers fertile ground for theological reflection, it has received little extended theological attention. Apart from some interest in the subject by biblical scholars, no more than a handful of academic monographs have dealt with the subject in recent decades. In recent books on migration and theology, Susanna Snyder and Kristin Heyer have begun to redress this need.1 It was a cold spring day. I had been called and asked whether I could accompany Annette to the Home Office Report Centre in Solihull. Sure, I said. No problem. We drove from Birmingham city centre, parked in a multi-storey and took the short walk across the road to the centre. Annette seemed nervous but I didn't think any more of it. It was to be expected. She went through security and into the room where asylum seekers queued to be seen by an official. Nearly an hour must have gone by. I was outside and beginning to get twitchy now too. It shouldn't have taken anything like this long and the waiting area was hardly designed to make you welcome and relaxed. Annette suddenly appeared behind some glass; she was waving at me and clearly anxious. The case official accompanying her came out and explained that they were holding onto her as there was a problem – they wouldn't tell me what – and that she seemed to be having an asthma attack. She wanted me to fetch her medication from a drawer in her house. Not having a clue where she lived – she had moved into a new place only a few days before – I rummaged in the handbag she had left with me and found some keys and an address on a scrap of paper. I rushed to the car and got hopelessly lost trying to find her room, somewhere in a cul-de-sac in Chelmsley Wood. I felt like a criminal trying the key in every door in the house before entering her tiny room and rifling through the drawers to find an inhaler. No luck. All I could find was a huge bag of medications. I just grabbed it and dashed back to the car. Using one hand to reverse out of the drive, I used the other to phone Shari at Restore. I explained what had happened and she promised to get straight onto Annette's solicitor. I eventually arrived back at the centre, handed over the bag of medications and went through the security myself. Annette still seemed distressed, sitting opposite a case official in her cubbyhole. My phone vibrated. I got outside just in time to answer and it was Sheri saying that Annette would probably be released if her solicitor could fax a document through immediately. Was there a fax number? Nobody seemed to know. The case official appeared and then disappeared again. All I can assume is that the proper documentation arrived satisfactorily. Annette appeared at the doorway to the waiting area a few minutes later, looking exhausted and relieved. This is but one example of the uncertain life of “those seeking asylum” in Britain (11), the focus of this book. Snyder's aim is to reflect on church engagement with migrants so as to transform and liberate that practice. The book makes a sort of migration between disciplines, linking the inchoate field of forced migration studies with biblical studies and practical theology. Its most valuable contributions come in two forms: biblical meditations on fear and faith toward migrants, and proposals for the churches' encounters with migrants. Following astute introductions of what causes the flight of migrants and the fright of established communities, Snyder turns to Scripture to provide what she calls an ecology of fear and an ecology of faith. Against a selective use of more palatable Bible passages about foreigners, Snyder turns to Ezra-Nehemiah to discover an ecology of fear. There, Ezra and Nehemiah lead efforts to reconstitute Israel among exiles returned to Jerusalem, calling the people to walk in the Torah and to rebuild the temple and city walls. The stories culminate in the exclusion of foreigners from the cult and a demand that men send away their foreign wives. Rather than ignoring these texts or gleaning only a spiritual message, Snyder chooses two other paths: “The first reads the books from the perspectives of its submerged voices — the excluded strangers — and involves acknowledging the complicity of the wider Judeo-Christian tradition in fostering hostile attitudes toward foreigners” (142). Here, she follows the work of scholars who argue that the “people of the land” may have protested at rebuilding efforts because they foresaw the exclusion that would come. And, we hear, these texts are just the beginning of Christian complicity in turning some into “others.” Snyder's second move is to mine Ezra and Nehemiah for insights into contemporary fears toward immigrants, asking what it is that makes so many of us feel a deeply rooted concern at the presence of foreigners. We hear that just as law, walls, and temple were reestablished in these two books, a fear of foreigners often comes out of a desire to restore a lost and often mythologized past. Snyder tells us that the wives sent away may not really have been foreigners, but rather those people who stayed in Judah while others were exiled. Here, women bear the brunt of the pursuit of purity. Could contemporary reactions against immigrants in fact be ways of expressing dislike for other groups within our own societies, polite ways of saying we do not want any more of “their” kind around, when “they” have been here for many generations? Snyder next turns her gaze to Ruth and the Syro-Phoenician woman from Mark 7:24-30, and there we find the book's most lively offerings. These are stories of women who are “multiple outsiders” (168): Ruth is a widow from Moab, the very people that Nehemiah excluded from the assembly of God (13:1-2) in keeping with a warning to exclude those who had not welcomed Israel as they traveled toward Canaan (Deuteronomy 23:3-5). Yet it is Ruth's risky acts of faith that bring her mother-in-law Naomi joy, that save aging Boaz from childlessness, and that contribute to the lineage of the coming king David. The Syro-Phoenician woman too is a female Gentile whose daughter has an unclean spirit, multiply unclean, and Jesus refuses to heal her daughter because he has come to feed the children of Israel rather than Gentile “dogs.” When the woman quips that “even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs,” Jesus says that for this logos her daughter is healed. Citing Susan Miller, Snyder tells us that this unnamed woman “brings Jesus ‘the word of God'” (173) and provides a turning point in Jesus' mission, directing it toward the Gentiles. It's not just that we owe strangers love and justice, then, but they are bringers of new life. Snyder foregrounds these encounters, personal and embodied, involving risky boundary-crossing out of love. Such encounters require not only the stranger but also the host to risk change, and they invite the host to let the stranger “remain strange” (193), a real, complex, and ambiguous individual. Why then do Ruth and Mark come before Ezra-Nehemiah, privileging faith toward strangers over fear of strangers? Snyder briefly states two reasons: there is simply more biblical material pushing for the inclusion of strangers, and as a matter of “subjective hermeneutical choice,” Snyder writes, “I read the Bible as a source of life for the contemporary world and particularly for the oppressed and marginalized” (163-4). These comments invite further reflection on the canon of Scripture: Would it be possible to read the exclusion of foreign wives in Ezra-Nehemiah as something meant just for that one time and place? Going further, could these expulsions be the work of morally complex characters like David or Samson, representing rebellion against the Isaianic declaration of YHWH, “my house will be called a house of prayers for all people” (56:7)? In its second major contribution to theological discussions of migration, Asylum-Seeking, Migration, and Church describes and “moves on” church encounters with migrants (197). The work builds on Snyder's first-hand conversations with those seeking asylum and those engaged with them as members of churches and church-related organizations. She describes encounters of service, encouraging her readers to “hang out” with asylum seekers (22, 25, and 199), listening to them and standing alongside them, rather than standing above them and leaving them without agency. Next come encounters with the powers, as churches raise awareness and advocate for those seeking sanctuary. As a model, Snyder praises the City of Sanctuary movement, which unites local congregations and organizations around a commitment to being a welcoming city to those seeking asylum. Snyder also details encounters in theology, encouraged by growing attention to migrants but calling for works that listen to asylum seekers' experiences and that consider migration as not peripheral but central to our experience before God. Snyder proposes encounters in worship, where, she says, we can be transposed into the kingdom of God and its fullness of justice. She says that church life may give migrants a rare opportunity to be “known primarily as mothers or doctors or teenagers or Iraqis rather than as ‘asylum seekers'” (210). Worshipping with asylum seekers can revive the practice of lament, and it can enable fresh understandings of Christian identity as people on the move, seeking a homeland. At this point, Snyder's tantalizing suggestions about worship beg the question about the line between worshipping and encountering the powers. Is it only through writing, protesting, and organizing that churches encounter the authorities who have such power over immigrants? Could it be that a new people already encounters the powers of nation-states as those with and without passports, those close to home and far from home, gather to worship the reigning Christ? A month after my high school graduation, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents with loaded guns, bullet-proof vests and steel-toed boots surrounded my house and nearly pounded down my front door, demanding to see my dad and me. I came out to the front yard where the head agent asked my name while pulling out his handcuffs as if he were standing in front of some criminal. No GPA or letter of recommendation could save me then. I fell to my knees in front of the agent and began pleading with him to let me stay, telling him I was starting college in a month on a special scholarship. He said to me then, “Fine, I will let you go but only if you tell me where your dad is.” I stood there shocked and dumbfounded, unable to answer the question. Was this what normal students had to sacrifice for their education? I shot a look over at my hunched and mortified mother, who nodded yes to go ahead and tell them. My heart ripped in two as I revealed the precious information. The ICE vans sped off to my dad's work, where he was arrested in front of his boss and coworkers. Within a few minutes they had him back in my driveway for a quick goodbye, where he leaned in, handcuffed, to kiss each of us. When he came to me, he looked me in the eye and said, “Sigue adelante. Te quiero.” “Keep moving forward. I love you.” Seconds after, the van sped off. I stood in complete disbelief; I had sold my own dad for an education. I realized then that leaving for college now meant leaving my mom alone with two kids and a house she could no longer pay for. My heart was breaking. With this tale, Heyer shifts our focus away from Britain to the United States and to “immigrants from Latin America” (3). To achieve A Christian Ethic of Immigration, the book's subtitle, Heyer undertakes another migration between disciplines, linking a sampling of social scientific and journalistic writing with theology. As a Roman Catholic layperson, her contribution is to bring Catholic Social Teaching on human nature, sin, family, and solidarity to bear on immigration issues alive in the United States today. Forces that strip away the humanity of the migrant are Heyer's first stop. Heyer points out how an economic calculus turns persons into things to be used for profit, whether in the name of North American free trade or to benefit a growing immigrant detention business. She also indicates that a thirst for security and constructions of nationhood rely on turning the immigrant into an “other.” Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr's insights on the group egotism of the nation-state, Heyer advocates treating the human person as end, not means. Following this line of thought, she argues that human labor is valuable and best done when free; the human person is inherently relational. This leads to criticism of wage slavery, of sexual exploitation, and of disruptions to family life. It also leads to a case for human rights, among which Heyer includes “rights to emigrate and immigrate” (11) and “the right not to have to migrate” (27). Later, she stipulates these more precisely when she writes of Catholic social thought, “It is the tradition's affirmation of social and economic rights that establishes persons' rights not to migrate (fulfill those rights in their homeland) and to migrate (if they cannot support themselves or their families in their country of origin)” (145). This discrepancy between broad and specific notions of rights deserves comment. Heyer's earlier claim of a right to emigrate and immigrate evokes John Paul II and his call to the Church in America to defend “against any unjust restriction the natural right of individual persons to move freely within their own nation and from one nation to another.”2 Heyer's second claim reflects the better developed suggestions of earlier documents as they draw on Leo XIII's conception of the family as a society prior to the state, within which the father has a duty to work and provide for his family.3 These come to fruition when John XXIII states that from this duty to preserve the welfare of the family comes the “right of the family to migrate.”4 These formulations need further refinement–for example, by recognizing the role mothers as well as fathers play in providing for their families–but they are superior to the simple assertion of rights to emigrate and immigrate. Threats to the humanity of the migrant lead Heyer to a theological analysis of their source in social sin. In a late-twentieth-century discussion between John Paul II and Latin American liberation theologians, Heyer draws out a concept of sin in which individuals remain responsible for free acts while their sinful acts create structural injustices and ideologies that further induce individuals toward sin. With this concept, Heyer brings to light ways that Americans are complicit in systems that create the very conditions that cause many to migrate illegally. For example, she names free trade agreements that render traditional vocations no longer viable, representations of immigrants as parasites, and consumerist attachments to cheap goods and services as implicating U.S. citizens in the migration trends they criticize. For Heyer, the Church is a locus of transformation as liturgies draw the faithful into recognizing their sin, mourning and repenting of it, and achieving “conscientization — the development of a critical, liberating consciousness” (50). Social sin targets migrant families and women in particular, Heyer argues. Migration issues are not secondary to central moral issues of marriage and family. Instead, the book makes a strong case that migration issues are family issues. We are told of the particular threats that migrant women face, from sexual assault to workplace abuse, compounded by fears about reporting these wrongs because it may lead to their deportation. Heyer levels an incisive critique against Christian ethics and its assumption that acts involve control and agency. As female migrants compromise their sexual purity or their legal status, whether to survive or to serve their family, they lack control and they take risks. Such a phenomenon, Heyer writes, requires an ethics not of control but of risk. Along with threats to migrant women, we hear of threats to united families. Ideologies of the free market lead to policies that keep some family members fearful of being deported. In response, Heyer draws on the Christian tradition and its commitment to the integrity of the family, describing the family as a school for society, as a place to learn interdependence and mutual respect. Heyer also calls for a reassessment of what counts as family, forwarding a Latina/o sense of familismo as embracing far more than the nuclear family of the norteamericano. As a caveat, Heyer notes that migration to the United States might not only disrupt family life but also make room for the agency of women within families. Heyer's next move is to respond to the damaging effects of globalization with a nuanced understanding of solidarity. Among free-market policies that uproot and disturb men and women, the most engaging tale describes how the North American Free Trade Agreement and federal United States corn subsidies left Mexican corn farmers unable to compete, wiping out a form of agriculture that had lasted for some four thousand years. Such changes left them impoverished or migrating north, where many find work on U.S. farms that send agricultural goods back to Mexico to sell. (To document this, Heyer largely cites fellow theologians, but the tale calls for further substantiation.) Heyer goes on to propose three dimensions of solidarity that can salve a world troubled by globalization. Beyond an institutional solidarity that would make global organizations more transparent and accountable to those persons of the edge of society, she describes two more forms of solidarity not as pleasant platitudes but as remedies for sinful patterns. One is incarnational solidarity, “being with the neighbor,” achieving a “kinship” (117) by living among the disposable. A second is conflictual solidarity, by which Heyer means that we can only achieve solidarity by way of conflict with forces that prevent that solidarity. As the book concludes, Heyer recommends ways forward in the U.S. immigration debates. She writes of a hospitality for the stranger that is subversive because it challenges the host, calling the host to “enter … the world of the half-dead stranger,” (144, quoting William R. O'Neill). Heyer is prepared, too, to offer a variety of policy proposals for the United States: a path to earned legalization, a new worker visa program that would include low wage workers, a reform of visa allotments, a standing commission on immigration, a deference to human rights, trade equity with developing nations, and protection for native-born workers. On the subject of integration, she proposes a further sort of kinship, “civic kinship” (149), stronger than liberal nationalists' proposals for unity through ideals alone, but less specific than conservative nationalists' proposals that center on Anglo-Protestant commitments and the English language. Kinship Across Borders excels at assessing the current state of affairs in the United States for immigrants in need, and it excels at drawing recent Catholic Social Teaching to bear in this setting. Still, the oldest source the work draws upon is Reinhold Niebuhr, followed by John Paul II and liberation theologians. When the book assumes that subjects possess rights, when it speaks of the “incarnational” (116 ff.), and when it examines the nature of sin, the work invites meditation on Christian Scripture and tradition. Further writing on theology and migration will benefit by moving beyond the shorthand of Catholic Social Teaching to return to the sources, keeping a lively tradition of social thought both rooted and fresh, while possessing greater potential to convince those not already convinced by magisterial assertions. To injustices against migrants, and to migration as a matter rewarding theological reflection, Susanna Snyder and Kristin Heyer provide valuable contributions that carry discussions a number of steps forward. For scholars and teachers of undergraduate and graduate students, for educated laypeople and clergy, each book provides a way into understanding migration today, a thorough introduction to contemporary forced migration studies in the case of Snyder's book, and a description of the forces surrounding vulnerable immigrants in the United States in the case of Heyer's book. Each excels in articulating the social imaginaries that fund responses to migrants, whether fear (in Snyder's book) or judgment for law-breaking (in Heyer's book). For those seeking to perceive migration with the eyes of faith, each book offers fresh resources. Snyder's volume prompts the discovery of faith toward migrants through biblical explorations and recommends ways to enrich and extend encounters with migrants. Heyer's volume enables new understandings of the human person threatened and renewed, and the book reveals threats to family and civic bonds while pointing to how those bonds may be strengthened. Heyer concludes with a sort of reflection reminiscent of Snyder's book when she points out ways that migrants serve as “witnesses to enduring hope,” so that hospitality and kinship among fellow sojourners provide “eschatological glimpses” of “the unfolding of God's kin-dom” (160).