“Does your family eat cats and dogs?”
That’s not just a question that was posed to Haitians at workplaces, school cafeterias and playgrounds in Springfield, Ohio. Many other immigrant communities across the United States have been taunted with this trope and others similar to it since refugees from Southeast Asia began arriving in the mid to late 70s, and have been a part of the Chinese-American experience when Chinese were brought as cheap labor to help build the American railway system in the 19th century.
This is just one of the many fear-based questions and narratives immigrants have had to face over the decades. Professor, scholar, and Christian, Russell Jeung, reminds us that these tropes tend to spread during high times of immigration, and often to the benefit of politicians creating fear.
According to a recent Lifeway Research survey, evangelicals are more likely to see a presidential candidate’s positions on the economy and immigration as the most important issues for choosing a candidate, even over abortion and personal character.
Whatever way this data can be parsed and nuanced, our political framing of immigrants and immigration is top of mind for many American church leaders.
Few would argue that our government leaders have a long way to go to effectively reduce unauthorized border crossings and to ensure humane conditions and processes for asylum seekers granted entry into the United States. But we shouldn’t be naive in thinking that fear narratives such as these are about actual solutions rather than rallying up potential votes and stoking potential dissension.
Regardless of how politicians on either side of the spectrum intend to use rhetoric, church leaders should be mindful of the on-the-ground impact, which is often the “othering” and demonizing of entire communities of people, potentially to the detriment of our Christian witness.
Christians can’t demonize groups of people and then later romanticize how difficult it is to reach them.
Much of fear-based rhetoric goes against our call to love our neighbors and make disciples of all nations. And Christians and church leaders willing to tout and/or allow these sorts of tropes to perpetuate in their community likely lack the proximity to their new neighbors necessary to effectively make disciples of the nations already among them. Proximity would allow them to see that many of their neighbors arrived as people experiencing trauma and vulnerability due to war, conflict, and crisis.
In my humble opinion, for Great Commission Christian churches, whether we are churches of welcome or churches of apathy has some correlation to how we are motivated to obey Jesus’ words “to make disciples of all nations.”
