Oh No! I Quoted Deuteronomy as the Knock-Down Verse About Migration Ethics!

An Approach for Christian Migration Ethics in Miniature

Working out a migration ethic is more than the Old Testament verses. Now unlocked for all subscribers.

To start, quoting Deuteronomy on migration isn’t a bad place to start. It’s just not a great place to end, nor does it do the work you think it does. Let’s discuss.

Tracing A Personal Concern for Migration

For about nine years now, migration has been one of the very low-key elements of my reading and research. For about two years, I planned and ran an ill-fated project through the CCCU on migration and the early church. The plan was to gather together patristics experts and social ethicists, to read literature from both and see how early church though might inform migration ethics, and vice versa. The project collapsed due to internal problems at the CCCU, but I’m hopeful to see it revived one day.

When I was living in Florida in 2015, most of my seminary students were from West Africa, the Carribean, Central America. Our neighbors were from Jamaica, Lebanon, and Haiti. My eyes were opened to dynamics which had been all around me in Texas before I left, and I couldn’t not see it now. When I named to a now-defunct chair in Christian ethics in a now-defunct seminary, and we found ourselves moving back to Texas, I knew that migration would be one of the things I wanted to pay attention to more. I had been working on issues of war and peace in Christian thought for more than a decade, and saw how conflict fueled much of what was (at that time) the beginning of a global crisis. There are more migrants now than at any time in the modern age, more refugees from wars than any time since the Second World War.

Since returning to Texas in 2016, I’ve tried to make good on that commitment. I’ve lectured on migration ethics, authored three peer review articles on retrieving figures within historical theology for migration ethics, and now co-convene a group on migration ethics at the Society of Christian Ethics. I name all of this not as a way to bolster my credibility, for there are many whose lives are intertwined with migrants in ways mine is not. Mine is an advocacy from a distance, given things that I cannot control but also things I can. I just name this to say that migration is something I care about, and a particular topic that I want to help Christians think better about.

Passing Our Concerns Through Deuteronomy

The Old Testament, as Danny Carroll has demonstrated—both in person to me and through his writings—that the Scriptures are migration stories almost all the way down. Long before the Exodus—the migration story par excellence—there is the Abrahamic line, and long after Exodus, there is the exile and return, Mary and Joseph into Egypt, the wandering Jesus with no place to call home. In the power of the Spirit, we are given stories of a church scattered in persecution from their home, apostles traveling in danger over sea and land, and letters to the diaspora churches.

Migration, in other words, is inseparable from God’s presence in the world. The Scriptures bear ample witness to God’s people in motion. God is not present with them because of their motion, but the connection is undeniable.

Now, there is motion, and there is motion. All the world moves by virtue of being in time, but not all the world moves by virtue of being compelled to leave home. My point is this: migration is a more acute version of being in the world, one which forces people to seek out a home in front of them when the one behind them cannot hold any longer. Migration is the most natural act for humans—people who are in motion in time—and the most tenuous—for we do not desire motion, but to belong to a place.

The sermon from the National Cathedral this week garnered a lot of noise, though the sermon was fairly milquetoast as far as sermons go. One would think, based on news clips and ensuing discussion, that the bishop had called for burning down the White House with an army of migrant workers and transgender athletes, but the foreground of the sermon was national unity, respectful dialogue, and charitable disagreement.

Migration appeared in exactly one sentence, in a typical appeal to Deuteronomy 10:18-19: “For the Lord your God…loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Deuteronomy in particular is filled with injunctions concerning migrants, about not cheating them or doing them harm. Interestingly, these discussions never include Deuteronomy 28:43-53, which seems to play into every stereotype of recent migration executive orders:

43 "Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours.

44 They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end they will be your rulers.

45 "All these disasters will come on you, and they will be with you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the Lord your God and keep all the laws that he gave you.

46 They will be the evidence of God's judgment on you and your descendants forever.

In this case, the verses speak of migrants living in the land as firstfruits of those who will occupy the land if Israel is unfaithful to God, not as threats to Israel, but as a sign that fair treatment of migrants is integral to the Law given, and that fair treatment withheld is a harbinger of bad times to come. But case in point: migration critics have their clobber verses waiting in the wings¹

Beyond Deuteronomy: Migration as a Christian Concern

My point in bringing this knot of verses up is that making a case for migration from Scripture cannot be as simple as weaving a few commands from Deuteronomy into our speech, for at least two reasons:

1. Christians Don’t Read Hardly Any of the Old Testament This Way. There are any number of places who take issue with any number of Old Testament features. To stay with the examples at hand, we don’t treat the Old Testament with that simple of a brush. Not all migrants in the Old Testament are depicted as objects of charity; some, as with Ezra and Nehamiah—are seen as harbingers of doom. Some—as in Ruth—are seen as suspect. But beyond migration, there are any number of features of Old Testament law, custom, or liturgical practice which aren’t taken as normative the way that Deuteronomy on migration is.

2. Christians Read the Old Testament Through the New Testament. I can hear the Biblical scholars firing up their keyboards, so let me qualify this by saying “Christians cannot read the Old Testament absent New Testament qualifications.” In this case, migration isn’t so much qualified as it is transfigured. The temple gives way to the church in Christian worship and imagination, and so, the way that migration concerns are viewed change as well. What I mean is that while God’s concern for migrants does not change, the manner of care does: no longer is there a territorial dimension for migrant care, but a transnational dimension.

Deuteronomy has a framework of the land, and belonging to the land in view, but this simply doesn’t hold for Christian understandings, insofar as the church is a transnational body in which land and. nation are no longer centralized concerns. It isn’t to say that Christians are from nowhere, but that how migrants are incorporated takes the form of international concern and unity that largely relegates questions of the nation to a secondary level. It’s just presumed that wherever the church is—in Syria, Rome, North Africa, Turkey—that the migrant is at home. To apply Deuteronomy as flat fiat is to inadvertedly return to a nation-based, territory-based model of migration which prioritizes territory in ways which just don’t work for a Christian account of migration, in which the people of God don’t have a land so much as any land in any place.

This last bit can feel like a dodge, but it’s a much more potent reworking: Christians are those who commit themselves to the migrant whether they are in territory or not, because being in territory isn’t the thing. To cite Deuteronomy in the way it nearly always is is to once again play into the hands of nations with boundaries, forgetting that the earth is the Lord’s and that God has a really funny way of respecting national boundaries given that Israel is captured—frequently by God’s design— by international invasion quite a bit of its history.

There’s more to say here, but for the moment, here’s an Amazon reading list that I’ve compiled. Go nuts: there’s lots of good resources here for understanding migration’s intersection with Christian theology and ethics.

The next four years are going to be wild on this question, and I’ll be writing more as we go, but the one thing we cannot keep doing is treating Deuteronomy as if it’s a mic drop passage on this. International migration is at an all-time high, and keeps rising: currently nearly 4% of all people in the world. It will continue to be one the most pressing moral and political questions for Christians to grapple with, so let’s slow down and do this well.

1. I actually hate the framing of this article as xenophobia versus xenophilia, but it illustrates my point here, in that the flatness of our thinking on Scripture on migration not only leads us to pit some verses against others, but it causes us to name Scripture according to territorial categories that just don’t work in view of the New Testament. Sorry, Holy Post: I kind of like your stuff otherwise, but this is a bad framing of the issue.