A Haka in Parliament, Immorality in Immigration Imprisonment, the Honesty We Owe Black Students
Plus, evangelizing Christian Nationalists?
Hi everyone,
Our monthly subscriber chat is tomorrow! The registration link is at the bottom of this email. Become a paid Subscriber and join us! We’ll be taking your questions, and we already have some good questions on how to regulate yourself when talking to people you strongly disagree with, how the Dems lost, and more!
Our highlights this week include:
- The Immorality of Our Immigration System
- A Story about Cultural Belonging, and also soup
- What we owe Black college students
- The Maori resist racist laws in New Zealand
- Sy keeps us grounded with a webinar on how to help Christian Nationalists follow Jesus
- And a preview of tomorrow’s Shake the Dust season finale
Sy’s Recommendations
The Immorality of Our Immigration System
I recently read an op-ed by a Cambodian immigrant who is currently in ICE detention. Sereyrath Van was born in an IDP camp in Thailand because his parents fled the Khmer Rouge. He moved to the US when he was four. After serving five years in prison for a non-violent drug offense, he’s facing deportation to Cambodia, though he has never been there. ICE has released and subsequently re-detained him in a private detention center where prisoners face significant violence and dehumanization. The detainees don’t have the legal rights of citizenship or the Constitution’s protections for criminal defendants. Plus, many speak no English and the overwhelming majority have no access to lawyers. He discusses how the trauma and injustice of the criminal and immigration legal systems are one and the same; and private corporations profit mightily off both. And now, immigration detention is likely to become significantly more severe under Trump. There is a gap in some people’s moral thinking when it comes to immigration. We too often believe deportation is basically acceptable for people who didn’t follow the legal path to enter or remain in this country. But the uncritical conflation of legislative distinctions with the boundaries of our moral responsibility to immigrants is lazy, probably reflects some idolatry of the American government, and makes no sense in light of scripture. As followers of Jesus, we don’t get to dismiss the concerns of people because they are not citizens of our nation. We cannot fail to assess the justness of our immigration laws or to take into account the factors causing people to migrate (many of which you will find are largely our country’s fault if you look into it). This article is a great place to start thinking in the right direction.
A Story of Cultural Belonging, and Soup
It’s not often I recommend an article about food here. But Longreads recently published a really well-written piece partly about the North African and Middle Eastern dish Mulukhiyah, a seasoned and spicey broth made from a kind of jute plant. But it’s also largely about the often frayed and confusing identity questions that arise from living as part of a diaspora. The writer, Kristina Kasparian, is an Armenian woman whose family first moved to Egypt, and then Canada. Mulukhiyah is not Armenian. Her family picked it up in Egypt and made it an essential part of their home lives. Kasparian vividly communicates the many feelings making and eating the dish unearths in her and those around her. From nostalgia for childhood feelings of safety among family, to guilt over not learning how to make the soup properly, to anxiety about loving another culture’s food more than their own, and much more. Kasparian is one of those writers who can drop you into a completely unfamiliar setting, orient you, and give you a clear picture of a highly specific experience in order to communicate something universal. In this case, something about the search for belonging and home. Don’t miss this one.
Jonathan’s Recommendations
Campus Ministries Owe Black Students Transparency
Black students around the country received absurd, racist text messages after Trump’s reelection. Theologian and author of the second book we published, Tamice Spencer-Helms, wrote a powerful essay exhorting campus ministries to love and serve their Black students well in this moment. The problem she says is that many ministries have financial incentives to do the opposite. Individual donors sustain most campus ministries. Sometimes, those donors give if the organization does what it says it will do. Sometimes support is more complex, implicitly or explicitly conditioned on ministries abandoning their missions to enact the will of the donors. Often conservative and White donors hold different views than those the organization serves. Acknowledging the racism of the MAGA movement at all, let alone caring for its victims, will anger a lot of donors. Spencer-Helms writes with nuance, honesty, and prophetic clarity about the urgency and necessity of being open with the people ministries serve about where financial support comes from and how that impacts ministry work.
The Maori Resist Racist Laws in New Zealand
The recently-elected conservative government of New Zealand introduced a bill to change the existing interpretations of the country’s founding treaty between the British and the indigenous Māori people. The bill is unlikely to pass, but has still sparked protests from Maori around the country who see the bill as one in a line of recent efforts undermining their sovereignty and civil rights. A video went viral of the youngest Member of Parliament, the 22-year-old Maori Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke leading the Haka, a Maori dance, interrupting the vote on the bill. The powerful act of resistance to continued settler colonialism resonated with people around the world. But Parliament briefly suspended her and is considering further discipline. In addition to the helpful explainer article linked above, this video from a New Zealand news station explains the historical context of the bill: the exploitation, abuse, violence and land theft that preceded and followed the signing of the treaty. Further context is that the rightward shift of the country as a backlash against the progressive government of Jacinda Ardern. The last national election yielded the most conservative government in recent history. The new coalition, which does not include the Maori Party or its priorities, is rolling back decades of hard-one policies. Settler colonialism is not a process that starts and stops. People who continuously decide to be complicit in domination and hierarchy keep it in place. I pray for peace and justice in New Zealand. Jesus, may it be so.
- Read about the bill and the protests
Staying Grounded with Sy
On Tuesday, Jonathan’s team at Intervarsity is leading a Zoom webinar with Caleb Campbell, a pastor and author, on being a missionary to the Christian nationalists in your communities, churches, and families. Campbell has written a book on the subject distinguishing those trying to dissuade Christian Nationalists the way Jesus does versus the way colonizers do. The event promises to be helpful to those of you looking for ways to make a difference in your relationships with people who find Whiteness and nationalism more attractive than the way of Jesus. And it’s just in time for your annual conversations with those proverbial Thanksgiving uncles. I’ll be there, and I hope you join us.
Shake the Dust Preview
Tomorrow is our season finale! Hear us answer some listener questions and give our ongoing thoughts about analysis we’re hearing on the election results, and how the church can and can’t fight anti-Blackness. We also share what will be going on with the podcast in between seasons, so don’t miss this one!
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