How do we balance ‘love your neighbour’ with controlling borders?

Question 12048.

Every time border control comes up in conversation at church, somebody quotes the good Samaritan and somebody else quotes Nehemiah building a wall, and both of them think the argument is now over. It never is. This is one of those questions where the Bible has a great deal to say and almost none of it fits neatly into a party manifesto.

So let me try to hold two things together rather than pick one and shout about it, because I think Scripture holds them together and I think most Christians privately do too.

Why border control and neighbour love feel like opposites

The tension is real and pretending otherwise is dishonest. Love your neighbour as yourself is not a suggestion, and Jesus deliberately made the neighbour in His parable a foreigner of the wrong sort, someone His hearers would have crossed the road to avoid. Meanwhile border control is about limits, about saying no to some people, and saying no rarely feels like love.

What makes it worse is that the two duties often sit with different people. The Christian who houses a refugee is not the Christian who has to decide how many can be housed. Compassion is personal and immediate; policy is impersonal and cumulative. My answer on whether Christians should be involved in politics and my answer on Christian ethics approach the same ground from two directions. Confusing the two produces a great deal of bad argument in both directions, so that a question about border control turns into a test of whether you have a heart.

I want to suggest that the New Testament gives me my duty and Romans 13 gives the state its duty, and that these are genuinely different jobs rather than rival positions.

What the Old Testament says about the sojourner

Israel was told repeatedly to love the sojourner, the ger, because they had been sojourners in Egypt. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, Leviticus 19:34. That is not a marginal verse. The command appears more often than the command to love your neighbour.

Notice, though, what the sojourner was expected to do. He lived under Israel’s law, kept the sabbath, abstained from the practices Israel abstained from, and could be circumcised and eat the Passover if he chose to join the covenant community. Welcome was generous and it was not unconditional. Israel also had borders, defined by God, and defended them.

Israel was a theocratic nation under a covenant no modern country shares, so I do not lift these statutes directly into British law. What they do reveal is the character of God, and God’s heart towards the vulnerable outsider is not in any doubt. Any Christian argument for border control that cannot say that sentence without flinching has already gone wrong.

What Romans 13 gives the state

Paul says the civil authority is God’s servant for your good, bearing the sword to restrain the wrongdoer, Romans 13:4. Protecting citizens, maintaining order and controlling who enters the territory fall naturally within that remit. A government with no border control is not being generous, it has abandoned part of its commission.

That gives me the freedom to say something many Christians feel but hesitate to say aloud. Supporting border control is not, in itself, unloving. A nation is not a household and its resources, housing, schools and hospitals are finite. Wisdom about limits is part of governing well.

It also cuts the other way. The same passage that authorises the sword restrains it. A government that treats human beings as a problem to be processed rather than as people made in God’s image has exceeded its brief, and Christians should say so loudly. My answer on a Christian view of immigration develops the wider picture.

The image of God does not stop at a frontier

Whatever policy I favour, the person affected by it bears the image of God. That is the non-negotiable, and it is the point at which a lot of Christian conversation about migration quietly goes rotten. You can argue for firm limits without ever using the language of infestation, invasion or vermin, and if you cannot, the problem is not political.

I have noticed that the tone of a Christian’s speech about migrants is usually a better indicator of his spiritual health than the policy he supports. Two believers can hold the same view on numbers and sound entirely different, one grieving that limits are necessary and the other enjoying them.

Human dignity is not conferred by paperwork. The man whose claim is refused is still someone for whom Christ died, and he is entitled to be treated with courtesy, honesty and speed.

Where the church’s duty is not the state’s

Here is the distinction that unlocks the question for me. The state is charged with justice and order. The church is charged with mercy and witness, and the church’s duty is not conditional on the state’s decisions. If a family arrives in my town, my congregation’s obligation to love them does not depend on whether we approved of the policy that let them in.

That has practical teeth. It means English classes, lifts to appointments, a meal, a friendship, a Bible in their own language. It means the church being the place where an asylum seeker is known by name rather than by case number. Some of the most fruitful evangelism in Britain today is happening exactly here, among people who arrived from countries where the gospel is illegal.

It also means the church does not need to wait for a political consensus before acting. I have watched congregations argue about border control for months while doing nothing at all for the family two streets away.

Honest disagreement among believers

Christians land in different places on this and I am not going to pretend that one position is obviously the faithful one. Some argue that generous admission best reflects God’s welcome and that wealthy nations have obligations arising from history and from need. Others argue that a government’s first duty is to those already within its care, particularly the poorest, and that rapid change strains the very communities least able to absorb it.

Both arguments contain truth and both can be held by people who love the Lord. What neither can do is claim a direct biblical mandate for a specific number, because Scripture does not give one. This belongs among the matters of wisdom rather than the matters of doctrine, and border control should be discussed accordingly.

What is not open to debate is the treatment of people already here, the keeping of promises, and the refusal to lie about either the benefits or the costs of migration. Truthfulness is a Christian obligation even in politics, which is a sentence that dates badly the moment you write it.

Fear, and where it comes from

Much of the heat in this debate is fear, and fear is worth naming. People fear that the place they grew up in is disappearing, that they will be strangers where they were once at home. That grief deserves better than being dismissed as bigotry, and churches that dismiss it lose the very people they should be pastoring.

At the same time, fear makes a poor legislator. It exaggerates, it dehumanises and it always wants more control than it needs. The believer has a settled hope which frees him to think clearly about border control rather than reactively, because his security was never located in a nation’s demography in the first place.

Perfect love casts out fear, 1 John 4:18. That verse is about the day of judgement, but its logic reaches into a great deal of our politics.

One more thing needs saying about honesty in this debate. Christians should be willing to name costs and benefits accurately rather than selecting whichever facts support the conclusion they already hold. Migration has brought this country doctors, nurses, entrepreneurs, pastors and neighbours I would not want to be without. It has also placed real strain on housing and services in particular places, and the people who feel that strain most are rarely the people writing the newspaper columns about it.

Holding both of those sentences at once is not fence-sitting, and it is the only honest starting point for a Christian argument about border control. It is the beginning of a Christian mind on the subject, and it is the only footing from which a believer can speak into the argument without becoming a partisan first and a disciple second.

So, now what?

Decide what you actually believe about border control and be able to give a reason for it that a non-Christian would recognise as thoughtful rather than tribal. Then hold it as a matter of wisdom, not as a badge of faithfulness, and stop treating brothers who differ as though they had denied the resurrection.

More importantly, do something local this month. Find out whether there are asylum seekers or new arrivals near your church and go and meet one. It is remarkable how quickly abstractions become people, and how quickly people change the way we argue.

If the Lord has brought the nations to our doorstep, is our first instinct to count them or to welcome them?

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

Leviticus 19:34, ESV