5 Reasons Christians Don't Like to Oppose Immigration

A Plea for Clearer Thinking and Bolder Speaking

Does it matter how Christians think about the western immigration crisis?

It wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t think much about mass immigration from a Christian perspective. This is not because I wasn’t aware of it, nor even that I was for it. Like many British people, I basically held a quiet disagreement with it, and as a Christian, due in part to the remnants of pietism, I was led to think it would be “inappropriate” to talk too much about something that was not explicitly tied to the Gospel.

That’s why, a couple of years ago, when Andy Bannister, my co-podcaster for Pod of the Gaps, suggested we do an episode on “What’s Gone Wrong With Immigration?”, I wasn’t too sure at first, and took some persuading. Is this really something the Church ought to talk about, I wondered? Do we really want pastors preaching about it? Wouldn’t we be overstepping our own Christian “boundaries” by talking too much about it when there are already so many issues we get in trouble for speaking about?

These are not invalid questions, but they ultimately belong to an approach to mission which stops short of actually wanting society to change for the better. If these are issues that affect people in your nation, such people are going to find voices to speak into it anyway. Why shouldn’t those people be Christians?

We recently followed up with a second episode on the topic, where we talked a bit more about the problem of how Christians end up being cow-towed into not speaking about immigration, despite the glaringly obvious facts. Such facts include that, at the going rate, in a few decades’ time we will need another fifteen Birminghams in England in order to accommodate all the new arrivals, most of whom will not share the values of the “host” culture. Should Christians not care what will happen to England if/when that happened?

Through That Good Fight I have also discussed the issue a lot more over the last year, both on the podcast (with Nathan Paylor) and on this very Substack. One of the key ideas I’ve been critiquing a lot over the year has been multiculturalism, that oft-misunderstood term which sounds like what God is doing through the Church (bringing together different kinds of people from every tribe and tongue) but is actually a very secular ideology that undermines the Church in and through the undermining of Christian nations. For newer readers, here’s a selection of such pieces:

• Multiculturalism and Rootlessness: Liberal Ideology, Islamism, and Christianity

• Why Multiculturalism is a Very Bad Idea

• The Cacophony of Western Guilt: The British Museum, Conservation, and the Noose of Imperial Penance

• Why Are British Evangelicals So Anti-Right-Wing?

• Soft Jihad and Multicultural Naïveté: On Islamic Cultural Conquest I

• Soft Jihad and Absent Knights: On Islamic Cultural Conquest III

• Woke Right, Far Right, and Christian Nationalism

• Multiculturalism, Nation, and Church: Why Christians Should Care about the Cultural Surrender of Britain

• The Mission of Islam: Why Muslims Are in the West and Why Multiculturalism Will Both Win and Lose

When you speak and write about an issue a number of times, connection points forge which soon become “obvious” to you. But it’s easy to forget that this may not be the case for those being presented with your conclusions for the first time, for which they may have no existing frame of reference other than: “We’re just not allowed to think (or talk) about that like that.”

This is why I am not all that surprised when Christians who might agree with me on many other issues (e.g. Biblical authority, anti-LGBT+, pro-evangelism, etc.) may still be strongly opposed to a more Right-leaning stance against immigration and multiculturalism. Such default opposition is one of the deeper blind spots of contemporary evangelicalism, though it no doubt also rears its head within other streams of the Church too.

Objections to Objections to Immigration

One online detractor recently unleashed a couple of “essays” upon me in comment thread in response to one of the aforementioned podcasts on immigration. The particulars of his response exemplified many of the familiar assumptions and objections one often finds among many Christians today, so I shall refer to all five of them below as “emblematic” of a fairly common attitude one may likely hear in everyday conversation on immigration by Christians.

1. “Putting Nationalism Above the Gospel”

Due to the fact that, in the West, Christians have long been taught to be, a.) ashamed of our culture and nation, and b.) scared away from “getting too political”, many Christians have been highly susceptible to the drip-feed of multicultural ideology. This is another instance of such Christians being more effectively engaged by the culture rather than engaging the culture for Christ.

In time, such indoctrination will inevitably produce knee-jerk responses to anything that sounds too “nationalistic”, with the immediate assumption that one will idolise one’s nation above God Himself and/or turn into a pop-up Nazi at the drop of a hat. As soon as a patriot raises a flag, it’s as though they are simultaneously desecrating the flag of the Gospel:

“As for Christians the moment that one puts nationalism before the Gospel is the point at which one loses interest, and the moment that sites and podcasts like these start getting into bed with right wing political rhetoric which estranged us from many who would be open to the gospel, I question the mission of such people.”

If someone does happen to “put nationalism before the Gospel,” that would indeed be a problem. But why make that assumption at the outset? Why not just challenge idolatry when it actually appears, rather than cutting off the large swathes of the population who do still happen to love their country? Is there something especially onerous about caring for the health and heritage of one’s country that requires some kind of special insurance against compromise?

Arguably, it was the Church’s compromise with secular liberal individualism and globalism (contra patriotism or nationalism) which rendered the Church so impotent to speak into the present moment, where there has been undoubtedly a new awakening to national and/or patriotic fervour. Why do we let the shadows of the last century’s misdirected nationalism(s) haunt us so severely?

2. “Replacing Mission with Right-Wing Politics”

Another common objection is closely related, but slightly broader than the first. Referring to people like me, my representative detractor highlighted “those who court the right wing politically…playing into underlying beliefs about the value of their culture above others, and has little to do with the gospel, but mere politics.”

This is so often the way modern evangelical opinion wanders. The left-wing secularist norms imbibed over time by many Christians have been hugely detrimental upon Christian mission, but these go largely unacknowledged. Yet as soon as someone sounds explicitly right-wing in any of their political expressions, it is assumed that all hell has broken loose and the Gospel has been abandoned to “mere politics”. This assumes that the Gospel can and should never take on any particular political expression, as though the effects of the Gospel are never allowed to look like something in socio-political life. No one actually believes that, of course, but they like to sound like it whenever they critique “Right wing” political expressions which may cohere with Biblical truth.

The familiar refrain continues:

“If as Christians we cannot accept that God's kingdom and mission comes first the church itself becomes just another political movement no better than the many ‘progressives’ that have captured many churches and are doing the same.”

As with the fear about nationalistic idolatry, anything that is also supported by “right wing” types is almost always imagined by such Christians in terms of having been “captured” by a worldly ideology. This itself is a direct product of their passive submissiveness to secular cultural norms whereby a socially liberal political vision dominates how they interpret the political spectrum. Even among those who stand on conservative principles in other areas, a unique anxiety seems to emerge around anything too far to their Right, which is always seen as more obviously dangerous than whatever may lie to their further left.

As I noted in an article from earlier this year called “On Refusing to Reach the Right,” the need of the hour is not about compromising with the political Right; it’s about knowing the truth, knowing the times, and being prepared to speak and act accordingly when the time comes:

“We should come out to fight wherever there is compromise, wherever there is truth to be told, especially when and where it really needs to be told. Christians should not be too proud to reach the deplorable Right, nor to give praise where virtue or nobility may be found (cf. Phil. 4:8).

The Right will need chastising too, just as the Left do. But in a time in which Christian virtues seem to have been bent every which way in order to fit the socio-political assumptions of the Left, British Christians should not be surprised to see a sustained recovery of Christian virtues and issues in the coming years which are more clearly identifiable with the Right.

They need not clutch their handbags and lament over this. They should instead continue to pray in faith at what God may be doing, and continue to read their Bibles “to see if these things are so” (Acts 17:11).”

For those who do not realise that the “Centre” (or the “I’m-neither-Left-nor-Right”) position in recent years has been disproportionately favourable to Leftist advances, it is difficult for them to imitate those Bereans who consulted what the Bible really says about what should (or should not) outrage them.

3. “Generalising or Demonising People Groups”

A third objection is also somewhat related to the first two. At the heart of why some Christians find it difficult to agree with something said by someone too far to their right is the concern that they might be sponsoring unpalatable ways of speaking about others which they find uncomfortable, immoral, uncompassionate, and thus unchristian.

Leaving aside claims of, say, racist speech (which is far less frequent among the serious Right than is hysterically imagined), the particular discomfort some Christians feel is in making generalisations about [im]migrants, as if they are lesser people about whom God does not care.

“Broad brushing all immigrants as is commonly done simply fails in the gospel’s call to all tribes and nations and demonises people God is calling to himself.”

The irony is, of course, that such objections usually tend to portray a very negative view of right-wing people, devoid of the very empathy they claim is lacking from that very group. Where they claim that the right-wing person broad-brushes all immigrants as evil (usually inaccurately), they seem happy to imply—via broad-brush—that all right wing people who agree on the problems of immigration, are bigots or morons.

It should be noted that it’s not actually unbiblical to make generalisations about groups of people in some contexts. This even includes generalisations which might be interpreted by some as “de-humanising,” such as Paul’s infamous agreement with the comment about the Cretans as being “beasts” (Titus 1:12). The special concern in our time against such rhetoric is the result of the complex philosophical and political inheritance of the twentieth century. This is why many people are especially wary to not even appear to generalise people too broadly in ways previous eras of human history did not think twice about.

It’s also true, however, that at least some of the pro-immigration instinct among Christians is related to explicit Biblical calls to welcome the stranger, the sojourner, the neighbour, and the enemy (e.g. Ex. 23:9; Lev. 19:33-34; Prov. 5:10; Matt. 25:35; Rom. 15:7). These should not be ignored. It is indeed God’s heart to welcome outsiders. We ourselves were all once outsiders to God’s kingdom, “alienated” from Him (Col. 1:21). There really could be a danger among those so hardened by the absurd overreaches of liberalism that they no longer know how to show love and compassion for the stranger in front of them.

But loving the stranger in front of you does not automatically mean you should not challenge their right to be in front of you. Stopping people coming on boats to Britain via France, for example, is about illegal immigration from one safe country to another. It should not even be controversial to challenge this. If you have a lock on the front door of your house, it means you are already not in favour of illegal “immigration” into your house and are not wanting to be “welcoming” to anyone who decides to wander and/or break in. So too with the nation.

The problem is not with some amorphous always-evil group known as “immigrants”. Those who come to Britain are merely taking advantage of the ideologies and policies which dupe nations like Britain into tolerating both illegal immigration and unsustainable levels of legal immigration. If Christians truly love their neighbour, they should not support such socially disruptive levels of immigration, not only for the sake of their own nation but also for those nations from which such people are so willing to migrate rather than seeking to stay and improve, generation upon generation. What about the Albanians stuck back home in Albania, the ones you don’t see? With so many able-bodied young men leaving, are they and their societies not worse off than those who were able to pay thousands of pounds to a trafficker in order to get across the English Channel?

4. “Enabling Long-Term Suppression of Religious Freedom”

Another common reason to challenge immigration is not only the “quantity” of immigrants but also the “quality”. By this, I mean the kind of immigrants, most of whom will be Muslims who—whether they know it or not—form part of a longer term “mission” of Islamisation in Britain. Those who reject pushback against immigration (naively seeing illegal immigrants as would-be asylum seekers) worry that this would undermine the human rights of such people to seek asylum, thus discriminating against their religious belief.

Their point is not so much to support Islam necessarily, but to support religious freedom in general. My emblematic detractor made the point that “if the rights under the equality act are subverted in an attempt to curb Islam, that two-edged sword will be used on Christians.” The assumption here is that Christians who oppose immigration are appealing to the powers of the secular government to suppress the spread of Islam, blissfully unaware that such powers would eventually be turned on Christians too.

What country are such Christians living in? Or rather: what planet are they living on? The idea that Christians on the Right are advocating a use of secular powers to limit Islamic freedom only for that to one day be turned on them is bizarrely short-sighted. Can they not see that Christian freedoms are already being limited by secular government, whereas Islamic freedoms are not? Christians who oppose immigration are not appealing to “secular” norms of religious freedom but to the historic Christian foundations of the nation, with the hope of reviving such foundations into life again. This is the only long-term hope for the nation.

My detractor even made the point that Christians need Muslims in order to help us defend our religious rights, saying: “It is in fact the impact of the voice of Muslims to follow their religion that defends the rights of Christians to follow theirs.” On the contrary, the impetus to religious freedom in Britain did not come from Islam, nor is it maintained by Islam. It came from Christianity, and is maintained by the (fast dissolving) remnants of Christian salt and light which were sown into this nation’s history, laws, and culture.

If Islam does become the socio-political majority in the nation one day, it will not actively promote Christian freedom, not least if Christians were actively seeking to convert Muslims. As in many Islamic nations around the world, such conversions will be opposed. It may seem to some that we have a nice polite equilibrium of freedom right now, but it certainly won’t stay that way if and when Islam’s foothold is further strengthened, not least by the multiple hundreds of thousands of new recruits to the cause arriving in Britain year on year.

The only way to safeguard religious freedom in the nation is if Christianity is re-established as the nation’s norm. This means changing hearts and minds, yes, but also establishing and enforcing laws. Quantities of people who believe similar things really does make a difference, not least in a democracy. Muslims know this and hence have made vast political gains in recent years by voting en masse in blocs. Christians have not done this, mainly because we have been so politically secularized for so long that many Christians no longer believe it's even a good thing for a nation to be “Christian”.

5. “Neglecting Opportunities for Migrant Evangelism”

One of the most common evangelical points one hears in favour of mass immigration (or in rejection of those who are not in favour of it) pertains to evangelism:

“Have you considered that the sovereign God himself might have a hand in sending people over here and it might be to hear the gospel?”

As I noted in one of the podcasts, if the common evangelical refrain that mass uncontrolled immigration presents a gospel opportunity, how are we doing with the existing Muslim communities (over four million people) who are already here? Do we need close to another million new people every year in order to evangelise such communities? What about the swathes of unevangelised British people we are neglecting as a result?

We absolutely should endeavour to reach all people with the Gospel, irrespective of their political status. But why can't we do that whilst also challenging the illegal behaviour and undermining of religious cultural values in our nation? If there was a prison outbreak, for example, one could potentially see this as yet another “opportunity” to convert those escapee prisoners to Christ. But could you not also want to see them put back in their proper place, lest they become a significant threat to society?

Immigrants are not all de facto criminals obviously. Some are, even disproportionately so, including all who arrive illegally. But even if many immigrants are here benignly seeking little more than a better life for them and their family, can it really be denied that mass uncontrolled immigration on the scale we’re now seeing does not constitute a long-term threat to our societies at a fundamental level?

God is indeed sovereign. But I’m often dubious when his sovereignty is invoked as a reason not to do anything about a very real and present danger, when we would probably never apply the same point to other scenarios. I don’t recall many left-leaning Christians responding to the invasion of Ukraine by saying: “Well, God is sovereign… maybe God wants Russia to have Ukraine for His greater purposes…?” Yet when it comes the longer-term threat posed by mass immigration to the West, such apathetic theological reasoning is surprisingly common. Those who want to defend their nation from cultural overhaul are routinely seen as unsavoury people who ought to care less about preserving their national identity.

Rather than saying that God is bringing illegal and unsustainable immigration to our nations in order that we might evangelise some of them (when we've hardly evangelised those who are already here), we could just as easily say His purpose is to wake Christians up to the need to care about their national identity and heritage. Rather than saying nothing about mass immigration in the hopes of reaching more immigrants, why not seek to reach fellow patriots (rather than condemning them for being patriots) at just the time they appear to be seeking Christianity?

This is why immigration really is an important issue for Christians to think clearly and speak loudly about today. The cultural heritage we are seeking to defend within western nations is explicitly Christian. Many people are only just waking up to what life might look like without it.