The exception to MAGA's religious liberty commitments

Brown people. The exception is brown people.

Apologies to my Christian friends for obliterating nuance, but: When conservatives talk about “religious liberty” what they often mean is “white Christian privilege.”

The notion really solidified for me a few decades ago, when conservatives made a big stink about the refusal of some Muslim cabbies in Minnesota to carry passengers who were openly transporting alcohol with them. At the very same time, a lot of those same conservatives — and their allies certainly — were lobbying hard for “conscience” protections for pharmacists who didn’t want to dispense birth control medications.

Liberty for me, but not for thee. So it goes.

Trump 2.0 has made a big show of “eradicating anti-Christian bias” from government and public institutions. But the administration is plainly setting the table — again — to privilege a particular kind of Christian viewpoint, or (as they tend to say) a “Judeo-Christian ethic.”

Openly so. “They say ‘separation between church and state,’” Trump said earlier this month. “I said, all right, let’s forget about that for one time.”

There is an exception to this: When Christians want to help immigrants.

Suddenly, the rules become very important.

“Sanctuary churches undermine our nation,” Timon Cline writes at The Claremont Institute newsletter The American Mind.

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“Sanctuary churches,” of course, are churches that aid and protect immigrants to America. Sometimes it means providing food and water at locations in border regions so that migrants don’t die coming into the country¹. Other times it can mean physically harboring a migrant who doesn’t want to leave.

The Trump Administration has already made it clear it doesn’t care much for the religious liberty of those churches. One of its first moves was to give ICE agents explicit permission to make migrant arrests at churches.

The folks who run those churches, for what it’s worth, see providing that harbor as part of their purpose. “It’s part of our religious mission to reach out and provide a place of safety to new arrivals and other people, regardless of their status,” one pastor told AP in January.

Makes sense to me.

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But not to Cline.

That churches are being used to harbor criminals is no defense against enforcement. That churches are aiding and abetting lawbreaking is a blight on Christianity, which Tertullian defended on the basis that its adherents were law-abiding, faithful citizens. Christians, whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant, have long recognized the temporal sovereignty of secular or civil government. When it comes to things concerning safety, security, and law and order, there is no basis for resisting civil power, which has been given the sword so that citizens may live quiet and peaceable lives.

I prefer Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking on the matter, in his famous letter to the clergymen of Birmingham:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break law. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just laws and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

One cannot simply outsource one’s conscience — and its influence on one’s actions — just because the government says so.

Is American immigration law unjust? That’s a trickier question, admittedly. But as King says: “There are some instances when a law is just on its face but unjust in its application.”

The Trump Administration is deporting or attempting to deport the citizens of “shithole countries” to places like El Salvador, Libya and South Sudan — notoriously dangerous places — even though the people it is trying to deport mostly don’t come from those places. Meanwhile, it welcomes white South Africans fleeing a made-up “genocide.”

Sounds unjust to me.

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The point here, though, is that the MAGA right expects the U.S. government to defer to Christian sensibilities, except when those sensibilities work for the protection of brown people.

Which is also an “unjust application” of the law, it would seem.

King again:

An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow that it is willing to follow itself.

That’s clearly not the Trump Administration’s approach. The law? It’s for other people. And if that doesn’t exempt the rest of us from obeying the law, it does suggest that maybe we don’t owe automatic deference to the way it chooses to enforce the law.

We might even choose to provide sanctuary.

Cline:

DHS’s new policy is a long overdue corrective in the interest of safeguarding U.S. sovereignty. The department is right to say that the new policy “empowers” federal agents “to protect Americans” from the “invasion” of the southern border by “criminal aliens.” This is, in fact, the situation we are facing. And religious liberty must be tempered by due regard to this urgency.

Religious liberty is essential. Except this time, when it means that other people — brown people, foreign people, people who don’t look like us — might receive protections. It was ever thus.

1. This seems like a very Jesus thing to do, right?