Blocking Syrian refugees denies religious responsibility to help

Onissues like birth control, abortion and gay marriage, conservative politicians routinely charge into the fray like moral warriors, vowing to protect the sacred constitutional right to religious liberty.

Hobby Lobby. Kim Davis. They got your back.

But when it comes to a basic tenet of Christianity — caring for the stranger — the warriors have turned their swords against Scripture.

Governors in red states, including our own Greg Abbott, stomped all over religious rights last week as they sought to block faith-based organizations and other nonprofits from resettling Syrian refugees in the United States.

Abbott said Texas would not accept the refugees and, under his direction, Texas Health and Human Services Commissioner Chris Traylor instructed nonprofit resettlement agencies to follow suit.

Under veto threat, the U.S. House of Representatives, including many Democrats, also voted to make acceptance of Syrian refugees all but impossible.

Bible lessons — about the Good Samaritan, the sheep and the goats, even the Christmas story — apparently became inconvenient truths.

The political actions have shocked Christian leaders and groups whose ministries are heavily involved in resettlement.

“It is morally irresponsible for political leaders to lead with fear and misinformation,” read an op-ed signed by eight local faith leaders, including the bishops of the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, and the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “… Recent statements by political leaders are disappointing and appeal more to our base selves than to our more worthy selves. We expect our leaders to shepherd us on a higher plane.”

Bee Moorhead, executive director of Texas Interfaith Center for Public Policy/Texas Impact,

wrote back the HHSC commissioner, expressing “shock and dismay” at his demands.

Moorehead said Abbott and other governors seem to be trying to pressure faith communities into “falling in line with a secular, fear-based agenda.”

“Serving strangers in need is a widely held religious value — even when it’s risky,” she said.

Yes, and in the grand scheme of things, heavily vetted Syrian refugees aren’t risky.

No Syrians and no refugees were involved in the terror attacks on Paris. It has been speculated, but not confirmed, that one of the attackers may have entered France as a fake refugee.

Of the 4 million Syrians whohave fled their country, the United States plans to accept only 10,000 over the coming year. Of those already accepted, officials report half are children; only 2 percent are males of combat age. Each was painstakingly screened by the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department and other agencies, who checked biometric data and other information against security databases. The process averages two years.

“The refugee resettlement program is the least likely avenue for a terrorist to choose” as a way to enter the United States, said Kathleen Newland, senior fellow and co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute.

In an online post last week, Bishop Mike Rinehart, the Lutheran representative in the op-ed, noted that Syrians have been bombed, tortured and traumatized.

“To close the door on resettling Syrian refugees would be signing a death warrant for thousands of families fleeing for their lives,” he wrote. “Are we prepared to say, as we approach the Christmas season, that there is no room in the inn?”

He serves on the board of the second largest resettler of refugees in the United States, the U.S. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. The group, he says, endured the same concerns and fears when it resettled Germans in the Nazi era.

In response to suggestions by Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz that the U.S. consider taking only Christian Syrians, Rinehart didn’t hesitate.

“We believe in serving by need and not by creed,” he said.

Suzii Paynter, executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an Atlanta-based organization of 1,800 churches that commissions global missions in 30 countries, said she found it “unbelievable” that political leaders would seize on the refugee system as vulnerable to terrorism.

“It’s one of the most lawful and regulated aspects of immigration in the United States,” she said.

Paynter’s group has missionaries who serve Syrian refugees every day in Lebanon.

“They are called by God to love these refugees,” she said. “They learn their language, their culture, their celebrations; they learn to cook their food as acts of compassion and solidarity and helping them move out of displacement to accommodation to a new place.”

She frowned on the idea of a religious test for refugees.

“I definitely think we should keep out all the terrorists,” Paynter said. “Let’s test for that.”

Rather than cowering behind discriminatory policies, Paynter said people of faith living in a sinful world should turn to God for strength.

“Our Christian call is to live in that tension, with the ultimate knowledge that God’s plan for us is not to be a fearful and warring world but to live in the vi- sion of the kingdom of God, which is the lion shall lie down with the lamb.”

On this road to Jericho, we Americans have a choice to make. Will we walk past the Syrians?

Or will we be the Samaritan?

As Jesus said after the telling of that parable, “Go and do likewise.”