Christian leaders support refugees

Churches reject GOP’s stance on resettlement

Arguing that “Jesus was a refugee,” local, state and national Christian leaders are taking aim at proposals by Republican presidential hopefuls U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush that Christians rather than Muslims fleeing the war-torn Middle East be given preference for resettlement in the United States.

The clerical comments came as the U.S. House of Representatives voted to “pause” President Barack Obama’s plan to next year admit 10,000 Syrian refugees into the U.S. Cruz, a second-generation Cuban-American and member of Houston’s First Baptist Church, has said that allowing Muslim refugees to enter the country is “nothing short of lunacy.” Bush, an Episcopalian-turned-Catholic, has called for focusing help on Christian refugees because “no Christian is a terrorist... they’re persecuted.”

The superheated, preelection year rhetoric blossomed as the world grappled with ISIS strikes

in Paris that killed at least 129 people and official confirmation that a Russian passenger jet leaving Egypt was downed by an explosive device. Fueling the concern were reports that at least one of the terrorists blamed for the Paris killings entered France as an ostensible refugee. More than 30 U.S. governors, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, want to stop all Syrian immigration to their states.

Last week, the National Council of Churches called on the United States government to open its borders to 100,000 Syrian refugees in the coming fiscal year, noting the growing crisis as Syrian Christians and Muslims are driven from their homes. “This refugee crisis was years in the making,” the group said. “It is now unfolding before our eyes. We cannot let it continue.”

“Every person who is a (presidential) candidate is a leader of this country,” said Rebekah Miles, ethics and practical theology professor at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology. “You would think one of their responsibilities would be to talk sense, to be moderate in a helpful way when everyone else is losing their heads. But instead of calming, they’re inciting. They just want to get their base going. In the end, I don’t think you can win an election with that kind of rhetoric.”

Miles said it is the “clear responsibility of religious leaders of all faiths to be willing to openly and publicly push back against hate mongers or just against hate.” Understanding evil

Obama has dismissed Cruz’s plan to introduce legislation to bar admission of Muslim refugees as “not American.” “We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” he said. Cruz, who claims to have found God at Houston’s Clay Road Baptist Church, countered that his proposal wasn’t a “religious test.” “It is an understanding of the nature of the evil we face,” he said.

Advocates for the refugees said those fleeing Middle East terror undergo a stringent screening process that can delay admission to the U.S. by up to 24 months. Houston is one of the nation’s leading sites for refugee resettlement, although relatively few Syrians have been brought here. About 1,700 Syrians have been resettled in the U.S. in the past year, about 90 in Houston.

Zach Dawes Jr., managing editor of the Nashville, Tenn.-based Baptist Center for Ethics’ Web site, EthicsDaily.com, said the Bible “emphasizes showing compassion for immigrants ... based on the Hebrew people’s history and experience of being immigrants. ... We can’t respect and uphold human rights of immigrants and somehow exclude religious freedom. We can’t disqualify refugees on the basis of religious traditions.”

Still, he added, urging a balance between refugee rights and national security, “That doesn’t mean that the U.S. or any nation needs to take an open-border approach.” The Bible, he said, “doesn’t provide specific guidance on public policy decisions, and Christians clearly can disagree on those policy questions.”

Deacon Sam Dunning, director of the Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston’s Office of Justice and Peace, said he doesn’t question the motives of politicians reluctant to admit Muslim refugees. “I can’t speak to those,” he said. But he worries that a “narrative pitting an overwhelmingly Christian country against a sizeable segment of Muslim society” will “open a kind of international rancor deeper than already exists.”

The fate of “10,000 people, a large proportion of them women and children, speaks to our hearts as a people of faith, not only Catholics, but across the religious spectrum,” he said.

The Rev. Jennifer Butler, a Presbyterian minister who heads the New York City-based religious social advocacy organization, Faith in Public Life, labeled the stances of Cruz and Bush “very un-Christian.”

“It was no mistake that God chose to come into the world as a child with no place to rest his head, that his family had to flee Bethlehem for Egypt,” she said. ‘Pandering to fear’

Unfortunately, she added, “I think there’s a lot of demagoguery at this stage of the campaign, a lot of pandering to fear. … We should show courage.”

In Houston, Bishop Janice Huie of the United Methodist Church’s 676-congregation Texas Annual Conference said, “We are all made in the image of God and all children of God.”

“Our calling as Christians is to care for all people, regardless of faith,” she said. “We believe in and value hospitality as a Christian tenet.” The Unit- ed Methodist Church, she said, “has a long history of working with interfaith connections, including the Muslim community, and would not support discrimination based on religion.”

The Bishop Michael Rinehart of the Houstonbased Evangelical Lutheran Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod said, “Statements from some of our political leaders make us recall unfortunate times in our history when our government turned away Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and imprisoned Germans and Japanese residents without evidence of loyalty.”

Rinehart expressed faith in the efficacy of current screening procedures for potential immigrants. “The people seeking refuge in the United States are fleeing a brutal fouryear war,” he said. “Keep in mind that the majority of the victims of the war in Syria and Iraq are Muslims. ISIS has made Muslims the object of its terror, calling for the execution of all apostate Muslims, which for them means every Shiite Muslim.”

Alluding to the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, Rinehart noted that established religious leaders failed to assist the man in the ditch. “The hero of the story is the Samari- tan — a member of a despised ethnic group — who lends aid,” he said. “I don’t think he stopped to check the religion, nationality or documentation of the man left for dead. Our faith does not tell us to help the needy if they are Christian. It does not tell us to help the needy, but only if they have proper documentation.” ‘Running from terror’

At Baylor University, Chris van Gorder, a professor of Islamic studies, questioned how authorities reliably could separate Christian refugees from Muslim.

“In an interview at the U.S. embassy, are you going to ask them to define the Trinity?” he said. When reporters earlier presented that issue to Bush, the Florida Republican responded, “I mean, you can prove you’re a Christian. I think you can prove it. If you can’t prove it, you are on the side of caution.”

Van Gorder said he thinks people need to take a step back from the issue and view it clearly.

“These people we’re talking about are not terrorists coming here to murder innocent Americans,” he said. “They’re running from terror.”