Ferment at the frontier shows a chasm within America’s world of faith

By ERASMUS

IN PLACES at Europe’s southern extreme, such as Sicily, Catholic charities work hard to succour the indigent folk who turn up in leaky boats. A few hundred miles to the north, xenophobic politicians, claiming quite literally to be more Catholic than the pope, denounce the Holy See for being soft on migrants. In the United States, meanwhile, the chasm between the religiously inspired left and the religious right is probably even deeper, and migration from the south is an equally intractable bone of contention.

On December 10th federal authorities arrested at least 32 participants in a dignified but impassioned multi-faith demonstration organised by a Quaker group on the border with Mexico. They were calling for an end to the deportation of newcomers and voicing support for a “caravan” of asylum-seekers who have camped out on the other side of the barrier. America’s Border Patrol said 31 were detained on suspicion of trespassing by the Federal Protective Service, and one was arrested for assaulting an agent. Almost all were released within 24 hours. The demonstration attracted more than 300 people including many Christian ministers, rabbis and imams, all of whom insisted that their faith mandated kindness to the vulnerable stranger.

In a service in San Diego on the evening of December 9th, ministers gave an interpretation of the Christian (and Christmas) message that seemed poles apart from the religion professed by many of Donald Trump’s supporters and advisers. “Our God tears down walls, we welcome the stranger, give food to the hungry,” a local pastor, Caleb Lines, was quoted as saying. Traci Blackmon, a minister with the United Church of Christ from Saint Louis, declared that a “brown-skinned Jesus, seeking refuge in a foreign land” would have been turned away by Mr Trump’s America. Indeed, “his family might have been greeted with tear gas and rubber bullets or...he might have been taken from his mother's arms.”

This week’s altercations were the second time in a few weeks that things have come to a head at the south-western extreme of the United States. On November 25th migrants including women and children were repelled from the border with tear gas, prompting a temporary closure of the border. The United States authorities said Border Patrol agents had to use gas because some of the migrants were hurling “projectiles” and causing injuries.

The Catholic church, with its wide network of contacts on both sides of the border, has given a nuanced response to the recent flare-up. Although they have urged the American authorities to deal much more compassionately with the people knocking at their door, Catholic representatives have also been critical of the organisers of the caravan which has surged northwards from Honduras and camped out in Tijuana. The organisers are exposing participants to danger and placing an unbearable strain on the authorities in Tijuana, in critics’ view.

But the white evangelical citizens who cast their ballots in overwhelming numbers for Mr Trump stand at the very opposite end of the migration debate. A poll conducted earlier this year by Pew Research found that 68% of evangelical white voters believe their country “does not have a responsibility” to house refugees, while only 25% took the opposite view. Among the electorate as a whole, it goes the other way: some 51% of voters believe that such a responsibility exists, while 43% does not. Other cohorts of Christians are much more likely to believe in a duty to accommodate refugees than their evangelical co-religionists are. Some 50% of Catholics acknowledge such a duty, as do 63% of black Protestants and 43% of Protestants from more liberal or “mainline” denominations.

The contrast in sentiment might be described this way. For religious types who favour compassion to refugees, the message they want to send is something like this: our faith tells us to care for the vulnerable and these people on the move are intensely vulnerable. The message delivered by Mr Trump and received enthusiastically by many of his supporters is a bit more like: Americans are the vulnerable ones, the ones who need protection from all manner of dangers, including those posed by ragged newcomers from the south. The first message wins greater acceptance among those who themselves feel relatively secure, whether materially, psychologically or even spiritually.