“God made the mountains, God made the sky
“God made the people. God knows why.
“He fixed up the planet as best as he could,
“Then in come the people – and gum it up good!”
– “The First Thing You Know,” from “Paint Your Wagon”
Our household revolves around religion. It’s not just because my livelihood derives from it; we’ve been a religious (if at times highly irreverent) family since my husband John and I began dating in high school. So it wasn’t a surprise when my beloved emerged from his “man cave” recently as I was watching one of my favorite old movies, “Paint Your Wagon.”
“I just had a thought,” said my spouse. “You ought to write about the theology of ‘Paint Your Wagon.’ There’s lots of it.”
I smiled benevolently and assured him that was something to think about. I thought about his idea for about two minutes, pondering how to make the religious frame of a musical about two California gold miners sharing one wife into something suitable for Insight’s audience. Then I proceeded to forget about it until the next day when I came across this photo on Facebook:
Border Baby
A child clings to its mother as a U.S. Border Patrol agent demands the child be surrendered. Photo courtesy of Revolution News.
UPDATE: This striking image sent me on a hunt to verify it. I first found it on a website called Revolution News, which the watchdog site Media Bias terms “left-leaning, but factually sourced.” However, a sharp-eyed reader reported the photo as being from a different situation along the border in 2014. More research found the photo is indeed from 2014 and was apparently taken and distributed by the U.S. Border Patrol. Since the photo was first published this week by Insight, other photos documenting the trauma of family separations have flooded news outlets and social media. [See a link below to Brian D. McLaren's column on a government report documenting U.S. abuse of immigrant children between 2009 and 2014].
Hundreds of these youngsters are now housed in detention centers awaiting sponsorship usually by relatives. The average wait time is 41 days. On June 11, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that border agents would also screen the immigrant status of potential sponsors in a supposed effort to weed out human traffickers disguised as compassionate, unrelated sponsors.
In other words, Immigration and Customs Enforcement now uses these vulnerable children as bait to catch undocumented immigrants. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, who was denied access to a Texas center where children are detained, wrote to the head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to The World. “Other press reports show more than 600 children have already been taken from their families since the policy was initiated at the start of May this year, bringing ‘the total under your care to a staggering 11,200,’” the senator was quoted.
Officially, The United Methodist Church opposes the U.S. government’s action: "We oppose immigration policies that separate family members from each other or that include detention of families with children, and we call on local churches to be in ministry with immigrant families." – 2016 Discipline, Paragraph 162.H
The U.S. practice of separating immigrant children from their families has become a national wave of outrage.So where are United Methodists to be found amid these shocking developments that separate children from their families and possibly endanger them? There has been some activity at the highest levels. United Methodist Women issued a statement June 4 decrying the policy, demanding the U.S. Justice Department to cease the practice and protect immigrant children. On June 7, the Council of Bishops issued a press release, saying it was joining with other faith leaders to oppose the policy of separating children from their families.
Aside from official statements and immigration resources, United Methodists’ presence seems scant along the border, where compassion and advocacy are most needed. Except for two border conferences – Rio Texas and California-Pacific – none of the regional United Methodist units along the U.S.-Mexico border have commented on the government’s actions in taking immigrant children from their families.
Of the conferences along the U.S.-Mexico border, three more are scheduled to meet this week:
- Desert Southwest June 14-17; no resolutions on immigration.
- California-Pacific June 13-16; a resolution outlining a broadly sketched policy welcoming immigrants is on the agenda.
- New Mexico Conference, which includes the active border town of El Paso, Texas, June 12-15; no resolutions on immigration.
Dozens of individual United Methodists are working faithfully to care for immigrants, so why should annual conferences bother to get involved in a national issue such as immigration policies that separate families? Possibly because annual conferences are the basic unit of The United Methodist Church, and ought to be doing more than seeing to business-as-usual matters like property, insurance, clergy salaries and budgets. Jesus calls us to care for the vulnerable, especially children. This precept out to be our guiding star, our first priority, yet so often is subsumed by church politics and economics by the unit we call the UMC’s basic structure.
To end where we began, the moral center of “Paint Your Wagon” lies in the idea that religion often spends too much time trying to regulate people’s private behaviors while ignoring the truly horrific things that “civilizations,” i.e. people’s social systems, do to one another out of power, greed and bigotry. We may not recognize it, but we are becoming more and more like ancient peoples who sacrificed their children to idols (Psalm 106:37-39). The question now before us is: How long will we let this government-sponsored child abuse go on?
Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.