By the end of 7th grade, I had something of a routine. I would come home from school, make myself a snack, and open that morning’s copy of the Baltimore Sun that had been abandoned on the kitchen table. Of course, I would start by reading about my beloved Baltimore Orioles, but I would soon find my way to the front page. It was there, in the Spring of 1994 that I followed the Rwandan genocide. Sitting in that little kitchen I wondered how all these adults I knew and respected could let something like that happen. Surely my country, with all its money and power could stop the slaughter, and yet we simply watched as men and women and children were hacked to death. We chose to ignore genocide.
You might think that such experiences would prepare me for the current humanitarian crisis on the U.S. border. You might think that by now I would know that the U.S. government is not, and has never been, composed of angels, but I still thought we were better than this. Sure, I might have expected that we would treat adult immigrants cruelly – that we would house them in substandard conditions and deport them back to dangerous situations – as shameful as it is to admit, I suppose I had made a sort of peace with our inhumanity to adult immigrants. But I never expected that we would separate children from their families; that we would use a parent’s love for their children as a weapon to discourage immigration; that we would house children like swine, guarded by an agency with a history of brutality.
But what I was least prepared for, and what I should have most expected, was our collective disinterest in the human rights abuse our tax dollars are funding. We go on about our lives, aware that there are children living in cages, concerned perhaps, and yet ultimately, we do nothing. We may feel a swell of anger as we watch the news or scroll through Facebook, but then we move on, content to watch the depravity from our couches.
When I was a child, watching the Rwandan Genocide from afar, I was confused by the silence of the adults around me. Then, as now, there were plenty of think pieces and hand-wringing, but ultimately the adults did nothing. Now I am one of those adults, and I understand. We feel powerless to do anything, and we are too busy even if we could. From a secular perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Yet from a Christian perspective, this attitude is toxic.
As Christians, our theology does not ask us to change the world. Instead, it asks us to be obedient to God and to have faith that through that obedience, God will change the world. I don’t know how we can change this awful policy, just like I don’t know how to fix poverty, or war, or any of the other ways man is inhuman to man. But I know who does.
Often, we get frustrated by the evil we see in the world because we don’t see how we can make a difference, and so we do nothing. But that is inconsistent with the story of God in the New Testament. To care for Jesus, God chose a poor, migrant family whose only qualification for the job was their obedience. Later, Jesus chose 12 poor, powerless, uneducated nobodies to be his disciples. Again, their only qualification was a willingness to drop everything and follow Jesus, and today we name our churches after them. Fishermen, a tax collector, women, and a tent maker. None of these people were notable on their own; if it were not for their obedience, no one would remember them, yet through that obedience, these people brought hope and light to millions of people over thousands of years.
The story of Christianity is not about powerful people making the world a better place for the powerless. It is a story about God’s power manifested through normal people because of their obedience. So when we see injustice, we are called to act with and through love. Write letters, join a protest, preach a sermon, teach a class, have a conversation – and when you do, remember that the goal is not political victory, but healing. Just as in every human rights abuse through time, there are two sets of broken people in need of healing and compassion. There are those who are hurt because their families have been torn apart, and there are those who would put their political aims above a child’s well-being. Neither the oppressed nor the oppressor is whole, and actually solving this crisis requires healing for both.
Brian Snyder is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at Louisiana State University and a member of First United Methodist Church in Baton Rouge, La.