‘Who is My Neighbor?’

Commentary

by

Perspectives

Baptist News Global | Sept. 24, 2024

Over the past two weeks, the Trump/Vance campaign has spoken often about an influx of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and proffered the outrageous claim that these immigrants are stealing and eating the pets of white Springfield citizens. Despite a multitude of fact checks and on-the-ground denials that none of this is actually happening, the Trump campaign has continued to advance these racist accusations.

Jamelle Bouie notes in The New York Times that Trump told a rally audience: “Twenty thousand illegal Haitian immigrants have descended on a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life. Residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. They’re taking the geese. You know where the geese are, in the park. And even walking off with their pets.”

Greg Garrett

As a cultural theologian who studies racist mythologies, I can confirm that this is just Racist Myth 101. “Immigrants are eating the beloved pets of white Americans” is a core story about how “Those People” are different from and inferior to “Us People.”

Whether the objects of this myth are Asian immigrants or Black immigrants, this is one of the most basic Othering stories. Imagine populations so inhuman that they transgress this basic human contract, and imagine the loss and anger that white populations must feel because of these invaders!

The problem, of course, is that these myths are just that: Stories that serve the purpose of a powerful community trying to maintain its power and lies that allow that community to call for a multitude of negative responses with no moral consequences. The Other can be marginalized, criminalized and their challenges set aside because of these horrific — if fictional — offenses.

What I am most interested in around this rhetorical dustup about immigrants has to do with Christian responses to it. Reliable news media have fact-checked this story into oblivion, since even Republican officials in Springfield and in Ohio are saying it isn’t reality. But what I’m observing on social media is an amazing — if alarming — debate between varieties of Christians about how Christians should or should not respond to this story.

“What I’m observing on social media is an amazing — if alarming — debate between varieties of Christians about how Christians should or should not respond to this story.”

Right wing commentator Megan Basham — who organized a mob of people and/or bots to come after me on Twitter earlier this year for the heresy of arguing that God loves everyone — has stepped into this controversy hard, arguing that the Christian Testament says the commandment to love God and love your neighbor leans harder on the first part of the Two-Fold Commandment.

The question “Who is my neighbor?” is asked of Jesus by an expert on Jewish law in the 10th chapter of Luke and prompts Jesus to offer the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a story that expands the possibilities of God’s grace and love to a place where it is uncomfortable, countercultural. A hated and marginalized Samaritan shows compassion and mercy to a Jew who would — and probably does — despise him.

So when Jesus asks, “Who was a neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?” the lawyer, can only respond, “The one who showed him compassion.”

Augustine argued that the Parable of the Good Samaritan suggests that everyone is our neighbor. Martin Luther King Jr. said in Memphis on the last night of his life that the story of the Good Samaritan should call us all to “dangerous unselfishness.” Episcopal preacher and writer Barbara Brown Taylor has preached that the story teaches us our neighbor is everyone in need. Cairn Divinity School Dean Keith Plummer says, “Loving God with one’s whole self and being a neighbor who exercises costly compassion to those in need — that’s what God requires.” And the recent He Gets Us media initiative has a simple response: “Jesus held a simple and unfiltered belief — everyone is a neighbor. Everyone in every sense of the word, not just the people in our orbit whom we have something in common with but also the ones we don’t notice, the people we don’t value, and those we don’t welcome.”

So it is startling to me how American Christians are staking out positions on both sides of this story despite being the beneficiaries of all this teaching. Those on the right, who are arguing Christians have no responsibility to Haitian immigrants in Ohio — and who often argue they are in the country illegally, despite the fact that they’ve been granted refugee status — have followed the Megan Basham line that we are not really called to love these strangers, that they are not our neighbors. Like the expert in the Jewish law, they would dearly love to stake out an understanding of faith and justice that doesn’t require extravagant love and acceptance, and so they lean into attacks and vilification.

“They would dearly love to stake out an understanding of faith and justice that doesn’t require extravagant love and acceptance.”

But here’s the thing: Jesus (and Augustine) defined the twin commandments to love God and love your neighbor as the core of Christian belief. The Twofold Commandment is seminal, and you can’t separate the first teaching from the second. You can’t love God and not your neighbor, since your love of God makes possible your love of neighbor, and love of neighbor demonstrates your love of God.

I posted on Twitter that the Bible actually leans deeper into this interpretation the more it thinks about it. The author of the First Letter of John returns to the question “Who is my neighbor?” by glossing it as an essential part of the love of God with mind, heart, strength and soul. 1 John 4:20 tells us this: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”

All people — including immigrants from Haiti — are our neighbors, and Christian theology insists that each of us — including immigrants from Haiti — is made in the image of God.

There’s a biblical phrase I don’t roll out often, “The truth is not in them.” But since I grew up in a tradition where we were taught, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it,” I have no patience for Basham or anyone else making bad-faith biblical arguments.

That phrase comes, appropriately, from that First Letter of John which places love at the heart of its theological argument:

He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked.

Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which ye have heard from the beginning. Again, a new commandment I write unto you, which thing is true in him and in you: because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth. He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.

In recent years, my training as a preacher and theologian increasingly has felt relevant to the arguments of Christians and pseudo-Christians about what people purporting to serve God should be doing, what is darkness and what is light.

Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are created in the image of God and are our siblings in Christ. They are our neighbors, as Jesus taught, worthy of compassion, recognition and support.

And if anyone — Donald Trump, JD Vance, Megan Basham or anyone else — chooses to embrace ridicule, shame or threat against our siblings, the truth is not in them.

Greg Garrett teaches creative writing, film, literature and theology classes at Baylor University. He is the author of two dozen books of fiction, nonfiction, memoir and translation, including the critically acclaimed novels Free Bird, Cycling, Shame and The Prodigal. His latest novel is Bastille Day. He is one of America’s leading voices on religion and culture. Two of his recent nonfiction books are In Conversation: Rowan Williams and Greg Garrett and A Long, Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation. He is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.