In the winter of 2016/17 I began meditating on the spiritual meaning of a refugee. I encourage you to read the post at the link before finishing here.
As a guide for my meditation I turned to Hannah Arendt who wrote at length on the topic as her moral philosophy was shaped to a large degree by her experience as a refugee. Hannah Arendt was a Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler who was then shunned and condemned to the status of 'meaningless' and 'valueless' by the rest of the world because she was a refugee. One must remain a refugee because one has become a refugee.
Ah, but what is a refugee? A refugee is one who has no place on earth. What is a refugee who is forced to remain a refugee? A person who everyone else, in seeing that a person has no place on earth, consciously decided that they must remain a person who has no place on earth. To refuse to give refuge to a refugee is way of negating the return of a human being to the land of the living, giving them a status of the living dead. It is to have the opportunity to offer salvation to the damned and to consciously choose to re-damn them.
To refuse a refugee, then, is an act that is, frankly, more violent than murder. Perhaps this is why scripture is so vocal about the raw evil of refusing to help a refugee.
But there's more. Refugees are more vulnerable than any other group of being used as a political weapon. In the winter of 2016/17 it became clear to the world that Putin was creating a humanitarian refugee crisis in Syria (with the help of Assad) in order to cleanse Syria as well as to destabilize Western Europe. I wrote at the time: "What does it mean to use people as a weapon, as Putin has done in Syria, by turning millions of 'undesirables' into refugees? What does it mean to refuse refuge to those whose de-humanized status is being used to destabilize democracies, to undercut the principles of rule of law and inalienable human rights? These are the pressing questions we must ask in this time if we are to remain morally and spiritually resistant to genocide." My fear at the time was that it would only be a matter of time before Trump attempted to copy Putin by weaponizing refugees and immigrants for political gain in America. The danger we are in is that if we take the stance now that refugees must be met with "Zero Tolerance" rather than with refuge, is that we will have then crossed the threshold of being complicit of a type of genocide. Because a refugee is a sort of human zombie in the political and social sense it should be a chief calling of Christians to be the vanguard of refuge. This is precisely why a place of worship is called a 'sanctuary.' The worship of the church is to be, literally, the place of refuge for the refugee. The body politic will always have strong incentives to damn the damned, to demonize and reject the refugee. The calling of the church should be to guide the conscience of the body politic, to be a moral restraint to damning the damned, to refusing refuge to the refugee. It is time for us to lift our voice and to open our churches for the act of worship that is 'sanctuary.'
Ah, but what is a refugee? A refugee is one who has no place on earth. What is a refugee who is forced to remain a refugee? A person who everyone else, in seeing that a person has no place on earth, consciously decided that they must remain a person who has no place on earth. To refuse to give refuge to a refugee is way of negating the return of a human being to the land of the living, giving them a status of the living dead. It is to have the opportunity to offer salvation to the damned and to consciously choose to re-damn them.
To refuse a refugee, then, is an act that is, frankly, more violent than murder. Perhaps this is why scripture is so vocal about the raw evil of refusing to help a refugee.
But there's more. Refugees are more vulnerable than any other group of being used as a political weapon. In the winter of 2016/17 it became clear to the world that Putin was creating a humanitarian refugee crisis in Syria (with the help of Assad) in order to cleanse Syria as well as to destabilize Western Europe. I wrote at the time: "What does it mean to use people as a weapon, as Putin has done in Syria, by turning millions of 'undesirables' into refugees? What does it mean to refuse refuge to those whose de-humanized status is being used to destabilize democracies, to undercut the principles of rule of law and inalienable human rights? These are the pressing questions we must ask in this time if we are to remain morally and spiritually resistant to genocide." My fear at the time was that it would only be a matter of time before Trump attempted to copy Putin by weaponizing refugees and immigrants for political gain in America. The danger we are in is that if we take the stance now that refugees must be met with "Zero Tolerance" rather than with refuge, is that we will have then crossed the threshold of being complicit of a type of genocide. Because a refugee is a sort of human zombie in the political and social sense it should be a chief calling of Christians to be the vanguard of refuge. This is precisely why a place of worship is called a 'sanctuary.' The worship of the church is to be, literally, the place of refuge for the refugee. The body politic will always have strong incentives to damn the damned, to demonize and reject the refugee. The calling of the church should be to guide the conscience of the body politic, to be a moral restraint to damning the damned, to refusing refuge to the refugee. It is time for us to lift our voice and to open our churches for the act of worship that is 'sanctuary.'
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