Another battle over amnesty is about to be joined. Informed members of the historic American nation have to mount another bitter grassroots struggle against our political, media, corporate and religious elite.
That elite definitely includes a group of Evangelical leaders that calls itself the “Evangelical Immigration Table”. (See my blog entry on this group here).
The Evangelical Immigration Table is staging a major PR campaign to bamboozle evangelicals into supporting amnesty as their Christian duty.
The group has released a video (entitled “I Was a Stranger”) in which a number of the organization’s leaders recite the words of Christ in Matthew 25:31-46. It’s the famous Sheep and the Goats discourse, wherein Christ exhorts his followers to help “one of the least of these brothers of mine”, the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the one needing clothes, sick or in prison. The video emphasizes the part about “I was a stranger and you invited me in”.
What they're trying to do here is to guilt trip evangelicals into thinking that if they don't support amnesty, they are disobeying Christ. The passage in question, however, is about voluntary good works, not about supporting a mass amnesty for foreign lawbreakers.
These evangelical Open Borders boosters are distorting the words of Christ in order to support their agenda, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.
But how representative of evangelical opinion is the Evangelical Immigration Table ?
You have to read between the lines on the Main Stream Media coverage.
For example, look at one recent headline: Evangelicals Reign In Conservatives On Immigration Reform, Favoring Amnesty Over Enforcement. By Trisha Marczak, Mint Press News, January 16, 2013.
Now, besides the fact that “reign” should be spelled “rein”, that might lead you to believe that all or most “evangelicals” are supporting amnesty.
Well, I’m an evangelical Christian. I sure know that I don’t support amnesty—nor do I think that immigration enforcement and the nation-state are incompatible with Christianity. And I know I’m not alone in that.
In fact, it’s doubtful that any group—certainly not the Evangelical Immigration Table—could speak with authority for all evangelicals. That’s because, notwithstanding the left-wing stereotype of evangelicals as a monolithic movement, American evangelicalism is actually rather fractious.
The American evangelical world is one of endlessly multiplying and dividing denominations, non-denominations, independent churches and ministries. Many evangelicals, when they don't agree with something in their congregation, will often just quit and join another—or even start another church!
Moreover, while most American evangelicals could probably be classified as basically right-leaning, many are apolitical and some belong to the Evangelical Left.
On the question of immigration, I believe a 2009 poll is still valid: most evangelicals are immigration patriots. The poll showed that, when compared to mainline Protestants, Catholics and Jews, evangelicals had the highest percentage of respondents who believe that (1) the quantity of immigrants, illegal and legal, is too high; (2) illegal immigration is caused by lack of enforcement, (3) we have enough Americans who can do our labor, (4) amnesty for illegals is not the answer, (4) attrition through enforcement is a good strategy, and (5) enforcing the law is better than amnesty. [Religious Leaders vs. Members: An Examination of Contrasting Views on Immigration, Steven S. Camarota, CIS, December 2009].
Roy Beck of Numbers USA has estimated that one-third of his group’s members are evangelicals.
Which means that the Evangelical Immigration Table does not speak for most American evangelicals. Even its own website, at the bottom of the long list of evangelical leaders and their organizations who support amnesty, posts this disclaimer:
Titles and institutions are provided for identification purposes only and do not constitute endorsements by those institutions.
Indeed!
This naturally leads to the question: who is really running the Evangelical Immigration Table?
Well, at the top of the aforementioned list appear the names of the nine principal leaders—I’ll call them The Big Nine. Let’s look at the Big Nine and consider what sorts of motivation these people might have. Here are the names:
Note that four of the Big Nine—Noel Castellanos, Luis Cortes, Gabriel Salguero and Samuel Rodriguez—are Hispanics.
Dare I say it? Is it possible that these four have an interest in supporting amnesty that is not entirely spiritual? Such as, possibly, increasing the proportion of the U.S. population that belongs to their own ethnicity—and thus increasing the importance of Hispanic leaders such as, maybe, themselves?
Well, there, I said it!
I’ve written about Samuel Rodriguez before. He’s president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Rodriguez is of Puerto Rican extraction—thus not personally affected by immigration law, because Puerto Ricans are technically American citizens. Yet he has chosen to identify with the interests of the pan-Hispanic bloc.
In fact, Rodriguez is an outright Hispanic chauvinist. He has proclaimed that “We [Hispanics] have a more complete vision of the gospel.”
Just imagine if a white Anglo-Saxon evangelical had said something like that!
NEA President Leith Anderson has been campaigning for amnesty since 2009. I wrote about him here. (Anderson also supported Obamacare).
I wrote about Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, here and here.
Unfortunately, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, approved a resolution approving amnesty in 2011. I don't see the Southern Baptists I know as big amnesty supporters, but apparently their church now suffers from the characteristic problem of Big Religion: capture by Leftist bureaucrats on the permanent staff. Note to VDARE.com readers belonging to the Southern Baptists—maybe it’s time for the above-mentioned characteristic solution of Evangelicals: split.
Then there are Stephan Bauman of the World Relief Organization, and David Beckmann of Bread for the World.
The titles of these two organizations imply that they stand for helping poor folks in the entire world. If that’s the case, why be limited to the United States? If you want to help poor folks in poor countries, help them there, where your dollars actually go further. Don’t bring them all here.
But Bauman and Beckmann want to amnesty foreign illegal aliens in the United States—regardless of the havoc it wreaks on Americans.
World Relief gets most of its funding, not from freewill offerings given by cheerful givers, as prescribed in the Bible, but from the federal government—that is, from the taxpayers (who aren’t generally “cheerful givers”).
That means your tax dollars are supporting World Relief’s pro-amnesty agenda.
Bread for the World, you might assume from its name, is active all over the world giving food away. Right?
Well, not exactly.
According to Richard Hoehn, a representative of the group:
Bread for the World does not do relief and development projects. ..Bread for the World lobbies the U.S. government and the World Bank for policies that help hungry and poor people.
So Bread for the World is basically a lobbying organization, which lobbies for, among other things, welfare spending in the United States, also provided by taxpayers. The organization’s board of directors includes such political celebrities as Bob Dole, Chuck Hagel and Loretta Sanchez.
Finally, there’s Jim Wallis, President and CEO of Sojourners, which says its “mission is to articulate the biblical call to social justice.” Wallis is a long-time Left-wing evangelical, and now “spiritual advisor” to President Obama. The original title of Sojourners magazine, by the way, was The Post-American.
Hmm, what interest would an evangelical Leftist Obama crony have in promoting amnesty?
Just asking.
There’s another interesting connection here. Wallis has received over a quarter of a million dollars in funding from none other than atheist globalist billionaire George Soros. As reported at the Weekly Standard:
Sojourners activist Jim Wallis, who, if his boasts are accurate, has been the chief Evangelical Left chaplain to the Obama administration, has reluctantly admitted that he too has benefitted from Soros’s largesse. In recent years his Sojourners group has received at least $325,000 from Soros’s Open Society Institute.
Hmm, curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would have said.
Why would George Soros be giving money to a leftist evangelical group if he didn’t think it would benefit his causes somehow?
So don’t be deceived, evangelicals, by leaders who claim to speak in your name. Amnesty is not Christian charity. Authentic Christian charity is helping others, in the name of Christ, of our own free will.
Amnesty is a high-handed attack on the historic American nation by an overbearing, arrogant elite.
It must be defeated.
American citizen Allan Wall (email him) moved back to the U.S.A. after many years residing in Mexico. Allan's wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.
