By Cody J. Sanders, guest co-editor
Our treatment of immigrants is a frontline concern for the living out of our identity as followers of Jesus in the United States. We live in an era when immigrants in our midst – documented, under documented, and undocumented – are forced into the political center of an intensely divided polis. As the objects of religiously infused political scapegoating, described later in this issue by Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, many immigrants face the full force of the U.S. government. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, became the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country while this special issue of Christian Ethics Today was in preparation.)
From rural farming communities across the Midwest to urban centers from coast-to-coast, we know the gifts that immigrants bring into community – not because of what they add to the economy, but because of the gifts their lives add to our communities. However, as Isaac Villegas writes in this issue, “the unrelenting fear of being snatched from loved ones, torn from a household,” creates a social circumstance in which all our lives in community are diminished, and the lives of our immigrant neighbors are greatly endangered.
This is, of course, not a temporary concern. Pastor Hierald Osorto recounts in this issue an experience of a recent ICE raid on his community, commenting, “After a deputy pushed my colleague to the ground, I found myself wondering, If this is happening in 2025, what will the future hold for our community?” In the coming decades, climate collapse, rising sea levels, increasingly numerous unpredictable weather catastrophes, widespread drought and famine, and the heating of some regions beyond reasonable human livability will increase the pattern of migrations both within and between countries.
Faith communities across the country are stepping into ministries of solidarity with migrants in their midst – churches like Holy Trinity Lutheran and Saint Paul-San Pablo Lutheran in Minneapolis, and the Border Church / Le Iglesia Fronteriza, a cross-border ministry at the U.S./Mexico border, that you’ll read about in the articles that follow. They demonstrate creative and courageous acts of resistance to the violence enacted against immigrants in the U.S.
In the coming days, many more churches will face a decision about their calling as Christ followers: Will they actively support a Christian nationalist agenda intent on fusing empty Christian symbols with the violent power of empire? Will they passively sit idly by in hopes that their placid kindness will be enough to stand against the forces of violence and destruction? Or will they engage in creative and courageous acts of resistance that risk their corporate comfort and security to stand in solidarity with their immigrant neighbors?
Lives will depend on the decisions churches make.
As a minister and a scholar of community care, I can conceive of no other way for a faith community following the way of Jesus to embody that faith than through practices of solidarity and risk for and with our immigrant neighbors. That’s why we’ve dedicated this issue of Christian Ethics Today to the subject of immigration, in hopes that faith communities and their leaders – lay and ordained – will find these words resourceful and, perhaps even more importantly, words of provocation toward a risk-taking faith praxis in solidarity with our immigrant neighbors.
The writers you’ll encounter in this issue are compassionate, knowledgeable, and skillful pastors and professors – some of them immigrants or the children of immigrants – who are courageous practitioners of the way of Jesus. I am privileged to know each of them, and we are all fortunate to take their wisdom with us into our lives and places of service.
— Cody J. Sanders is a Baptist minister and associate professor of congregational and community care leadership at Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, MN. He serves on the CET board and as guest co-editor of this issue of Christian Ethics Today.
