Fifteen years ago, God changed my mind about immigration and used a small evangelical university in Southwest Ohio to do it.
Cedarville University hosted the G92 Immigration Conference in partnership with the National Association of Evangelicals in the fall of 2011. This wasn’t your mother’s evangelical conference.
The conference derived its name from the 92 instances in scripture where God speaks about the “ger” (immigrant). Sadly, most of those passages were as alien to me as an undocumented person might be to an ICE agent. As the weekend progressed, the talks gave me a new perspective on biblical hospitality and immigration.
When I opened the scriptures, God’s provision for the immigrant, the vulnerable, the oppressed leaped off every page. How had I missed this? How had I grown up in an evangelical Christian tradition that takes God’s call to bring the gospel to the nations so seriously, yet missed so dramatically God’s call to show hospitality to the nations at our doorstep?
I was glad to support missions that drill wells and provide clean water in Jesus’ name. But when the thirsty traveled thousands of miles to our borders, I was content to turn them away.
We translated the Bible and snuck Christians into closed countries to bring the gospel to the unreached. But when Christians from those countries had to flee for their faith, we closed our borders to them.
I’ve come to understand this as Evangelistic NIMBYism, taken from the acronym meaning, “Not In My Backyard.” We want the gospel to reach the nations; we just don’t want the nations to reach us.
Frederick Douglass identified this cognitive dissonance long ago, noting, “They love the heathen on the other side of the globe. They can pray for him, pay money to have the Bible put into his hand, and missionaries to instruct him; while they despise and totally neglect the heathen at their own doors.”
He, of course, was speaking of his own experience of being beaten by “God-fearing” people simply for reading the scriptures or teaching others to read them, while those same people evangelized the lost across the globe. Such a contradiction rightfully shocks us.
While the plight of the kidnapped and enslaved is certainly not a direct, one-to-one comparison with the experience of the modern undocumented person in America, there is a moral rot at the heart of the dehumanization taking place today that feels all too familiar.
In July, the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for over 300,000 Haitian immigrants, forcing them to return to Haiti voluntarily or face deportation. This will impact 50,000 U.S.-born children who will be forced to be separated from their parents or return with their parents to a country that our government urges Americans not to travel to due to “crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.”
This administration also assured the American people that ICE was only going after dangerous criminals who were here illegally. Yet after hundreds of thousands of arrests, only 3%-5% of those detained have violent criminal convictions, while 70% have no criminal convictions at all.
I think we can all agree that there are massive problems surrounding our immigration system that demand thoughtful, nuanced solutions. I think we can also agree that what is taking place in America today is a far cry from the mercy God has called us to show.
As Christians, how did we get here? To borrow a phrase from New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, we have “platonized our eschatology.” We have made the thrust of the Christian story about us going up there and spending eternity as a disembodied soul somewhere in the sky.
We will remain content offering the nations heaven in the sky and hell on earth until we recognize that God came to bring heaven to earth. Our Evangelistic NIMBYism will continue until we accept that God’s kingdom is coming to our backyard. That is why John can say, “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”
What does this look like in real life? How do we show hospitality to those in need and secure the borders to keep residents safe from those who wish to harm them? These are complicated questions and no policies are perfect; however, some are more hospitable than others.
One such bill is the Dignity Act, which was introduced last year. This bipartisan bill creates an earned pathway for lawful, permanent residency for qualified individuals who pay a substantial fee and meet other criteria. While not perfect, this bill is a nuanced, bipartisan approach toward greater hospitality and security for those who have found refuge in America.
Evangelical Christians spend nearly $50 billion on foreign missions each year. That shows a profound commitment to the Great Commission. It’s about time we address the great omission and take that same evangelistic fervor into our backyard, bringing an end to a long history of Evangelistic NIMBYism.
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Cam Hill is the executive director of LEAD Collective and the pastor of spiritual formation at One Community Church in Greenville, South Carolina. Read more of his writing on Substack.