Lessons from Immigration

I just finished reading an interesting article by Lawrence Auster in Front Page Magazine called, "How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism."  It is located at http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16157.

 

In this article, he addresses the impact that liberal Christianity has on immigration policies.  But the most amazing thing in the article to me was the recognition that outside influences can actually change our culture.  When I grew up, our textbooks always referred to America as the "great melting pot," a country where people of all different nations and nationalities and cultures could co-exist in freedom and peace.  But, even though we were a melting pot, when immigrants came into our country, they typically adopted our laws and our customs and our way of thinking while retaining their own religion and individual cultures.  The danger comes in when immigrants come into a country and rather than conforming to a country, they try to redefine it to fit what they know.  Consider this quote from Auster's article:

 

"But a moral tension that remains manageable so long as different peoples with their respective cultures are living in different societies, becomes insoluble when radically different peoples and cultures are living in the same society, especially if it is a democracy. If a democratic country has a large and culturally different immigrant minority, the native majority cannot readily announce that they are against the continuation of more immigration, because if they did so, the immigrant group, who are now the majority's fellow citizens, would feel that the natives regard them as undesirable. As civilized, democratic people, the native majority do not want to insult the immigrant minority, or to deny their equal humanity, or to create even the slightest appearance of doing those things. So instead they-meaning we-surrender to the situation, accept continued mass immigration, and allow their country to be steadily transformed by an ongoing influx of unassimilated peoples and incompatible cultures."

 

Simplifying what Auster wrote on, here's the bottom line -- with open immigration you run the risk of allowing your country to be transformed if you do not hold fast to what your country stood for.  Auster goes on to make the point that this situation has come about in America as a result of liberal theology, but that's not where I want to go.

 

Thinking about this from a religious perspective, you can see a danger in allowing outside influences into the church, whether you are talking about other religions (a process called syncretism) or the world.  This is a fine line that we have to walk, and some denominations are doing a better job at it than others.  How can we make sure that we are seasoning the world rather than letting the world season us and transform us into a church that does not hold to orthodox doctrines?

 

We are not called to isolate ourselves from the world, but to be in the world -- just not of it.  And, we are called to reach out to non-believers and to bring them into the church so they can experience Christ.  Hopefully, our churches will be places of enormous immigration as non-believers come in, similar to immigrants coming to a new country.  The goal, though, is to not conform to them but to have them conform to Christ.  In other words, we are called to influence the world without allowing ourselves to be influenced.  So, how can we do this in practice?

 

I think one of the main things we can do is to stand firm in our convictions and to boldly speak what we believe, without worrying if it offends others or is "intolerant."  Others need to know what we as Christians believe since the goal is to have them conform their lives to Christ and not to the world.  Alternately, we need to listen to our non-Christian friends and respect their right to share their beliefs, but without the requirement to accept them on our own.