The ethic (and reality) of sanctuary

Below is my column in today's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle (I believe that’s the theological word for it) this past week when it began making the rounds that the City of Grand Haven Human Relations Commission (HRC) was exploring the question of making our city a “Sanctuary City.”

As one would respect in our day and age, people immediately jumped to their respective sides on the question before they had a chance to see what actually was going on and what it would actually entail. Like so many hot button issues, the word “sanctuary” has become a polarizing concept for folks. It’s like other terms, such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “pro-life vs. pro-choice,” or “gun-safety vs gun-rights” – the second the phrase is uttered the battle lines are drawn and the ability for curious inquirer evaporates.

The first and most important thing that everyone needs to be aware of is that, despite what some people claimed online, neither the HRC nor the City Council have plans to make Grand Haven a sanctuary city. (That rumor became so pervasive that the city had to issue a statement clarifying matters.) There are people in our city who think the question is worth exploring, so they sent that request in and the natural first place for it to go to be vetted was the HRC. That way they could study the question and give their own recommendation to the elected City Council.

That shouldn’t scare anyone or make people angry. In a participatory democracy, all citizens should have a voice, should be able to ask their government bodies and committees to study questions and ideas. Having the conversation is a good thing, no matter where you hope the conversation will lead.

(And, by the way, the actual conversation at their meeting was less than five minutes long before they all agreed they needed to do more research so they could have a good response to those who asked about this question).

In the hopes of that conversation being a bit more productive, no matter what our City Council or residents decide, there are a few things that might be helpful to remember.

First, the idea of sanctuary cities comes from the Bible. In ancient Israel, there were six “Cities of Refuge” established by God himself in Numbers 35. The Hebrew word is “miklat” and it can be translated as refuge or asylum. If someone killed another person unintentionally, they could flee to those cities and be kept safe until there could be a just trial to determine guilt.

Starting in the 5th Century, churches became places of refuge and sanctuary under canon law, meaning that if someone was accused of a crime but was able to reach a church, they could claim sanctuary and avoid being arrested immediately. (Fun fact, this is the reason why many churches – including my own – have their doors painted red; it’s a symbol of sanctuary.) During the time of the reformation, as the Roman empire gave way to the rise of the nation-state, sanctuary laws were gradually abolished and modern protections like the right to due process were instead put into place.

In the early 1980s, the idea of churches as sanctuary was revived because of the many Central American refugees who were fleeing civil conflict. Obtaining asylum (a recognized right for refugees under international law) was increasingly difficult and so churches offered to provide safe haven for refugees until they could receive legal status and safety.

This sort of sanctuary is an act of civil disobedience, a choice someone or a group make because of their deeply held religious belief and because they believe that handing refugees over to immigration officials would violate their duty as Christians to care for the least of these. It was this same form of civil disobedience that inspired Christians who worked on the Underground Railroad, breaking the laws of cities, states, and even our own country to protect slaves seeking freedom.

Now, what the HRC was asked to consider was something different than that. It was whether Grand Haven should be a sanctuary city. The practicality of that decision would simply be that our police and civil servants would not work with immigration officials in enforcing immigration law. It would also require that we don’t inquire into or take action based on someone’s immigration status. Basically, it leaves immigration enforcement to ICE and says that, as a municipality, we will not involve ourselves in this question.

That’s actually the way our law works. There is nothing in the United States law that requires local government to cooperate with immigration enforcement and that point has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Many have found that it’s essential for local authorities not to be involved, that way immigrants feel safe contacting police when they are the victims of violent crime or going to the hospital when they are in need of care.

Even though the immediate warning people throw out there at this idea is that it would lead to a rise in crime, studies show that’s not the case. In fact, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Urban Economics found that sanctuary policies had no statistically significant impact on crime rates. In the same year, a report by the Center for American Progress indicated that “Statistical analysis illustrates that across a range of social and economic indicators, sanctuary counties perform better than comparable non-sanctuary counties.”

In fact, the only study that has found a correlation between sanctuary study and a rise in crime is one done by the right-leaning “Heritage Foundation” – and that study has been criticized for its faulty methodology.

And I will say that, as a Christian, I support the sanctuary movement. Our current immigration laws and system are broken and based upon the history of racism in our country. And I do believe that we need both civil disobedience on the part of Christians alongside of the refusal of municipalities to cooperate with this unjust system.

Did you know that the idea that crossing a national border without authorization is a criminal offense is actually a rather new idea. It wasn’t until 1929 that our own country passed a law criminalizing undocumented immigration. That law was part of efforts by nativist politicians and white supremacists who believed that the United States should be a nation of white Anglo-Saxon protestants. And so they created race-based quotas that gave preference to people from northern and western Europe while banning almost all immigration from Asia, for instance. And the current system continues to give preference to some countries (like the UK) while also creating backlogs so that it takes twenty-two years to wait in line and immigrate legally from Mexico.

I think it’s unlikely Grand Haven will become a sanctuary city, largely because there is more violent emotion around the phrase than thoughtful concern for the plight of the undocumented person who is fleeing violence and poverty. But I do hope we can have that conversation and, no matter what, come away better informed about what our actual laws entail even as Christians ask what we, as people of faith, believe Jesus would have us to do when it comes to our immigrant neighbor.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com. Information on his own parish’s Sanctuary Statement is online at https://www.sjegh.com/immigration-justice

The Order of Love

Below is my column in today's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune. 

Well, it’s not every day that the latest in politics gets people debating about Augustinian theology or the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, but we do indeed live in strange times.

Last Thursday, Vice President J.D. Vance gave an interview where he claimed that the concept of ordo amoris (the order of love, or, love rightly ordered) was what lay behind his views on immigration and refugees. He said the concept was “that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

Now, Vice President Vance is correct in one thing, order amoris does exist as a theological and ethical concept in the Christian religion. However, as a relatively new convert to the Catholic faith, the way he is using it in this context demonstrates that he is lacking in catechetical instruction about this concept and how it applies in the life of the follower of Jesus.

St. Augustine wrote about this in De Doctrina, when he talked about holiness of life involves keeping your affections under control and loving rightly. That is, not loving things you ought not to love, nor loving things more (or less) then you should. This concept was picked up by Aquinas in Summa Theologica, where he defined the ordo caritatis (the order of charity, or, rightly ordered charity). In that work, he cited Augustine to insist that Christians must love all people equally, but that the manifestation of that love runs out in concentric circles of interconnectedness.

Since then, many have taken to social media, either in defense or in criticism of how he is interpreting the application of the order of love, particularly in the policies of our country. One of the best responses I have read came from Mark Clavier, a priest and theologian whose doctoral work was on St. Augustine of Hippo.

As Clavier so aptly articulates, the point actually being made by Augustine and Aquinas (as well as authors like Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx) is that to love rightly we must begin by loving that which is the highest good – God. In Clavier’s words, “This does not mean rejecting the love of family, place, or work. Rather, these loves only find their true form when they are rooted in the love of God and a generous love of neighbor. Left to itself, love folds inward and becomes possessive, seeking to claim rather than to give.”

What Vance has unfortunately missed is the starting point of the order of love. It’s not your family. It’s certainly not yourself and your people. The starting point is the love of God as made manifest in our love of Christ, his son.

When Christ is at the center, our love will indeed pour out in concentric circles, pushing beyond the natural boundaries we tend to create. It will push us beyond our family and friends, our own country and people. It will propel you into love for the marginalized and vulnerable. Because Jesus told us clearly in Matthew 25 that loving them was how we love him. It will propel you into love for the immigrant and stranger, because the love of Jesus crossed those lines in his own ministry, often to the discomfort even of his own disciples. It will propel you even into love of your enemy, a love that Jesus said was the new teaching he brought in the Sermon on the Mount.

Once more, as Clavier so artfully says, in the church we are called to “practice a love that moves outward, not because of our own strength, but because love, rightly ordered, cannot help but spread. Like a bonfire on a winter night, it’s not content to warm only those nearest to it. Its nature is to glow, to beckon, to give itself away to a world lost in its own darkness.”

Some have said that the problem isn’t a desire to exclude some people from love, but a limitation of resources that this was the point Vance was trying to make: you feed your family before you feed the stranger. The problem with that idea is twofold. First, you cannot extrapolate the responsibilities of the individual onto the responsibilities of the most powerful country in the world. Surely we, as a society and a people, have greater responsibilities than any of us could hold individually.

The second problem is that’s just false. There is no scarcity of resources here. We are by far the wealthiest country in the world, holding over 30 percent of all household wealth. Second behind us is China with 18.6 percent, then Japan with 5 percent, Germany with 3.8 percent, and the UK with 3.5 percent. Did you catch that? We have over 30 percent of all household wealth and our siblings in the UK only have 3.5 percent. So, for leaders in our country to say we do not have the resources to help those fleeing violence and poverty is not just false, it is obscenely false.

So, let’s be clear, our country can absolutely reach out in support of others, we can follow international law for the welcome and resettlement of refugees, we can build a new rational immigration policy that is not based on racist quotas, we can do all of that and absolutely still care for our families. Nothing is stopping us. (Other than, perhaps, the wealthy and powerful who would prefer the system keeps benefiting them.)

As a country, we have resources to help the vulnerable. And to insist that the order of love requires us to take care of our own and turn our back on the rest of the world is a twisting of Augustinian and Thomistic theology of the highest order. It is contrary to the very basic teachings of Jesus Christ himself, who calls us to remember that whatever we did for the least of these we did for him.

Rightly ordered love, in truth, orders us to extend our love, our resources, out from our own people to heal a world broken by sin, violence, and injustice. Love orders us out, not in.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com.

Christianity: Not just for the religious

Below is my column in today's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune. 

One part of the new year I am excited about is the return of my short radio segment on WGHN radio each week: Christian Mythbusters. I ran this for a few years in 2020-2022 and, after a break for the past couple of years, I’m glad to have it starting again. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts. So, I thought for this year’s first column I would share my first new episode of that series.

I was working on all of this on the Feast of the Epiphany, a feast in the church that falls each year on Jan. 6. And, as I reflected on this feast in preparation for my own parish’s celebration, I found myself thinking about how this Feast actually breaks a myth – the idea that Christianity is only for religious people.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a Christian priest and so, clearly, I’m a pretty religious person. And I’m not one of those people who thinks religion is a bad thing or a dirty word. The word itself comes from the Latin ligare, which means to bind or connect to something. So anyone who adopts practices, customs or ways of living that seek to bind you or connect you to something is practicing some form of religion – for good or ill.

In my own life, both as a priest but also just as a Christian, I have found binding myself to the teachings of Jesus, teachings of love, compassion and mercy to be an important part of who I am. I keeps me from focusing on my own perspective or desire too much; it helps me grow as a person.

But, not everyone’s as religious as a priest and that’s OK! And, as I said, the Feast of the Epiphany reminds us of that.

If you know the story of the Epiphany, it’s the story of the magi from the East who came to worship the Christ child, bringing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrhh. Depending on how the Greek is translated, you may have heard them descried as the Three Wise Men, the Three King or the Three Magi.

The word in Greek, though, is magos, and that was the same word used to refer to the Iranian priestly caste of Zoroastrianism, a group who gained an international reputation for the ancient science of astrology.

A few things here are essential. First, unlike the Jewish shepherd who visited the Holy Family after the birth of Christ, the magi were certainly not Jewish. They were from another nation entirely and practiced another religion entirely. And yet, something in their own religion drew them to Jesus, leading them to offer their own gifts.

Second, though it says that they worshipped the child Jesus, it doesn’t actually specify that they converted to Judaism. It’s even less likely that they would have converted to Christianity – that religion wouldn’t be founded for another 30-some years, after Jesus died and rose again.

And yet, their witness and presence is honored, both in the biblical text and the tradition of the church.

To put it another way, when Jesus was born some Persian astrologers showed up and brought gifts. They weren’t told to change their beliefs and they weren’t turned away. Their gifts were accepted and God even protected them on the way home so that Herod wouldn’t come after them.

So, when I say that this day reminds us that Christianity is not just for religious people, what I mean is that one of the fundamental points of Christian belief is that the child whose birth we just celebrated, Jesus of Nazareth, came to earth for all people, to offer all people God’s transforming and merciful love. Some people respond to that love by binding themselves to it, being baptized and becoming practitioners of the Christian religion. Others, though, don’t – but that doesn’t mean they don’t have gifts to bring. That doesn’t mean you don’t have gifts to bring to bear when it comes to the cause of God’s love and justice in the world.

And whether or not other people appreciate your gifts, know that this Christian priest does.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

About the writer: The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven.