“Holy morons, Batman!”
The Lake Street Church of Evanston has erected a Christmas manger scene on its lawn that “reimagines the nativity as a scene of forced family separation, drawing direct parallels between the Holy Family’s refugee experience and contemporary immigration detention practices.”
Other than the reality that Jesus’s mother and her husband were not in any sense of the word refugees, as they were traveling from one part of the Roman Empire to another, and the even more relevant reality that this was over 2,000 years ago in a different culture and time that make attempted comparisons with modern immigration policies, problems and legal enforcement ludicrous, it’s a great point!
Defaulting to the Bible and religion as the cheapest “appeal to authority” imaginable is persuasive evidence of a lack of genuine arguments and an IQ deficit, or perhaps a cynical desire to confuse the intellectually deprived. In either case, its an abuse of Christmas. Indeed, the defenders of illegal immigration literally have no valid justification for their beliefs at all. A church that would engage in this cynical, ahistorical deception can’t be trusted.
And now…a song!
Ethics Alarms 
King Herod definitely intended to kill baby Jesus in his semi-autonomous region of the Roman Empire. The family were definitely refugees in a sense. While they fled to another part of the Roman Empire (Egypt in this case), presumably taken in by the large Jewish population there, given the political organization of the day, I don’t see why they couldn’t be called refugees given the difference of laws there. Then once the threat had passed when Herod died, they returned home.What’s the real difference between Jesus’ family and say, millions of illegal immigrants today that undermines the refugee analogy?There was nothing illegal about Joseph and Mary taking Jesus to Egypt while there’s plenty illegal about the flood of migrants seeking to forcibly enter the United States outside of the legally defined system.
Those with legitimate refugee/asylum requests are fairly processed in our system just like the system allowed Mary & Joseph to take Jesus to Egypt. Our media and the lying democrats (but I repeat myself), insist every last person crossing the border has some sort of legitimate refugee/asylum request. They don’t however.
Will the actual refugees and asylum seekers return to their home countries after the danger has passed? I certainly doubt the democrats would ever have that expectation. Joseph and Mary, with Jesus, 100% returned to their home and in this case, they didn’t even have to (except of course it was going to happen as prophesied: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”).
But isn’t that more like sane people leaving NYC for Florida now that the city has elected a Communist?
Almost. Red states often suffer a flood of blue state refugees.
However, Joseph and Mary weren’t fleeing conditions they helped create with the goal of creating the same conditions in Egypt.
Adept response, as usual. You know, your are one of my favorite commentators among the EA Five, and I miss the days when you were so relentless that poor tgt retreated with his metaphorical tail between his legs. Always great insight, MW. See, the season is making me sentimental and gooshy….
I wish I could comment as often as I had before but my commentary often got in the way of actual work tasks so I was convicted of that and had to actively step back.
I think our culture is also at a weird dialogue inflection point. The conversation has so gone off the rails from one point of view that it is virtually impossible to have an honest conversation from the same starting value set.
Until one side wins and other side resets, I’m afraid more and more conversations will seem like echo chambers.
The beauty of this blog commentariat is it never leaves things surface level. Every time a big picture topic is addressed it dived into the basic fundamentals. Every single time.
So much so that once the bare essentials were pulled out, tested, and proved, time and time again- with each heating of the cauldron allowing slag to be scraped off until an unassailable pure alloy of “right” is all that remained.
Unfortunately – as in the multiple knock down drags outs regarding the big topics of the past 15 years-
Abortion
Race related topics
Socialist health care
War
Immigration
And more-
The progressive side of the house couldn’t face the reality of the implications of their basic premises and first principles. And instead of changing or continuing the argument, they quit.
“Red states often suffer a flood of blue state refugees.”
It’s the ultimate self-owning irony; they can’t stomach living in a place that’s in the…um…grips of a governance they willingly created.
There’s even a name for ’em: LEFTUGEES
PWS
They’ve definitely screwed up Arizona.
Never mind that the birth location was dictated by Mary and Joseph complying with the Roman census (They were obeying the law!) They weren’t fleeing anything at that point.
Solid point.
Wrapped in swaddling … aluminum foil?
If that’s the church in the background, it looks pretty impressive. The least they could have done is assembled a less cheesy-looking nativity.
It looks as if the baby Jesus is ready to be placed beneath a broiler.
From their website!
And there’s the little soon to be baked potato his own self.
Google street view reveals, flanking the church marquee, a banner on the left “Black Lives Matter”, a banner on the left, the rainbow flag. And the marquee announcing the sermon: “Revenge Fantasies are Killing Us”. Whatever Sunday that was.
My main question when inside a current day Protestant church: What’s with the Social Justice and Black Lives Matter banners? What ever happened to the Faith, Hope and Charity banners?
The current Protestant church is undergoing a general split between those who hold fast to the inherited faith and those who, for lack of better phrasing, only use the inherited faith as a facade for their real religion- secular progressivism.
You’ll see it time and time again- and the architecture of the church betrays it- an old established congregation, probably very well to do given the beauty of the church- poured their efforts into their little church community and built something lasting.
They understood genuine sacrifice and they understood genuine efforts against real tangible evils and they did it together – so much so that they were willing to pour their own money into the church community.
I’d be willing to bet they were so devoted to this cause that the church was endowed well enough to function almost as a perpetual trust.
In come a new generation then that didn’t have to put forth any real effort and still reap the rewards. And if life has taught me anything- people who inherit much with little to no effort almost always adopt fake causes and fake monsters to slay and end up being progressive leaning.
I’d wager any given Sunday there are about 8 people in the congregation- 2 of whom tithe. All hearing a sermon about how evil republicans are and how if you have any weird conservative feelings you should repent and how God just wants you to be you. And there’s only 8 people because you can literally get that message from TV at home.
Meanwhile, banging churches are filled with people hearing sermons about how evil they themselves are. Shoot- they’ll even sing songs about themselves being hopelessly evil without an intervening God.
No- it isn’t “Protestants” as it’s an ongoing split. One could easily say the Roman Catholic church is facing the same pressures given the string of recent Popes.
Good point, Michael. The new Pope makes Francis look old school. He’s a big fan of the movies! He met with Al Pacino to highlight the Church’s and Hollywood’s shared values!
1. Mary and Joseph were clearly not refugees of the Roman census. Yes they were following the law, not avoiding enforcement. Apparently, Rome took its census seriously and the people knew it and respected it enough to travel across the country while pregnant.
2. And Jesus was born in a manger sometime around that census. But fleeing from Bethlehem occurred about 3 years later on account of the maggi visiting Herrod being the tip off. And yet the maggi left serious wealth gift behind which would have essentially made Mary and Joseph independently wealthy.
Best tidbits of the story in Luke-
The word traditionally translated as “inn” in better translated as “guest room”
“κατάλυμα” (kataluma) also found in Luke 22:11 & Mark 14:14 means “guest room” – and in these later instances are part of the day before Jesus’s crucifixion when he celebrated Passover with his disciples in a guest room I Jerusalem.
“πανδοχεῖον” (pandocheion) is word the Greeks of the time period used for “inn”, found in Luke 10:34. Derives from Greek pan “all” dechomai “to receive”. This is the story of the Good Samaritan who took the injured victim and paid for his stay at an inn while he recovered.
Luke’s nativity narrative has Jesus’ family feel lodging in a guest room in the ancestral home of Joseph. Meaning in all likelihood this was a relative’s house.
The symbolism here is deep that Jesus is rejected even by his family in his most helpless condition because the guest room was already occupied.
And not to sleep in a stable detached from the house even but rather a lower utility type room of the very house with the guest room they were rejected from. Several examples of 1st century common homes featured a room that animals were housed in over night in which a stone feeding trough (manger) would be found.
Tightly bundled in swaddling cloths, we get another round of early Luke and late Luke parallels like “kataluma”. Here the swaddling clothes parallel the burial cloths and the manger parallels the stone slab in the tomb.