ICE Agents in Churches ‘Does Not Bode Well for the Future of Religion’ in America

Last week, the federal Department of Homeland Security reversed longtime policies restricting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection arrests in certain locations including churches, schools, and hospitals.

The department’s announcement has sparked fierce pushback from immigrant advocates, school officials, and faith leaders. For decades, some religious activists have used houses of worship as “sanctuaries” to shelter migrants in danger of deportation. DHS’ policy reversal came swiftly after Trump’s inauguration and is part of the administration’s efforts to ramp up removal of undocumented people, with daily ICE arrests quickly rising to more than 1,000, per the agency. An Atlanta man was already arrested by immigration agents outside his church. 

David Brockman is a Christian theologian and author based in Fort Worth. He is a nonresident scholar in the Religion and Public Policy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute and teaches at Texas Christian University, and he’s contributed regularly to the Texas Observer’s coverage of religion.

Earlier this week, the Observer spoke with Brockman about the federal policy change, the First Amendment, and what Christians should do now.

TO: Now that ICE agents are allowed to arrest immigrants in churches, what do you think this shift signals for U.S. society and for Christianity in the U.S.?

To be honest, the very first thing I thought of when I heard about this policy change was the extreme irony. I’ve been studying Christian nationalism for the past 10 years, and one of the common claims by Christian nationalists about church-state separation—if they’re not outright denying that it exists at all—is they will call back to the idea that the wall of separation is a one-way wall that is meant only to keep the government out of the church, not to keep the church out of government. It’s a common claim that they make. With this change of policy, the president they support is potentially sending government agents into the churches, synagogues, mosques, and so forth to seize and arrest worshippers. That’s not keeping the government out of the church. I found that very ironic, to say the least. 

For the U.S. as a whole, this policy signals a return to some of the cruel and shameful policies that we’ve seen in our history, like the forced expulsion and resettlement of Native Americans in the Trail of Tears, or the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. It’s the same order of shamefulness, and it’s rousting people out of their homes and livelihoods for no real justifiable reason. I know that many of the defenders claim that the people they’re arresting and deporting are violent criminals, but even their own statistics don’t show that. So, that’s a very flimsy excuse. For Christianity, I think that this policy means the end, at least for now, of any kind of separate sacred space, a kind of religious realm that’s off-limits to the government and enshrined by the First Amendment. The implications of that also are troubling. 

If the government can invade sacred space and seize worshipers, what’s to keep it from dictating what can and cannot be preached, what people should or shouldn’t believe, and so on? I don’t generally like slippery-slope arguments, but I think this does have greater implications for religious life than just whether some undocumented people are arrested in a church setting. I think this does not bode well for the future of religion in the United States.

For Christian nationalists who are okay with ICE coming into churches, when do they want the government out of their churches? 

Again, that’s that irony that I was talking about before. Christian nationalists have complained about the Johnson Amendment keeping them from being able to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. Essentially they feel it is keeping them from being able to preach what they want to preach. But I think that we have a situation here where, through their endorsement of President Trump, they’re de facto endorsing government interference with the church—the very government interference with the church that they’ve complained about in the past, and government interference of a worse form. 

What does the Bible say about how Christians should treat immigrants? 

The Bible is a big book. It’s really a collection of books. The Bible can be used to prove just about anything, and it has been used to prove all sorts of crazy things in the past. But I think that serious students of the Bible—Jewish and Christian alike—if they sit down and read through the biblical texts, they’ll see running throughout the Bible the duty to care for the stranger, alongside widows and orphans, and other vulnerable people. One of the key stories in the Torah, that is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, is the story of the ancient Israelites themselves being migrants, living in a foreign land. They migrated from their homeland to Egypt to escape a famine. It’s a very similar kind of situation to migrants that we see today who are fleeing famine or violence, warfare. There’s this theme that you just can’t miss in the Bible that we are to care for the stranger in our midst. For Christians, that’s something that’s commanded of us. That’s kind of the bottom line. 

There are all sorts of practical questions that come from that. How do we care for them? Does that mean that we just have a wide open border in which anybody can move around with no restrictions? Those are separate questions that have to be dealt with. But the bottom line is that Christians are supposed to care for the stranger among us. 

Other than the irony, what else did you think, as a theologian, when you saw the announcement about ICE enforcement in churches?

I just feel a deep sense of grief, sadness, and I guess this is not so much as a theologian, but as a student of the history of Christian theology and of Christianity. President Trump could not have won reelection without the enthusiastic support of conservative Christian and evangelical voters. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and his threats of mass deportations were crystal clear during the runup to the election. So conservative and evangelical Christians who supported Trump had to know that something like this was going to happen—not necessarily raids on churches and schools, but maybe raids on workplaces and so forth. He talked about that in the past, and if they didn’t know about it, if this is a surprise to them, they just weren’t paying attention prior to the election. One of the things that I grieve about is that what we see here is a kind of echo of other shameful episodes in Christianity’s past: the Crusades, antisemitic pogroms in Europe, biblical defenses of American slavery by Christians. 

I think that too often throughout Christianity’s history, Christians have been tempted by—what do we call it?—I guess the siren song of power. Tempted by the desire for power over others, to stray from Jesus. 

How do you see churches and faith community leaders like Bishop Mariann Budde organizing to protect parishioners or pushing back?

We’ve had this fire hose of executive orders and we’re all struggling to figure out what the state of play is. I think there’s going to be a kind of discernment process where religious organizations are going to have to figure out what to do. I think it will help to hear from denominational leadership bodies like the National Council of Catholic Bishops or the United Methodist Church Council of Bishops. What may be needed right now is a kind of declaration—from particularly the mainline Protestant churches in the United States, like the Barmen Declaration. Let me give you a little context for that. Do you know what I’m talking about? 

I don’t think I do. 

Basically, in Germany, after Hitler took over, many German Christians willingly subordinated their theology, and they even regarded Hitler as a prophet. They were countered by a group of Protestant clergy and theologians that called themselves the Confessing Church, who were horrified by the church bowing down before Hitler. They collectively issued a declaration. It was more or less a statement of principle in opposition to bowing down before any earthly rulers, including Hitler. The point of the declaration was to say “We Christians are not bowing down to this new Nazi regime, we intend to stay faithful to what we understand to be the gospel, and if that puts us at odds with political authorities, so be it.” 

The major religious bodies in our country will need to come together and declare their fidelity to the basic core teachings of Christianity. I’m not equating Trump with Hitler, or saying we’re in the same boat right now. But I do think that this is something that Christians should be considering right now: a united statement to show the Trump administration that it does not have the support of all Christians. Not that that will not do anything politically, but at least the administration will be on notice of where many Christians stand. What would be even better would be to cross religious lines as well, to include Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and other religious groups. I think that’s something that Christians need to think seriously about.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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