Immigration, Law, and the Gospel
Christianity Today, the once-revered and continuously diminished evangelical publication, published a piece on March 31st titled, “America Could Lose 10 Million Christians to Mass Deportation.” Staff editor Andy Olsen writes, “The world’s migrants are disproportionately Christian, and demographers say they are helping stanch secularization in countries like the US and Canada.” Presumably, we as American Christians should be compelled to rethink our nation’s immigration enforcement.
Without calling into question the idea that many migrants check “Christian” on the form when selecting for religion, the article is lacking in substance. Instead, Olsen deploys an anecdote, like much of the original World Relief “study,” to argue that we should suspend our immigration laws for the sake of our faith’s practitioners.
The story is of a PCA pastor, who has had his temporary protective status (TPS) suspended. Migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, too. All of which is due to President Trump’s series of executive orders targeting immigration. Pastor Martorano and others in his position are now faced with a new reality: their lives in America are coming to an end. The reader is compelled to nod-along with empathy — it is an unfortunate situation — both for the immigrant pastor and his congregation, who, on an unrelated note, lost their last pastor to cancer before calling him.
Yet it’s clear in Christianity Today’s article and the World Relief study that we’re not meant to care too deeply about the reality of mass immigration and the devastating effect that it has had on American citizens. Instead, the author urges us to dwell on the broader feeling we have for Pastor Martorano, using it to obscure the consequences of lawless immigration, the civil law, and the law of God.
When sin becomes rampant in a church or culture, there is an unspoken pressure upon believers to accept it. To bend the word of God to the demands of the day and to make excuses for the shortcomings of society. Andy Olsen and World Relief are making an identical argument. The implicit argument to ignore those who break our immigration laws, and normalize further such people, is akin to the argument that gay marriage, the affront to God that it is, has become too rampant to preach against for seeker-sensitive churches. This argument is not only an abdication of our duty, but a profound misordering of our Christian obligation.
America, facing rising costs, overwhelmed systems, and cultural fracturing, while running head-first into a debt crisis, should have no question about where resources go. This is the question Christianity Today wishes to avoid. A question of love: Does the American government have as great a responsibility to the citizens of the world as they do to the American public?
To misorder your love is a sin; it’s a sin when a father neglects his kid or a leader neglects his people.
It’s the principle of ordo amoris, the proper order of love. Articulated well by JD Vance in a January 2025 interview with Sean Hannity
“There’s this old-school [concept]—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
Christianity Today’s article subtly asserts that our Christian men and leaders should forgo the immediate needs of their family, neighbors, communities, citizens, and their own country, instead prioritizing those who have no birthright to the blessings bestowed upon us by God and the sacrifice of our forebears.
This is not Christian compassion. It’s abdication.
In attempting to promote the demotion of the enforcement of the law and the deportation of criminals, it is promoting the demotion of the American people to second-class citizens in their own country. An idea that is flatly rejected by God’s Law. To be complicit in the usurpation of America’s people is failing not only to be just, but also falls short of loving one’s neighbors. When the government allocates much-needed resources away from Americans and to these non-government migrant resettlement organizations, you see an abdication of rightly ordered love.
This January, in response to President Trump’s cutting of USAID, World Relief’s president and CEO, Myal Greene, wrote,
“When Jesus judges the nations at the end of time, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, he will do so in part based on how they fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger and cared for the sick….”
How much more will our God judge us and our nation for neglecting our hungry, thirsty, and estranged?
In 2024, World Relief, a subsidiary of the National Association of Evangelicals, received over 150 million in public government grants, or more than 75% of all their generated funds.
Organizations like World Relief, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) profit from the ongoing American immigration crisis. Megan Basham demonstrates the way our “Non-Government” charities solely rely on taxpayer dollars, and as a result are barred, from spreading the Gospel in her bestselling book Shepherds For Sale. The reliance has only become more apparent as both the LIRS and USCCB have announced job and budget cuts given the Trump administration’s recent actions on government spending and border policy. This is cause for true Conservatives to celebrate, and Christians to praise God.
Instead of spending the hundreds of millions of dollars World Relief raises annually to spread the Gospel to an increasingly irreligious America, they would rather lobby the government to increase immigration en masse while receiving funds to aid and abet the immigration crisis. The American government, by giving World Relief, LIRS, USCCB, and other pro-mass immigration groups, has failed to love their citizens as the Word of God commands them.
In his commentary on Romans 13:1, John Calvin writes
“…for they (magistrates) have not ascended by their own power into this high station, but have been placed there by the Lord’s hand… The reason why we ought to be subject to magistrates is because they are constituted by God’s ordination. For since it pleases God thus to govern the world, he who attempts to invert the order of God, and thus to resist God himself, despises his power; since to despise the providence of him who is the founder of civil power, is to carry on war with him. Understand further, that powers are from God … because he has appointed them for the legitimate and just government of the world.”
Calvin’s writing here is plain in text and pointed in application: God has placed men, magistrates, to govern in right accordance with the Law of God so that our government might benefit the well-being of God’s Church and its people.
To make an exception to the rule, so that Christians who have transgressed the Civil Magistrate and governing entity, works against the principles of Christian thought — that His law and the law of the magistrate be applied with justice and love. Furthermore, rejecting the responsibilities God has imparted to our leaders is, in effect, rejecting God Himself, and as Calvin states, “… to carry on war with him (God)” It is the role of a Christian leader not to make an exception to rules for the Christian, but to enforce them as strictly as you would against a non-believer.
Christianity Today’s article is another in a long line of empathetic plays at the reader’s heartstrings. Promoting a system contrary to the Word of God and the well-being of American citizens and taxpayers. The only argument to be made is whether an immigrant has broken the law or not. Their faith, their character, and their supposed benefits to America do not matter; what matters is our law and our duty to uphold our laws. By usurping this order, organizations like World Relief are operating in sin, and would do far more good converting their remaining funds into soup kitchens for America’s homeless—their actual neighbors.
We have no Christian obligation to defend law-breakers merely because they claim to be Christian. There is, on the other hand, an obligation to defend your nation’s laws, people, and the truth.
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