Pastors Should Value Religious Freedom Over Illegal Immigration

The Sunday invasion of Cities Church in St. Paul, Minneapolis, brings Christians in America to another inflection point: Will Christian leaders and pastors stand up for believers’ freedom to worship or cower in the face of the leftist pro-illegal immigration onslaught? Worse yet, will they join in it?

Prominent Christian leaders and pastors (legitimate and otherwise) have often advocated vigorously for immigrants, both legal and illegal. In some cases, leaders affirm a commitment to rule of law but place such a heavy emphasis on compassion and kindness that actual enforcement of the law seems impossible in their framework. More often than not, these leaders present illegal immigrants as law-abiding, religiously faithful victims. In other cases, leaders support the violation of immigration law or its nullification. At the same time, religious groups have incentivized and supported illegal immigration while shuttling millions to migrants and migrant services.

The anti-ICE hijacking of the Cities Church should — at the very least — push leaders and pastors to advocate just as vigorously for their congregants’ freedom to worship. The hijacking signals that leftist insurgents view Christian places of worship as targets, as does the ongoing harassment of churchgoers attending Christ Church D.C. The Christian faithful need their leaders to stand in the gap by affirming the importance of religious freedom, pressing government officials to bring swift justice to those who disrupted the Cities Church service, and affirming the legitimacy of immigration law enforcement.

But a refusal to do so wouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Leftist messaging and Christian leaders’ pro-illegal immigrant advocacy has cultivated the belief in many believers and unbelievers that the enforcement of immigration law is illegitimate; that deportations are un-Christian; that the United States has a moral obligation to accept any would-be entrant immediately. The violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants, the absence of vetting of millions who entered the U.S., the Biden administration’s deliberate abandonment of the enforcement of border law and its obstruction of those who tried to enforce it — these factors go ignored or unmentioned. In the resulting societal milieu, many, many Christians end up giving tacit or explicit affirmation to the notion that every Democrat president can usher in 10 million illegal immigrants and subsequent Republican administrations can’t do anything about it.

So Christians end up with pastors unaware or willfully ignorant of how unfettered immigration disrupts communities, strains the cultural fabric to the breaking point, facilitates human trafficking, undermines religious freedom, accelerates the theft of billions in taxpayer dollars, and endangers the vulnerable. Without assigning motives, embarking on a mind-reading tour, or rendering judgment on persons or ministries, this is a glaring failure that needs to be acknowledged and abandoned.

For some pastors this is an ethical misunderstanding resulting from years of left-wing manipulation. Beguiled by leftist talking points, they’ve bought the lie that a nation can’t have borders — or, more specifically, that the United States can’t have borders, that everyone is a U.S. citizen, that there’s no ordo amoris. Such pastors signal that they need to encounter a firm, candid, patient, and theologically robust correction. (Note the emphasis on the word “patient”: The manipulation scheme is a years-long campaign; it won’t be undone overnight, at the individual or institutional level.)

But the pastor who dismisses or approves of what happened on Sunday in Cities Church while stumping for illegal immigration sends his congregants an entirely different message: Find another church. This sort of error signals a buy-in to leftist, anti-Christian ideology and a failure to recognize the obligation to stand for the freedom of worship when Christians need it the most. If the crackdown on worship and gospel-preaching during the Covid pandemic didn’t convince pastors of this obligation’s necessity, Sunday’s church invasion and the rising tidal wave of anti-Christian left-wing violence are another blaring warning signal.

With Democrat state and local officials unlikely to provide any real accountability for the Cities Church insurgents, many are looking to the federal government to protect Christian gatherings. But if government officials fail to protect the First Amendment freedom to worship, faithful pastors must be ready to stand in the gap on behalf of the believers they shepherd.

Joshua Monnington is an assistant editor at The Federalist. He was previously an editor at Regnery Publishing and is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.