No, Deportation Is Not Un-Christian

President Trump is making good on his campaign promise of deporting illegal aliens. So, of course, various self-described Christian leaders are outraged.

Mariann Budde, the Episcopalian “bishop” who reportedly owns a $2 million D.C. mansion, has drawn much attention to herself due to her lecture at the Washington National Cathedral. “I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” Budde said to Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance at the inaugural prayer service, adding that “the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals” but are “good neighbors” and members of religious communities.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) agrees with Budde. The bishops’ response to Trump’s executive orders regarding illegals came via a statement from Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso. He rolled out the usual cliches, saying that “describing all undocumented immigrants as ‘criminals’ or ‘invaders,’ to deprive them of protection under the law, is an affront to God.” Seitz also characterized deporting those who have broken just immigration laws as an injustice and implied that the 14th Amendment commands birthright citizenship, which is not true. The bishop even managed to denigrate the idea of a unified, American identity. 

Let us put aside for a moment the fact that the Catholic bishops received nearly half a billion dollars of taxpayer money under just the Biden presidency to process illegals. The question raised by Budde, the USCCB, and various other so-called pastors is: Is deporting illegal aliens un-Christian? And the answer is: of course not. 

To be un-Christian, deportation would have to be unjust, unmerciful, or both — and none of those are the case.

Deportation is obviously not an offense to justice because every illegal is, by definition, a lawbreaker, despite Seitz’s attempt to muddy the waters. It is the old action/reaction paradigm: Break the law, pay the price. The price is very mild in the context of how other countries punish illegal aliens. Conviction for being illegally in Mexico, for example, can result in up to two years in a Mexican prison (which is not a retirement home like its American counterpart); in Japan, it can lead to three years imprisonment or a fine of up to 3 million yen. 

Deportation is just punishment for illegal aliens in any country, but it is especially so in a republic where the rule of law and social compact of the citizens are supposed to be real and thick realities. If illegal immigration is not justly punished, the social compact is shattered because the just decisions of a virtuous people governing themselves under God are flouted and thrown into a landfill, making republican self-government a bad joke. By allowing millions upon millions of people to openly flout the law and then receive better treatment than actual citizens, the very idea of equality under the law is butchered and replaced with a postmodern caste system. 

“But Christians are called to be merciful!” the Budde disciple and USCCB water carrier will shriek in unison. “God is love! Blessed are the merciful! Welcome the stranger!” 

It is hilarious to see so many people who have rewritten the Bible and even declared God “nonbinary” suddenly become preachers on the topic of everlasting illegal immigration. The easy rebuttal to this shrieking is Matthew Peterson’s line:

My favorite part of the Bible is when Jesus says that if you don’t go along with the wealthy and large corporations desirous of cheap labor, votes, and power and allow millions of random people you don’t know to illegally enter your country you are a bad person who hates his neighbor.

The deeper rebuttal is this: Not deporting illegal aliens is itself a sin against pietas, which is not just the fancy Latin for our modern understanding of piety. The old Roman virtue of pietas (most beautifully illustrated in Virgil’s Aeneid) is much broader than just being religiously devout on Sundays. It is the virtue through which the divine, yes, but also the state, the homeland, the ancestors, and the family are honored and the duties owed them fulfilled. It is the bone-deep understanding that a country is not just an idea, that a people is not an amorphous pile of Lego bricks that can be changed out every other Thursday.

It is also the knowledge that we are a part of this state, this homeland, and this people because of our birth and our citizenship. This, in turn, places certain duties and responsibilities upon us, the primary one being a primordial loyalty to and love for those elements — people, heroes, language, history, traditions, norms, and institutions — that belong to us because we make up a particular country and nation.

This is exactly what Vance was articulating when he recently said that not putting your family and fellow Americans before global strangers puts the ordo amoris — the Christian idea of hierarchy among the people to whom we owe our charity — on its head.

Some will argue that coming from the Roman Republic, pietas is un-American and un-Christian. But Virgil and The Aeneid were profound influences on the Founding Fathers, the early republic, and the American spirit in general. And since the same people who loved The Aeneid were also devout Christians, and since God is ultimately the Founder of all nations and the Setter of their boundaries (Acts 17: 26-27), the idea that pietas is anti-Christian washes out. 

If pietas is loving what belongs to us more than what does not, we sin against it by doing the opposite. Allowing so-called “law-abiding undocumented immigrants” to stay in our homeland with just a slap on the wrist before a yellow brick road to citizenship is rolled out for them would be doing precisely this. It would not be an example of welcoming the stranger but putting the stranger on a pedestal above everyone else. It would be a statement that the laws we made through our legislators do not matter and that the expressed (and just) desire of Americans for the United States to be a law-abiding republic of Americans does not matter. It would communicate that the suffering of American citizens who have been displaced from their homes, fired from their jobs, or had their communities radically changed without their consent means nothing. 

Some will still insist that their definition of charity must supersede pietas. But, even here, the sinners against pietas run into a brick wall. Mercy and charity have their own hierarchies and orders. Going outside those orders and unshackling mercy from justice creates more injustice. A man who makes his children sleep in the basement so illegal aliens can sleep in their bedrooms is not charitable. And neither are the bishops just looking for good press and a fat bottom line. 

Nathan Stone is a storyteller who looks at culture, politics, and religion from a different POV on his YouTube channel Nate on the Stone, and who exercises the moral imagination in his writing. A lover of books, music and the outdoors (especially with dogs) he earned a masters in American history from Liberty University in 2016. Subscribe to his channel and follow him on Twitter.