Photo: Napoleon Avenue, Uptown New Orleans, June 2021 – Love Your Neighbor Y’all, cropped, altered; CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED
“Love your neighbor as yourself” is one of Christ’s greatest commandments, as he said in Matthew 22:39. This is an incredibly important commandment, that we should love and look after those around us and take care of those in need. We should treat others as we would like to be treated. However, there are those in the more liberal sects of Christianity who hope to twist the meaning of this passage. Liberal Christians and non-Christian liberals alike point to this passage to tell Christian conservatives that they should support open borders. This is a misinterpretation.
St. Basil the Great wrote on how we are to take care of the least among us. Charles Haywood updated his ideas for modern times, contextualizing how to love the least among us in our current political and economic landscape. Discussing charity, Haywood says “We often owe specific duties to those immediately around us that we do not owe to everyone. This implies that charity should not generally be directed outside the country, or even, usually, outside our own towns and cities.” Loving your neighbor means loving those close to you first, not jumping straight to migrants coming from across the world.
Loving your neighbor actually means standing up against migration, because a large influx of migrants negatively affects your neighbors at home. Charity, Haywood says, “implies we should work vigorously against our societies admitting migrants, who depress wages of the working class, thereby increasing poverty of those already in our community.” Many migrants work for cheaper wages, which takes American jobs away from Americans.
Christian liberals advocating for migration are committing “a gross violation of Christ’s cardinal commandment of charity, of love for our fellow man, cleverly camouflaged as adherence to Christ’s command.” Do not fall for the lies of the left, who seek to pervert and change Christ’s instructions to fit their own destructive political agendas.
This post originally appeared at https://www.phyllisschlafly.com/national-sovereignty/immigration/christian-charity-and-immigration/
