The Republican governor of Texas — or whoever sent busloads of destitute migrants to the vice president’s official residence over Christmas weekend — might have had some vague memory of the holiday having something to do with a poor refugee family seeking shelter in a strange place.
Vague because Gov. Greg Abbott is among many Americans who have a fuzzy knowledge of the religion they claim to follow.
We hear more and more from Republicans in the Donald Trump camp who come right out and call for the United States to be an officially Christian nation.
A culture that measured the worth of our lives based on how we treated “the least of these” when they were cold, hungry and sick might indeed be a wonderful place to live. But it is nothing like what the so-called Christians of today’s American right are working for.
Clearly, the Christian nationalism that the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, Lauren Boeberts and Ron DeSantises of the world are calling for has nothing at all to do with the Bethlehem story that was the focus of the season before crass commercialism slowly pushed it aside. What they want is properly referred to as white nationalism, basically a form of fascism that gives a higher-power gloss to the bigotry that has always been part of Western culture.
It recalls a statement often attributed to India’s spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi, who apparently didn’t say, but might well have felt, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
There were, in Washington, some volunteers whom Gandhi and Jesus might have recognized as proper followers of Himself. Instead of taking the arrival of the asylum-seekers as a taunt — “You like these brown people so much how about you take care of them” — they were there to throw blankets on the T-shirt-clad refugees from South of the Border and take them to shelter in local churches.
One of the volunteers told CNN that, done properly and humanely, it might actually be a good idea to hire buses to take asylum-seekers from the overwhelmed border crossings in Texas and Arizona to shelters in New York, Washington and New England. That is an idea that our Democratic president, who also counts himself a good Christian, might heed.
Our modern society has professionalized many things that used to fall to each household. Just as we no longer all make our own clothes or raise our own food, we also communalize such functions as teaching children to read, guarding our communities against crime and fire, carting off human waste and finding ways not to waste humans.
Utah’s shameful rate of homelessness, for example, would not exist if every household would take in one homeless person and every church would host one homeless family.
The map of LDS ward houses maintained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself — warm and empty most of the week — shows how easy that ought to be. The knowledge that the church has literally billions of dollars set aside for a rainy day is further proof of how easy this problem would be to solve if we really wanted to.
If we believed the words attributed to Jesus in Matthew 25, where he says the way to tell the good people from the bad is which ones help those in need because doing so was the same as helping Him.
The reason every LDS ward doesn’t have a homeless family is the same reason why we don’t expect individual households to take in those without shelter. Or, at least, why I don’t volunteer my home.
We worry that most people in that circumstance are not just a little down on their luck. We know many of those in need carry some heavy baggage of mental illness or drug addiction, often accompanied by violent tendencies. We know that, without some staff-supported place for them to go, turning out a homeless guest would be cruel. And they might not be willing to go.
We want the homeless cared for, but we want it done by people and institutions we already pay taxes, or tithes, to. The way we shift duties to schools and hospitals and public works departments. Not just to wash our hands of the responsibility, but to have some hope that it will be done properly and end successfully.
Anyone who really wants Utah and the United States to be run the way Jesus would have us do it would be all about tending to the needs of the least of these above all else. Until that happens, please, no more about this being a Christian nation.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, sort of remembers something about blessed cheesemakers.
gpyle@sltrib.com
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