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We should deport Venezuelan gang members and any other criminals who are illegally in this country. American Christians should not, and probably do not, object to that policy.
As Christians, we recognize that the most basic biblical justification for the existence of a state includes that state’s responsibility to uphold the law and protect its citizenry (Rom. 13:1–5).
And as Americans, we can see that our founders built into the constitutional republic of which we are a part the means for our government to do just that, to make sure the laws are faithfully executed. That means prosecuting dangerous criminals and sending those who are here illegally out of the country.
The what of that kind of deportation shouldn’t be in question, nor should the why. We ought, though, as both Christians and Americans, to recognize that we should also care about the how.
What alarmed me about the recent reports of the sweeping deportations of alleged members of the infamous Tren de Aragua was not that they were arrested or deported, nor was it, at first, about the questions of due process for these alleged criminals. Law enforcement is often charged with violating due process in some way or another, and usually these charges are met with government agents arguing why, on the basis of the law, they have the right to act as they did.
To some extent, that’s what White House border czar Tom Homan did when pressed by reporters as to whether the executive branch has the powers it is claiming under the Alien Enemies Act to deport these alleged offenders to an El Salvadorian prison. He said they do, and would fight for that right in court. That’s perfectly appropriate, and that kind of question is what courts were meant to discern.
What concerned me was what Homan said next.
To ABC News’ This Week, Homan responded to a question about due process with, “Where was Laken Riley’s due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TDA—where was their due process? … How about the young lady burned in that subway—where was her due process?”
Laken Riley, of course, was the nursing student murdered by an illegal immigrant. The cases Homan mentioned are all criminal and should be morally outrageous to any functioning conscience. The rhetoric here, however, confuses categories in ways that could have implications for much bigger questions of the size and scope of the state.
If your neighbor is apprehended by the police for running a meth lab in her basement, that arrest is a good thing. You don’t want to live in a society where laws against drug running are ignored by the authorities. Unless you are watching a Breaking Bad rerun, you probably won’t have any sympathy for meth dealers, nor should you.
But what if your neighbor’s meth lab is found not by suspicion of criminal activity, followed by a legal investigation of it, but by the fact that the government has installed secret surveillance cameras in every house?
If you object to this kind of unlawful spying without a warrant, someone might say, “What about the meth dealers we arrested? Are you pro-meth?”
Of course you’re not pro-meth or pro-murder. Your objection to a police state would be an objection to the government not following the law, even if the government’s lawbreaking led to some good results. In that, you would be recognizing one of the best aspects of liberal democracy: the idea that a people must give attention not just to lawful ends but also to lawful means, that what matters is not just what results we get but how we get them.
Most of us take for granted that this system is just the way things have always worked. Some, such as journalist Jonah Goldberg, have argued for years that we ought to recognize what a miracle this kind of project is—a nation that operates not out of bonds of tribal loyalty but according to a system of laws accountable to the people, one that even protects the rights of the minority when the democratic majority wants to oppress them.
One very secular proponent of liberal democracy and constitutional republicanism argues that this “miracle” can be traced to at least one very unlikely source: Calvinism.
Francis Fukuyama wrote in 2017 that most of his fellow secularists discount the importance of the Protestant Reformation in the emergence of the modern state and that the Lutheran and Calvinist wings of the Reformation both contributed to the order we now take for granted.
Lutheranism added fire to the drive for mass literacy by encouraging the reading of the Bible by the laity. And in a later interview, Fukuyama said it was Calvinism’s “austere personal morality” that was crucial for eliminating corruption, especially “in the founding of modern bureaucracies in the Netherlands, in Prussia, in England, and in the United States.”
Fukuyama was not suggesting that Calvinism itself was (small l) liberal or (small d) democratic. Anabaptists—as they were fleeing Switzerland under threat of drowning by Calvinist magistrates for refusing to baptize their babies—would know that, as would Michael Servetus as he was led to the pyre for heresy.
Instead, Fukuyama argued that the kind of personal morality Calvinism emphasized ultimately led to something unnatural: an impersonal state. He continued:
I think in the end that corruption is a very natural thing. You want to help your friends, and you want to help your family. This idea that you should be impersonal and not steal on behalf of your friends or your family doesn’t occur to anyone unless they’re forced to do it. Calvinism imposed a kind of morality on its believers that was conducive to a strict order, in which you could tell bureaucrats that this is really wrong. Unless you internalize those rules, no amount of external surveillance is going to make people really honest.
Fukuyama is partially right. The “friend-enemy distinction” is indeed natural in this fallen universe east of Eden. That’s why, if we base our ethics, politics, or culture on nature, we will end up with something akin to the law of the jungle: those with the most guns or tanks win, and everyone else is subjugated.
That leads, by definition, to an unlimited and unrestricted state. It leads, and usually quickly, to a rule by bribery and intimidation in which criminality is defined not by what one does but by who one knows.
Only if one thinks there is something to which even the state is ultimately accountable—to a moral order that is about more than just who has the most votes—can one have a state that is in any way limited.
As Americans, we ought to care about the how and not just the what of any government action because we believe there’s a Constitution by which even the most popular notion must be constrained. As Christians, we ought to care about the means as well as the ends because we believe that rendering unto Caesar does not include recognizing Caesar as a god.
Venezuelan gangsters, Danish money launderers, Romanian human traffickers—we should prosecute them all, and remove from the country those who are here illegally.
But we ought to care how we do it. A liberal democracy slows down a lot of things we might like to do, but we will miss it when it’s gone. The rule of law is fallible, but it’s a good idea—one we can’t afford to deport.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
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