If You're a Christian and You're Cheering Deportations—You Sure as Hell Ain't a Christian

In the 1986 movie Hannah and Her Sisters, an embittered painter named Frederick (who is also an Atheist) is lamenting the grave state of the world to his partner, when his anger turns toward Christians, saying, “If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.”That’s about as eloquent and topical a sermon as I can imagine.At this point, I need a barf bag or a plastic bucket just to scroll on social media or watch the news anymore.As a person of faith, one raised in the Christian tradition and who served for decades in local churches as a pastor, one of the most difficult tasks right now is watching a group of supposed followers of Jesus do stuff that not long ago, just a few years ago, wouldn’t simply be declared out of character for such people—but morally impossible.My timeline is now filled with people unable to restrain their glee at the terror and trauma being visited upon immigrants (both documented and undocumented); on refugees who fled war and poverty and famine; on black and brown-skinned people from every nation; on families and couples and children who have not had the good fortune they have had to be born here.These self-identified Jesus-followers are celebrating the separation of parents from their children and spouses from one another; cheering families being torn apart, lives being violently uprooted, and human beings being terrorized at school and at work and at church.They are feeling they’ve won something by watching strangers suffer.And they are doing this all while having the audacity to pretend they give a s**t about Jesus, or anything he lived or taught or called his followers to.And the tragedy is that these deluded hypocrites aren’t just filling my timeline, which is bad enough. There’s also filling Congress and our courthouses and school boards and PTA meetings and police forces and board meetings.And worst of all, they are filling hundreds of thousands of churches throughout this nation.And in those buildings this Sunday, there will be preachers and pastors pounding their pulpits and shouting with delight about this vicious, coordinated Government assault on our most vulnerable: the homeless, the marginalized, the poor, the foreigner—those Jesus called “the least of these.”And staring back at them, rows of people so weaned on white supremacy, so indoctrinated by fear, so poisoned by hateful theology, and so programmed to dehumanize strangers—will be applauding it all as if it’s some righteous victory for the White Army of the Lord, when in reality they have become the very corrupt tables Jesus would flip, were he to show up.Sadly, these people attend Bible studies and prayer meetings and Sunday school classes and worship services, all supposedly centered around a poor, dark-skinned Middle Eastern Jew who didn’t speak English and whose parents fled the territory where lived when he was a baby to avoid politically-ordered genocide—oblivious to the fact that were they to encounter him right now, they’d be enthusiastically joining in his persecution.Look, I’m not big on declaring who is a Christian and who isn’t, as that kind of personal moral decision isn’t something anyone can really evaluate from the outside.However, Jesus said that we could look at what people say and trust that “from the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks";”that we could evaluate their outward actions as the tangible “fruit” of their lives.Given this, I can declare with a pretty clear conscience something I hope more followers of Jesus will declare and pastors will preach:that if you’re a Christian and you are celebrating the deportation of immigrants, the turning away of refugees, the separation of families, and the traumatizing of the least to these, you’re not a Christian—at least not one who has the slightest interest in seeing, caring for, listening to, emulating, or loving Jesus or those he called us to love.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe