Abstract
Julia Kristeva opens her book Strangers to Ourselves (Columbia University Press, 1991) with a provocative statement. She writes: ‘Foreigner: a choked up rage deep down in my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur’ (p. 1). Human beings, she is suggesting, have a tendency to respond to difference with fear, hostility and exclusion—and it is this response to difference that both God and the Illegal Alien and Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear seek to grapple with. Both authors address the question: how are we to engage with those different from us living in our midst? While a timeless challenge, it has particular urgency today, in that concerns about those living within the nation-state deemed not to belong have stimulated seismic shifts in the political landscape in the West in recent years, notably the success of politicians campaigning on nationalist and anti-immigrant manifestos. Robert Heimburger wrestles with how US citizens should respond to immigrants—specifically, the more than 11 million living in the US without legal authorization, the majority of whom are Latinx—and Matthew Kaemingk explores how Christian citizens in the West should react and relate to Muslims. Both books are the outcome of doctoral research in theology and ethics—for Heimburger, at the University of Oxford; and for Kaemingk, at Fuller Theological Seminary and the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Both offer academically rich, practically-grounded and insightful discussions of complex contexts and debates. Each articulates a clear, passionate and original argument, drawing on extensive interdisciplinary research as well as personal encounter, and as a result both books provide a stimulating and thought-provoking read.
In God and the Illegal Alien, Heimburger seeks to address a lacuna he identifies in the Christian ethics of immigration—namely, a sustained and sophisticated engagement with legal history. Heimburger argues that we need deeper understanding of the origins and assumptions of immigration law coupled with a ‘better theological account of politics’ that can help us properly to evaluate these legal assumptions and norms ‘in light of the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (p. 18). To this end, his book is dialectically structured in three two-stage parts. The first stage of each part delves into legal history—offering ‘close readings of the cases and legislation that have made what immigration law is today’—and the second then engages in close readings of Scripture and other theologians to assess and challenge the legal concepts and assumptions disclosed. His goal is to remind church and civil authorities of their purposes as given by God (p. 19).
Part I explores the legal concept of the alien, which Heimburger describes as the ‘basic building block of U.S. immigration law’ (p. 26). He traces the distinction of the alien from the citizen back to the rule of naturalization in 1790 in the US and before that to late medieval and early modern common law in England, specifically to the 1608 case of Calvin v. Smith. Narrating a shift from a fluctuating, generalised notion of the alien in English law to a fixed, direct definition in US law by 1917 as ‘any person not a native-born or naturalized citizen of the United States’, he notes that the solidification of the concepts of alien and sovereignty went hand-in-hand (p. 30). The second stage of Part I presents his theological challenge to this legal trajectory. Drawing on Karl Barth, he suggests that life can be ordered in alternative ways that do not depend upon defining migrants as untrustworthy aliens. For Barth, being human involves reaching out towards other human beings and seeking fellowship with those far away. Heimburger, building on this line of thought, argues that migrants are better understood as ‘distant neighbours coming near’ (p. 53).
Part II moves on to investigate how some aliens came to be classed as illegal—the first of two major conceptual innovations Heimburger identifies in US immigration legal history (p. 20). A detailed exposition of the development of immigration law highlights late-nineteenth-century bans on Chinese immigrants and accompanying assertions of the sovereign right of the nation-state to exclude and expel aliens. Heimburger points out that the granting of increased legal rights to immigrants stimulated the development of laws ‘to fend off newcomers’ (pp. 85–86). As immigration restrictions intensified after 1921, self-preservation and entrenchment of sovereignty to guard the nation-state became the overriding considerations in law. The second stage of this part again offers a counter-vision. Suggesting that the guarding of places in Christian scripture looks rather different—evidenced through an exploration of the guarding of the garden and the city in Genesis and Revelation in conversation with Martin Luther, Jacques Ellul and Oliver O’Donovan—Heimburger argues that Christian guarding has both responsibilities and limits, and takes place within the broader context of divine guarding. He invites his readers to remember that human guarding is limited to this era and subject to God’s judgement, and that it should therefore always be ‘humble’. He extrapolates: ‘Authority over immigration is not plenary or unlimited as in U.S. law, nor is it a good in itself’ (p. 114). Weighing up different types of moral wrongs and goods, Heimburger goes on to conclude that immigration offences should most properly be categorised as misdemeanours—minor rather than major offences—and that these would better be punished by fines than deportation (pp. 141–45). Part II concludes with a discussion of seven particular cases of offences against US immigration law, calling for a reduction in the severity of the punishments meted out.
Part III explores the second major legal and conceptual shift Heimburger identifies, namely, how those from neighbouring countries became unlawfully present. In another detailed exposition, he traces how changes in immigration law in the 1960s—notably the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was touted as a triumph of democratic principles for having ended national quotas that discriminated on racial grounds—ended up ironically proving ‘unneighborly’ (p. 150) as it reduced the number of Mexicans being admitted to the US. Heimburger argues that this, when combined with the turbulent history of Mexico-US relations and increasing demands for migrant labour in the US, led to the creation of ‘a permanent underclass of migrant workers’ (p. 178). His searing criticism of the current immigration regime is memorably and pithily captured in the concluding sentences of chapter 6. He writes, ‘Americans do not keep slaves anymore, but they have something close. Across town or next door live members of a settled underclass that is neither slave nor free’ (p. 178). Chapter 6 presents the anticipated counter-frame. Heimburger turns to O’Donovan’s discussions of expletive and attributive justice in Grotius as well as a fresh reading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan to outline practices of love and justice that could make the US a better neighbour and restore Mexican-American relationships. For Heimburger, becoming a neighbour is an ongoing activity—a verb rather than a noun, perhaps—which involves encounter by chance with someone who comes near and necessitates first that the one in the process of becoming a neighbour is merciful to the one who has come near. Mercy is for all and neighbour love is always properly situated within the love of God. Wondering whether a country rather than just an individual can become a neighbour, he envisions (borrowing from O’Donovan again) borders as presenting ‘an opportunity to relate and interact’ (p. 202). He reminds Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and Americans ‘that the neighbor represents the face of Christ’ (p. 207). What, then, does this mean in practice? Heimburger focuses his suggested responses at the level of national policy. He suggests that defending one another from attack, granting funds to avert financial crisis and receiving refugees are ‘good examples of becoming a neighbour’ (p. 205), and concludes by outlining three specific ways in which the US could become a better neighbour today. He argues for the recognition of those who have lived peaceably in the US without legal status for a long time; for the reform of laws so that more Mexicans are able to come; and for the seeking of opportunities for co-operation across the border with Mexico (pp. 205–206).
Whereas Heimburger focuses on Mexican immigrants to the US, Matthew Kaemingk’s Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear considers contentious responses to a different group of immigrants in the West. He critiques what he sees as two overly-simplistic and polarized reactions to the presence of Muslims—and, more generally, to religious pluralism. One response has been to advocate openness and tolerance; the other aggression and tougher policies. Compellingly challenging both ‘right-wing nationalism’ and ‘the romanticism of left-wing multiculturalism’, he proposes ‘Christian pluralism’ as a third way for Christians seeking a response rooted in Christian conviction (p. 2). He argues that ‘Muslim immigration presents very real and very deep cultural and political challenges to the Western status quo’ (p. 3) (affirming some truth in the idea that the meeting of Islam and the West—or Mecca and Amsterdam as he puts it—represents a clash of civilizations) and, simultaneously, that the defence of Muslim rights and dignity depends on Christian conviction (rather than, as is usually assumed, on abandoning Christianity for a supposedly neutral secular stance). His book is structured into four distinct parts.
Part 1 discusses the recent history of Muslims in Amsterdam, representing Kaemingk’s effort to ground often abstract discussions of pluralism. Narrating how a progressive government in the Netherlands sought to integrate Muslims culturally and economically into a liberal consensus and marketplace, Kaemingk critiques this as a ‘benevolent but patronizing policy toward Islam’ (p. 52). This approach fell apart in the early twenty-first century, as a narrative of an ‘apocalyptic clash between Mecca and Amsterdam’ (p. 32) became dominant and resulted in the marginalisation of Muslims in multiple spheres of life. He highlights the ‘mocking wit’ (p. 61) of film director Theo van Gogh and his subsequent murder in 2004 as paradigmatic.
Diagnosing liberal assumptions and hegemony as the problem and arguing that liberal notions of multiculturalism are widely agreed—at least by European governments—to have failed, in Part 2 Kaemingk proposes Christian pluralism as an alternative counterculture capable of fostering religious and cultural freedom (pp. 72–74). In his view, the church needs to act as a ‘pluralist subaltern’ to ‘contest liberalism’s hegemonic dreams at multiple points’ (p. 116). To set the historical stage, he sketches the nineteenth-century movement for pluralism in the Netherlands which led to the formation of a Christian pluralist political party—the Anti-Revolutionary Party—in 1880, led by Abraham Kuyper. He then devotes the rest of Part 2 to an exploration of Kuyper’s work. Kuyper, as interpreted by Kaemingk, deconstructed secular liberal uniformity, arguing that faith was pervasive, pluriform and public (p. 92) and that liberalism was itself a religion with its own ‘liturgical, catechetical, and dogmatic practices’ (p. 99). As a result, the church needed to remain independent from the state and the state should avoid seeking to ‘assimilate pluriform faiths’ (p. 116). While he saw Christian faith as the only true religion, he otherwise affirmed diversity as a God-given source of delight. For Kuyper, Christian pluralism was an inevitable corollary of the ultimate sovereignty of Jesus Christ in spatial and temporal dimensions. If Jesus was a king who demanded justice for all religions and ideologies, nation-states needed to understand themselves as ‘stewards and not sovereigns’ which meant, in turn, refusing to impose ‘national [liberal] uniformity and hegemony’ (p. 124). Rather, the role of states was to create a deeply pluralistic public square in which all faiths could be expressed and embodied freely (pp. 121–28). But Kuyper recognised that the liberal nation-state was always trying to expand its dominance and reach beyond this remit. Churches could and should push back and thereby contribute to a healthy political culture. As Kaemingk summarises, ‘in serving Jesus Christ exclusively, they could serve the culture pluralistically’ (p. 137). Did this mean that human beings were inevitably disconnected from one another, able only to comprehend fully those within their own group? Kuyper, Kaemingk suggests, had hope for fragile moments of ‘cooperation, connection, and contact across ideologies and cultures’ through ‘gemeene gratie or common grace’ made possible through the activity of the Holy Spirit (pp. 147–49).
In Part 3, Kaemingk explores three lacunae he identifies in Kuyper’s pluralism—and in so doing, turns his hand to constructive theology to reimagine his legacy for the twenty-first century. First, Kaemingk suggests that Kuyper’s royal Christology was too limited and draws on Herman Bavinck, Klaas Schilder and Hans Boersma to ‘construct a more complex Christ-centred approach to life between Mecca and Amsterdam’ (p. 169). Invoking a mosaic of Christological images—including those of Christ as slave-king, naked king and hospitable king—he suggests that the three Christian callings to grace, truth and justice together comprise the mission of Christ and should inform the role of the church in relation to the state today. For Kaemingk, excavation of a more complex Christological repertoire enables a more sensitive ‘walking alongside’ Muslim neighbours than is usually found in, for example, one-dimensional responses to the hijab (p. 193).
Second, critiquing Kuyper for paying insufficient attention to the importance of character formation through worship, Kaemingk argues that Christian rituals and shared experience can help people to develop the habits, desires and practices of pluralism. Not all worship facilitates this, he points out with characteristic care. However, the theocentric, participatory and temporal nature of Reformed worship can encourage participants to make space for others and adopt a posture of active response, as well as train them in humility, lament and hope. The corollary is a call for churches to develop ‘multi-sensory counter-liturgies’ which can instruct ‘participants into a new way of seeing and living in the world’ (p. 225). Kaemingk’s third critique of Kuyper is that he and his followers failed to appreciate fully the importance of ordinary action in daily life. While recognising that the hope of democracy lay with the lives of ‘de kleine luyden (the little people)’ (p. 162), Kaemingk insists that Kuyper’s focus on bringing about pluralistic change at structural legal and political levels led to insufficient emphasis being placed on everyday actions. Addressing this omission, Kaemingk presents a medley of stories of real, ordinary Dutch Christians embodying justice, hospitality and grace in a ‘thousand small ways’ or ‘micro-practices’ (pp. 237–38). He describes Christian and Muslim women gathering together to sew, academic hospitality within the Free University of Amsterdam, practices of a doctor and district nurse, and community and political action born from informal coffee invitations and pot-luck meals.
The final section—Part 4—goes on to suggest what American Christians, and particularly evangelical Christians, can learn from the Dutch context. In a section that may have been tacked on in order to reach a US market, Kaemingk outlines three steps. First, there needs to be honest assessment of the historical and contemporary challenges Muslims have faced in the United States. Second, US evangelicals need to recognise how Muslim citizens are ‘already taking action’ and exercising agency in the public square, not least though the development of Muslim spaces of empowerment including schools, charities and mosques. Finally, Kaemingk details ten specific ways in which Americans evangelicals might act in the cause of Christian pluralism. The Epilogue, written in and through the lens of Holy Week 2017, acts as an evocative conclusion—drawing together key themes, and reiterating Kaemingk’s thesis that ‘political visions that myopically seek either high walls or open doors are not only unsustainable, but they are dangerous’ (p. 301). He ends where he began. Both those are, for Kaemingk, missing the vision and practices of a ‘well-set table’ that require ‘costly sacrifice, true humility, and real relationship’ (p. 305).
The two books have, at one level, a considerable amount in common—as do their authors. Heimburger and Kaemingk are both North Americans towards the beginning of their academic careers who have spent a substantial period of time living in Europe. The primary interlocutors for both are scholars identified with the Reformed tradition, and both foreground their own committed Christianity. Kaemingk articulates his evangelical, conservative and suburban Christian identity through ‘uncompromising commitment to the exclusive lordship of Jesus Christ’ (pp. 16; 264), and his desire for Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear to act as an example of Reformed public theology. Heimburger peppers his text with confessional phrases such as ‘the good news of the Lord Jesus goes out in the power of the Spirit’ (p. 61) and concludes with words from Psalm 146. They see the role of the theologian similarly, as ‘humble’ (Heimburger, p. 19) and as a ‘servant’ (Kaemingk, p. 14), and the concern for human beings at the heart of their respective projects is born out of the authors’ personal encounters in the US and the Netherlands. Both books stand out in their persistent effort to pay attention to and wrestle with complex and difficult realities—specifically, the multi-textured nature of both the reactions and the responsibilities of Christians to those deemed not to belong—and as a result, both refuse to settle for the simplistic, one-dimensional answers of either totally open borders/limitless hospitality or closed societies/higher walls that are so often mooted by those on opposite ends of the political spectrum. This, of course, is the central and explicitly articulated goal of Kaemingk’s work. Heimburger’s realism is more implicit. He recognises the divinely given nature of earthly authority and the need for immigration laws, while tempering this with warning of God’s judgement and the call to become a neighbour.
Both books also share a target for their criticism: national governments. Heimburger and Kaemingk present robust critiques of governmental responses to challenges brought about by immigration, and more profoundly, they both contest the overreach of the state. Governments, Heimburger and Kaemingk agree, need to become more modest in their ambitions and limit their role. For Heimburger, this is because political authority—acting through the law—always tends to do more than what is required. For Kaemingk, the overreach represents a more fundamental desire of secular liberalism to entrench its ideological dominance. This is where the books diverge. Because of their differing (albeit related) diagnoses of the problem with the nation-state, the trajectories of hope that Heimburger and Kaemingk outline also vary. Their suggested solutions to tension, hostility and injustice require different actors. For Heimburger, government moderation and reformation of the law in a more inclusionary direction present the best way forward. His theological conclusions lead him to argue that the existing immigration system needs improving, and that careful attention should be paid to economic and political relationships with neighbouring Mexico. He has a message for lawmakers and policymakers, particularly those who may want to know how their Christian faith should inform their action. Kaemingk, by contrast, sees Western governments—enslaved as he construes it to secular liberalism—as fundamentally part of the problem, and therefore incapable of fostering the kinds of pluralistic socio-political spaces necessary for engagement with difference. For Kaemingk, hope lies in Christian counter-culture imbued in local communities and individuals with worship and enacted through daily practices. As such, his book represents an exercise in distinctively Christian, post-liberal virtue ethics. The intended audience for his book is largely Christian communities—especially evangelicals in the US—as well as those interested in what Christians are doing and thinking. Kaemingk’s analysis perhaps chimes more with the zeitgeist in terms of its disillusionment with governments’ willingness or capacity to do what is necessary for people within a society to flourish, as well as with the emergence of voices contesting the long-held assumption that secular liberal democracy marked the apogee of human history. Held together, though, the different roadmaps proposed by Heimburger and Kaemingk illumine a potential path for transcending our current divides and disconnections around immigration and religious pluralism.
I would like to ask the authors some questions. Kaemingk has a tendency to stereotype liberalism—portraying it flatly as if it has a universally agreed definition, ideology and set of practices—and it seemed a little ironic that the path of Christian pluralism he sets out so persuasively in contrast to liberalism coins the language of the ‘third way’ (p. 2), given the term’s associations with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century liberals. Was this intended, I wonder? I am also unsure about the use of the word ‘immigrants’ in the title given that Kaemingk’s focus is on Muslim populations generally in the West, including many who are citizens and/or have been born in the US or the Netherlands. He does not attend to nuanced definitions of immigrants or discussions of integration that take place within the field of Migration Studies—most of which, like his analysis, challenge simplistically inclusionary and exclusionary positions. I am surprised, given the racism embedded within Western Islamophobia, that Kaemingk does not grapple with Kuyper’s own racism and the ways in which his thought was drawn upon by those developing Apartheid in South Africa. Kuyper’s arguments for pluralism have been used to justify precisely the exclusionary mentality that Kaemingk is at pains to condemn. Where Heimburger importantly articulates the presence of Christ in the other and the need to receive from the migrant—the mystical and mutual potential of relationships—Kaemingk gives the impression that the presence of Muslims (and religious pluralism, by extension) is more of a problem to be managed than a source of gift.
In God and the Illegal Alien, the significant time that Heimburger devotes to the intricacies of legal history, case law and an impressive multiplicity of sources and interlocutors makes for dense reading at points. Heimburger could helpfully have teased out the notion of the near neighbour a little more. While he mentions that numbers of unauthorised migrants from Guatemala, India and Honduras have increased during the last few years, the book focuses almost exclusively on Mexico and Mexicans. Can neighbourliness be construed only in terms of geographic or physical proximity? What do his arguments mean for US responses to Central Americans who have journeyed through Mexico to cross the border? The concluding suggestions for action and reform of the legal system are not new, even if the route by which they are reached is refreshing and robust. I wonder whether there were reasons why neither author engaged with political philosophers who have discussed the constitutive role that a group constructed as ‘other’ plays in the establishment and maintenance of the nation-state (e.g., Carl Schmitt, Georgio Agamben), and I am also disappointed not to see Latinx or Muslim (or female) scholars engaged in the body of the text as substantive interlocutors.
These questions and issues aside, there is much that impresses about both books, and each makes a substantial and innovative contribution to the field of theological ethics. Heimburger and Kaemingk have clearly both engaged in rigorous historical and theological research, and their arguments are consistently backed up with evidence and potential chinks and inconsistencies astutely named. Clear structures and engaging writing styles help readers to follow both headline arguments and nuanced detail. Each book presents an original and determinedly Christian rationale for reconsidering how we respond to those often deemed not to belong who are living in our midst. As such, whether you agree with their conclusions or not, both books will be of great value to those working in the fields of Christian ethics, political theology, and law and religion and deserve to be read widely.