Would It Matter If Mass Immigration Was Good for the UK Church?
What we welcome in providence we need not endorse in politics
NOTE: I owe a huge thank you to regular readers who have put up with my lack of posting over the summer. I last wrote back in June. A combination of family illnesses in July, and the need to take a break over the summer, have kept me from my keyboard. With September arriving however, the new school year’s routine has set in and I am optimistic that I will be back to regular posting.
On the rare occasions that I have seen British evangelical leaders address the topic of immigration, there has been one repeated theme: that mass immigration to the UK has been good for the British evangelical church. It is argued that immigrants add to the numbers of evangelicals on our increasingly godless shores, that they increase the number of voters who have small-c conservative values, that their presence forces British Christians to confront their racism, and that they provide an opportunity to manifest the cross-cultural power of the Gospel in increasingly diverse churches.
I’m not here interested in whether any of these things are true. To some extent, I’m sure they are. What I am interested in is asking “would it matter if they were?”
When the above argument is presented, a small but significant leap is often made. Either explicitly or by implication, many British evangelicals conclude the following: mass immigration is good for the UK church… and therefore British Christians should welcome and endorse mass immigration.
This is quite flimsy thinking. There are a few reasons why, but the most fundamental, I think, is this principle: what we welcome in providence we need not endorse in politics.
How do we arrive at such a principle? Well, Scripture and church history are full of instances where God has used political events to advance both the spread of the Gospel and the spiritual good of his people. Yet often, these are events which either Scripture explicitly condemns, or which are plainly condemnable for Christians by good and necessary consequence.
Perhaps the most obvious example is Acts 8. Following the martyrdom of Stephen, a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, “and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria” (8:1 NIV). However, the result of this is the further spread of the Gospel: “Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went” (8:4). The persecution of Christians here is, at one level, a political matter. The Jews were afforded a certain level of self-governance in the Roman political order, especially when it came to matters of the Jewish law, and they availed themselves of that here. This is why, in Acts 9, Saul of Tarsus asks the high priest for permission to arrest Christians in the synagogues of Damascus. But I doubt that any Christian reader of Acts expects the early church to have been cheering this political decision on because they believed it would be spiritually beneficial to the church.
People may quibble with this example though. After all, it could be argued that the Jews were going beyond their political jurisdiction in Acts 8-9 (we know that they didn’t always stick to the limits of authority Rome allowed them). Much of the rest of Acts is taken up by repeated episodes of the Jews persecuting Christians—Paul in particular—and the Romans stepping in to protect them, largely judging that the Jews have no right to make a political problem of it.
So, let’s consider a different example: the Roman empire itself. Christians throughout the centuries have generally agreed that, in God’s providence, the Roman empire provided a uniquely effective environment for the spread of the Gospel. The roads, the ship routes, the order and security of the pax Romana, the shared language(s), the extent of the territories from Britain to the Middle East—in God’s providence, all this and more meant that, under the Roman empire, the Gospel could spread to the nations in a way it never would have done at any earlier time in history. The realities of Roman persecution of Christians are often grossly overstated. As already noted, in Acts, Rome is far more of a friend to the church than Jerusalem is. And so, it’s fairly reasonable to say that in many ways “the Roman empire was good for the church.” (I could have worked a “what did the Romans ever do for us?” joke in here somewhere, I’m sure).
But should Christians therefore endorse the Roman empire? Or empire as such? That’s a less straightforward question. And I imagine most British conservative evangelicals inclined to think about it would be reluctant to say “yes”.
Another example, and perhaps the most helpful: the exile of Israel and Judah. Anyone familiar with their Old Testament knows that exile came about as a result of Israel and Judah’s sin. It was forewarned in the law (e.g. Lev. 26:14-45, Deut. 28:15-68) and eventually falls on the northern (2 Kings 17) and southern (2 Kings 21) kingdoms. In God’s providence, the pagan empires of Assyria and Babylon carry out his punishment upon his people.
And yet… exile was good for God’s people, right? It created the Jewish diaspora, which ultimately led to the spread of the Gospel. Along with that, it arguably furthered the advance of “Jewish values” (Jews, for example, were known to rescue infants from exposure much as Christians later were). By mixing them among Gentiles, we could argue that it forced Jews to confront their racism. And, with the post-exilic growth of “God-fearers” (that is, Gentiles who worshipped the God of Israel), it surely helped to manifest the fact that the Gospel promised to Abraham would one day result in blessing to all the nations.
The exile, then, was a political event that was spiritually beneficial for God’s people.
And yet it is not politically endorsed by Scripture—quite the opposite, in fact. The paradox of God’s providence is that, even though he ordains the exile as a just punishment for Israel’s sin, he condemns Assyria and Babylon for carrying it out. He uses the sins of the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish (and yet spiritually benefit) his people.
Isaiah 10:5-12, a prophecy against Assyria, is worth quoting here:
“Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger,
in whose hand is the club of my wrath!
I send him against a godless nation [i.e. Israel],
I dispatch him against a people who anger me,
to seize loot and snatch plunder,
and to trample them down like mud in the streets.
But this is not what he [i.e. Assyria, personified as the king of Assyria] intends,
this is not what he has in mind;
his purpose is to destroy,
to put an end to many nations.
‘Are not my commanders all kings?’ he says.
‘Has not Kalno fared like Carchemish?
Is not Hamath like Arpad,
and Samaria like Damascus?
As my hand seized the kingdoms of the idols,
kingdoms whose images excelled those of Jerusalem and Samaria—
shall I not deal with Jerusalem and her images
as I dealt with Samaria and her idols?’”When the Lord has finished all his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, “I will punish the king of Assyria for the wilful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes.
Here, Assyria is “the rod” of God’s anger, sent against the “godless nation” of Israel to punish its sins. “But this is not what he [i.e. Assyria] intends!” That is, although providentially God uses Assyria to punish Israel’s sins, politically that is not what Assyria is intending to do. No, Assyria’s political purpose “is to destroy, to put an end to many nations”. This is a great political sin on Assyria’s part, and when God has concluded his providential purposes with Assyria, he declares he will punish it for its pride.
Much the same is said of Babylon. Although God uses Babylon to punish Judah, he declares in Jeremiah 51 that he will avenge Judah for this punishment! “Before your eyes I will repay Babylon and all who live in Babylonia for all the wrong they have done in Zion,” declares the LORD” (51:24).
And so, even though, in God’s providence, the actions of Assyria and Babylon are to be “welcomed” as part of his purposes for his people’s good and his own glory, they are clearly not to be endorsed at the political level.
The same could be said of many post-biblical events in church history that have unexpectedly turned out for the good of the church. An oft-cited one would be China’s expulsion of Western Christian missionaries after the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Supposedly, this led to explosive growth in the Chinese church, as it had to become truly indigenous and self-sustaining. Although estimates vary by quite a way, there are now at least tens of millions of Christians in China (although growth seems to have stalled in recent years). Yet I doubt any of us want to endorse the Chinese Communist Party’s religious policies simply because they turned out “good for the church” in certain ways.
And so, I think we arrive at the principle I laid out at the beginning: what we welcome in providence we need not endorse in politics.
This is something we need to bear in mind when we try to discuss mass immigration as British evangelicals: the question of whether it benefits our churches is, ultimately, irrelevant. It may well be the case that mass immigration benefits the church in the ways I’ve mentioned above, and perhaps even more besides. But that doesn’t really matter when it comes to determining whether pursuing a policy of mass immigration (as successive British governments at both ends of the political spectrum have done for some time) is a just and prudent political decision. Determining the appropriate amount of immigration is a political matter, not a churchly one. Christians should certainly speak to the issue from a Christian perspective, but this is not the same as saying that it should be judged based on its benefits to the church or on whether it seems to advance the Gospel.
A final point: It strikes me as particularly odd that benefit to the church and the Gospel is offered as a rationale by British evangelical leaders given that, in general, our constituency is usually quick to broadly endorse a liberal, secular public order in which Christianity is not given preferential treatment. British evangelicals (yes, even the Anglicans) generally kick back against any suggestion that the state should be subservient to anything explicitly Christian in any way. And yet, when discussing immigration, many of us seem to become uncharacteristically willing for the responsibilities of the state to become subservient to the mission of the church.
Now, of course, it may well be that politics and providence coincide. But it ain’t necessarily so.