An adult conversation about Syrian refugees

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

An ISIS killer who posed as a Syrian migrant to enter France has increased fears of terrorists abusing the goodwill of nations toward refugees and sparked a heated debate in the United States.

Some conservatives, such as Ross Douthat of The New York Times and Trevin Wax, writing in The Washington Post, say we need to move forward with Syrian refugees here in America. Others, including David French at National Review and Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist, raise questions about that. Many of them have respectfully engaged the other side, but plenty of lowbrow arguments have come up, too.

“There’s certainly some childish assumptions on both sides. For example, those who want to let the refugees in claiming that the motive for not [doing so] is simply hate,” said John Stonestreet. “On the other side, [some] are saying … America should never accept a single Muslim refugee ever again, and you’re like, what on Earth does that even mean?”

Stonestreet said Chuck Colson’s earlier approach to crime and incarceration could instruct Christians in how they approach the refugee crisis. When Colson first started working on justice reform, two schools of thought prevailed: Tough on crime and soft on crime.

“Tough on crime was what you did if you loved your country, and soft on crime is what you did if you loved people. He jumped in and said, listen, we can be tough on crime but smarter about sentencing laws,” Stonestreet said. “I’m wondering if that’s the level of conversation we need to have. Clearly, a one-size-fits-all government policy is not the best way to preserve human dignity. … We’ve got to come up with third and fourth solutions. I don’t know what those are,” but they should involve nongovernmental agencies, too, he added.

“Christians have always jumped into the mess, and I think in this case we need to do it as well,” Stonestreet said.

He and I also talked about how secular Western culture has responded overall to last week’s terror attacks in Paris.

“A hundred people dying at the hands of ISIS happens almost on a weekly basis in many developing nations. Why is it that when it happens in the West—a 9/11 or in Paris—that suddenly it’s such a bigger deal?” Stonestreet asked. Ethnocentrism could explain part of it: Westerners more readily identify with events in nations similar to theirs. But another reason Westerners reacted so strongly to the events in Paris is that they shattered our illusion of control, a hallmark of secular society.

“Most people aren’t conscious secularists or conscious atheists; they’re practical ones. They live most of life as if God is irrelevant, and one of the great indicators of this is our illusion of control. I think this strikes at the heart of why an event like what happened in Paris strikes us,” Stonestreet said, adding, “The fear of God is the only fear we’re supposed to have, and the fear of God casts out other fear.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on The World and Everything in It.