Green card a la iglesia

“We’re not going to check the immigration status of people who attend our church,” Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas said on Fox and Friends, “but we’re also not going to harbor illegal immigrants who are criminals.” Those that do so follow the “Jesus of their imagination, rather than the Jesus of the Bible.”

Others disagree. They think the Jesus of the Bible would fight for immigrants. “We are trying to abide by God’s law, especially when the laws of this country are so unjust, and so wrong, and so broken,” said Eric O. Ledermann, pastor of University Presbyterian Church in Tempe, Ariz. UPC supports Sanctuary 2014, a grassroots campaign to prevent the United States from deporting immigrants.

Activists emphasize the terrible conditions in immigrants’ home countries. The United States Department of State has issued travel warnings for Honduras, Mexico, and El Salvador, and the warnings pull no punches. The one for Honduras emphasizes its murder rate—one of the highest in the world—and warns, “The police may take hours to arrive at the scene of a violent crime or may not respond at all.” In Tamaulipas, a Mexican state on Texas’ southern border, the state department warns, “State and municipal law enforcement capacity is limited to nonexistent.”

Christian leaders disagree about what position to take on immigration, in part because they dispute each other’s statistics. “There is research showing that immigrants do commit a disproportionate share of crime,” Center for Immigration Studies’ Steven A. Camarota said, “but there is also research showing that the opposite is the case.”

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, appealed to American Immigration Council statistics suggesting a lower incarceration rate for immigrants than for citizens. “The typical immigrant is not likely, statistically speaking, to be a rapist or a murderer,” they conclude. “But he or she is quite likely to be a Bible-believing Christian.”

Yet others look to the economic analysis of Northwestern’s Jörg L. Spenkuch showing “a 10 percent increase in the share of immigrants is estimated to lead to an increase in the property crime rate of circa 1.2 percent, while the rate of violent crimes remains essentially unaffected.”

Potluck bellies

If the 1980s had rich Christians in an age of hunger, the 2010s have fat Christians in an age of vegans. No wonder the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association named The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life, by Rick Warren, Daniel Amen, and Mark Hyman, its 2015 Christian Book of the Year.

Sunday school donuts and potluck (or providence) lunches have found their way to the collective ecclesiastical waistline, and pastors are not exempt. One Baylor University study released this year revealed obesity plagues more than a third of American clergy.

But pastors aren’t alone, either. An earlier study by Purdue’s Ken Ferraro identified the biggest believers: Baptists, especially women who consume religious media, e.g., television. The study controls for residency, so even Baptists not in the South face trouble buttoning their trousers.

Pastor H. B. Charles Jr. appreciates these concerns but says there’s an issue that trumps health: holiness. “For every preacher you hear about dying in the pulpit because of obesity,” he writes, “there are scores more stories of preachers who lose their pulpits because of the destructive forces of sex, money, and power.” —J.B.