Between Two Cities

Reflections on Immigration and Unrest

A faculty colleague recently expressed concern to me that Trinity students are caught between conflicting views on immigration. In their churches, they hear one message, but social media and friends promote another. Some say Christian hospitality means welcoming and loving our neighbors, while others argue that love requires us to uphold the law and protect civic order. Both perspectives cite the Bible and claim to be faithful to the gospel.

In an environment like this, we are all likely curious about what Christian love actually requires. As tensions in places like Minneapolis continue to increase, some Christians have moved from advocacy to civil disobedience, joining efforts to block deportations and disrupt immigration authorities. There’s a growing sense among some Christians that any cooperation with immigration law is inherently wrong. But this perspective overlooks important biblical teaching on our responsibilities to the state. Paul’s instruction in Romans 13 is very clear:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment (13:1-2).

This doesn’t give governments a blank check, but civic order is a divinely ordained good to be protected. As Paul goes on to say, the government “‘is God’s servant for [our] good… [so if we] do wrong… [it] does not bear the sword in vain’” (13:4). Legitimate authority has the right and responsibility to maintain order, and this includes control over borders.

Image by Fibonacci Blue, CC BY 2.0

But the current unrest is complicated. Even as we affirm the necessity of legal order, we can’t be indifferent to how immigrants are treated – especially the most vulnerable. The Christian commitment to human dignity doesn’t evaporate because someone entered a country illegally. We’re talking about people made in the image of God whose humanity demands pastoral care and compassion, even when legal consequences must follow.

The current unrest in Minnesota shows us why this matters. Over the past month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations there have detained more than 10,000 people, including legally admitted refugees awaiting permanent residency. Churches have delivered thousands of boxes of food to families in hiding, and at least two Americans were killed during confrontations with federal agents. Citizens and legal residents report widespread fear of being detained based only on their racial appearance, and a federal judge found that ICE violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota in January alone.¹ The scale of disruption and the reports of overreach raise serious questions about whether enforcement is being carried out with the justice and mercy Scripture requires.

Bishop Eric Menees of the Diocese of San Joaquin offered a characteristically Anglican response to these events in a recent pastoral letter. Acknowledging the complexity, he wrote: “A faithful Christian response must therefore hold together two truths: the responsibility of governments to uphold the rule of law and protect their borders, and the obligation to treat immigrants and refugees with justice, mercy, and compassion, in accordance with God’s law.” This is exactly right. The task isn’t to choose between order and mercy, but to hold both together through properly ordered love.

As an Anglican priest and seminary president, I work with a faculty and staff who prepare men and women to shepherd congregations facing these tensions. Our students need to understand how Christian love works when it engages questions of law, order, and the common good.

The Gift of Particular Obligations

One of Augustine’s most important insights is that love isn’t a formless universal sentiment we direct equally at everyone. Love has structure and can be ordered rightly or wrongly. In De doctrina Christiana, he writes:

Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you... Just so among men: since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you.²

Because we’re finite, we can’t love everyone in the same way, which means that real love requires differentiation. You love your children in a different way than you love your neighbor’s children – not because other children matter less in God’s eyes, but because God has given you particular responsibility for these specific children.

Looking after those closest to us isn’t selfish; it’s how God intended human love to function.

The same principle applies to political communities. I have obligations to fellow Americans that I don’t have to citizens of other nations, and this is not because Americans are inherently superior. Instead, it’s because Americans share a common legal order and mutual responsibilities. When Jeremiah commands the exiles to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (29:7), he’s recognizing this truth.

But our obligations to fellow citizens don’t cancel our obligations to the stranger. The same finite love that requires special care for those nearest us also requires humane treatment of those who arrive looking for refuge or opportunity. We can insist on the rule of law while demanding that enforcement be carried out with pastoral sensitivity. Christians should care about immigrants as people – that’s not negotiable. But caring for them doesn’t mean abandoning concern for civil order.

The Earthly Peace We’re Given to Use

But doesn’t this emphasis on earthly communities compromise our eschatological identity? Shouldn’t we be unconcerned about law and order among our earthly communities, since our real home is in God’s eternal city? Paul tells us plainly that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). Colossians commands us to “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (3:2).

Gustave Dore, The New Jerusalem, 1865

I’ve heard Christians asking these questions recently, but I believe they present a false dichotomy. In Augustine’s City of God, the eternal and earthly cities aren’t set in opposition. They exist together in this present age, sharing a common concern for what Augustine calls “earthly peace,” which is the relative order, security, and justice that make human life possible. Augustine explains in Book 19:

The earthly city seeks an earthly peace... The heavenly city, or rather the part of it which sojourns on earth and lives by faith, makes use of this peace... Consequently, so long as it lives like a captive and a stranger in the earthly city, it makes no scruple to obey the laws of the earthly city... and thus, as this life is ordinary to both cities, so there is a harmony between them regarding what belongs to it.³

Augustine suggests that Christians use civic order the way pilgrims use roads. We don’t worship them or confuse them with our ultimate destination. A legal system that preserves fundamental justice creates conditions for human flourishing and Christian faithfulness. We’re supposed to work to preserve and improve them – not because they’ll save us (only Christ does that), but because they serve human goods during our sojourn.

This has immediate ramifications for immigration debates. It is right to ask whether the scale and pace of immigration in some communities threaten the earthly peace in ways that harm real people. When hundreds of thousands of people arrive annually from cultures with legal and political traditions fundamentally incompatible with constitutional democracy, we face real questions about whether our systems can bear such rapid transformation. The European experience should serve as a warning to us.

Take Sharia law as a case in point. It’s not “Islamic law” in the way that canon law is “church law.” It’s a comprehensive ordering of all life (political, economic, domestic, and religious) that doesn’t recognize the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical authority that Christianity spent centuries developing. The classical Islamic legal tradition produces an entirely different vision of justice, authority, and human liberty than the Western legal tradition. European nations are struggling with large immigrant communities who resist integration into liberal democratic institutions and prefer to establish parallel legal and social structures. Many European nations have subjected their own citizens to serious social and political turmoil and injustice. Young women have paid the highest price as instances of sexual violence (perpetrated primarily by Muslim men) against them have increased dramatically, and authorities have been reluctant to acknowledge or address the issue.⁴

I think of our Nigerian students when I hear these debates. They’re facing something far more urgent, since the Fulani (a muslim ethnic group) have waged a systematic campaign of violence against Christian communities for decades. When a Nigerian Christian tells me he’s concerned about Islamic expansion (as Abp. Ben Kwashi did just last week), he’s doing so because of murdered neighbors and burned churches. Properly ordered love in his context might well require stronger resistance to Islamic expansion than would be warranted in suburban America, precisely because the threats and responsibilities differ.

This line of thinking is not grounded in tribalism or “Christian nationalism.” If Christian love has order, then we must acknowledge that some neighbors have been entrusted to our care in uniquely binding ways. To neglect their welfare – especially the welfare of children and other vulnerable people – in favor of abstract notions of universal justice is to invert love’s proper order. The scale and pace of immigration in parts of Europe show us what happens when the desire to act justly is severed from the duty to protect those for whom we hold primary responsibility.

Some legal systems better reflect the moral order embedded in creation than others. Western legal traditions, with all their flaws, have developed protections for human dignity, limitations on arbitrary power, and frameworks for ordered liberty that took centuries to achieve. They’re fragile right now, and this should concern us all.

The Both/And of Faithful Love

We can and should extend Christian love to immigrants – including Muslim immigrants. That love has to be real rather than abstract. It means welcoming them as neighbors, working for their good, praying for them, and recognizing them as fellow image-bearers. The Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:25-37) makes clear that neighbor-love crosses ethnic and religious boundaries.

But this doesn’t mean we’re indifferent to whether our legal and cultural order survives. We can love Muslims as people made in God’s image and still resist legal and social norms that would undermine justice, as Sharia law certainly does. We can work for the good of refugees and still insist that immigration happen at a pace that allows for genuine integration. What’s at stake is whether immigration at current levels from societies with fundamentally different legal traditions can happen without transforming our society in ways that make it much less just.

Religious liberty is protected by our First Amendment, but it doesn’t require us to facilitate the introduction of legal traditions that would eliminate religious liberty. We can extend hospitality while enforcing reasonable limits. Both are expressions of properly ordered love.

The theological tradition, from Augustine through Aquinas to Richard Hooker and beyond, insists that earthly peace is a real good and that just laws matter because cultural coherence serves human flourishing.⁵ What matters is whether we’re ordering those concerns correctly.

This means rejecting two opposite errors. First, we can’t embrace an anti-immigrant, xenophobic idolatry that treats our culture as ultimate. That’s paganism dressed in Christian language. But there’s an equal and opposite danger in treating concern for earthly order as automatically suspect, as though Christian eschatology requires indifference to whether our children inherit order or chaos. To do so is to fail to love our neighbors – especially the most vulnerable among us – with the particular, embodied, and finite love our humanity requires.

Augustine developed the Christian just war tradition on the premise that earthly communities and their peace are worth defending. The magistrate who fails to protect his people from invasion sins against justice. Love doesn’t negate the duty of defense – it properly orders it.⁶

Living Between Two Cities

I don’t pretend this answers every question Christians might have about policy and the proper approach to Christian witness in our time. Prudential judgments about specific immigration numbers, asylum procedures, and enforcement methods require expertise I don’t have. What I do know is that Christians need better categories than the ones dominating our current debates.

We need to recover the understanding that particular political communities and their legal orders are genuine goods worthy of Christian care. We should certainly avoid both the nationalist temptation to idolize our culture and the universalist temptation to pretend that all cultures and legal systems are morally equivalent.

Most importantly, Christian love has structure and order. It is particular, differentiated, and embodied care for those brought near to us by God’s providence, including our families, neighbors, and fellow citizens. That’s how finite creatures participate in God’s love as we make our pilgrimage between two cities.

We’re citizens of heaven, yes. But we’re citizens who still travel on mortal roads, and some roads are better than others. Our pilgrimage toward the New Jerusalem doesn’t require indifference to whether the paths we travel are marked by justice and order or chaos and violence. We care for earthly peace and work to preserve it because love requires nothing less from pilgrims who have neighbors to care for and a long road still to walk.

1. This has been widely reported - I’m citing a Fox News Story to avoid accusations of liberal bias: https://www.fox9.com/news/ice-violated-least-96-court-orders-january

2. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana 1.28.29.

3. Augustine, The City of God 19.17.

4. The Rotherham scandal offers the most well-documented case. Alexis Jay’s independent inquiry found that at least 1,400 children – predominantly white British girls from troubled backgrounds – were systematically groomed and sexually abused between 1997 and 2013 by gangs made up primarily of men from Pakistan. The institutional response was especially troubling, as police treated victims with contempt, social workers downplayed the abuse, and officials across multiple agencies refused to confront the pattern for fear of appearing racist. Similar failures occurred in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Derby, and other English towns. Louise Casey’s 2025 national audit found that, despite serious gaps in data collection, local police records from Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, and West Yorkshire showed disproportionate numbers of Muslim men from immigrant communities involved in organized child sexual exploitation. See Alexis Jay, Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, 1997–2013 (Rotherham: Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, 2014); Louise Casey, National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (London: Home Office, 2025).

5. Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum 22.75: “The natural order which seeks the peace of mankind, ordains that the monarch should have the power of undertaking war if he thinks it advisable, and that the soldiers should perform their military duties in behalf of the peace and safety of the community.” See also 22.74: “Good men undertake wars, when they find themselves in such a position as regards the conduct of human affairs, that right conduct requires them to act, or to make others act, in this way.”

6. For Augustine on earthly peace, see City of God 19.17; for Aquinas on law and the common good, see Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 90-97; for Hooker on law and political order, see Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 1.10.