If You're a Christian and You're Cheering Deportations—You Sure as Hell Ain't a Christian

In the 1986 movie Hannah and Her Sisters, an embittered painter named Frederick (who is also an Atheist) is lamenting the grave state of the world to his partner, when his anger turns toward Christians, saying, “If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.”

That’s about as eloquent and topical a sermon as I can imagine.

At this point, I need a barf bag or a plastic bucket just to scroll on social media or watch the news anymore.

As a person of faith, one raised in the Christian tradition and who served for decades in local churches as a pastor, one of the most difficult tasks right now is watching a group of supposed followers of Jesus do stuff that not long ago, just a few years ago, wouldn’t simply be declared out of character for such people—but morally impossible.

My timeline is now filled with people unable to restrain their glee at the terror and trauma being visited upon immigrants (both documented and undocumented); on refugees who fled war and poverty and famine; on black and brown-skinned people from every nation; on families and couples and children who have not had the good fortune they have had to be born here.

These self-identified Jesus-followers are celebrating the separation of parents from their children and spouses from one another; cheering families being torn apart, lives being violently uprooted, and human beings being terrorized at school and at work and at church.

They are feeling they’ve won something by watching strangers suffer.

And they are doing this all while having the audacity to pretend they give a shit about Jesus, or anything he lived or taught or called his followers to.