America's Real Border Crisis

Conservative Christians are right: we need to fortify the wall.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Republican politicians are right: America has an urgent crisis at its border.

Moderates and those of us on the Left need to admit it and face it and do something about it because the danger is growing by the second. This brazen breach of our nation’s protective wall should be alarming to every decent American who understands what is at stake in this very moments. We can no longer turn our heads and avert our eyes and hope the emergency will pass.

We have to reckon with the sickening reality: Conservative Christians have broken open the border between Church and State and we are all in great peril.

Our Republic is currently at the precipice of full-blown theocracy and we have only ourselves to blame. For decades Republicans have played the long game: carefully building their alliances with Evangelical pastors, foreign oligarchs, and partisan media outlets; making slow and steady inroads into state and local elections, quietly permeating school boards, slipping into county courtrooms, and reworking districting maps.

And at the same time, far too many Americans have been asleep at the wheel: trusting that rightness would prevail no matter what, abdicating their responsibilities to vote consistently, paying attention to only the national and high-profile election results.

And in 2016, the opportunity came for a small minority of unhinged zealots to permanently dismantle the walls separating America from oppressive theocratic movements—and they are a hair’s breadth from completing their objective.

Today we find ourselves with a weaponized Supreme Court packed with Freedom Caucus surrogates, a religious extremist House Speaker, and a Republican Party that has repeatedly declared its intentions of obliterating every previous Constitutional protection designed to keep organized religion out of the spaces our laws are created and our national policies decided. Decades of civil rights are evaporating, books are being removed from school libraries, and long-decided rights to marry and have body autonomy are now in jeopardy.

The people of this nation (both religious and non-religious) who believe that America should not be an Evangelical Church need to move in solidarity in these moments. We need to work fiercely to fortify the border between the Church and the State—and the only way we’re going to do that is by consolidating our collective power and voting for the Democratic Party. Practically speaking, they are the only remaining safeguard we have left. A third party vote at this specific place and time in the history of this nation that is not strategically leveraged to oppose Republican rule can do nothing but ensure that theocracy is enshrined.

Most people (myself included) see the wisdom and necessity of expanding beyond a two-party system here, but the grim and sober truth is that if Conservative Christians break through the paper-thin Congressional barrier we currently have, we will be a one-party system going forward. None of us will have a voice or a vote. Our options will dissolve and we will all be at the mercy of people for whom mercy is not a consideration.

I’m a lifelong Christian and I began serving as a local church pastor twenty-seven years ago. The teachings of Jesus and my personal faith have always been of great value to me (as for many others) but I have no desire to legislatively impose my or any religious convictions on our Government or the people living beneath it. Spirituality should always be a personal choice, never a national legal mandate.

We don’t need to build a border wall to separate Church and State, we already have one called the Constitution.

It’s time for the humane Middle and the passionate Left to defend that wall with all we have: with our work and our voices and our votes.