"What will happen if Trump wins the elections in November?”
People that I meet at Casa Esperanza that are migrating North ask me this question often.
It weights on me, and all the more so after watching the presidential debate last week and hearing such hateful rhetoric leave Trump’s mouth about immigrants.
There’s many ways that I’ve thought about writing this newsletter... and even as I sit down to write, I’m not exactly sure what I want to communicate.
For much of my life growing up in the church, politics were not connected to faith. “Being too political” was considered, in its extreme forms, as cardinal sin, and in other moments as something that was simply best not to involve yourself in. But something that the theology of the church in Latin America introduced me to, and that certain faith communities in the US have helped to form in me, is the idea that our Christian faith is meant to be lived out in the public square… that is to say that the things that we do AND the things that we leave undone (read: complicity) in our communities are reflections of our Christian witness.
So our Christian faith should carry us into involvement in the public square (read: politics). Why? Because politics are foundational to the life of a community.
Most simply, we can understand “politics” as a set of rules by which we organize ourselves. Rules are necessary for the ordering/organizing of any society — any community. We see that in the beginning… God created and ordered this magnificent, vibrant, flourishing, beautiful, interconnected creation.
God then gives the Torah (or a kind of politic) to God’s people, imparting a vision for this ordering of community.
Jesus too imparted — and imparts — this vision of shalom that is a kind of ordering of community. It is a vision of mutual flourishing, in which all are cared for and contribute to the well being and health of one another as individuals as well as the community.
The theology of misión integral or “holistic mission” that comes from the Latin American faith tradition also has helped me to move past a disembodied theology that focuses only on the salvation of our souls, separating us from our embodied existence. This theology also tends to hold to the idea that we will leave behind the earth too. Instead, integral/holistic mission guides us to remember the prayer that Jesus himself prayed that says, “on earth as it is in heaven.” Heaven is brought down to earth, and the earth — this very earth — and all of creation will be redeemed. We are not escaping to a different world (heaven), but we actively participate in the joining of the heavens and the earth, the coming of the kingdom of God to this land upon which our feet walk. God hopes to restore all of this — God’s creation that Godself made in the beginning.
I’ve found myself reflecting on the beatitudes again in the last couple of weeks… what strikes me is this vision that Jesus gives to correct the politic of a community that has strayed from this vision of shalom. So Jesus speaks to the people who have been oppressed by systems that were formed by a politic that no longer was centered around mutual and interconnected flourishing, but around greed and power that gave power/privilege to some at the expense/exploitation of others.
I want to return to an idea that I shared in a previous newsletter (source still to be discovered haha): our politics/policies always show up on human bodies. They might not be our own, but they always show up on somebody’s body. That somebody might not even necessarily be our neighbor next door, or our neighbor the next city over. That neighbor could be countries and countries and thousands and thousands of miles away.
But our politics never fall flat. They always fall onto someone. The call to us as Christians is that we would act justly and love mercy, working together to create a politic — an ordering of our communities — that seeks mutual flourishing. And because we live in a globalized world that is so interconnected, we must remember too that our politics might not have a negative affect on our own community, or even on our own country. But we must be aware that there are others who suffer at the hands of the politics of our country.
As a Christian, and as a United States citizen, I must be quick to evaluate any policy that my country puts forward that does not promote the flourishing of all of God’s creation. If it hurts my brother and sister in Latin America, or my brother and sister in Gaza, or the lands that are thousands of miles away from me, I am not living according to God’s vision of shalom.
I must be quick to renounce such hateful narratives that Trump is spreading about the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield or any other narratives that are pedaled that dehumanize people or groups of people.
I also want to recognize that Kamala Harris’s rhetoric towards migrants and proposed policies, to me, does not embody the welcome that the God of love and justice tells us we should extend and practice.
The migrant community is made of up “sociedades en movilidad” [societies on the move]. Societies are complex and broken and corrupt and sinful and oppressive and resilient and beautiful and innovative and again, so complex. Societies are complex, because we as human beings are complex.
One of my frustrations with an increasingly polarized political context in the US is that we fail to give space to nuance and humanity. Policies have become so partisan and our imaginations are being formed to think in very black and white terms, without dialogue and creativity to image together what the words of Jesus invite us to.
Lord, free our imaginations of these black and white ways of thinking to give space to the humanity, story, complexity, nuance, life, and dignity of each human being.
May we seek justice and love mercy, juntos y juntas.
Con la paz de Cristo,
Elena
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