If you’re like me, you’ve had lots of difficult conversations this week about how Christians should be responding to news of child and family internment camps along our southern border. While I don’t pretend to have all the answers (or, really, any particularly good answers), I feel compelled to address one specific claim I have heard from a number of fellow Christians over the past few days.

That claim goes something like this: “Yes, it’s sad that there are children being separated from their parents at our borders. But we should be taking care of our own first.”

The implication is that the families coming to our borders are not our responsibility. They don’t belong to us, and therefore are not worthy of our care and concern. I find this idea deeply troubling.

Who Belongs?

The first issue raised by such a statement is how we decide who does in fact belong to us. If we want to approach that question from a Christian perspective, I think we have to start not with our national citizenship but with the creation story of Genesis 1:27. That text tells us that

God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them,
male and female he created them.

At the very core of Christian belief is the claim that every single human being is created in the image of God. In that sense, we are all the same. There are no human beings who are less than us. There are no human beings who are different from us. There are no human beings who can be called vermin that infest our world. We are all created in the image of God, and God has declared us all collectively “very good” (Genesis 1:31).  We all belong to God—and therefore we all belong to each other.

Someone might suggest that human beings have been alienated from God by sin, and therefore that only those who have accepted Christ count as belonging. But the New Testament doesn’t agree. Rather, the apostle Paul claims that even now God is “reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). God doesn’t draw lines between us and them but works for the reconciliation of us all. As a result, those of us who have already been reconciled to Christ are likewise called to “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18). Our task isn’t to differentiate who does and doesn’t belong to us; rather, it is to gather the whole world into the abundance of new life.

Even if we were callous enough to suggest that only those who are Christian are worthy of our compassion (God forbid that anyone would say such a thing), most of those coming to our southern border are themselves Christians. Countless Bibles and rosaries confiscated from asylum seekers testify to that fact.

If all that is the case, then the only thing “take care of our own first” can possibly mean is that we should take care of Americans first. And while I suppose that may be a perfectly reasonable political position, it is emphatically not a Christian position.

Welcoming Foreigners

While there are any number of biblical passages that deal with the status of immigrants and foreigners, for me there is one that encapsulates them all. It appears in Matthew 25:31-46.

In that well-known passage, set in the last days of Jesus’s life, he describes to his disciples the judgment of the nations. Sitting on the judgment throne, the Son of Man divides the people to the right and to the left. He invites those on his right to inherit the kingdom of heaven, saying,

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me (Matthew 25:35-36).

When the people ask when they had done those things for Jesus, he replies, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).

It’s clear enough what it means to feed the hungry, quench the thirsty, tend the sick, and visit the imprisoned. But the part about welcoming the stranger is the part that matters most in discussions of the border. The word translated stranger is the Greek xenos, which is the root of our term xenophobia. It refers not simply to an unknown person but to a foreigner. A person not belonging to our community. A person who is not, as we say, “one of our own.”

According to this passage, then, one of the criteria for inheriting the kingdom is specifically our treatment of those who are not our own. Indeed, the way we treat the ones we think do not belong to us is the way we treat Jesus himself—“as you do to them, so you do to me.”

Jesus tells us that we are to welcome the foreigner. The word translated welcome is the Greek synago, which means to receive as a guest. It connotes not mere politeness but actual hospitality. Opening one’s home. Sharing one’s food. Offering a place to rest. Certainly not locking in a cage to await deportation.

As Christians, we are judged precisely by the way we treat those who are not “our own.” Jesus comes to us in the hungry, thirsty, sick, and imprisoned. Jesus comes to us in the foreigner. He comes to us at the border. How we treat him has eternal consequences.

“America First” is Not a Christian Stance

To me, all of this means that the claim that we should “take care of our own first” is not in fact a Christian position. The faith calls on us to extend care and hospitality to everyone—and most especially to those who are strangers and foreigners. Christianity is thus fundamentally incompatible with “America First” patriotism.

To be clear, I’m not claiming that the United States should be run according to Christian principles. The Christian faith was never intended to govern empires. For that matter, nor was the United States ever intended to be governed by Christian principles. That’s why we have a Constitution.

Rather, my claim is simply this: If we want to act as Christians, our priority must always be to extend hospitality to strangers—whether at our nation’s border or at the racial and economic divides in our local communities. Our posture must always be one that recognizes the full dignity and humanity of every person we encounter—and especially those we are naturally inclined to think are not “one of us.”