Progressive Evangelicals lose their minds again! RFK, Asylum Seekers, and the Ordo Amoris

Hey everyone, welcome to the conversations that matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. I'm a little bit of a jumpy John this morning. I'm not sure what's going on with my camera. I thought I had rectified this issue.

So my apologies to those who are watching but you're not gonna see a whole lot of me for this podcast. You're gonna see William Wolfe, who is our guest today. We're gonna be talking about the Trump administration the first few weeks and the reaction from progressive evangelicals.

William Wolfe is the former deputy assistant secretary for the Pentagon. He is the founder and executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, centerforbaptistleadership .org. Welcome again, William.

Thank you for joining us.

Yeah, it's great to be here, John. Thanks for having me back on the show.

My pleasure. So I'm gonna minimize myself and let you talk. The first question we're gonna jump into it is how is Trump doing the first few weeks in office? What grade would you give him? And as a Christian, are you happy with his performance so far with his policies and his administrative picks?

Trump’s First Weeks, Executive Orders, and the SBC Reaction

Yeah, well, that's a really, really difficult question, John, way to put me on the spot, right, as we joined the show here. But no, I mean, he's doing incredible. I mean, in terms of a grade, A plus plus, I know Trump likes his superlatives.

So I mean, he's doing excellent. Right out of the gate, we have seen what I was telling people I thought we would see and was really hoping that we would see and that he's organized, he knows what he wants to do.

And he's going after it. He's clearly staffed up his administration right out the gate with like absolute experts and people who are our guys, so to speak, people who are swimming in the waters that we're swimming in.

I mean, look at JD Vance just recently defending the order of Morris rightly ordered loves, you know, and dunking on midway academic professors on X. But you know, to get back to what Trump is doing, over 200 executive orders in the first two days, some of them were just absolutely incredible working to end the invasion at the border, revoke birthright citizenship, which is, you know, an unconstitutional interpretation under the 14th amendment currently to end, you know, get radical gender ideology out of the federal government and defend, you know, the biological reality of male and female from conception in that language.

Since then, he's done more to take on the transgender industrial complex going after, you know, and he even uses the right language. He calls them so-called gender affirming surgeries for minors, which is really just horrific, physical, bodily mutilation upon these poor confused teenagers that need real mental and spiritual help.

He's gone after that. He's gone after getting DEI out of the federal government. I mean, he's just firing at all cylinders. His deputies are doing fantastic. Marco Rubio, who many of us know, if you've been following conservative politics over the last decade, you know, Rubio really got a bad name for being a big author on this massive amnesty bill back in the day, part of the so-called Gang of Eight.

And then he sort of crashed and burned when he ran in the 2016 primary against Trump. And he's understood to be a big part of the neocon wing, but he's come off, it seems, almost all the way over to the MAGA agenda.

He tweeted out from the official State Department account, the age of mass migration is over. They've shut down the refugee admissions program. They're sending the National Guard and other military services to the border.

I mean, it could not be better. And of course, right at the end of the first week, we've had a national catastrophe with the helicopter and plane accident over DC. And I feel like we've seen good leadership from Trump and his other surrogates on that issue, including Sean Duffy, who's the Secretary of Transportation.

Pete Hegseth, we've got him confirmed, which is huge. That seemed touch and go for a while there. I mean, I could keep going on, but it seems like on every cylinder, Trump 2 .0 is shock and awe, pursuing a fantastic conservative and right-wing agenda that Christians absolutely can and should be excited about.

Yeah, I mean, it's been startling for me to see how much he has done, how quickly he's done it, how he is rolling back so many of the Biden administration policies. Let me ask you this before we get into specifics.

Talk to me a little bit about the Southern Baptist Convention in relationship to this. Obviously, Southern Baptist helped put Trump in office. No, I'm not talking about necessarily the leadership of the denomination, but the people in the pews certainly did.

And I think that they obviously wanted certain things from his policy prescriptions, and I think they're probably getting that, and I would assume happy with what he's doing. But what are you seeing? And obviously, plug too, because you have a podcast that you do on YouTube if people wanna hear more about this who are concerned about the SBC.

But I don't know if you have other content related to this question that you've already put out there.

Yeah, I mean, we've already, we've done some great content on the question of sort of Southern Baptist and Christians and Trump. Our latest podcast episode for the Center for Baptist Leadership, which you can find us on YouTube, Center for Baptist Leadership.

Would love for you to like and subscribe to that on how Trump is really a mercy from God in our country, an undeserved mercy that gives us four years to build and to take this country back for the good of the church and for the good of the nation.

We had a great article published at the Center for Baptist Leadership by a PhD student at SBTS. John, one of the things I'm really excited about with Center for Baptist Leadership is reaching the next generation of Baptist leaders.

I mean, that's why we called it what we did, Center for Baptist Leadership, not because we're necessarily saying, we're the leaders right now. I mean, our group doesn't control the entities of the SBC, but we're trying to find the guys who will.

And so Nick Spencer, he's the policy director at the Kentucky Family Foundation, wrote a great article on how the return of Trump is the return of the true politics of joy. This was a campaign slogan that Harris tried to commandeer for herself.

But Spencer really artfully argues that Trump is governing according to natural law, principles, and reason. And when we live according to God's good created order, that actually does bring true joy into our lives.

So great podcast, great article there. Check us out. But in terms of Southern Baptist and Trump, John, what I would really say is that Trump 2 .0, the beginning of the end of what will be 12 years of Trump dominating the political discourse in the United States of America is an utter and total repudiation of the failed leadership class of the Southern Baptist Convention, elites, and regime evangelicals.

Many of the guys at the highest levels of the SBC were never Trumpers in 2016, including most notably people like Russell Moore, and even someone like Al Mohler, who I appreciate a lot of what Mohler does.

And Mohler actually came back in 2020 and did support Trump, which cost him, I believe, amongst some of these people who are still anti-Trump. But in 2016, Mohler was a never Trumper. These guys, they did not want Donald Trump.

Many of them were never Trumpers, and the base overwhelmingly went for him in 2016. Then we got four years of an incredible, I'd say success from Trump with some bumps in the road, COVID, things like that, appointing justices that overturned Roe v. Wade.

And so we got to 2020, I felt like it was sort of, he had won a lot more support, but then the 2020 election came, and we got four years of Biden, and a lot of those same Southern Baptist leaders, they wanted to move on from Trump.

I guarantee you the vast majority of the big name Southern Baptist Convention pastors during the primary were even as conservative as they may be or may not be. They were sort of DeSantis guys. They wanted to move on from Trump, and the base absolutely did not want that.

And then we get the law fair. Then we get the assassination attempt. Everyone finally sort of rallies behind Trump, and now he's just doing things, John. He is going to the executive branch, and he's rooting out DEI, rooting out wokeness, rooting out gender ideology, which quite frankly shames the Southern Baptist Convention leaders, particularly people like J .D. Greer and others, who have really made wokeness a key pillar of their quote-unquote Christian doctrine, and they've infused it all across their convention.

I've said this to somebody, and this can't happen, but I would love to have a Southern Baptist Convention president with sort of the powers that Trump has. With just the stroke of a pen, he can start rooting out this nonsense across our convention.

That's not how it works for us, but that's frankly what we need. So I would put it like this. The return of Trump and what he's done in the last 10 days, and really this last eight-year saga and four more to go is a repudiation of the winsome-to-the-left, embracing-wokeness approach that Southern Baptist Convention elites have taken over the last eight years, and I will argue it's people like us at Center for Baptist Leadership, people like yourself and others, the ones who've been proven right, we are the ones who are clearly sort of fit to lead in a moment like this, and organizations like the ERLC, led by Russell Moore, Acolyte and Crony Brett Leatherwood, they've disgraced themselves, and they've shown that they're unfit for political leadership in this moment.

Excellent, well stated. I'm gonna pull up some articles and some videos for us to go over, and I'll get your reaction. Let's start here with the asylum seekers and the, well, the immigration issue more broadly.

Well, actually, I'm struggling to know if I should play the Noam thing first, or we should talk about illegal migration. Maybe we'll start with illegal migration, because those are different issues, the asylum-seeking issue.

They're very similar and related, though, so I'm not saying they're totally different, but there's some articles. This one first from, this actually isn't an article, I guess this is more of a statement from the Evangelical Immigration Table to President Trump, Secretary Rubio, and Governor Noam, and it is signed by a number of Christian leaders, as I understand it.

I don't see the name on here, Brent Leatherwood. I think you were telling me Brent Leatherwood was, he maybe shared it.

No, you can see the stamps of the organizations that have signed it, so Evangel, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has signed onto this letter under Brent.

Okay, explain this to us, then. What's this letter from the Evangelical Immigration Table, and why is, remind everyone why the EIT is significant.

The Evangelical Immigration Table and Church-Sensitive-Location Policy

Yeah, I mean, this just shows us, John, that these people really have not learned their lessons. The Evangelical Immigration Table actually technically does not exist as its own separate legal entity or organization.

It is entirely a project and a front group of another organization called the National Immigration Forum. I think I'm getting, I may or may not be getting that name wrong. I think that's right, the National Immigration Forum, which is a Soros-funded pro-amnesty, pro-open borders group.

This is the National Immigration Forum's sort of cover group, astroturfed organization trying to bring Christians in to supporting a progressive immigration agenda. This has caused a lot of consternation in the Southern Baptist Convention over the last decade with really, unfortunately, no real accountability, but they're up to their old tricks again.

And so here we have this Soros-funded front group, Evangelical Immigration Table, getting ostensibly conservative Christian organizations like the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and the CCCU, which I have no idea why they think that this is an interesting concern for them.

And what they're doing here is they're complaining about an executive action taken by DHS to say that criminal illegal aliens, such as rapists and murderers, cannot be sheltered in places like churches and schools.

So that was actually, you know, this was a longstanding order under previous administrations that you could have immigration enforcement and removals, arrests and removals of criminal illegal aliens and most likely dangerous ones in places like churches and schools.

The Biden administration, they changed that longstanding order and they essentially revoked it and said, ICE stay out of these quote unquote sensitive locations, churches and schools, except in the most extenuating circumstances.

And so on January, 2021, I have the order up on my phone here, statement from DHS spokesperson on directives, expanding law enforcement and ending the abuse of humanitarian parole. They rescinded the Biden administration guidelines for ICE and CPB on enforcement actions that thwart law enforcement in or near so-called sensitive areas.

And the way they describe it as this, they say this action empowers the brave men and women and CPB and ICE to enforce our immigration laws and catch criminal aliens, including murderers and rapists who have illegally come to our country.

Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America's schools and churches to avoid arrest. So this is a very sensible policy, undoing sort of a dangerous policy for the Biden administration. And yet the evangelical immigration table led this letter sort of saying, this potentially violates religious liberty.

It's so concerning to our churches and schools that there might be an ICE raid during a service, which is highly unlikely. But essentially there's no way around this, John. This letter from the evangelical immigration table with ethics and religious liberty commission on it is essentially saying, quote unquote, religious liberty is an excuse to allow churches to harbor some of the most violent and dangerous criminal illegal aliens in our country.

Here's one of the quotes from it. It says that the effect of the revocation of the guidance that you just explained from the Biden administration has been that many immigrants and their US citizen family members, so it's expanding this to those who are US citizens, are afraid that attending a Sunday morning worship service or a Wednesday night Bible study could put them at risk of deportation or of separation from their loved ones, which to me is such a sneaky way to approach this.

Look at any other crime and say that the criminal who has committed a crime, I don't care what it is, is afraid to go to church because there could be a police officer who arrests them in the church. Do we treat any other crime this way?

I'd like to know. I mean, I know that there are situations where you need warrants, and I think that does depend probably on the locality and so forth, but maybe go into that a little bit. I mean, is this going to, even if it hasn't happened yet, lead to raids, warrantless raids from the ICE in churches and so forth?

Yeah, well, that's a good question. So let me try to break down a little bit of the immigration law for individuals listening. First of all, you don't need a warrant to apprehend and remove an illegal alien.

Every single illegal alien in the United States of America is subject to apprehension and removal. That's what's in the code. So you don't need a warrant. They are lawbreakers. There's no warrant needed.

They're not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. So there's that just in general. And you're absolutely right, John, that immigration law is not some sort of special law that Christians get to break because they're Christians.

So many people act like that, though. It's like somehow, you know, that like, if you were, say, an American citizen and you had committed a murder and there was a warrant out for your arrest, and just, again, in this analogy, every illegal alien essentially has a standing warrant for the apprehension or removal because they're here illegally, you know, you wouldn't be able to go into a church and avoid being rolled up by the police, you know, because you're a murderer.

It's the same thing going on here. Like, churches can't give safe haven to criminals. Just because you come into a church doesn't mean the law enforcement can't get you there. But the reality is this is going to be so few and far between that such things could happen.

But let's keep in mind how many liberal churches are out there in this country that I actually believe would do things like try to shelter criminal illegal aliens from enforcement. And so this is just a sensible policy from the Biden administration, and we're seeing emotionally manipulative language coming from people like Brent Leatherwood, the ERLC, the EIT.

I have Brent's statement. Well, you might pull it up in the Hispanic Baptist article here, but this is common sense, and they are just, I think, looking for opportunities to make Trump sound heartless, quite frankly.

Here's the article from Baptist Press. Hispanic Baptist leaders say loss of sensitive location rule hurts church. Is there a quote from Brent Leatherwood of the ERLC that you want to read from this?

Yeah, he says, and so first of all, the framing of this article is really important. Go back up to that headline. So first of all, look at this. They couch it in terms of a minority group, right? Hispanic Baptist leaders say loss of sensitive location rules hurts church.

So the first I have to say, again, there's no exception for being Hispanic Baptists from following the law. Why are we assuming that all these Hispanic Baptists are congregations full of illegal aliens?

Why would that be the case? Why are these churches breaking the law more than anybody else? So it's ridiculous, emotionally manipulative framing, appealing to sort of DEI minority sensibilities. But in it, Brent says this, if you scroll down, he says, no church that I'm aware of harbors criminal actors.

Whether they're here legally or illegally, and no church leader wants that. Okay, that is a crazy statement, John. How in the world can Brent know that? How can Brent know, and he throws in the I'm aware of.

Of course, Brent, there are literally millions of churches across this country, and you have no idea what's happening there. But to make this even worse, this guy, Matt Crawford, who's a Southern Baptist Convention pastor at Trinity Baptist Church in Cordova, Tennessee, he stood in his pulpit on a Sunday recently, I think you covered this.

And he said that, he was raising concerns with this rule. And he said at a previous church of his in Miami, there was an undocumented immigrant there for many years. Okay, an undocumented immigrant is an illegal alien.

An illegal alien has broken our laws. They essentially are a criminal. And he said that there was no pathway for citizenship to that guy, and he wished that there were. And that makes me know that Matt Crawford never did anything to turn in this illegal alien to ICE.

And so Matt Crawford did exactly what Brent says he thinks nobody is doing, which is essentially harboring an illegal immigrant at his church. And so that Leatherwood is just out to lunch kind of phrasing it like this.

And again, as I said, I guarantee you there are tons of radically progressive churches, Episcopalians, Methodists, et cetera, who do knowingly harbor illegal aliens and might even harbor those illegal aliens if they've committed other additional criminal actions in our country.

And so Brent's statement there is truly laughable on its face, but then what's worse is he goes on and he tries to make it like into a religious liberty argument down there. He says, not only can this be done in a way that respects religious liberty, it is something that would be strongly supported by our churches.

So the inference there is that somehow this infringes upon religious liberty, to which all of your listeners, to Brent Leatherwood and to all Baptists, I would say, there is no such thing as a religious liberty excuse or exemption for harboring illegal aliens.

They have broken our law. We're not infringing upon religious liberty to remove those illegal aliens wherever and however we find them.

Yeah, and they would still need probable cause to go into a church. This is one of the things I think that they're leaving open-ended and this manipulates people. There's not going to be ICE agents walking into your church, like the Gestapo or the Stasi to see everyone's papers and just make sure that there's no illegal migrants present.

They have to go, if they're gonna go in, they're going to have to have some reason for going in there. And I think as you rightly pointed out, there was a pastor, Matt Crawford, who admitted that this has happened.

It was even a staff member at his church. And I'm gonna point out something that I know I've pointed out before, but the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention years ago admitted that he had on staff at his very church an illegal migrant.

And that was one of the reasons he was lobbying for the DREAM Act. Now, I don't know if Clint Presley, the president of the SBC has weighed in on this at all. Do you know where he stands on this issue since his ERLC director is certainly signaling strong anti-Trump sentiments here?

Yeah, I haven't had a conversation with Clint about this. So just reading the tea leaves, I think Clint has probably moved in a more conservative direction on a lot of these issues. I do believe, again, not speaking about any particular conversation I've had with him, but I believe that there's general frustration across the Southern Baptist Convention about Brent Leatherwood's leadership.

I will say this, I'm pretty confident nobody at the ERLC board knew Leatherwood was signing onto this evangelical immigration letter table, immigration table letter, or the other one we're gonna talk about.

He's just sort of doing these things, giving these quotes. And so I think Brent's really on an island. I mean, I'm looking at just another portion of his quote here. He says, the unintended impact of this change will be that many law abiding immigrants will be fearful to attend our churches.

That makes no sense. The scripture teaches us that the government is supposed to be a terror to law breakers and to commend law doers. Well, so if you are a law abiding immigrant, you have absolutely nothing to fear.

This is about the removal of illegal aliens, particularly illegal aliens who've committed other crimes. I mean, Brent just clearly doesn't understand immigration law. And actually, John, you might disagree with me on this, and I'm happy to debate you a little bit, but I would actually say that if ICE is aware that there are congregations that have high percentages of illegal aliens gathering there, I mean, I could be wrong about this, but I think ICE has every warrant and reason to go make immigration enforcement checks at churches.

Again, I don't think that the First Amendment protects illegal activity from occurring within a church. So you and I might disagree on that, but I'm okay with that.

I think what you're describing, though, is probable cause, as I understand it, at least. They have to first have a strong suspicion, a reasoned suspicion that

Sure, of course.

Go into any church, and that's how they're presenting it here, is that any church a Hispanic enters is going to be, you know, ICE is gonna be right there waiting for them to make sure that their legal migrant status is all in order or something.

And I think that's ridiculous.

Yeah, that's certainly not happening. But, you know, this is obviously a very few cases, but really, again, let me put it this way. I trust the Trump administration and the people who are leading his immigration policy.

And as you pull the camera back out, every little thing leads to another. If the Trump DHS is saying, we need to revoke this Biden administration sensitive locations rule, which, I mean, just on the basis of the fact that it was the Biden administration who did it, I think it should probably be revoked, that they have, I think, good grounds to think there may be some very few cases where it's necessary to go and remove dangerous, violent, criminal, illegal aliens from either a school or a church.

And the schools, it's a big part of this too. I mean, I've seen some reports recently that have shown that there is, you know, there are incredible numbers of illegal aliens attending, you know, schools across this country, right?

And so again, if ICE becomes aware that a legal alien is attending a school, you know, just, and again, probable cause because they know, okay, this illegal alien is there, they have the right to go and remove that illegal alien and catch them on campus if need be, right?

So it's like, the point that Trump is sending here is that there's no safe place to hide and you can't use places like schools and churches to shield yourself from reasonable apprehension and removal.

Let's talk about the asylum seeker issue. I wanna play a little clip from Kristi Noem and then we will talk about the Christian reaction to this, especially from World Vision.

Refugee Resettlement, NGO Funding, and the Christian Backlash

Okay, so now let's turn back to the border quickly.

Can you hear this all right? Was that volume okay for you?

Yeah, it's great.

All right.

Joining me is the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has an exclusive announcement on more action her department is taking. Secretary, thanks for being with us here today. I understand you have something to share with us that we haven't heard yet about what you're gonna be doing at DHS.

Yes, well, thank you, Will, for inviting me to be with you. Today, we are announcing that we have stopped all grant funding that's being abused by NGOs to facilitate illegal immigration into this country.

So it's amazing to me the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent by the federal government that has been sent to NGOs to facilitate this invasion of our country. So I've taken action to stop those funds to reevaluate them and to make sure that we're actually using the taxpayer dollars in a way that strengthens this country, that keeps us safe.

So I think people are curious when we look at grants that are given out by federal agencies at how they're utilized, and that evaluation needs to be done. We're not spending another dime to help the destruction of this country.

We're gonna make sure that we follow through on what President Trump has promised, and that's to make sure that we're securing our border, departing those who are here illegally, and committing criminal actions, and that our taxpayer dollars aren't spent to help it.

And let's stop it right there. She goes on to talk about how some of these non-government entities essentially operate on both sides of the border, and they facilitate people coming into this country illegally or taking advantage, I suppose, of the asylum system.

We can talk about that in a moment. But that they're doing the kinds of things that the government is prohibited from doing, but they're still getting government money for doing it. So essentially, they're acting as an extension of the administrative state.

And this is what they're trying to put an end to. And of course, the reaction from many Christian progressives, if you wanna call them that, on X and social media was pretty severe. Trump is shutting down Christian ministries, says Tish Harrison Warren.

Ministries I've supported may have to close their doors. I've never seen anything like this. And then of course, you have from, this is from World Relief, the statement that they made on this, which another statement signed by Brent Leatherwood, he's been busy the last week, where they take a stand against what you just heard from Kristi Noem.

So maybe put a little meat on that. What exactly is going on? Isn't this a legal migration? I know Neil Shenvey and some others tried to say on X that this is different, that there's a line between the illegal and illegal migration and this is shutting down a legitimate path to actual legal citizenship and so it's wrong.

Yeah, so I mean, so again, let me commend something that I just did recently. This was two nights ago. I hosted a space on X and you can go find the recording. It's my pin tweet on X right now at William underscore E underscore Wolf, where I convened some actual immigration experts, which Brent Leatherwood is not.

And quite frankly, World Relief is not either. Or if they are, they certainly ignore vast swaths of immigration law. I brought together people from the Immigration Accountability Project, experts from Heritage and the Oversight Project at Heritage as well, including Nate Hoekman, who's a journalist at America 2100, who's done a deep dive on the Refugee Resettlement NGO Industrial Complex.

So I highly recommend, that's a deep dive on this issue. But what's going on in here is sort of, there's one topic that's being adjudicated across a couple of different agencies and there's refugee resettlement NGOs and then there's other NGOs.

So I'm not quite as particularly familiar in terms of what the NGOs are that partner with DHS grants, but it's really sort of the same thing across state and DHS. So at state, the State Department, Rubio issued the same sort of ruling and that's what World Relief is responding to.

There are nine or 10 major NGOs that do refugee resettlement. Almost all of them are explicitly religious. You have the Catholic Charities, which is part of the US Catholic Conference of Catholic Bishops.

You've got World Relief,.

Which is essentially the major evangelical one. And this is fascinating. You'll recognize this name, John, maybe some of your listeners will too. World Relief is technically the World Relief of the National Association of Evangelicals.

So it is the,.

Which was originally a conservative evangelical group and isn't by any means anymore. And so what these organizations do is they take your taxpayer dollars, essentially laundered through the federal government, and then they use them to facilitate mass migration into America, focusing particularly on the piece of refugee resettlement and the resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees across our country, year over year.

Biden's refugee admissions cap over the last four years was 125 ,000 each year. They're coming into small towns across America that don't have the infrastructure resources to support or care for them.

And they're doing it all on your taxpayer dollars. World Relief in 2022, got 126 million in federal grants. And so now that Trump's back and he's recognized that this is essentially taking your taxpayer dollars to fund the destruction of the United States, he's put an end to it.

And that's why we've seen this World Relief PR campaign essentially out there shilling for your money to cover the quote unquote gap of their taxpayer dollars that are being turned off. That's what Tish Warren Harrison was talking about.

She's totally getting it wrong. Trump's not shutting them down. He's just turning off the taxpayer grift. If people wanna give to these organizations, they certainly can, though I would not recommend it.

And so they're presenting themselves as sort of Catholic charities being targeted by Trump, which isn't the case at all. Trump is recognizing that these so-called charities are facilitating the destruction of America's communities, he's bringing in people who are potentially dangerous.

This is another really important point too, John, is that they claim that all these refugees are quote unquote vetted. But as Mike Howell with the Oversight Project at Heritage said on our space, there's really no such thing as vetting these people.

I mean, many of these people don't have a social media imprint. Many of them are committed Muslims and Islamists, and there's no way to sort of vet them for potential acts of terrorists. In fact, there was a man who came in as a quote unquote Afghan refugee who was arrested right before the election, I believe in Dallas, who was planning a terrorist attack on the country.

He came in through this program. And for someone like me, John, like one is too many, right? One is too many. I don't care if you've sort of resettled 95 ,000 so-called peaceful refugees who aren't gonna commit terrorist attacks.

If in those 95 ,000 comes one who's going to potentially kill dozens of American citizens, that's one too many. And so Trump is doing the right thing here to shut it off. Noam is hitting all the right notes and saying, we're not gonna use taxpayer dollars to fund these programs anymore.

This is the moral thing to do. This is the Christian thing to do as the American government and all these organizations out there, again, using weaponized pseudo religious language to guilt people into opposing Trump on this are really just trying to look out for their bottom line.

Speaking of organizations that are looking out for their bottom line, let's start out with Christianity Today, an article from Russell Moore. Yes, Jesus was a refugee, he says, and I'll give you some quotes.

He says that the question of whether Jesus was a refugee is straightforward. United Nations defines a refugee as someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence.

And that fits Jesus essentially. And then at the end of the article, he says that most Americans are not refugees. Many won't know a refugee family in their community personally. These Christians might then simply ignore the plight of refugees, and yet no Christian conscience can allow their mistreatment to stand.

We all know a refugee family. As a matter of fact, we are part of one. If we are in Christ, his history is ours. Refugees are unpopular. Often they are scapegoated and maligned. So let me get your reaction to that.

Jesus Was Not a Refugee and the Politics of Refugee Resettlement

Yeah, I mean, the man is supposedly a public theologian, and yet his theology is absolutely terrible. You know, and first of all, I completely disagree. I do not think it is accurate in any way, shape or form to refer to Jesus as a refugee, particularly when what Russell Moore is doing there is he's trying to evoke modern day refugees, you know, from failed nation states or people fleeing religious persecution or political violence, and they need to be relocated out of one country, ideally to another country.

And I didn't say this, there's so much on path. But again, if we wanna talk about smart refugee resettlement policy, the best thing to do, the most cost effective thing to do, and the way to best care for these individuals is to resettle them in a country as close as possible to their country of origin.

First of all, it costs way less. Mark Krikorian has done a study on this, I believe at the Center for Immigration Studies, showing that you get essentially a tenfold return on your money caring for refugees in the closest country next to their country of origin, as opposed to importing them all the way to the United States of America.

But getting back out of the policy weeds and to the point about Jesus was a refugee, first of all, if an angel appears to you in a dream, because a particular violent, mad dictator king like Herod is coming to kill the Messiah, the Son of God, and you need to flee, well, then we could maybe have a conversation about who's a refugee, but that was clearly a providential and extenuating circumstance for the purpose of protecting Jesus Christ as a incarnate child from the violence of Herod.

They told, an angel told Mary and Joseph exactly where to flee, go to Egypt. Also, the point there was to fulfill prophecy, out of Egypt, I've called my son. And arguably, Egypt at that time and where they went was under the domain of the Roman Empire at the time.

So technically, while Jesus might have sort of gone to another quote unquote country or province, he actually was still staying within sort of the boundaries of the Roman Empire. It's not like he was illegally crossing or anything like that.

And so like, it's just, it is honestly, I would say this, John, trying to argue that Jesus was a refugee in order to argue for the continuation of refugee resettlement policies into America, particularly on taxpayer dollars, is a way of taking the Lord's name in vain.