The Space - Episode 1 - Immigration

What you're about to witness is what

I think is a very helpful and interesting conversation about immigration and basically the issues that we've been talking about the last week or so.

I think one of the things that I've noticed about this particular conversation, and this is all kind of related to every kind of social justice thing that's going on in the church, but I think a lot of people have a tendency to oversimplify things and they kind of make it seem that if you don't have my opinion of the immigration issue, well then you're barely even a

Christian. You're not loving your neighbor as yourself. It's really just that simple. And I don't think it's that simple and I think that there's room for nuance and there's room for disagreement.

Now, obviously the Bible teaches one specific thing, but the way we understand that, I don't think we should be lobbying anathemas to people over their differences here.

And I think that what you're about to witness sort of demonstrates that it's possible to disagree and it's possible to have nuanced discussions about this issue without lobbying bombs over to the other side of the table.

What we have here, we have four professing Christians and also myself. I'm going to introduce them really quick and I'll add some links and stuff to the description of this video so you can find these people.

But the first person I want to introduce is Jacob Brunton. He is a co -founder and author for a website called

For the Christian Intellectual, ChristianIntellectual .com. Next, we have Bobby McPherson, currently pursuing a master's degree in philosophy and he's writing for TheReformedConservative .org.

The third person is Steve Schlichter and he is associated with a website called TaoAndTauheed .com and that's a

Muslim evangelism and apologetics website. And finally, we have Matt Travis who is, his website is

TheKingsWrites .com. He's a blogger. He's on Twitter. He's on Facebook. And of course, I'm A .D.

Robles and this is The Space. All right, so we'll just get started here.

We're going to talk about Romans 13. We're going to talk about immigration. We're going to talk about, probably about separating children from their parents and all of the above.

And hopefully, you know, this will just be a sort of an example of how, you know, Christians from different perspectives can have a real conversation about all of this stuff.

Because clearly, there's been sort of a dumbed down simplistic version of this argument that has played out all over the place, even on, you know, mainstream media with Christians saying things that sort of make it seem like it's a very black and white crystal clear issue.

And I'm not saying that the scripture is not clear. I think it is, but it is a nuanced issue.

And so, we want to talk about that and have a good discussion here. And what I'll do is,

I'm going to start with just a few points that I think we can all agree on, but it's possible that we can't.

And so, if you don't agree with something that I say, feel free to jump in. And this will just kind of be a free -formed conversation.

And you know, the first time you talk, if you want to introduce yourselves, that'll be fine.

Or if not, we'll just let people figure out who you are. So here's where we'll start.

I think that we can all agree, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Romans chapter 13, the verse that Jeff Sessions used to sort of justify his policy, or at least obeying the policy, that's not teaching blanket obedience to literally anything the government says.

Can we all agree on that? Yes. Okay. Okay, good.

Here's something I think we can all agree on as well, and I'm not sure if we really can, so we'll see. The Bible, according to the

Bible, borders are something that is allowable. It is okay, according to scripture, for Christians to have borders.

Is that right? I would agree. Does anyone disagree with that?

Well, so to have a border, or to be able to restrict movement across the borders, you see that as two separate things?

Well, why don't you tell me what you think about that? Because I think a lot of people would see that as two separate things, but some people wouldn't.

Yeah. So I don't think, I don't know where the right to restrict movement across a border would come from.

And one of my arguments would have been, you wouldn't want someone restricting your right to leave a particular border.

But I saw in one of your questions that that was, yeah, that is a right you think does exist. So I'd have to know where that right would exist outside of possible necessity because of some previous right that was already violated requiring that right to, you know, requiring that to happen.

So I see the freedom of movement and freedom of associations as kind of a human right.

I don't think enforcement of not letting people do so is kind of problematic. So if anyone wants to respond to that, again, this will just be a free -flowing thing.

I'll be moderating it. And if I have something to respond, I will, but I'll kind of defer to you guys to have the conversation.

If you want, I can elaborate further. If you don't have any thoughts on that, it's up to you.

Sure. No, that's fair. I mean, if everyone agrees with what he just said, or if they don't understand, we can kind of go from there.

Yeah. Well, we have to go. We can't agree with both me and your original statement, probably. So we're clear later, we have to have some kind of disagreement.

Fair enough. Fair enough. I would make a very, a distinction between immigration and naturalization.

So I'm not talking about, I'm separating natural rights, we're using the term immigration and political privilege or political rights.

So naturalization, I think we should have a very high bar. In fact, I'm concerned about most of the people that are already here voting, much less other people coming in and being able to vote money out of other people's wallets.

So referring specifically to immigration, that's a natural rights are basically your life, your liberty and your property, right?

You can't kill, so you can't take someone's life. You can't steal, so you can't take someone's property.

You shouldn't enslave someone, so you can't take their liberty. So to restrict someone because they're on one side of a border from having voluntary associations, you're not just restricting the person coming in, you're restricting the person that's here, wants to hire someone, you're restricting their ability to have some kind of a voluntary association with someone because they're on the other side of a border that doesn't really exist outside of, you know, in our own kind of construct.

So that's basically the idea that you restrict immigration, not political rights, but natural rights.

You're restricting someone's ability to make a living, to freely move about, to associate voluntarily both the person coming in and the person that's hiring them.

Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. So I have a question about that.

Would that also mean that if somebody is not, if somebody is not allowed to come here for a legitimate reason, or at least what

I would see as a legitimate reason, I'm not sure if you would, like for security reasons, would that be violating the rights of the person who couldn't associate with them, even though the person that's here didn't do something that caused them to be a security risk?

Yeah. I mean, it gets... Right. I understand. Well, if someone has a history, is that what you're saying?

Well, I'm saying that it seems that that argument falls apart. Like saying that it's restricting the rights of people here to not let others associate with them.

It seems like it falls apart if the person that you're not letting them associate with is not allowed to enter the country for like security purposes or something along those lines.

Yeah, I guess the assumption of security purposes is problematic to me.

I think a good number of the people that are already here are probably a security risk. The, you know, someone coming from a certain region, perhaps

I can see, you know, I mean, you can very easily pull this pie -in -the -sky idea of human rights down.

So I'm not, I'm not naive. I'm not, I'm not saying that you couldn't, you couldn't do that.

There's security problems, but the assumption that people coming to work here from South America or Latin America are a security problem in and of itself,

I think is kind of problematic. You could say it's, you know, people talking on their cell phone after midnight is a security problem.

Yeah. Yeah. I would agree with that. I would say that I was, I was arguing more with the principle of your statement that if we don't let somebody come here, therefore they can't associate with somebody here, therefore restricting the rights of people here.

I think that that would be, that would, there would be an issue. If you're saying that, then that would mean we can never restrict anybody coming here ever.

You know what I'm saying? Because then somebody's - Right. We could do it. We could do it, but what you're saying is that by doing it, you'd be violating someone's rights here already.

Correct? Yeah. That, that's the issue that I have. Okay. Not that you'd be violating the person that couldn't come, because obviously the security risk, they've done something to where they've gone.

There's been some process that has taken place where we say that that person's rights aren't being violated because they did something and we verified it through some process, right?

But my issue that I'm taking with this is that you said that the person here's rights are violated, which unless we're going to hold people here accountable for what other people did somewhere else, and then therefore say that they can't associate with them and that's okay.

Yeah. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, I do see what you're saying. Right. So there's a point where you're, you're, you, you have so much freedom to who can come here without any vetting that you're violating someone else's rights by having, you know, a known killer walking freely.

Is that? No, no, no, no. Not necessarily. I don't think I'm explaining very well, but okay.

Okay. So initially you said, you said that the reason that people should be able to cross the border is not only because it's their right to cross the border, but also because people within the borders of citizens of the

United States have a right to associate with them. So what I was saying is if somebody does something that makes it to where they no longer get that right to cross the border, because I think we would all agree that our circumstances specifically surrounding security, where we would say they no longer have the right to come here.

Well, then that means by restricting that person, you're also restricting the individual that lives in the

U S that is a citizen of the U S you're restricting their rights to associate with somebody. Do you know what

I'm saying? So, so to say that if to say that by not letting them come here, we're taking the person, the citizens here, the citizens here, their rights away from associating with them,

I just don't see the argument is valid because then that would almost put them as responsible for people who can't come here for the crimes that they did that don't allow them to make it so that we don't allow them to come here.

For the crimes that they've already done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, that seems fair that that same thing is true with you hire someone who commits crimes here.

Right. Yeah. And I'm probably not explaining this. Well, sorry. That's the first time I've ever heard that argument.

So I'm just trying to get around my head right at this moment, but hopefully that made sense in the end.

So, so let's let me let me just something Steve said in the beginning. I think I don't know if everyone would agree with this.

So, you know, let's let's talk about it a little bit. So he kind of recognizes a difference between the freedom of movement.

So letting people come over the border for, you know, to engage in commerce or whatever it is, and he makes a distinction between that and naturalization.

So he said, I think I think you said, Steve, that the bar for naturalization should be pretty high. But the freedom of movement, the bar for that, you know, there is a bar.

It's not like you just let anyone who wants to come come there. There is a standard there, I think you said, but it's a lot much lower.

Is that does everyone agree with that? Is that is that a is that a biblical concept that allows sort of the freedom of movement?

And that's something that's that's biblical? Yeah, I would generally agree with that. I'd say there's exceptions, but sure.

So everyone would agree that the that the civil government does have the right, according to Scripture, to control to some extent who can come in and who can come out.

Or no. Yeah. Yeah, I think that there might be differences on what those controls should consist of.

Yeah. Or what what the proper role of government is in outlining those controls.

So what would you say that the biblical sort of warrant that we have and what would what would that look like? What kind of things could we control and what kinds of things should we not?

Well, I don't like to claim that it's a biblical warrant, per se, because I take into account a lot of general revelation when

I think about these issues. And I think you inevitably have to, because I don't think the Bible is a political science book or a political theory book.

But I think if you utilize all of God's revelation, including Scripture, you can come to a principle that says that the government's only purpose is the protection of individual rights, specifically the rights of those within its borders or within its own geography.

And in that case, when it comes to immigration, there's not really a function of the government for keeping people from moving across the border other than threats to physical safety.

So, you know, if someone's got a communicable disease, if someone has a significant criminal history, if someone's got ties to a terrorist organization, those are things that the government should step in and, you know, either prevent them from coming or do some sort of intensified checking.

But apart from those things, I can't think of any principled role of the government when it comes to immigration, whether biblical or otherwise.

So would not be legitimate for the government to control, you know, people in order to protect the economic interests of people that are already citizens?

No, I mean, I get kind of infuriated when I hear conservatives, especially making those types of arguments.

I call that half -hearted socialism. The idea that you've got a right to a certain job is essentially no different than the idea that you've got a right to a certain wage.

It's ludicrous and it's really shameful that conservatives and especially Christians would make that argument.

Fair enough. Nobody here would make that kind of argument, right? No, I think I think

I'd agree with you on all that. Great. Great. I know a place where I would differ, though.

I know Jacob's views in a number of ways and they are very, very like minded. But I would and I don't know how

I could be succinct. I would agree with Jacob that looking more at general revelation,

I would argue a common moral theory understanding of a principle that the government can use in regards to understanding borders and understanding, well, almost everything, everything from authority to law to rights and how we can get to rights.

So common moral theory began, you could argue, with Edmund Burke, who I would argue is the Augustine of modern politics.

And after Edmund Burke, you end up getting people like Friedrich J. Stahl, people like Herman, I always struggle with those names.

And they argued a theory of law.

They're all reformed guys. And what they said was, is that order. And this is my own language.

I don't use this terminology. Whoa. They would argue that order is its own moral principle.

Here's a scenario that I think hypothetically, they would argue would work in regards to this.

You have like where I come from, a small little town, Winfield, Kansas, not a very big population.

Well, do research has shown that there's been 11 to 12 million people that have immigrated legally or illegally over the past two decades.

Well, most of them are not all over the place. They're all over the place. But if you had 12 million people come to my hometown of,

I don't know, like twenty five thousand people in that town or something, the infrastructure there could not handle it. It would be complete disorder.

And when you have this order, it actually undermines the law and not to mention it's a bit of a safety hazard itself.

So it's not just that the individual has a right, but the individual may or may not have a right to to come for the sake of order.

Too many people coming creates a problem that has to be dealt with. And for them to say, well, no, even though you are free to come, we're full.

And so that's a common law principle that I think that needs to be brought into the discussion as well. And I think that contribute. But Bobby, but Bobby, don't you agree that that the

Bible says you need to love your neighbor as yourself and you need to take care of the sojourner? Of course,

I agree with that. I don't think that I think that that is exactly part of the thing you don't want to take.

You see this principle with the lady who was interacting with Jesus, the the one who said to him, well, the food that falls from the table, the dogs eat the scraps, don't they?

There's an aspect where Jesus pointed out this aspect. He said, you don't take food out of the mouths of children, my own children to give to others.

You don't let your own children starve. If people in that area are and this goes actually back to and it's a conversation for maybe

Jacob and I, but egoism and altruism, I will argue, unlike if I understand

Jacob's position, I would argue that there's a both end there with Christology. You have both

Jesus as God and Jesus as man. And you have to uphold both of those principles. Most philosophy actually is a both end conundrum.

And usually you fall into a problem when you don't uphold the other part of the equation. And so I can't help somebody who's dying in a water, in the ocean, in a river if I can't swim.

So there's an aspect of where a healthy aspect that we are losing. Well, I have to go take care of myself first before I can take care of somebody else.

Bobby, that is honestly very, very true. And I think this kind of thinking that you're that you're critiquing there is rampant in the church, especially, you know, there was a brother the other day who was talking about how he how we're supposed to live in this radical way where we're giving away to the poor and things like that.

And he even said almost to the point where you are sort of foregoing, you know, saving for retirement and saving for your children.

And the problem is that the scripture doesn't say to do that. The scripture says that that a righteous man gives to his children and also his children's children.

And so there has to be a way to sort of to sort of connect sort of the the way we're supposed to divest ourselves of some of our money and also at the same time have, you know, capital for our children and our children's children and taking like you said, taking care of your yourself in addition to others as well.

So that was I think that was pretty astute. Well, and like I said, that's something that Jacob would agree with as well, that.

You can't take care of other people if you're not taking care of yourself now, then we get into is it arrogant, though people say that it's arrogant, but it's a nation first.

You really have to two sides of this debate. You have the I call them cosmopolitanists, the globalists, whatever you want to call them, who argue that we ought not to place the nation first.

And then you have those who say that if you want to call nationalists, those who say, well, no, the government is supposed to place its own nation first.

And that's the side that I would land on, is that a government is not supposed to necessarily putting not necessarily period is not to be putting another nation first.

The borders are meant for. Well, it's been for many purposes, but it is included to protect ourselves when we pay taxes.

Jesus said, you know, render it a season with Caesars. He's talking about giving taxes to Caesar so that he can then use those provide for its own people, not for another people.

But then we get back to what is a citizen. And that's part of the problem, too, is does that include the foreigner?

Does that include the stranger? And that opens up a whole new can of worms. There is an aspect of where we are to protect,

I suppose, the stranger within our gate, that we're not to treat them like garbage. There is an aspect of where they do deserve basic human dignity.

So I'm not at all arguing that we don't love our neighbor. In fact, I would argue along the lines of Arthur Brooks from the

American Enterprise Institute, he did a whole bunch of research showing that actually conservatives are the most loving people, actually the most compassionate people.

They give a whole lot more than those on the left. And interestingly, though, I brought that up to a socialist professor of mine once.

And he said, well, that's because socialists and those on the left, they're giving when they pay their taxes.

I was blown away by that. I was like, I think that that's a complete cop out.

You can't sit there and say, well, I give to people because I pay taxes. But if it's true that they are more generous than you would expect them to also be generous with their time, generous with other non -financial means.

But again, with that research that the president of AEI, Arthur Brooks, showed, no, those who are conservatives actually spend more time donating their money and their time donating, a couple of words here, they donate their time to institutions, charities, helping out, poor relief, you name it, way more.

So this whole idea that people like Jacob or any of us here are unloving or uncompassionate, it's really it's not true.

It's slant. I think, yeah, I'll let somebody else jump in here. But just to say this to you,

Bobby, I think you're exactly right. I think there's a tendency to sort of say, well, if you're not for very open borders, then automatically you're not obeying, you know, you know, love your neighbor as yourself.

And I just think that that's just so simplistic. And I think it is what you said. It is slander. But let me ask the group here, because what you said about potentially making sure that the infrastructure it has is is capable of supporting these numbers.

Do you think that the government has, you know, sort of a mandate in order to do what what

Bobby is saying here? No, because there's no collective right.

And that's sort of the idea behind, you know, protecting the infrastructure. It's the idea that the infrastructure is sort of collectively owned.

And then as a collective, we as a small city or as a nation or whatever it is, has a right to it.

I want to say that we should reject collectivism totally, not just the collectivism of the socialists, but the collectivism of the nationalists.

The I don't think the government needs to put America as such. I think the government needs to put its own individual citizens rights first or the individual rights of those within its borders first.

Rights are individual, not collective. And I mean, we run into application problems right now because we've got a lot of collectivized property like infrastructure, roads, things like that.

And so, you know, there's some good, interesting questions of how do you apply that principle in our current context or how do you move towards that ideal?

But I think it's important to first identify what the ideal ought to be. And I would argue the ideal ought to be individualized property and individual rights.

And in that context, if thousands of people want to move to a certain area, then they've likely got good reason to want to move there.

And if if that quote unquote hurts somebody else in a non -material way, in a way that doesn't actually violate their individual rights, then they're not actually being hurt in a way that the government ought to step in to to guard against.

And if you say that, well, you can hurt them without violating their individual rights, well, then you're stepping in to the concepts of socialism that socialists adopt when it comes to government regulations.

Can I jump in there? Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. Go ahead.

OK, so for the sake of everybody, back to the one in the mini balance there in philosophy, both individualism and collectivism are wrong without the other counterpart.

And both of them have half truth is my position. Both need to be balanced, just like I explained earlier.

It's my again, that's just my position. I'm not trying to debate that. And then secondly, in regards to order, you can deny common law theory, but none of us deny the common law principles.

Here would be a good example and a few different examples, really, that I think are very illustrative and very helpful.

I think in the modern context we're looking at today. If you have so much racial tension going on, if you have a cop who pulls over a guy, doesn't know who you know, what his race is, when he pulls him over, the idea is he enforces the law, the law, the law and justice, all about justice.

But then when he finds out, let's say, too, and this actually happened, it's a prominent member of a president of the

NAACP or something like that. He could just let him go for the sake of order, because go ahead and write a ticket or arrest or whatever the case may be, could incite violence and a riot.

And so a common law principle would say that go so that order is maintained.

Order is an equally a moral principle as what we see this every time, actually in church, in church, you don't fight every single error, every single heresy.

Well, I think the heresy part out. Well, that is how we define heresy. Don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it. I think we know we all know what you mean, though. And the same thing even happens in regards to the final point there or explanation in regards to the presidency.

We have a peaceful transfer of a peaceful exchange of power. And so what you have happened, it's called a hypothetical scenario where you have two people or four candidates.

One is a complete scumbag who slandered the other person and who has horrible policies. But that other person, good policies all agree with their policies, a righteous character and refused to slander.

Let's suppose the first person won because of slander. Sounds kind of familiar, probably. Well, what if justice was absolute and not order, then people would argue it'd be

OK to go ahead and use maybe a little bit of violence, maybe use a little bit of dirty tricks to go ahead and put the right guy in power.

But for the sake of order, we I would hope we all would agree. No. As unfair as it is, the guy that slandered the guy that's a scumbag is the president.

We left that peaceful exchange. If we go ahead, here's what will happen if we go ahead and put the right guy in by force.

Then what's going to happen is in the future, not so good guys are going to get in by force and it's going to further undermine order, which then further undermines law.

We found this seems to sort of relate directly to what just happened with Romans 13 and Jeff Sessions, because a lot of people would disagree with the law that Jeff Sessions was upholding and were encouraging him to not uphold that law.

And that kind of ties in directly to what you're saying. Well, and yeah, and here's here's something

I'm playing with. See, I'm new to the Commonwealth, so I'm still trying to figure it out. But I'm willing to at this point in time, speculate, not dogmatic about this.

I'm willing to change my mind. But I at this point in time, I want to say that Romans 13 is not about justice. It's about order.

And if that's true, then the government's job is order and not justice. And if that's the case, then it totally redoes the whole rights is about the individual thing.

And it totally changes everything on its head. What do you got? I think this is I think this is a problem with contemporary conservatives.

Order is not a definable principle. It's completely pragmatic and it will inevitably give way to a more principled version of chaos, which is socialism or something similar.

The idea that you can forego justice or or it's even morally ideal to forego justice for the sake of order, just encourages those who would so disorder and chaos.

All right. So your example of, you know, not wanting to arrest the guy in order to avoid a, you know, a protest.

Well, then what is the incentive there? The incentive there is threaten lots of protests and the extent to which you've got a lot of people, a big mob ready to protest is the extent to which you can get away with anything.

I agree with your concern, but I disagree on two two notes.

One, the cops do do this. I have a buddy of mine that I was sharing this with to a very fast. They shouldn't. I know they do.

They should. That's what I'm saying here. Yeah, though, I parents and this is why these conversations,

I think, are so good because I love how the connection between society and government and family and home. So I think that one is a natural outflow of the other.

And the way I parents reflects my idea of government, I don't like the idea of having any kind of rule in my home that can't be enforced.

If I can't even if I like the idea of the rule, if I know that I can't enforce it, I'm not going to make that a rule.

And so you see with government the same kind of thing. And I think this is this is a matter of order. So a buddy of mine was sharing this idea with him.

He talked about how he was at a concert and there was a bunch of people smoking weed, a lot of people smoking weed. And so the cops there were doing nothing about it.

He talked to them, said, well, hey, what do you guys do? Why aren't you guys doing your job? And he said, well, if we try to enforce this, there's not nearly enough here.

There's thousands of people. We don't have the manpower to enforce this. And if we did, it would be a huge mess.

People might stampede. People might get hurt in the process. It's better to not do that. So there's an aspect of where you are.

Sure. But we all I think we all agree that smoking weed, the laws against smoking weed are unjust, change the illegal behavior to rape or murder.

If there's a whole bunch of people raping and murdering and you went for the cops and said, why aren't you doing your job? And they said, well, it would just be too difficult.

We can't do it. You know, it's not feasible. We need order. It's more orderly to just allow the rapes to continue.

Yeah, that's the way to put it. Let me let me mention this in scripture that I believe that scripture teaches.

We'll let Steve answer right after you, Bobby. OK, it was good. So Jesus was asked about marriage and people asked him.

Well, I think they asked him. He said originally it was not so when it comes to divorce, but it was allowed because of the hardness of your hearts.

Now, with the scripture, you always see hardness of hearts as a matter of sin. And that passage has always troubled me. I've always struggled with, wait a minute, if it was originally it was not so.

You're not. And it's allowed because of hardness of heart. You're saying it's allowed because of sin. And God is winking at sin.

God doesn't make it sin. And so the only way I've ever been able to actually make sense of that passage is if the hardness of their heart meant a lot of disorder would have happened.

And order is actually a moral principle. So it's not Jesus being a pragmatist. It's not

Jesus being a good politician. It's it's Jesus actually saying that order has a moral value to it.

And that makes sense to me. Yeah, I totally see.

I agree that order is not really a principle, although there may be pragmatic concerns.

And that's not a bad example. And Jesus's attitude toward divorce and how he expounds on answers the question, how, why did

Moses command us to give certificates of divorce? So, well, it's not because God hates divorce.

We know that knew that divorces were going to happen and wanted to protect protect those. So that were the weakest partner in the divorce.

So that may be an example of what you're doing, what you're saying. And but I don't think order itself is a is a principle and kind of tying it back to immigration.

I think the issue is that we've like conservatives especially have really lost conservative values and they can't conceive of immigration without like an element of socialism that we've already accepted.

So we accept the fact that if an immigrant come here, comes here, that means he's we're really talking about the political rights of welfare, political rights of health care, the rights to social safety nets.

And when we talk about infrastructure and problems related to immigrants, it's really the problems related to our bad view of what the immigration would have to mean that we have those sort of things versus immigration.

That is just the freedom of movement. And we could tell the free market could tell us exactly how many immigrants could be here because the immigrants that would belong here would be the ones that could take care of themselves, could find employment, could find housing and could prosper here when the free market can't do that.

And there's no other reason for immigrants to be here. Immigrants wouldn't come here. So I don't I don't think order is really a principle.

I think the principle derives from biblical concepts of love your neighbors. As Jesus broke down the

Ten Commandments, it gets broken down into two things. Love your neighbor and love God. When you put those two, you aggregate them beyond how do

I love one individual person? Well, I don't steal from him. If I if there's 10 of us, that means

I don't hire someone to steal from him. I don't elect someone to steal from him. And I think the same thing applies to how to love immigrants.

I find a lot of the the the application of this to be phony and kind of fake, terrible view where, you know, we have this desire, this

Christian, this appeal from Christianity to help immigrants isn't just allow immigrants to to to seek employment and prosper.

It's that you have to steal money from someone else in order to give it to the immigrant. It's it's not even that you're doing it yourself.

You know, the idea that we have to, you know, we have to get a plane and fly and pay for a plane and fly a bunch of people over here because of love of immigrants with money that doesn't even belong to us is kind of a phony implementation of that.

It certainly does complicate the issue for sure. I would agree with that. Matt, do you have anything to say here?

I think you're on mute. Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. So I missed that last part of your conversation.

I was asking something. But just earlier, what I was going to say is I wanted to see to you,

Bobby. You said that Romans 13 was about order and you seem to kind of dismiss that it was about what was that?

I'm not dogmatic on that. Oh, OK. The idea. OK, I was just wondering where you were getting that.

Well, so like I said, I've been studying everybody from like Abraham Piper to Edmund Burke and the original

Calvinists when they were dealing with the original liberalism 200 years ago. They said, look, order is what it's all about.

Now, it's interesting that Jacob said that conservatives today are all about order. No, they're really not. They're actually more liberal than I would argue.

But anyways, it's interesting, though, because I don't know if they're liberal.

They're more just inconsistent because they don't have a consistent principle.

Yeah, exactly. Modern conservatives are using liberal principles to do their conservative thinking.

But I won't go down the rabbit trail. I'm getting common law theory. The idea of order being what is first and foremost, having studied with it with just the law aspect.

And then when I went to scripture, it started making sense, like I said, of the passage where Jesus said that in the beginning was not so.

Now it's allowed. That made sense to me for that passage that they want. They make sense of that passage. What else does it make sense of?

And that's what I'm thinking. Well, Romans 13, I always thought that Romans 13 showed that the government's job is to establish, maintain and to defend justice.

It's all about justice. And that's Herman Boving's position. Well, like I said, having studied this as well, of course, we all agree that law creates order.

The common law idea is that order creates law just as much as law creates order.

That they're equally valuable, law and order. It's something

I'm playing with. I'm not dogmatic on it. I just think of very orderly societies that are not very just or lawful.

Well, yeah, and that's the thing is that it would go down another rabbit trail that I honestly don't really want to is it actually helps me to understand my position about the

American Revolution. The American Rebellion is Paul said to submit to them.

If it basically would mean that a tyrannical government, you can still sit there and say, like what you actually had during the ancient

Roman era, Paul can still say submit to them. They're doing their job. It gets rid of the idea of Augustine's idea that an unjust law is no law at all and you can rebel if the laws are unjust.

It gets rid of the idea that, oh, well, the government's so tyrannical, so corrupt, so abusive, you can go ahead and revolt. People don't like that idea.

People are going to go on the side of revolution, which is the liberal principle, which is not the principle. I mean, if I'm not loud,

Abraham Typer called his political party the anti -revolutionary party for a reason. It was anti -revolutionary and it was all about order.

But that's I don't mean to derail things. I apologize. No, that's OK. That's OK. Yeah, no, thanks for the clarification.

Did you have something to say to that, Jacob? I thought I saw you talking, but I could be wrong. No, I didn't start talking.

All right, great. Well, I mean, this is this has been interesting. Let's let's talk just quickly about sort of the the issue with separating the children and all that kind of thing.

That was the that was the hot topic last week. And lots of people were losing their minds about that. So so quickly.

Well, we'll see how quickly it goes. I mean, whoever wants to jump in and say, you know, kind of what that was all about and where they stand on that.

Is it really as black and white as a lot of evangelicals are making it seem that would be probably the best thing to wrap up?

Yeah, I think I think evangelicals and conservatives in general are just in a tight spot because they they affirm an unjust law, which is this arbitrary, tight immigration law that they start off by by claiming, oh, no, we just want to enforce the law.

You know, we want to we want to nail the illegals. But then if you if you really question them, they don't want to make it easier to become a legal immigrant.

Right. What they're really afraid of is they're afraid of losing their jobs. They're afraid of economic impact.

They're afraid of disorder, things like that. And so they they want to affirm this unjust law against immigration to keep people out.

But then when it comes to actually applying that law, you you see some very uncompassionate behavior by the government, or at least that's what it looks like.

And and so you kind of end up in a tight spot where, all right, well, what do we do? Do we do we try to do the love your neighbor thing or do we try to do the enforce the law thing?

And none of them stop the question. Well, maybe the law was unjust to begin with. Yeah, I agree that the law was that the law is unjust.

However, it's something Republicans and Democrats together have been doing for a very long time. The one thing that got confirmed for me over the last month is how much the media controls the narrative of what we talk about and where the conversation starts and where it eventually ends.

So that's one thing that the whole thing seemed kind of strangely contrived to me.

Yeah, great. Yeah. I think that as Christians, our goal in the political arena should be not reaction to one side or the other, but to set a picture of what the ideal should look like and then figure out how to move towards that.

So rather than reacting against the media for manipulating this, because really this was

Obama's policy and why blame Trump for it? And, you know, you can get in the weeds with that.

But that's that's not as helpful, I think, especially as the church in the long run, as it would be to do some difficult thinking on these issues.

Think in principle and identify what would the ideal look like and then how can we move towards that?

Right. So in other words, you know, right now we're kind of at least even if it's just rhetorically, it kind of seems like we're caught between love your neighbor and yourself and and and justice and establishing just law.

But those two things aren't contradictory. They aren't at odds. It's just that with unjust they shouldn't be.

They are currently. But they shouldn't be. They don't have to be. And I think that's kind of the the the horns that were caught on here, because on the one hand, we do want to defend the rule of law, but but not necessarily all law.

I think we all agree with that in the beginning. I think this comes down to what Jacob was saying, like, is is the law just or is it unjust?

Because if it's unjust and the separation of children is bad, but it's not bad because they are separating children from their families.

And that's the only reason why it's bad, you know what I'm saying, because we do that with every other law where you prosecute somebody, you don't get to sit with your family in jail with any other circumstance.

So it's either the law is unjust itself or it's not unjust. I agree.

I'm not disagreeing, but but I would still go a little farther and say that and I'm sure everybody would agree with this, but that the separation of children from their families is unjust.

And from their family. Is not itself an inherent good, but is itself all things equal, all things apart, still a bad it is a bad thing.

Yeah, it is a bad thing, but it's a bad thing as an owner, that's not good, but it's only an unjust thing if the law you're prosecuting them for, which requires you to separate them from their children to follow the process of prosecution is itself unjust.

I agree. Like, for instance, if they killed somebody and now we have to prosecute them for to figure out whether or not they killed somebody, we're not going to let their kid sit in a detainment facility with them.

I agree that it's not just I just, yeah, necessarily based on that. I agree. I think we, yeah,

I think we agree pretty much on that. Well, sure. And that's clarifying. And I think another thing, too, is the importance of looking at some of the

Marxist underpinnings of a lot of what's going on right now. Many people out there do think that the idea that a border, they think a border is inherently wrong, that all it is, it keeps the have -nots from getting what those who are the haves possess, or that a nation state is really just another form of racism.

And this really is a bit of a problem, I believe. So, but those on the graph, the Border Patrol agents and others have noted that many people have died trying to make it across the desert.

Parents, I guess, from what I've read, assuming this stuff's true, and I'm not going to impute motives to these people.

I'm not going to assume that they have some kind of ill intent in telling us these things, that they're just making this up because they're racist or something.

But they've said that parents sending their kids because they didn't want to deal with them, they dropped their kids off, they would pay some money to smugglers to transport them, the kids were already separated, you name it.

And so, if these are the problems that are going on, I guess there's all kinds of rape issues going on,

I can't say that I want to encourage this activity to happen if it's such a dangerous activity. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

Yeah, and to me, I would say the issues there is the inconsistency with enforcing the law.

If it is, in general, a just law that we should require people to go through a certain process to figure out if we want to let them in or not let them in.

It's an injustice to not actually enforce that law, because then it creates this confusion, which causes all the things you were just talking about.

Well, and part of the problem, of course, and I'm sure you guys are aware of this, there are two different ideas of love. And C .S.

Lewis pointed out that an idea of love that's mere cowardice is really kind of a cruel love.

Real love has a kind of toughness to it. It really does. We don't realize that. Yes, I'm again, lacking words here, but you look at Jesus, he flipped tables and he called the

Pharisees names. That's not to be nice, but he didn't do it out of a sheer desire to watch people suffer.

He did it because he wanted their good. And so that's what we've been looking at here. The difference between a love that is more than mere kindness.

Those on the left would define love. I it seems to me the essence of love to them is inclusion.

But there's an aspect where love actually is exclusion. For example, in order to love

God, you love God, true love of God excludes love of a false God.

If I love my wife, that excludes love for others, other women. So there's this exclusion aspect that we automatically, unfortunately, are bristling at.

And it's a real big problem. But we should make, again, no mistake about it. All sides are for immigration in general, and all sides are for love.

It's two different ideas of love, two different ideas of immigration, two different ideas of justice that we're dealing with here.

Yeah, I agree. I think if we've done anything in this time, and we're just about to wrap up, we've been doing this for just about an hour or so.

But if we've done anything this time, we've shown that this conversation is nuanced. There is room for disagreement and still have agreement on the basic principles.

We all agree in the idea that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. We all agree that we should treat the sojourner and the native born with the same law, with no partiality.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to accept sort of this idea of completely open, letting everybody in who wants to come in and just kind of just going with it.

We don't have to accept that kind of a love. That kind of a love is not something that any of us would say is scriptural.

Now, we all have different ideas as to the thresholds. I think that's pretty clear. But we didn't have to sort of caricature the other side as the unloving, evil bigots.

Does anyone have anything they want to say to wrap up? You know, we can go for another five minutes or so. I think we're good.

I think one thing I was saying is that I think it's a good point, is it, Matt, that you made about the question of whether it's a just law or not is the question that no one wants to talk about in the media or even in just in culture.

So everyone's reacting to the taking away of children. But no one's having this conversation of whether the actual crime is a crime or the outbreak about pictures and the images of children being taken away from people that are accused of committing a crime and not really a conversation about whether the crime even exists.

I think that was a really good. Yeah, I think it's all it's all a distraction for political gain. Yeah, so it's there's no principle behind either side for the most part.

Agreed. Right. All right, guys. Well, thank you so much for for joining the conversation. I do appreciate it.

And I hope this is helpful for everyone. God bless. Take care. Thank you. Everything's been very nice.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that. I thought that was a really interesting conversation. We could have gone a little bit deeper.

We could have gone into a bunch of different directions. But I'm very pleased with how it turned out. At the very least, I think that what you what you can see here from this video is that it is possible to have nuanced views of things.

It is possible to have opinions that aren't very simplistic, that don't lob bombs and anathematize people on the other side and don't accuse people of not loving their neighbor if they don't agree with your open borders policy.

Now, everyone in this conversation was either conservative or libertarian or some flavor of that kind of perspective.

And so if you know any liberals, people that are all about open borders, people that are trying to make this very simplistic issue of Christian duty,

I would love to talk with them. I would love to set up some conversations between people who very sharply disagree about this particular issue.

I'm not calling people out, but what I've found is people on the conservative libertarian type side are more willing to have these conversations.

So let's have this conversation. Let's do the hard work of having nuanced perspectives and defending our positions and not just assuming that the

Bible is with us on any specific thing. So if you know anyone who's more on the liberal side, the progressive side that would be willing to have a conversation in a forum like this, please reach out to me and let's set something up.