Article

Church and state

Creed

Politics

8 February 2024

6 min read

The Church and the State need to disagree on asylum seekers

Politicians don’t always get how church and state relate, but both have a vital and different role to play when it comes to immigration. Graham Tomlin explores the age-old tensions between clerics and politicians

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A woman dressed in a blue suit sits at a table talking and gesticulating with her hands.

Then Home Secretary Suella Braverman, answer to a parliamentary committee, December 2022.

House of Lords, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As we all know, Suella Braverman thinks the church is aiding and abetting bogus asylum seekers. The case of the Afghan migrant Abdul Ezedi, who carried out an acid attack on a woman and her children and reports that residents of the Bibby Stockholm barge were attending churches nearby has added fuel to the former Home Secretary’s charge that churches are naively supporting the asylum claims of immigrants to the UK. Everyone on the right of British politics seems to have weighed in to the issue, from Nigel Farage to Priti Patel, Robert Jenrick to Melanie Phillips. Now, even the left has joined in. Keir Starmer has indicated he would close loopholes for those who falsely claim conversion if he becomes Prime Minister (quite how he will do that is not explained).

I feel personally invested in this story. When I take confirmation services as a bishop, quite regularly these days, among the list of candidates, there will be Iranian or Syrian refugees who have apparently become Christians, waiting in line among the 12-year old schoolkids, the new parents who want spiritual help in bringing up their children and the elderly man approaching death who realises he needs do something he’s been putting off for years.

I have confirmed several Iranian refugees. I can’t look into their heart, or even my own to guarantee all of them were genuine converts. Yet I have seen their desperation to escape an oppressive regime, and although some may have started out coming to church to improve their chances of asylum, in the process some of them at least, have found, to their surprise, real faith. Several that I know have gone on towards ordination in the Anglican Church. If that is a ploy to get past the immigration system, it does seem to be taking things a bit far.

It’s hard not to think the attack on the church is some kind of retaliation for the bishops’ opposition to the government’s Rwanda scheme. But underneath this argument there are deeper issues at play.

The wrath of God is more severe than the wrath of Suella. And the generosity of God is wider than the Home Office.

This dispute is in reality another outbreak of the age-old tension between the Church and Caesar. In the early years of the church, Roman emperors never really understood Christianity and thought they could use it for the purposes of the Roman Empire just like they were used to doing with the pagan cults.

Yet the Christians had other ideas and higher loyalties. As Augustine put it, the loyalty of the church is ultimately to the City of God rather than the earthly city. And in time, they developed a careful understanding of the way the church related to the state.

So when it comes to immigration, the church will always take a different approach from the state. St Paul, in the very early years of the Christian Church, wrote: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you.” In the very foundations of the Christian faith was this idea that even though we humans were moral and spiritual vagabonds, God has extended us a welcome into his presence. So woe betide any Christian who failed to welcome others into their fellowship if they wanted to join.

If the Christian life was a matter of imitating and displaying God's ways in the ordinary business of life, then hospitality became one of the core Christian virtues. As one early Christian writer put it: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it." To risk offending an angel - a messenger of God – was a bad idea. The wrath of God is more severe than the wrath of Suella. And the generosity of God is wider than the Home Office.

Now of course such hospitality could be abused. The New Testament also has warnings about naively welcoming scoundrels who speak falsehood and lies: "Do not receive into the house or welcome anyone who comes to you... for to welcome is to participate in the evil deeds of such a person." So, the early Christians were told to be on the lookout for fakes, just like clergy today. Walk down a street with a dog collar and you are a magnet for people telling you that they have lost their wallet and could you give them the train fare to visit their dying mother in Newcastle. With their doctrines of sin and the deceitfulness of the human heart, vicars should know more than most that not every claim to charity is genuine. Yet that dose of realism always took place in the context of a presumption to welcome. To think the best of people not the worst. To give people the benefit of the doubt.

The state on the other hand has a different role. Later political theology developed more nuanced ways of putting it, but it goes back to St Paul’s claim that civil authorities are “God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” It is their job to be suspicious, to investigate fully, to winkle out fake claims and to set proper limits, while tempering justice with mercy and be willing to welcome the genuine person in need. And wisdom is found in the tension between the two. It was always a mistake for the church to act like the state, being overly suspicious and critical. It was equally a mistake for the state to act like the church, being overly optimistic about all claims to asylum or innocence.

So, when asylum seekers turn up at church asking to be baptised, the local vicar should not act like an agent of the state, assuming they are all bogus, just wanting to fiddle the system. She must act out of loyalty to her faith which tells her to welcome the stranger. The immigration officer on the other hand, whether he happens to be Christian or not, has to play it differently. Of course, there needs to be proper scrutiny of people's application for asylum - that's why we have an immigration system and quite right too. But vicars are not immigration officers. Their job is not start out by doubting motives but to act out the welcome of God, even if it draws the ire of the Daily Telegraph. This is the way that church and state should work together, one reminding the other of the Kingdom of God - a whole different way of life where welcome and grace takes centre stage. The other, conscious of the human tendency to deceive, being rightly cautious.

Suella's problem is, at root, a theological one. She hasn't understood the way Christian faith works. She hasn't understood the relationship between the church and the state. And let's be honest, sometimes in the past, the Church has tried to play the role of the state as well, which is equally a mistake. There is an inevitable tension in this relationship, where sometimes the church will believe the state is being too harsh, or the state will believe the church is being too soft, as we have seen in recent times. But it's one of those creative tensions where each side needs the other.

Perhaps in other, wiser ages, we understood this delicate balance between church and state, and the careful work that went into defining their relationship. Maybe it's time to recognise the role that each plays, not just for the sake of a healthy social life, but for the sake of those people who come to our shores desperately seeking a new life – whether with good motives or bad.

Review

Awe and wonder

Creed

Easter

Film & TV

27 March 2025

5 min read

Heading Home: a pilgrimage that breaks out beauty along the way

We can learn a new language together as we travel.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A shaft of light from an opening in a dome lights a cross on a pedestal.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Kieran Dodds.

This film, this pilgrimage, this story begins in Jerusalem in the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with its Aedicule, a small chapel, containing the tomb from which Jesus rose.

Jesus' resurrection was revolutionary because it is the first fruits of a wider resurrection into a new heaven and a new earth, the new Jerusalem, where all that is harmful on earth is transformed into eternal glory and beauty.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre holds that vision within its walls, a vision that was then transported throughout the world through pilgrimage and creatively replicated in other locations so that all who entered their local church or cathedral would be transported through art and architecture to the New Jerusalem.

US philanthropist and author Roberta Ahmanson thinks that American Protestants, in particular, have neglected this story because of the Reformation's preference for word over image. As a result, in 2022, she gathered an eclectic group of Christian college presidents, church pastors, and Christian creatives taking them on a pilgrimage from Jerusalem to London via Italy and Aachen while filming their responses to the visual history of the New Jerusalem as found in the churches they visit. In their two-week journey, the group cover almost 2,000 years of church art and architecture.

Ahmanson explains that this search for the reality of the Kingdom of God as it is to be realised in the New Jerusalem at the end of time did not mean that pilgrims were to abandon the world. On the contrary, she says, "their job was to serve this world to make it more like the heavenly home where their ultimate citizenship lay." That remains the aim of this art and architecture as:

“By studying the nature of that promised place, as artists and architects and writers of the past have sought to express it, we are schooled to live lives of wholeness and beauty right here on earth. The longing for beauty is ultimately a longing to be Home, to be in the place where we are whole.”

The beauty of the churches visited on this pilgrimage provided a vision of the New Jerusalem to those who entered in order that they took that vision into their everyday lives when they left. Along the way, the pilgrims on this trip learnt how artists, architects and theologians worked in parallel for many centuries – from Saint Augustine’s vision of a New Jerusalem to Dante’s admonitions about the Last Judgment.

The film combines scenes of beautiful interiors with explanations of their significance from Ahmanson and others, plus it shows the reactions of various of the pilgrims as they allow their sense of wonder and understanding of Church history to be expanded. David and Joy Bailey, founders of Arrabon which cultivates Christian communities to pursue healing and reconciliation in a racially divided world, are two of those to have spoken about the impact the trip had on the group of pilgrims.

Joy said: “Everybody was very literate coming from these strong traditions of faith being either oral or written but to see it so visually impacting, it was breaking us all open and trying to find language for that took the entire trip.” David suggested that: “What the trip was helping you to see was this deeper rootedness, this long tradition that, I think, could actually be very helpful for us today because some of the things that were there were the understanding of humanity as plain on the outside and beauty on the inside, the glory that comes with the inward journey that reflects on Heaven as it is on Earth.”

Re-enacting, revisiting and reinhabiting Christ's journey to the cross and the meaning of his resurrection remains central to Christian experience

As we travel further from Jerusalem in the film, we are surprised to find that the template of the Holy Sepulchre continues to inspire and shape the experience of pilgrims. Ahmanson explains that: “In churches across the old Roman Empire, from Africa and Palestine to the furthest reaches of Britain, liturgy was created to tell the story and to bring the spaces alive in the telling. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and later to Rome and then to the tomb of Saint James in Spain became a kind of geographic liturgy. When the trip became too long or … too dangerous, believers found alternative destinations. Across the continent, from Magdeburg in Germany and Constance in Switzerland, to Bologna and Pisa in Italy and London and Cambridge in England, round churches or smaller models replicating the Church of the Holy Sepulchre became pilgrim destinations.”

Re-enacting, revisiting and reinhabiting Christ's journey to the cross and the meaning of his resurrection remains central to Christian experience, particularly during Lent and Holy Week. Walking labyrinths, Palm Sunday processions and Passion dramas, praying the Stations of the Cross, washing feet on Maundy Thursday, sharing a Passover meal, the Good Friday three-hour devotional, and the Dawn Eucharist on Easter Day are among the many ways Christians continue to follow in the footsteps of Jesus while remaining where they are during this most special season.

Many of these practices provide the opportunity to go on pilgrimage while remaining at home. Just as with images of the New Jerusalem brought from Jerusalem to the churches of Europe, so with, for example, the practice of praying the Stations of the Cross which originated in medieval Europe when pilgrims were unable to visit the Holy Land, so instead “visited” the Holy places through prayer.

The film, and other creative off-shoots including exhibitions of photographs from the pilgrimage taken by Kieran Dodds and performances by spoken word poet Street Hymns (one of the pilgrims), with his fellow poets Hanna Watson, Jasmine Sims, and Lo Alaman, in response to images of the New Jerusalem, provide viewers with a similar opportunity to experience, reflect and pray. The aim of all these initiatives is, as Ahmanson explains, what has always been the aim; “to serve this world to make it more like the heavenly home” where our ultimate citizenship lies, and to do so by “creating beauty in buildings and art and music and serving the suffering and those in all kinds of need”.

Explore more

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Give now