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.

Article

Creed

18 November 2024

3 min read

John Smyth: how evil masks itself as goodness

Be alert to the cloaked and warped wherever it occurs.

Graham Tomlin

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

William Blake's illustration of Satan, a winged angel, flying over a prone Eve.

Satan Exulting over Eve, William Blake.

Getty Museum, via Wikimedia Commons.

Much has been written over these past days about Justin Welby’s resignation and the turmoil in the Church of England. Attention has focused on who knew what, and who did or didn’t act on their knowledge. Less attention has been focused on the dark heart of this story – John Smyth himself and the way he conducted his sinister campaign of manipulation and harm. A campaign that was – the more I think of it – not just abusive, but demonic.

How could Smyth have got away with it for so long? How could he have persuaded these young men to go along with his sadistic beatings? Why did people try to ignore it, hoping they could keep it quiet?

If there is one note struck in the Bible about evil, it is its deceitfulness. Jesus called the devil ‘the father of lies’ – and lies always present themselves convincingly as the truth. St Paul once wrote of how “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness.” The meaning of the name ‘Lucifer’ is literally ‘light bringer’.

This all reflects the ancient tradition taken up by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, of Satan as a fallen angel – one of the crowd of celestial creatures, usually invisible to humans, who appear at key moments in the Bible, like the visions of Isaiah or the birth of Jesus – one who unlike all the others, resented his subservient role as a messenger of God and set himself up as a rival instead. Yet the point is he still looks like an angel. And so, it seems, did John Smyth, with his fine words, clever sounding theology and earnest prayers.

A few days ago, I listened to an account from one of the survivors of the way John Smyth went about grooming his victims. Smyth presented himself as a father-figure for young boys away from home in boarding school, looking for older parental figures who would help guide them through the confusions and complexities of adolescence. To justify this, he would say that of course God is our Father, as Jesus says in the Lord’s Prayer, but God is our Father in heaven, not on earth, and that he, John Smyth, was to act as their earthly father. And, as he claimed, fathers discipline their children, he had the responsibility to discipline them physically for their spiritual benefit, with the horrendous results with which we are all now too painfully aware.

The arrogance of this is breathtaking. For any being – human or celestial - to put themselves in the place of God, to presume to usher God into the distance and to step into his shoes, is an echo of that primal sin of Satan in the garden of Eden, who tells Adam and Eve that they don’t need to listen to God, but instead to him.

When you survey the carnage Smyth’s warped theology and evil practice has wreaked – most tragically to the lives of those he mistreated so deviously, it is hard not to see something more than merely sinful – but something demonic going on. John Smyth chose to obey the dark instincts of his heart, and to take the Faustian pact that grasps power over others at the loss of one’s own soul. He chose to give in to his evil desires entirely, cloaking them in phony but eloquent religious terminology.

Acknowledging the deceitfulness of evil is not to excuse those who tried to cover it up. In fact, recognising this is to hear a call to greater vigilance, in that when faced with something of this order we are not facing something obvious, ordinary, easy to spot. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” says the letter to the Ephesians, “but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” If we in the Church have not taken safeguarding seriously enough, it is because we have not taken the nature of evil seriously enough. Remaining alert for the evil that masks itself as goodness – whether in the church or anywhere else for that matter - is a spiritual and moral skill we need to learn more than ever.