Not So Among You (Part 2)

The "Right Way" as a Righteous Vocabulary

A few days ago, I wrote about the story we tell when we're afraid — the one that points at immigrants as the cause of our scarcity rather than at the systems that created it — and about Jesus's refusal, in Matthew 20, to accept empire's logic of domination: "Not so among you." I want to pick that thread back up here, because there's a phrase I hear constantly in these conversations that deserves a closer look.

"I don't have a problem with immigrants, as long as they do it the right way."

On its face, that sounds like a reasonable, even generous, position. But I want us to sit with what that phrase actually does.

It lets us feel compassionate while requiring nothing of us. It puts the burden entirely on the person with the least power in the exchange — the one navigating a system that is, by almost every honest account, backlogged, contradictory, and often functionally closed to the very people who need it most. And it lets us avoid the harder question: what happens when someone follows every process available to them, and the outcome is still cruelty?

What happens when "the right way" turns out not to be a real door, but a phrase that lets good people feel at peace while something unjust happens anyway?

Empire is very good at this. It doesn't need to convince good people to become cruel. It only needs to give cruelty a righteous vocabulary. Call domination "security." Call suffering "enforcement." Call the separation of families "the process working as intended." And suddenly people who would never say "I want to see a family destroyed" can watch it happen and feel, at worst, a complicated mixture of sympathy and resignation — because someone in authority said the magic words: law and order.

Jesus never told us we couldn't ask what a nation's laws should be. That's a legitimate conversation, and Christians can disagree about immigration policy in good faith. But he was crystal clear that Caesar's permission and love's requirement are not the same measuring stick, and we don't get to collapse them into one just because it's more comfortable. Caesar tells us what is legal. Jesus tells us what is loving. Those two things will not always agree — and when they don't, we already know, as followers of Jesus, which one gets our allegiance.

I want to be clear that none of this is me freelancing a political opinion and dressing it up in theology. The United Methodist Church's own Social Principles — grounded in scripture — have long called for immigration policy that is just, humane, and comprehensive: policy that keeps families together and honors the dignity of every person, regardless of status.

That's not an abstract commitment. This summer, after ICE agents fatally shot two unarmed fathers during traffic stops within a single week — men who were, by all accounts, simply driving to work — bishops across multiple conferences, including here in Texas, in New England, and in the California-Pacific Conference, released statements calling for full, transparent investigations and for real change in enforcement practices that they said were terrorizing whole communities. Our denomination's Immigration Task Force put it plainly: "no person should lose their life because they were driving to work."

Around the country, United Methodist congregations are living this out in very concrete ways — holding vigils, running legal-aid networks for people trying to gain lawful status, showing up outside detention centers with hot food and dry socks and letters of encouragement for people who are frightened and alone. None of that is fringe activism within our tradition. It's simply what it looks like when a church takes its own stated principles seriously.

I bring this up because I don't want anyone reading this to think I'm asking you to adopt some position I invented. I'm asking us to live up to one we already hold.

I'm not writing this to win an argument with anyone, and I'm not interested in humiliating people who are afraid. I'm writing it because I think our call as a church is to keep asking the question empire would prefer we stop asking: who is this story asking us to blame, and who does that blame protect?

When we hear "immigrants are the reason things are hard," I want us to have the theological muscle memory to ask: hard according to whom, and convenient for whom? When we hear "they should just do it the right way," I want us to ask whether we've actually looked at what that way requires, or whether we're repeating a phrase that lets us stop looking.

And when we're tempted to let fear pick our neighbor for us, I want us to remember the four words that were disruptive enough to get a man killed by an empire that preferred order to love: not so among you.

That's still true. It's true here. It's true now. And it will keep being true long after this particular argument about scarcity and blame has been replaced by whatever the next one is.

Not so among you. Let it be so among us.

For more on how United Methodists nationally are responding to this moment, see UM News' July 2026 report, "Amid ICE killings, churches defend immigrants."