By Daniel Johnson
In British political debate, it has not been customary for the past century or so to cite scriptural texts, let alone embark on their exegesis, in order to clinch an argument. Any politician or journalist who tried to do so would quickly discover that such tactics were rhetorically ineffective. Even in a properly moral discussion, such as the present one about euthanasia, quoting the Bible is counterproductive: it enables the other side to dismiss the case being made as ‘prejudice’ or ‘bigotry’. A century ago, the speeches of Lloyd George were saturated in Biblical references, which his audiences would have grasped implicitly. Now, I doubt whether, for most people, our question would register as an allusion to scripture, even at a subliminal level. We have long since lost the world in which Christianity permeated every nook of our mental furniture.
Across the Atlantic it is a very different story. There, many politicians take a basic familiarity with the Bible for granted and an appeal to divine justification is a normal eristic strategy – even for political leaders of whom it might be said, with Oliver Cromwell, that they have no more religion than a horse. It is worth considering this scriptural approach, if only to reject it.
When Jesus taught his followers that the second great commandment was to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, he was in fact quoting Moses directly. In the Book of Leviticus 19:18, the people of Israel are enjoined: ‘Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord.’ Note that by ‘neighbour’, Moses here implies acquaintances and certainly fellow Jews. However, in verse 34 of the same chapter, the scope of ‘neighbour’ is expanded: ‘But the stranger that dwells with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.’
For the Jews and Christians of biblical times, then, the meaning of ‘love thy neighbour’ was explicitly inclusive, not exclusive. In the commandment of Jesus, firmly based in Hebrew Scripture, there is no hierarchy of affinity, no ordo amoris – whatever the Vice President of the United States may say.
Yet there is a serious difference of interpretation about who counts as a neighbour and what our duties are to them. Pope Leo XIV has warned against the policies of the Trump administration, citing the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25: ‘For I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in.’ But of course there are always passages in the Bible that can be used to justify any cruelty or injustice. According to my fellow Catholic J.D. Vance, the actions of the ICE snatch squads are ‘humanitarian’, while my Evangelical namesake, Speaker Mike Johnson, has justified them as part of the ‘Christian case for border security and immigration enforcement’.
Both these Christian gentlemen are, in my view, being disingenuous. They must know that there is no Christian case for the violent and arbitrary overreaction to the presence of millions of undocumented immigrants that the world has witnessed in Minneapolis and other American cities. Why, then, does Johnson claim that he, and not Pope Leo, has the correct interpretation of Scripture?
In a written statement, Johnson insisted that the passages cited above from Leviticus 19 and Matthew 25 were addressed to individuals, specifically the disciples, while governments have completely different moral criteria. ‘Despite the unfounded claims of the Left, supporting a strong national border is a very Christian thing to do. The Bible tells us so.’
The Bible, in particular the Hebrew Bible, has indeed furnished powerful arguments for the idea of a nation state within clearly defined borders. But that is a very different thing from providing ammunition for the indiscriminate and generally unwarranted use of deadly armed force to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants who in most cases had been living peacefully and productively in the US for many years.
So the introduction of religious texts into a political debate does not resolve our differences. Interpretations of such texts differ widely and no useful purpose is served by turning a moral question into one of theology or indeed hermeneutics. Let us return, then, to first principles and only then compare our conclusions with the relevant passages of scripture.
There are, of course, two separate issues here: immigration and integration. Immigration is primarily a question of numbers. Britain, with a long history of migration and globalisation, ought to be capable of absorbing at least half a million migrants a year – roughly equivalent to the numbers now emigrating. It may not be fashionable to say so, but with a falling birthrate and ageing population, we need to import more skilled workers than we lose if the British economy is not to continue languishing in stagflation and welfare dependency.
In the 19th century there was large-scale immigration to England from Ireland: most of the six million or so Catholics in the UK are descendants of that wave, though that figure includes up to a million people of Polish descent too. Incidentally, there are more Catholics than Muslims in the UK – they are our largest religious minority – and more people speak Polish than any of the languages of the Subcontinent, the Middle East or Africa. Though Catholics only acquired civil rights in 1829 and remain subject to legal discrimination to this day (no Catholic can inherit the throne), their integration into a country with a Protestant established Church has been an unqualified success – admittedly over nearly two centuries.
So the practical problem to be solved is the maintenance of a manageable proportion between the scale of immigration and the pace of integration. For most of our history, that task has been relatively straightforward. Even substantial numbers of non-Christian immigrants – Jews, Hindus and Sikhs, for example – could be integrated without serious difficulties. This was demonstrated by the failed attempt of Oswald Mosley’s Fascists to march through the East End of London, in order to intimidate the poorer and more vulnerable elements of the Jewish community. Indeed, Mosley’s British Union of Fascists never won a single seat in the Commons. Their only major impact was on the National Government, which panicked about anti-Semitism and excluded all but a few Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. Fearing Arab riots, the British also prevented Jews from settling in Mandate Palestine throughout the period of Nazi persecution and genocide. Even after the Holocaust had ended, ships carrying Jewish survivors landing in Palestine were forced to sail back to a devastated, starving and hostile Europe. These boat people, remember, were classified as ‘illegal immigrants’.
For Christians, this episode ought to give us pause. One of our most ancient orisons, still prayed or sung in Greek, is the Kyrie Eleison – ‘Lord, have mercy’. To the people who taught us the meaning of mercy, however, we showed very little of it.
Of course, the moral choices we face today are very different. The Muslim population, for example, is much larger: a quarter of all primary school children in London are Muslim – a larger proportion in most boroughs than those who identify as white British. Under these circumstances, the question of integration changes: what exactly are minorities supposed to be integrating into? The popular panacea of the Danish Social Democrats – eliminating illegal immigration and preventing the formation of anything that resembles an ethnic ghetto – is incomparably less effective in Britain, given our burgeoning human rights industry and long-standing urban demography. ‘British values’ – tolerance of cultural and religious differences, fair play, ‘live and let live’ – are much more difficult to maintain once majorities are turned into minorities without their consent. Muslims are now the largest and most obviously sectarian bloc in British politics. Some of their self-proclaimed representatives having aggressively asserted themselves in public spaces – the prime example being the Gaza hate marches of the past three years – it is no surprise that other minorities feel threatened and organise themselves, too. The stage is set for civil unrest and sectarian polarisation, a scenario in which Christ’s commandment to love thy neighbour as thyself is all but forgotten.
An example of the mutual recrimination that has replaced reconciliation is the Reform UK policy on reparations for slavery. Last month the UN General Assembly passed a motion declaring that slavery, narrowly defined as ‘the transatlantic slave trade’, was ‘the gravest crime against humanity’, and urging member states to contribute to a reparations fund. Reform then announced punitive measures against any country that demanded reparations from the UK, starting with the denial of all visas to its citizens. They listed 13 states to be treated in this way, all of them Caribbean or African. Among them was Nigeria, some 300,000 of whose nationals live and work in the UK – one of the largest communities resident here and, perhaps not coincidentally, the country in which Kemi Badenoch spent most of her childhood and adolescence. In effect, Nigel Farage is threatening to penalise most of the nations from which black British citizens originated – including his most dangerous political rival. It is only one step from denying visas to forced deportations. Indeed, Reform has already pledged to carry out mass deportations. However we may interpret the biblical injunction to love our neighbour, it cannot possibly be justified to carry out the indiscriminate criminalisation of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people for no better reason than the actions of a government over which they have no control. If mass deportations were to take place in the UK, it would inevitably open the door to officially sanctioned racial and religious discrimination, potentially on a vast scale, and this country’s reputation for decency, compassion and equality before the law would be squandered.
Across the West, migration remains the most explosive issue in contemporary politics. The closely related questions of how far Islam should be expected to integrate into a predominantly Christian country, and what this means in practice, remain open. A lifetime has elapsed since Winston Churchill presented the site of the Regent’s Park Mosque to British Muslims in gratitude for their service in both world wars. Yet the Christian calling – what one might call the code of the Good Samaritan – remains imperative.
As I write, the case of the Southport killings has resurfaced, after a judge-led inquiry not only found all the responsible agencies to be culpable, but singled out the parents of the 17-year-old murderer for particular censure. Following this finding, parts of the media and some politicians have whipped up a hue and cry against the family, who have gone into hiding. Although there has been no repetition of the riots that erupted after the crime in 2024, the language deployed by Robert Jenrick, in particular, has been incendiary. He has demanded that the parents be deported to Rwanda, the place of the genocide from which they fled more than thirty years ago to seek asylum in Britain. Quite apart from the fact that they have not been convicted of any crime and are thought to have British citizenship, this family has already been punished for any failure to do their ‘moral duty’ with a life sentence of having to come to terms with the crime committed by their son.
Our moral duty as a society is to support the victims of his crime – but also to show compassion towards those who are also compelled to live with its consequences. Their reluctance to hand their disturbed son over to the authorities was a terrible mistake, but the fact that they must now live in secret for fear of violence does not speak well for our society either. And politicians who exploit hostility to migrants to gain popularity are certainly not acting in accordance with the teaching of Jesus Christ, whose name they often invoke. Not only are they disobeying the commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves, but also Jesus’s prior commandment to love God with all our heart, soul and mind. For that is incompatible with taking His name in vain, by weaponising it against the weak and defenceless. To put it bluntly: one cannot defend Christianity by speaking and acting in a tribal, that is an un-Christian, manner. The code of conduct embodied in the parable of the Good Samaritan requires us to treat strangers, immigrants and even (sometimes) enemies as neighbours — that is, to show them respect, dignity, mercy and even love. Such charity must, of course, be entirely voluntary: it cannot be coerced, not even in the name of human rights. Nor is it unconditional: there must be a degree of reciprocity. Kemi Badenoch is right that a privilege, such as indefinite leave to remain, must be earned; citizenship even more so. But once we have offered our neighbours kindness and hospitality, we cannot then withdraw it arbitrarily. As Jonathan Sacks used to say, a nation is not a hotel; it is our home. To make one’s home in a new land, to belong there, demands effort on both sides. Rights are not granted without evidence of commitment; they bring responsibilities and these are not to be taken lightly. But the Christian calling transcends rights, for love fulfils the law.
Back to the last days of Mandate Palestine, when Holocaust survivors were turned away from the promised land by soldiers who saw them simply as ‘illegal immigrants’. Michael Ivens, later founder of Aims of Industry and then serving in the British forces, captured this shameful betrayal in his poem ‘Haifa Bay in The Morning’. He describes his experience as a press officer as a shipload of Jewish refugees arrived, knowing that the British would send them away, yet hoping against hope that they would be rescued by the Haganah (the ‘defence’ militia of the Zionist Yishuv and precursor of today’s Israel Defence Forces). I happen to think that this is a great poem, but regardless of its literary merit, it has a message for us that is timely and perhaps even urgent.
Haifa Bay in The Morning
I saw a ship come sailing in,
Sailing in, sailing in,
With a list like a Stormtrooper’s twisted grin
At Haifa Bay in the morning.
The Army boat was waiting there,
(Haganah flashes ‘Take care! Take care!’)
The amiable squaddies all a’stare
Just three miles out in the morning.
And I was there in my little press boat
With one stout Guardsman to keep it afloat
And a man from The Times to keep it afloat
And a blasé photographer yawning.
Their lousy ship they bought from a Greek,
That it ever arrived was a flaming freak
Considering the size of its list and leak
Off Palestine in the morning.
Through shortage of water two girls had died
(Gone their dreams of a Sabra’s bride),
But two young boys jumped over the side
As the troopship moved close in the morning.
They could see the coast of the Holy Land
And the beckoning gleam of Haifa’s sand
And hoped for Haganah to give them a hand
To lose themselves in the morning.
But I was there with my little press launch
Full of zeal with my Guardsman staunch,
And when the two Zionists ceased to float
We hauled them up in our little press boat
And tried to explain they’d come to no harm.
(Both had numbers tattooed on their arms
In a quaint old Belsen warning.)
My Guardsman, a reprobate Irish Mick,
Albeit a lapsed Catholick,
Said, ‘Give the poor buggers a chance to run
And then we’ll go back and face the fun,’
His Paddy’s face white in the morning.
But the immigrant ship was towed to the quay
And the two little Zionists brought in by me;
One old Jew jumped over the side
And kissed the ground and cried and cried;
Another leapt down and split his head
And bled an Hebraic script of red
On the Holy Quay in the morning.
An Army troopship took them away
With swift discretion the very next day
And Haifa wept as they sailed away
To a Cyprus camp in the morning.
Envoi
They all are back in Israel now
And the two young Zionists work at the plough,
And my stalwart drunken Irish Mick
Is a reformed much-married Catholick.
But my mind it goes back to Haifa Bay
And dwells on the words I dared not say
And the sorrowful ship that sailed away
From the Holy Land in the morning.
Daniel Johnson is a British journalist and author who was the founding editor of Standpoint magazine and a former senior editor, editorial writer and columnist for The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Since 2018, he has been founding editor of the online journalism platform TheArticle, as well as being an associate editor of The Critic magazine and commentator for The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph.