Systemic Exclusion of Migrants Rooted in Colonial Christian Nationalism: A Case for Decolonizing Faith-Based Immigration Discourse
Original framing: “In ‘Jesus Was a Migrant,’ Jemar Tisby makes a Christian case for humanizing immigrants” — startpage news
The original framing omits the historical role of Christian institutions in justifying colonialism, slavery, and apartheid, which created the conditions for modern migration crises. It also neglects the economic drivers of displacement, such as IMF/World Bank structural adjustment policies and corporate extractivism in the Global South. Indigenous and Afro-descendant theological traditions, which center land, sovereignty, and communal care, are erased in favor of a Eurocentric moral framework. Additionally, the voices of migrant laborers themselves—particularly those from Central America, Africa, and the Caribbean—are sidelined in favor of a Western Christian perspective.
Medium structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by progressive Christian media outlets and progressive theologians like Tisby, targeting liberal Christian audiences to challenge conservative evangelical dominance over religious discourse. This framing serves to recenter moral authority within institutional Christianity while obscuring the material interests of capitalist classes and state apparatuses that benefit from migrant labor exploitation. The focus on individual salvation and humanization deflects attention from systemic critiques of empire, racial capitalism, and the role of churches in historical and contemporary violence.
The Christian justification for exclusion has deep roots in the Doctrine of Discovery (1493), which declared non-Christian lands terra nullius and justified their seizure, a framework later repurposed for modern border regimes. The transatlantic slave trade was similarly framed as a 'civilizing mission,' with enslaved Africans cast as 'heathens' needing Christian salvation—a precursor to contemporary dehumanization of migrants. The 19th-century Chinese Exclusion Act in the U.S. and Australia’s White Australia Policy were explicitly justified by Christian moral panic over 'alien' cultures, revealing a consistent pattern of racialized exclusion.
The framing of Jesus as a 'migrant' within a Christian nationalist context reveals a paradox: a religion that once justified empire now selectively invokes its founder’s marginality to critique modern exclusion, while ignoring its own complicity in creating those exclusions.