Beeson Podcast, Episode 31
M. Daniel Carroll
Mary 24, 2011
https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2011/Christians-at-the-Border

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.
Timothy George:	"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door." Those are words of a poem written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, and they are attached to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, have welcomed so many hundreds of thousands of persons who have come to this country seeking freedom and seeking a new beginning.
Timothy George:	Well, today on the Beeson podcast, we're talking about the question of immigration and what we, as Christians in particular, need to think about that and what the Bible has to say about that. Our guest is Dr. M. Daniel Carroll. He teaches at Denver Seminary in the area of Old Testament. He's written a wonderful book, Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church, and the Bible. Danny, welcome to Beeson and to our podcast.
Daniel Carroll:	Well, it's great to be here and thanks for inviting me.
Timothy George:	First question I wanna ask is, why are you interested in this subject?
Daniel Carroll:	Well, there's really a personal reason and then a Biblical reason. The personal reason is that I'm half-Guatemalan. If you would look at the book, you would see that it's "M. Daniel Carroll R.," and people always say, "What is the R?" Well, in Latin America you have two surnames. Your second surname is your mother's maiden name, which is Rodas. You can write it out or put it as an initial, and I've put it as an initial. That's why sometimes in this country you'll see some Hispanics hyphenate it, so that they can put both there.
Daniel Carroll:	But anyway, I am half-Guatemalan. I was raised bilingual, bi-cultural, spent a lot of time there growing up, and then I worked there for about 15 years teaching at a seminary before coming back to this country. What hit me really was two things. One, seeing Latins, Hispanics kind of be underside of the workforce, and some of the prejudice and some of the attitudes, which I found a bit disturbing. Even with Christians, there wasn't really much of a Christian conversation about the topic. Then when I started getting to the Bible, the Bible was full of all kinds of stories and laws directed toward the one from the outside. So one was this personal side and one was the Biblical side that got me into the topic.
Timothy George:	Now you mentioned that you're bi-cultural. Tell me a little bit about your father and mother, and your growing up.
Daniel Carroll:	My father was an American from Irish descent. "Carroll" of course is an Irish name. And my mother from Guatemala. They met in New Orleans after the war, and got married in Guatemala and then moved back. But my mother tells us we learned Spanish first, but I don't know. I couldn't remember that far back, but we were always speaking both languages, and every summer we would go to Guatemala, not just for the two or three weeks. We would go for the full summer. We normally would drive to Guatemala. We were in Houston, so it'd be one day to the border and then three days across Mexico, and then a fourth day up into Guatemala.
Daniel Carroll:	We would spend the summers there with my family in different parts of the country and we got to know the country and the language, and they put us in school. At the time that wasn't so much fun because you kinda went to school all the time, but looking back it was good because of the language and the culture, and it solidified all those things and gave us a greater feel for Guatemalan life and culture.
Timothy George:	Now you teach at Denver Seminary, but for a number of years you taught in Guatemala itself. Tell us a little bit about that seminary and what it's mission is.
Daniel Carroll:	There's an interdenominational seminary in Guatemala City, the Seminario Teológico Central Americano, the Central American Theological Seminary. If you put all our programs together, there's over 1000 students from all over the Americas, so I would have students from 20 different countries in my classes, and training for Christian ministry of all types and with the nascent missionary movement coming out of Latin America, there's also some mission training going on at the seminary. Because of its multinational student body and faculty, it really has quite an impact south of the border and now worldwide as Latins go all over the world now.
Timothy George:	Now let's talk a little bit about the Biblical basis of your thesis in this book, Christians at the Border. You're an Old Testament scholar by training. I think you did a PhD in Great Britain at Sheffield?
Daniel Carroll:	Yes.
Timothy George:	And had prior work at Dallas Theological Seminary in this area. Why in particular is the Old Testament important for Christians as we think about this issue of immigration today?
Daniel Carroll:	Well, what you find in the Old Testament is that it's full of stories about people on the move. Even the father of our faith, Abraham of course, leaves his original home and goes hundreds of miles to the promised land, and once he's there, he never really settles down and he doesn't own any property until he buys a place to bury his wife. And so what you find is that there's all these different kinds of stories of movement, some of it, in the case of Abraham, looking for food. But one can talk about, let's say Daniel, who was forced to move.
Daniel Carroll:	So you have the stories. The stories that, if we reread them from an immigrant point of view, we'll see all kinds of new things. I can give you some examples later on if you'd like. And then the laws. Because in this country, we have to get to legislation. We can talk about the moral issue, but we have to, at the end of the day, get to legislation. And so that was my interest in Old Testament law, you see? Can the Old Testament somehow give us some kind of orientation to our legislation? So those were kind of the things that got me going to the Old Testament.
Timothy George:	And I wanna come back to the sort of contemporary social, political, economic issues that are certainly deeply interrelated with this question. What would be your exegesis of this verse from Leviticus? Leviticus 19:34, where we read, "You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God." 
Daniel Carroll:	What's interesting, if you go earlier in that chapter is where you find the verse, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Then you come to this verse and it specifies the neighbor in this case as the one from the outside. And of course, when Jesus picks this up in Luke 10, it's with the Samaritan, you see? And so, the outsider that nobody wants becomes the example that he will turn to.
Daniel Carroll:	The other piece that's interesting about this, which is hard for people to love someone from outside because of language, culture, whatever, is the memory of Egypt. I tell people, "We have immigrant memories in this country but they tend to be food." My aunt Martha has the Austrian recipe for strudel that we've kept in the family for generations, you see. What you're hearing is an immigrant memory, but it's been reduced to food or something special you do on Christmas. You know, you have certain kinds of stockings because you came from Germany or something. 
Daniel Carroll:	But what you find that the immigrant memory that we have forgotten, which the Bible will not let them forget, is the sociopolitical and economic memory. So you were taken advantage of for labor, and that's what you should never forget. The food is part of their culture, as you know, the dietary laws, but it's the sociocultural and political memory that they should not forget. Which makes sense, if you look around us now, that the issues we need to grapple with are those very issues. We need to go back to our memories.
Timothy George:	Well, let's go to the New Testament. You've already alluded to some of the things Jesus said. What does the New Testament in particular say to us when we look at it with this question of immigration in mind?
Daniel Carroll:	Well, if you look at Jesus, he won't deal with the topic directly. What you see him, though, is dealing with people who are different, the Samaritans. I mean, I tell people when I talk on this subject, if we wanna use the parable of the good Samaritan, what if we had the parable of the good Mexican? How would people respond? The other part with Jesus ... and let me see if I can explain this. This has just recently been kind of bouncing in my head ... is his attitude toward those who disagree, because part of this whole issue is not only the truth about the topic, but how we engage the topic. 
Daniel Carroll:	And this is where I think it's important for Christians to take their cue from Jesus. You know, "Father, forgive them. They do not know what they do." And that's so true on this debate. People don't really know what they're talking about, but they get very angry. And the other part, if we were to move to the epistles of course, is that we all are sojourners and have citizenship in another country, and so we should hold this citizenship more lightly than we do perhaps. So those are kind of broad strokes out of the New Testament.
Timothy George:	Now, you develop the theme of pilgrimage too, which is of course deeply rooted in both Old and New Testament. We are, ourselves, called to a life of pilgrimage. Jesus himself was a refugee. So what does this paradigm of the fact that, "Here we have no continuing city but we look for one to come," how does that relate to a Christianity such as ours in North America that tends to be on the whole quite comfortable with its setting and its environment, and may be in danger of losing this sense of being on the edge, of being on journey, of being a pilgrim?
Daniel Carroll:	I tell my students at the seminary that we tend to forget that we are strangers in a strange land. We kind of like this place, and it's lost its strangeness. So we end up fighting to keep it as it is. It's not strange anymore. It's the very thing we fight for. And I think that's problematic, for the very reasons that you're alluding to, that we need to hold this very lightly. As Christians, even to be a leader in the church, we are supposed to be hospitable. And so we need to open our minds and open our hearts to those from the outside. I mean, it's a part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
Timothy George:	Part of the issue, isn't it, that ... We have, I think, not so much deliberately, intentionally in one decision, but by the way we live and fail to live, we've allowed allegiances such as culture, race, status, national identity, whatever it is, to eclipse the prior identity that we have in Jesus. Paul talks about, we're citizens of two worlds. We do have commitments here and obligations here, but we also remember that we belong to another world, another culture, another reality. And it seems to me this whole question of immigration and the stranger and the sojourner raises that in very important ways.
Daniel Carroll:	What you'll see is, if you have conversations with people that would want to view the United States as a Christian country, there you see the blending. One way you see it working itself out is the focus on protecting the border. And so that ideology begins to define where you start the conversation. If you start the conversation at the border instead of with people, it's a very different kind of conversation. It's about protecting. It's about who's in, who's out? It's about control instead of about human flourishing.
Timothy George:	Let's talk about this image of the border. That's the title of your book, Christians at the Border. You say in the book that this word "border" is used in a double sense, in a way. Talk about that.
Daniel Carroll:	Well, there's the one border that is the physical border with Mexico to the south. Everyone needs to make a decision about that border. What's it like? What is it for? How do we treat people coming across? There's that legal border, but there's another border that Christians have to respond to, and that is the border of faith, where if we become aware of all that the Bible has to say about this, we have a choice. Do we cross the line and embrace that with all the implications it might have for our legislation, for our lifestyles, for our views? Or do we hang back and not cross that border? So hopefully, this was what the book was trying to do, was to get people to be ready and willing to cross the border and embrace what God has to say. If we profess to be Christians, I would hope that's what we would be doing.
Timothy George:	Now, you make another distinction in your book I think that it'd be very helpful to hear a little explanation. You talk about the term, "undocumented" as opposed to "illegal." "Illegal aliens" is a term that we sometimes hear used with reference to immigrants, but you suggest "undocumented resident" is a better way of talking about it.
Daniel Carroll:	Well, so much of hot political topics are the language games. If you can kind of label things, you can kind of direct the conversation. And sometimes this conversation's very heated, so we'll use things like "invasion," a "mass horde" of people, this kind of ... "tidal wave," those are already pejorative terms. And with "illegal alien," what it can project really are two things. On the one hand, that these are a bunch of criminal-type people, when what you're looking at are people, the only thing that they don't have are some documents. That's a total mess if you understand the immigration system in this country anyway. So they're not criminals. They're undocumented. The women, the children trying to get to school and just do their jobs. And I've actually heard a sermon by an Hispanic pastor about, "make sure you go the speed limit so they don't stop you." They're trying very hard to be very legal on these things. And the other one, "alien." "Alien" means something totally different. Something that's not us, and ...
Timothy George:	Something from outer space.
Daniel Carroll:	Something from outer space, you see. We have these alien movies, and so when you say "illegal alien," there's kind of this pejorative ... They're criminal types. They're out here to get us, and then they're so different, they're aliens. When does an alien become a normal person? Just kind of one day they wake up and boom, they're normal? When do you quit being an alien?
Timothy George:	Yeah. Now, you point out also that so many of these undocumented workers who are in our country are actually believers in Jesus Christ. They're our fellow Christians. 
Daniel Carroll:	By the millions. There's a whole subculture of Hispanic ... and this would be true of other races, as well ... of believers. I mean, there are Hispanic Christian magazines. There's Hispanic publishing houses. There's Hispanic Christian music, and Denver has two 24-hour Hispanic Christian radio stations. You have speakers that if you say a name, they would all know who this person is, and this person does family life conferences and this is the youth guy, and there's youth organizations that are international as well as national. There's a whole subculture of millions and millions of Hispanic believers. There is an organization that claims that represent over 25,000 Hispanic churches in this country.
Timothy George:	Yeah. Now, that Hispanic Christian grouping would be largely divided into Roman Catholic and Evangelical/Pentecostal? Or something else?
Daniel Carroll:	Well, the statistics that I've seen is that about 65% of the Hispanics that claim some kind of faith would be Catholic, and 30-35% would be Evangelical, of which most ... let's say, 75% like in Latin America, would be Pentecostal.
Timothy George:	This is of course a tremendous hot button issue in our culture right now politically, in terms of the society in which we live. What are we going to do about immigration? All kinds of proposals have been set forth. How can a Christian think about this issue, both in terms of our commitment to our country, our family, our concern, and also our Christian concern about our brothers and sisters who are coming in larger numbers, both documented and undocumented, to this country?
Daniel Carroll:	Well, that's the big question. That was the purpose of the book, to get conversation going, because when you talk about this, it's not an overnight kind of an idea. I tell people, these are not bullet point conversations. These conversations are complex if you wanna talk about the statistics, the economy, and that's a very complicated discussion. Or the history of immigration. It's a very complicated discussion. Or the Bible itself, and if you're trying to move people to have different feelings about it, that's gonna take some time. But if you help them see that its grounded in the word of God, then they have to respond to that. That may take time, and when I speak to churches and other groups, I get, "Oh, I never knew that was there. Wow, there's so much of that there." 
Daniel Carroll:	That's the beginning point. The book is designed to get people talking Biblically about the issue, and trying to set aside their very natural emotions. It is hard when someone who's different comes in and your neighborhood changes. That's fine. That's normal. You can actually find in the Bible itself, responses to outsiders in some of these Biblical stories, and I can give you examples, where you see people reacting against or at least being open to outsiders, and so the same spectrum of opinions we have today, you'll find in the Bible itself. Which you'd expect, because people are people.
Timothy George:	So some of this may be xenophobia. It may be self-protection, but a lot of people say, who want to protect our borders are concerned, they say, about the question of terrorism and the fact that a loose, unprotected border allows all kinds of threats to be fomented within our own country. What would you say about Christians and others that are concerned about the border and terrorism?
Daniel Carroll:	Well, I would say this. Don't be swayed by the language of the media, because here is what they say. If one is looking for comprehensive immigration reform, they'll say, "So you're saying open borders?" Well, no one is actually saying that. Maybe some fringe groups are, but no one involved in comprehensive immigration reform is talking about an open border. Or they'll say, "Oh, what you want is amnesty." There is no way talking about amnesty, except maybe some fringe groups. Everyone is talking about a path to citizenship, you see. So when you talk about immigration reform or this, it's not about opening the borders and let the terrorists in. 
Daniel Carroll:	No, it's about organizing it more humanely. We have hundreds of people dying in the desert every year, and immigration control is also a multi-billion dollar industry. There are major multinationals that are bidding to build a wall, the drones, the electronics. Many of the detention centers in this country are privately owned. The one where I live is. They are paid by the day per head, and it's big business. And so, this is a complicated discussion but don't equate immigration reform with opening the border and no control, because no one is having that conversation. Though that's the caricature that is being used to stop the conversation.
Timothy George:	You know, it seems to me that so much of the discussion, the theological background of those who want to talk about this issue tend to come from the more mainline Protestant, liberal, progressive, whatever label we use, part of the church. And the more conservative, Evangelical, Bible-believing Christians, if not silent, have been more reactive. You're kind of challenging that. What do Evangelicals have to bring to this question of immigration?
Daniel Carroll:	Well in fact, I just had a couple conversations with public radio where I live, and the woman who was interviewing could not believe that Evangelicals are involved in this. She thought there was some kind of hidden agenda or something behind ... but what I tell them, and even this last weekend, with ecumenical types, we can bring the Bible. Here I am, the Evangelical professor, and they ask me to come and teach them what the Bible has to say, so we can bring the Bible. Then if they wanna talk about Hispanics, the overwhelming majority of all Hispanic Christians are Evangelicals, and so if the ecumenical side wants to engage the conversation with Hispanics, they've got to engage Evangelicals and Pentecostals, because that's what they are. So it's becoming a very interesting thing, and I'm seeing a broad theological spectrum of coming together to work on this issue.
Timothy George:	Now at Denver Seminary, you've been involved in, I think, what's a very creative and exciting outreach to Hispanic Christians. Tell us a little bit about that. 
Daniel Carroll:	Well, we have a lay-level program, a certificate program, where we teach basic Bible and theology. They get certificates for each class, which is one a month on a Saturday morning. They'll get a certificate for finishing the series, but it's been developing. We have about seven or eight faculty members for this, but it's all lay-level. Probably about 175 students going through, from many many churches, and most of them are undocumented, but they're very fervent about the Bible and fervent about their faith, and very involved in the local churches.
Timothy George:	And this could maybe become a model for some other seminaries that have this sense of mission and passion about sharing the message of Christ with everybody in the community, serving the whole church.
Daniel Carroll:	Yeah. I think if we look at them as Christians and then put the legal issue ... which is important, but don't make that the primary issue. They're our brothers and sisters in Christ, and so let's begin to reach out to them, and then we can work together toward legal solutions, but don't let the legal challenge prohibit us or stop us from reaching out to our brothers and sisters.
Timothy George:	I want to ask you to put on your real prophetic lenses, you're an Old Testament person, and look into the future with that understanding of prophecy. Five, ten years from now, where will this question of immigration be in North America?
Daniel Carroll:	This won't sound very prophetic. The answer is, I don't know. The thing that is sad is, both political parties are reticent to take this on because of the political capital they feel that they'll have to spend. That's the problem, and as we move into an election year, which is 2010, it may get pushed back into 2011. I have people at the church that I go to ... I go to an Hispanic church in Denver ... who are hoping for reform because of their own court dates, and they have wife and kids and they're good, good people and church leaders, and they were hoping for something to happen by the summer of 2010, and now I don't think we may even have any conversation until 2011. So I don't know. I think whatever happens will be a compromise that no one's happy with, and it's gonna be a messy debate and a lot of mud-slinging, sadly. It may be that's where Christians can begin to speak in truth and in love and in wisdom based on the scriptures.
Timothy George:	Yeah. Now think about the fact that many of our listeners are pastors. They're church leaders involved in ministry. How can we, on this side, as church leaders, deal with this issue? How can we make it a priority, as we seek to be faithful to Christ in this time?
Daniel Carroll:	I think in two ways. One, to see this as an educational process and that's the purpose of the book. Let people just probe the scriptures. Let the scriptures begin to teach them, and maybe with the postponement, there's time. The second thing would be, get to know some Hispanic pastors in your community. Some of them may even rent space in the afternoon, for goodness sakes. That's where a lot of my church meets. It meets in the afternoon in church. Get to know the Hispanic congregation that meets in your building in the afternoons, or make a concerted effort to do something with another group that meets somewhere else, because once people begin to get to know immigrants as people, a lot of the prejudices begin to wash away, and you begin to see they're just like you and me, trying to raise their kids and get to work. And they love the Lord. So that would be the place to start. Educate and just get to know some. Maybe some will even meet in your building today.
Timothy George:	Are there joint projects, common concerns that we would share with Hispanic Christians that might bring us together in some kind of alliance or friendship that could issue an action on behalf of the Gospel in our culture today? 
Daniel Carroll:	Well, the bridge is gonna be family. They have family problems just like we do. They get sick just like we do, so just some very human concerns would be the place to begin. And then, if there may be someone at congregation who can help them get a car fixed or with something medical, or at the schools or ESL, that'd be great. All these kinds of ways that churches are doing it. 
Timothy George:	Well, I've been talking with Dr. M. Daniel Carroll R., who is professor of Old Testament at Denver Seminary. He's the author of Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church, and the Bible. I wanna recommend this book to every believer and every listener to this podcast. I think you'll find it enlightening and challenging, and something that will stir our own conscience on this matter of immigration in our culture today. Danny, thank you for being with us and sharing this time.
Daniel Carroll:	It's been great to be here. Thank you so much.
Timothy George:	God bless you. 
Daniel Carroll:	Thank you.
Announcer:	You've been listening to the Beeson podcast, with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational Evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.