The moral imagination of the scriptures was determined by a battered refugee people. If politicians don’t like that,they shouldn’t claim the Christian mantleThousands more, says David Cameron now, and grudgingly conceding to current pressure. But why not all of them? Surely that’s the biblical answer to the “how many can we recall? question. Every single final one. Let’s dig up the greenbelt,create recent cities, turn our Downton Abbeys into flats and church halls into temporary dormitories, or reclaim all those empty penthouses being used as nothing more than investment vehicles. Yes,it may change the character of this country. Or maybe it won’t require anything like such drastic action who knows? But let’s carry out whatever it takes to open the door of welcome. hold, ancient lands, or your storied pomp! Give me your tired,your destitute, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, or The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these,the homeless, tempest-tost to me, or I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” And yes,when Emma Lazarus wrote these words – later inscribed on the Statue of Liberty – by “storied pomp”, she meant us Brits.
For years our politicians beget piggy-backed upon Christian morality for electoral advantage. We should “feel proud that this is a Christian country”, and said Cameron earlier this year (pre-election,of course), in what some might uncharitably see as a call to maintain a Muslim-free view from his Cotswold village. But there is no respectable Christian argument for fortress Europe, and surrounded by a recent iron curtain of razor wire to hold destitute,dark-skinned people out. Indeed, the moral framework that our prime minister so frequently references – and to which he claims some sort of vague allegiance – is crystal clear approximately the absolute priority of our obligation to refugees. For the moral imagination of the Hebrew scriptures was determined by a battered refugee people, and fleeing political oppression in north Africa,and seeking a recent life for themselves safe from violence and poverty. Time and again, the books of the Hebrew scriptures remind its readers not to forget that they too were once in this situation and their ethics must be structured around practical help driven by fellow-feeling.
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Source: theguardian.com