Jesus Was a Stranger Too
Advent and the lie at the heart of our immigration theology
I watched the clip a few times before I said anything.
Not because I needed more context—but because I wanted to be sure I was naming what was actually happening. Not reacting. Naming.
It wasn’t just a bad answer. It wasn’t just sloppy theology. It was something more dangerous than that.
A child was used as a prop.
Scripture was ripped out of context.
And Jesus—a Jewish, displaced, colonized man—was turned into a mascot for policies that tear families apart and disappear people in the name of “order.”
This is what fundamentalism looks like when it’s baptized in power.
It takes the language of faith and uses it to justify cruelty. It spiritualizes harm. It reframes violence as obedience. And then it asks us to call it Christianity.
As a progressive Christian pastor, I don’t have the luxury of treating that as just another clip online. Because this kind of theology doesn’t stay theoretical. It shows up in policies. It shows up in handcuffs. It shows up in children wondering who is coming to pick them up from school.
Advent Tells a Different Story
Advent refuses that version of Jesus.
Advent tells the story of God showing up not with borders or armed authority, but as a child. Born into poverty. Born under occupation. Dependent on hospitality. And before he can even speak, forced to flee state violence as a refugee.
That matters.
Because once you take Advent seriously, you cannot turn Jesus into a talking point for immigration enforcement. You cannot make him moral cover for policies that rely on fear, disappearance, and family separation.
Jesus is not the one enforcing the wall.
He’s the one showing up on the other side of it.
That’s what sent me looking for deeper voices—not louder ones. And that’s why I sat down and listened to an episode of The State of Belief featuring Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero, president and founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, as they launched the Advent Welcome Campaign: Room in the Inn.
And that’s where this stopped being abstract altogether.
When I listened to Rev. Dr. Salguero, I expected clarity about Advent and immigration. I expected campaign language. I expected theology.
What I didn’t expect was how pastoral this all is.
Not pastoral as a tone—but pastoral as triage. Pastoral as in: people are vanishing mid-life. Families are scrambling. Churches are absorbing trauma they didn’t create.
He shared that NaLEC receives dozens—sometimes hundreds—of messages every day. People picked up at shopping centers. People taken before they can pick up their kids from school. And then the line that lodged in my chest: families are writing power-of-attorney documents—not because they’re planning a trip, but because they’re trying to plan for being disappeared.
That’s not policy debate. That’s terror.
Then there’s this: churches losing 30, 35, even 40 percent of attendance—not because faith has faded, but because people are afraid they’ll be taken on the way to worship. One pastor friend went from 400 people to 40.
If you want to understand the spiritual violence of this moment, start there. People are being robbed of the most basic acts of community and comfort—even the ability to show up and breathe next to one another.
That’s not religious liberty under strain. That’s religious liberty being dismantled.
The Part That Exposed Us
Salguero named something I wish more pastors would say out loud:
If it’s true that we’re “pro-family,” then our policies shouldn’t create children who don’t know who’s picking them up from kindergarten.
If it’s true that we’re “pro–religious freedom,” then we don’t turn churches, schools, playgrounds, and hospitals into hunting grounds.
And sitting there listening, I couldn’t shake the question: how many of us have let ourselves be hypnotized by slogans?How many of us have nodded along to “values” language while domination is the value actually being enforced?
Then he said it—plain, unsentimental, devastating:
“Their money’s good, but their dignity’s not.”
That sentence indicts an entire ecosystem.
There are churches—there are denominations—who will gladly receive the tithes of immigrants while refusing to speak up for them. That cannot be who the church is.
At one point Salguero said, “We cannot be court prophets.”
That phrase lands because it’s ancient.
It’s the old temptation to stay close to Pharaoh so you can influence Pharaoh. Soften your language. Keep your seat. Trade your calling for access.
Liberation theology has given me language for this: when the church becomes chaplain to empire, the gospel becomes a hostage.
And none of this is theoretical for him. His story is embodied theology: a father shaped by addiction and incarceration, a family transformed by mercy, a storefront Pentecostal church doing soup kitchens, rehab, and reentry work—sweeping up vomit and cold sweats as holy labor.
And then the turn: direct service is not enough if policy keeps producing suffering. That’s the liberation insight. You can love people one by one and still be forced to admit the system is designed to keep the line long.
Or as he put it—almost offhand, but it’s a whole worldview—don’t just teach someone to fish. Ask who owns the pond. That’s theology. That’s anthropology. That’s refusing to reduce people to problems to manage.
Then he said the line that turned the interview into a mirror:
Moses had a decision. Will we be with Pharaoh or will we be with the people?
Every generation wants to believe they would have stood with Moses. But history keeps telling a quieter truth: most people choose Pharaoh not because they love evil, but because Pharaoh promises stability.
Order.
Protection—for the right people.
The illusion that compliance keeps you safe.
Salguero didn’t need to shout to make the point. Compliance is never neutral. The real question is not whether you are being targeted—it’s what you are consenting to become.
“Courage Is Contagious”
Near the end he said something that felt like both a warning and a gift: people need to hear they’re not alone. They need moral cover. Because—his words—“courage is contagious.”
That’s what I keep thinking about now. Not only what’s happening to immigrant families, but what’s happening to the church’s spine.
Because intimidation doesn’t just aim at deportation. It aims at silence. At isolation. At people looking around and thinking, Maybe I’m the only one who thinks this is morally reprehensible.
And then the silence does its work.
That’s why Room in the Inn matters—not as branding, but as permission. Permission for pastors to speak. For congregations to act. For people to trust what they already know in their gut: this is cruelty, and cruelty is not a Christian principle.
When asked what courage looks like, Salguero didn’t make it inspirational. He made it concrete.
Courage is picking up somebody else’s kid when they’ve been deported.
Courage is accompanying undocumented immigrants to hearings.
Courage is clergy using their microphones to say: due process is not optional. Human dignity is not negotiable.
And then—because he’s Pentecostal and unashamed—he said prayer. But not prayer as escape. Prayer as Bonhoeffer meant it: prayer and righteous action.
So here’s where I’m landing as a progressive Christian pastor shaped by liberation theology:
I don’t get to treat this as one issue among many. This is a people issue. A discipleship issue. A question of whether we believe the Incarnation has ethical consequences.
Advent is not sentimental. Advent is God showing up as someone empire could crush.
And if our faith cannot find Jesus there—among the targeted, the displaced, the hunted—then what we are defending is not Christianity. It’s just the comfort of the protected.
So I’ll say it plainly:
There is room in the inn.
And if we call ourselves Christians, we don’t get to treat that as a metaphor.
We make room with our bodies.
We make room with our churches.
We make room by refusing to be court prophets.
Because history has a way of recording not only the cruelty of our adversaries—but the silence of those who knew better.
And this is where I keep coming back to Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero’s blunt, clarifying reminder—one that cuts through all our excuses in a single sentence:
When Jesus said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” he wasn’t kidding.