Withholding visas from fleeing Ukrainians is a blasphemy
Nationhood is given of God, writes George Pitcher, so it should be shared with generosity
A version of this column appeared on Premier Christianity
For a government that is supposedly populist, the current UK one is pretty hopeless at judging the public mood. From a customs border down the Irish Sea, to attempting to protect Owen Paterson from his shameless lobbying of parliament for his own vested interests, to the axing of free school meals in a pandemic, to assuming that no one cares about law-breaking parties at Number 10, the Government has assumed - wrongly - that voters don’t give a toss about other people.
Its latest massive misjudgment of the British people is the shameful failure to extend a welcome and rescuing hand to refugees fleeing the horrors of the Ukraine war. While other European countries have responded to the heart-breaking plight of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian families, Britain initially managed just 50 visas, rising rather pathetically this week to a measly 300.
The assumption, off the back of “getting Brexit done”, is that the British people hate foreigners, so limiting any immigration under all circumstances will be politically appealing.
Fundamentally decent
The mistake here, as with the other issues mentioned above, is thinking that British people aren’t fundamentally decent. Or, rather, that their standards of decency accord with those of our prime minister (in other words, none at all). Boris Johnson seems metabolically ill-equipped to call what is the right thing to do, over what he perceives as politically expedient. His problem is that most of the electorate are able to make that distinction.
So it is with matters of nationhood and sovereignty. These are strong principles for the British people and, true, they formed the spine of arguments for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
But they are principles that are also rooted in our Judaeo-Christian heritage. That’s not to say that the British populace invests much time checking political policy against Judaic law fulfilled in the Christological covenant. But it is fair to say that there is, as Dr Rowan Williams would call it, a religious folk memory of the right and wrong ways to address nationhood and the welcome of strangers to our own.
The Church’s season of Lent starts with the temptations of the Christ in his wilderness, as he prepares for his public ministry. His human nature craves bread over the nourishment of the human spirit in the first temptation. The second (in Matthew) is a kind of suicidal version of Pascal’s Wager: Throw yourself off the Temple – you’ll either be protected as the Messiah or die a human death. That would settle it.
It’s the third temptation that’s about nationhood and sovereignty. Maybe his mission is to annex neighbouring nations to his dominion, to be “world king”, in Johnson’s childhood dream. This is the temptation that dictatorial leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin can’t resist.
And it’s to this temptation that Jesus of Nazareth responds by recalling the ancient Mosaic law in the Torah’s book of Deuteronomy: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.”
Principle of tithing
That resonates with a later passage of Deuteronomic law, in which the principle of tithing is established. God had delivered his people from slavery in Egypt to a promised land, “flowing with milk and honey”. The land’s “first fruits” are to be taken each season to the Temple as an offering of thanksgiving.
The implications of scripture are clear: The land doesn’t belong to the Jews but to God. He is the lessor and the Jewish people his tenants. That’s what the Nazarene refers to over the temptation of becoming a powerful worldly leader. (It is also, incidentally, at the root of all stewardship theology, with particular regard currently to human environmental responsibility – we have a duty of care to the poorest nations on earth here too).
It follows that obstructing Ukrainian refugees with officious bureaucracy in Calais and Paris is not just cruel and unpleasant, it’s also deeply unholy. Because our nation isn’t ours from which to exclude those who need it, but our God’s, the first fruits from whom we share. And to do so generously is to share the boundless generosity of the God who gave it in the first place.
Abomination
To throw that generosity back in God’s face is, in biblical terms, an abomination. It’s heretical to be mean or exclusive with one’s nationhood. It’s blasphemous to withhold visas from those fleeing for their lives and seeking our sanctuary.
The peoples of Poland and Germany seem to be responding like they get that, whether by an intuitive folk memory or through simple human compassion (which may amount to the same thing). By contrast, Britain doesn’t seem to get it at all.
This is a consequence of self-entitlement. It is the presumption of Johnson and home secretary Priti Patel that the British people are entitled to the nationhood that they enjoy by virtue of their own efforts, talents and good fortune.
It’s all too tempting to think like that, as the narrative of the temptations of the Christ demonstrates. It’s also tempting to say that Johnson is just weak – in the words of Oscar Wilde, that he can resist anything except temptation.
But it’s worse than that. It’s about appealing to the basest of human nature in keeping what we have from those who need it most. To be better than that is to serve God ahead of our national interest. The key, of course, is to try to make those two things one and the same.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest