The Christian Response to Refugees

Britain and ancient Rome have in common the cherished myth that they were founded by refugees who fled Troy when the city was sacked by the Greeks, after the wooden horse concealing Greek troops had been brought within the walls - as recounted by Homer in the Iliad. Vergil’s Aeneid retells and embellishes the story, connecting Rome to Troy through the descent of Romulus and Remus, the founders of the city, from Aeneas the Trojan refugee. The Historia Brittonum would have Brutus of Troy a cousin of Romulus and Remus, a descendant of refugees from Troy who had settled in Italy who was in turn driven from his home and eventually settled in Britain. Others have used the “Family of Nations”, the typology of the descendants of Noah according to Genesis, or the myth of the “ten lost tribes” of ancient Israel to explain our origins.

Those who have taken these myths as history have seldom accepted the implication that our origins lie in central Anatolia or Mesopotamia, and that our ancestors would not have qualified as “white” or “British” as defined according to contemporary demographic indicators. Nor have the chauvinist and jingoistic, frequently xenophobic and racist, sometimes overtly fascist elements who have perpetuated such theories taken seriously the recurring motifs of flight and exile in these myths and in the Biblical narrative. Nor, one suspects, have they had their DNA scientifically analysed.

Human history has seen larger and smaller population migrations, some over considerable distances, with famine, drought, and disease the catalyst as often as violent contests for control of land and resources. National epics have recounted triumph over adversity, conquest of enemy territory, and the subjugation or annihilation of others. The human cost, to those whose homes and livelihoods are destroyed, families decimated and dispersed, who flee to find a refuge in a strange land, is all too easily forgotten.

Our world is perhaps not too different from that of our forebears. National myths and racial stereotypes govern attitudes today as much as ever before. This invariably makes enemies of others, and elevates self to exalted levels of ethnic and moral superiority, often with delusions of invincibility and a willingness to go literally or figuratively to war to prove it.

The Bible undoubtedly contains statements we would regard as racist, which glorify war and the dispossession, enslavement, and annihilation of others; in other words, genocide. There are also texts which have been interpreted and appropriated to justify all manner of violence and oppression. But there are also laws which require hospitality and protection towards others, which limit the use of power of those who are weak, dependant, or impoverished. And the biblical narrative frequently recounts ways in which God confounds the powerful, the racist, the oppressor, and it is the refugee, the slave, the prisoner, the foreigner, the exile, the woman, or the child through whom God speaks and works for the healing and restoration of communities.

That our society is decadent, and that our leaders lack the vision and the moral will to remedy this or to challenge the dangerous forces their ineptitude and myopia has unleashed, seems clear. As we are called to show compassion and hospitality to refugees in the trauma and destitution of their flight from their homes and livelihood, and exile from the society and culture in which their identity is rooted, perhaps we need to see not just desperate individuals and families, still less scroungers, rapists, and terrorists, but people who in the fragility and vulnerability of their lives among us have the potential to be agents of God’s healing power in our sick and degenerate society.