Welp, I guess I’ve got my marching orders now. At least that’s the way I choose to interpret Friday’s pastoral message from the presiding bishop of my Lutheran denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, on the Trump regime’s threatened crackdown on the Lutherans, the Catholics, the Episcopalians and parish churches it suspects of harboring undocumented immigrants. In a word, I’m specifically called by my faith to resist.
While ELCA’s national (or “churchwide”) organization isn’t a party to a multifaith lawsuit challenging the crackdown, which violates the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment by rescinding an Immigration and Customs Enforcement order exempting churches, schools and hospitals from ICE raids, Bishop Elizabeth Eaton approves of its intent and urges Lutherans in the pews to oppose the crackdown. In Friday’s pastoral message, she said:
You are a superpower. They don’t expect thousands and thousands of ordinary people in our pews and in our communities to join together for this action. So, get motivated and get organized. We are church together, and together we will continue to defend the most vulnerable communities and people among us as Jesus taught us.
The lawsuit was brought Feb. 11 by the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, at Georgetown, a Jesuit university. Among the co-plaintiffs, according to an Episcopal Church news release, are Baptists, Brethren, Disciples, Evangelicals, Lutheran organizations (but not ELCA churchwide), Mennonites, Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Unitarian Universalists, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Kehilla Community Synagogue, Reconstructing Judaism and the Union for Reform Judaism. Almost a who’s who of mainline religion.
So why not join the lawsuit? The reasons are complicated, and they have to do with ELCA discernment, or decision-making, processes culminating in policies and procedures ratified by the biennial churchwide conference. Said Eaton:
Given the ELCA’s polity [administrative] and denominational structure, the churchwide organization would not be an appropriate plaintiff in these actions. But congregations can demonstrate that they could be harmed by the recission, and they would have standing in this lawsuit. We will continue to speak out against harmful policies and in support of our marginalized neighbors.
It’s important here to know that Lutheran Social Services has been accused — falsely, and without evidence (credible or otherwise) — of running a criminal “money-laundering operation,” and ELCA has vigorously tried to set the record straight. Noting that the falsehoods were initially spread on Musk’s social media platform “X,” and by Musk himself, Eaton counseled Lutherans Friday to seek out factual information — she came down hard on the word “factual” in the video — and to speak up for Christian values:
Please continue to seek out factual information and be thoughtful online in your interactions with each other, with people who do not share your point of view and with our staff across all expressions of our church as they are doing thier best to support you and to support each other. Hear this from St. Paul: Let us not grow weary in doing what is right. For we will reap at harvest time if we do not give up [Galatians 6:9]. Here’s the thing: People expect me to speak up. But you are a superpower. […]
Central to the Georgetown Advocacy Institute’s lawsuit is the fact that “congregations across the United States […] have already seen decreased attendance at worship services and social service ministries due to fears of ICE actions.” Julia Ayala Harris, president of The Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies, explained:
“Welcoming the stranger is not a political act—it’s a sacred obligation. When immigrants walk through our church doors, they’re not entering as outsiders; they are stepping into the heart of our faith, where their dignity and stories are embraced as reflections of God’s love,” […]. “This lawsuit is about protecting our ability to live out the Gospel without fear or interference.”
(Hence Bishop Eaton’s advice that some Lutheran congregations would have legal standing if the the have evidence the crackdown is interfering with worship.)
Welcoming the stranger is part of the Lutherans’ DNA, anyway. It has been at least since World War II, when one in six Lutherans in Europe was displaced by the fighting and other atrocities of the period. (I’ll bet the same was true during the religious wars that decimated 17th-century Germany, too.) According to a history of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service by Ralston Deffenbaugh, its executive director from 1991 to 2009, the effort began even before wide-scale fighting broke out:
After the Nazis came into power in Germany in 1933 and began enacting their hateful laws against Jews, political opponents, and others, a number of Lutherans began fleeing to America. Most of these were Lutheran by confession but considered Jewish under the Nazi race laws. By 1939 the numbers had grown to such a level that U.S. Lutherans determined that an organized welcome was needed, rather than just relying on informal networks. A Lutheran refugee office was set up within the National Lutheran Council. 522 refugees were helped the first year.
That office grew into LIRS (now known as Global Refuge) during the crisis that came with the end of the war. In 1945, hundreds of thousands of refugees — displaced persons in the language of the day — remained to be cared for in DP camps. Continuing the narrative, Deffenbaugh said in 2009:
American Lutheran church leaders joined their counterparts from other Christian and Jewish faith communities in appealing to President Truman to open America’s door to displaced people coming from countries that had been our enemies just a few years before. As a result of this advocacy, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act. Lutheran advocacy for refugees and migrants continues to this day.
It is that tradition of advocacy and good works that Trump now threatens.
But something even more basic is also threatened.
Deffenbaugh said by the mid-1950s, it was clear the immediately postwar crisis had been contained. So the Immigration and Refugee Service faced what he called an “ethical decision point,” the first of several. He explained:
The question was asked among Lutherans both internationally and in the United States: Is our work done? With the leadership of people such as Paul Empie [of the Lutheran World Federation and other agencies], the answer was a resounding no. Relying on the parable of the Good Samaritan, Lutherans decided that they were called to respond to the need of the neighbor without regard to religious affiliation. Lutherans had been equipped with skills and experience in working with refugees—those gifts needed to be used in service of others.
As so often happens, meeting the crisis presented in 1945 by so many Lutherans in DP camps turned out to be a charism, a gift of the spirit. Lutherans, and LIRS in particular, had an obligation to share it. Another ethical decision point came in the mid-1970s with the influx of hundreds of thousands of Vietnam refugees after the fall of Saigon. Said Deffenbaugh:
Despite it initially being extremely unpopular politically, President Ford took the courageous decision to promote resettlement for those on whose side the United States had fought. Furthermore, the Ford Administration decided that, rather than try to resettle through the government, the refugees would be better received and integrated if there were a public-private partnership with voluntary agencies representing a cross-section of American society. The question then for LIRS was whether to accept the government’s invitation to work together, knowing that money and guidelines coming from the government would change the way Lutherans do resettlement. LIRS accepted the invitation and for the past 30-plus years has been a leading resettlement partner with the federal government.
Since that time, the Lutherans have continued to cooprate with the feds on refugee services, even when they have disagreed with government policy. But they have done so in a nuanced way. This began in the 1970s when ELCA made the decision to also support Lutheran parishes that offered sanctuary to refugees from central America. Deffenbaugh explained some of its ins and outs:
By the late 1980s, it became apparent that among those fleeing from Central America were other unaccompanied children. If they were apprehended by the Border Patrol, they would be held behind bars in juvenile jails or immigration detention facilities while their cases were being adjudicated. To LIRS, this made no sense either from a child welfare perspective—the vast majority of the children were neither criminals nor posed a threat to anyone—or from the taxpayer’s perspective—it is much more expensive to imprison a child than to care for him or her in foster care or a group home. Using church dollars, LIRS hired a staff member to plan an advocacy effort to change this policy. Finally in 2002 this effort bore fruit when the Homeland Security Act switched the custody of undocumented unaccompanied children from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. ORR in turn works with LIRS and our Catholic counterpart to treat the children in a more child-welfare-friendly manner.
And he explained the principle behind what seemed to some like deliberate violation of the law and to others as one of the basic principles behind the Judeo-Christian tradition of law and ethics:
As LIRS has struggled with each of these questions, weighing issues of mission, politics, service capacity, and ethics, the agency’s self-understanding has been refined. LIRS works closely with government when our missions coincide but at base we are the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, not the government’s. We work better in partnerships than on our own. Our advocacy is informed by our experience in service, and when the advocacy is successful it often gives us expanded opportunities for service. We try to be faithful to our mission and stand up for what is right. It meant a lot when, in 2007, one of the leading immigration advocates in Washington publicly described LIRS as the “moral compass” in the immigration debate. We ask God’s guidance to give us discernment as we face new ethical questions.
So it has continued up to the present, as LIRS (now Global Refuge), right up till the Trump regime’s present crackdown on legal immigration. In January, after Trump’s initial flurry of executive orders was handed down (but before Musk’s “efficiency” experts accused Lutheran Social Services of being a criminal operation), Bishop Eaton cited that history in another pastoral statement:
Many of us in the ELCA come from immigrant peoples. As Lutherans, we have a long tradition of hospitality, dating back to the end of World War II, of helping displaced Lutheran refugees, assisting subsequent refugee groups and welcoming new immigrants. Our church has long called for compassionate, just and wise immigration reform.
And, Eaton concluded:
“The Scriptures are clear. We are called to see anew the image of God in our immigrant neighbors. Following God’s call in Leviticus 19 that is echoed throughout Scripture, the time is now.”
Leviticus 19, in case it has slipped your mind, has nothing to say about undocumented immigrants or USAID appropriations; instead it lists, and elaborates on, the Ten Commandments. Lev. 19:33-34 (in the New Revised Standard updated edition) simply holds:
“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
As Martin Luther surely would have said in the context, we can do no other.
Links and Citations
“ELCA Presiding Bishop Responds to Executive Orders on Immigration,” Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, News, Feb. 14, 2025https://www.elca.org/news-and-events/elca-presiding-bishop-responds-to-executive-orders-on-immigration.
Ralston Deffenbaugh, “Ethical Decision Points in the History of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service,” Journal of Lutheran Ethics, Feb. 2009 https://learn.elca.org/jle/ethical-decision-points-in-the-history-of-the-lutheran-immigration-and-refugee-service/.
“Episcopal Church joins religious freedom lawsuit challenging ICE enforcement actions in churches,” Office of Public Affairs, Episcopal Church, Feb. 11, 2025 https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/episcopal-church-joins-religious-freedom-lawsuit-challenging-ice-enforcement-actions-in-churches/.
Jack Jenkins, “Musk spotlights federal funds for Lutheran aid groups, calls them ‘illegal payments’,” Religion News Service, Feb. 3, 2025 https://religionnews.com/2025/02/03/musk-spotlights-federal-funds-for-lutheran-social-services-calls-them-illegal-payments/.
“ELCA presiding bishop issues statement on immigration executive orders,” Living Lutheran, Jan. 28, 2025 https://www.livinglutheran.org/2025/01/elca-presiding-bishop-issues-statement-on-immigration-executive-orders/.
[Uplinked Feb. 17, 2025]
Ordinary Time 