As a Christian, I am under obligation to follow the moral and ethical teachings of the Bible, because Christians believe the Bible is a record of God's revelation to man over time.
But it takes some education and common sense to interpret the Bible and understand how it applies to us today. I am not, for instance, under an obligation to utterly destroy the Amalekites (I Samuel 15:3). It was this desire to understand the Bible and learn how to apply it that brought me to Dallas 33 years ago to attend Dallas Theological Seminary.
I've watched with interest as both believers and non-believers have misused Scripture for political purposes in the last few days over the controversial issue of family separation at the border. To non-believers who have suddenly adopted a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible, I want to say, "Keep reading — there's lots of good stuff in there that applies to you personally, and not just for political ammunition." And to folks like Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who apparently think Romans 13 means that anything any government has ever done in human history had God's approval, I want to say, "Don't hide behind God for your own blundering inability to articulate a defense for an unpopular policy."
The Trump administration's choice to adopt a strictly literal interpretation of the law and ratchet up to 11 the separation of children from immigrant parents seeking asylum is certainly unpopular. But is it immoral? Do governments have an obligation to biblical passages urging kindness to immigrants?
It's a legitimate question, as a bedrock idea of Western civilization is the elevation of individual over group identity. That's due in no small part to the Bible, with its teaching of individual moral accountability ("the soul that sinneth, it shall die"). Contrary to attempts to apply moral imperatives to government, the Bible most often treats only individuals as accountable, and assumes nations (groups) to be beasts.
Much of the emphasis of popular speaker and writer Jordan Peterson, who is far from a fundamentalist but who respects ancient wisdom contained in biblical literature, is opposing the current rhetoric that focuses on oppressed groups rather than responsible individuals. Paraphrasing Peterson, only individuals can be virtuous, because only individuals can be accountable. You can't hold groups accountable while maintaining individual responsibility, which is why the whole concept of "social justice" is toxic to true justice and often a convenient deflection from individual responsibility.
As best we could, we held individual actors responsible for the Holocaust, and the German government for World War II, but we didn't hold "Germans" responsible, because not all Germans were complicit. Not all Southerners were slavers, not all Japanese participated in the Rape of Nanking, and not all men mistreat women. Justice can be maintained only through individual responsibility, not group identity, and thus it's not at all clear that the policies of a country can be held accountable to cherry-picked Bible verses.
Besides, it doesn't work. When the political left tries to use biblical passages to demand generous government welfare and social policies, the right can always counter with "if anyone is not willing to work, neither should he eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10). How's that for a biblical welfare policy?
But there is an important intersection between the biblical emphasis on individual responsibility and our nation's founding that should give us clear guidance on this issue of family separation.
Based on an inherited Judeo-Christian worldview, the Founders believed that the most important things, including families, are individual responsibilities. They cannot be entrusted to a group (the state) because they logically precede the state. So the Founders created a limited government in order to preserve wide swaths of liberty in which Americans could fulfill their individual responsibilities to God, their families and their communities, and tasked government with preserving rather than violating individual liberty.
Thus, there should be an extremely high threshold for government to intrude upon these pre-political areas, such as separating children from parents. The misdemeanor of crossing the border illegally just doesn't reach that threshold for a nation founded on the idea that the most important things in life are too important for government.
It may very well be government's job to stand between a foreigner and the border, but it is heinous to the American idea of limited government to allow it to stand between a mother and her child.
Tom Giovanetti is president of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a free-market public policy think tank in Irving, and author of Elements of a 21st Century Pro-Growth Immigration System.