Sorry, Mr. President. You’re wrong on Exodus and immigration
November 24, 2014
On my way back from an ETS meeting in San Diego, I was driving along the Arizona border near Yuma, with Mexico in sight just to my right, when I got a call from Cathy Grossman at Religion News Service. We’d done a number of things together through the years since I first met her as the new SBC Executive Committee PR VP back in 1991. Herb Hollinger, the head of Baptist Press, and I were traveling up the East Coast meeting newspaper religion editors, and we started at USA Today. We were braced for some pushback since we represented the “red neck” conservative resurgence in the denomination, but she was very gracious. She’d come to the DC area from Florida, where her family had worked with other Jewish families to keep their traditions alive, and she said she understood that this was our religious cause as well. Subsequently, every year or so, she called me to pitch in on something or other connecting with her beat, e.g., President Bush’s comments on the breakup of a space shuttle over Texas; the shooting on a Long Island commuter train at Christmas time; Romney’s Mormonism; publication of a Catholic study Bible; the anti-Christian, “Flying Spaghetti Monster” web site.
On this particular day in the fall of 2014, President Obama had just issued a statement in support of a lax immigration policy on the southern border, and he quoted some scripture to support his view. Cathy wondered if I might read it and comment, which I did, with the Washington Post’s picking up the RNS story. The, in the spring of 2015, I wrote a piece on the same issue for American Spectator, “ ‘Christian’ Paths to Amnesty,” responding in part to a workshop on the topic at SWBTS, where the speakers were mainly taking the Obama line. Of course, the topic is radioactive, and I picked up a few radiation burns from the administration at SBTS, but I’ve believed in this perspective right along.