Recently the John Tanton Network’s Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) hosted a “religious perspectives on immigration” panel in Washington, DC, to counter faith-based “supporters of amnesty for illegal aliens.”

Simply put, when anti-immigrant leaders turn to religion—or attack religious groups—in order to advance their restrictionist agenda, they’re simply using doctrines of faith to buttress some weakly contrived concerns for the dispossessed.

In reality, they’re simply using manipulations of faith to bevel the raw, splinter-ridden edges of a white nationalist worldview.

At the panel, Roy Beck and NumbersUSA opportunistically weighed in with an attack on Christian leaders whom, according to them, have declared “war on the unemployed in their pews” by “favoring more foreign workers (and illegal aliens) over unemployed Americans”; disingenuously, he also derides church leaders for abandoning the Black Underclass by favoring immigration reform. CIS’s James Edwards rounded out the affray with a scornful blitzing of the National Association of Evangelicals for, in his mind, becoming “the most recent religious bureaucracy to foist biblically [sic] questionable immigration policies on citizen parishioners.”

Claims like Edwards’ are perhaps why the three most frightening words in the English language are “the Bible says”—words often used to justify every conceivable form of human oppression and injustice ever conjured up by the dominant population.

For Beck, Edwards, and CIS’s Stephen Steinlight—whose dramatic and overwrought tirade over Senator Schumer’s recent immigration hearing, calling it “a cynical sham that mocks our deepest values as Americans,” is a classic—the Bible per se provides both rationale and reason for opposing “illegal immigration.” While Beck is adept at the frontal attack on religious leaders, Edwards goes for the theological and authoritarian jugular with his foundational belief in the sovereignty of the state acting “under God’s delegated authority” that, apparently, manifests a compulsion to keep “illegal aliens” at bay.

That is to say, nationalism reigns; God does not.

It is critical that religious leaders understand that the fundamental issue with these organizations and individuals is neither immigration nor religion—it is their collective commitment to maintain white America; it is their ideological links to white nationalism, the notion that this nation is of, by, and for white people. Period.

In spite of everything they have said, done, or written to distance themselves from it, however, white nationalism is certainly the bedrock of their existence. Period. In spite of Roy Beck’s relentless efforts to position himself in opposition to racism, for example, he operates fully within the framework of structural racism that feeds his closed understanding of the historic and contemporary role of race in the employment of low-wage workers of color. In spite of the academically-credentialed, media-driven attempts of CIS to cultivate Beltway legitimacy, they cannot escape their roots; they cannot sell their efforts to close this nation to any more people of color as anything other than what their efforts are–bigotry.

Taken in its entirety, the Bible is a powerful and sobering record of the ongoing actions of God in pursuit of justice among and with the destitute and dispossessed.

The dangerous, world-upending songs of two women chosen by God to incarnate realms of justice—Hannah in the Hebrew text of Second Samuel and Mary in the Christian text of Luke’s Gospel—provide, perhaps to this day, the overarching story of what “the Bible says” to and for peoples of faith. Building from Hannah’s powerful song, Luke’s text attributes to Mary the haunting, beautiful promise that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

So it was then.

So it is now. So it is in the ongoing struggle for justice with all peoples of all places who seek with one another lives of hope, communities of justice, nations of welcome.