A friend tells me that it is only good intellectual hygiene, as she puts it, to explain from the outset how one is personally implicated on any given topic. In turn, I wish to confess that I am almost entirely a product of immigration into England. My surname, Morello, is Mediterranean, and my mother’s maiden name is Mazierski. In our family we have Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, French, Ukrainian, Welsh, Scottish, and Jewish ancestry. And we even have a good helping of English blood thrown in there for good measure.
I am also married to a woman from Romania, with whom I have three children; were my children dogs, they would not be welcome at Crufts. We are, it is clear, a family of mongrels. Hence, as a political philosopher, as a practising Christian, and as an ethnic Heinz 57, the question of nationhood and national belonging is of pressing concern to me personally.
So, first, what does Christianity have to tell us about nationhood? According to The Holy Bible, salvation came through a chosen nation, the nation of the Israelites. Thus, nationhood played a central role in the story of salvation from the beginning.
The Israelites, we should remember, were in a deeply antagonistic relationship with all surrounding nations. But in Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, God founded a New Covenant, for which He gives what is known as the Great Commission, namely for Christ’s new community—the Church—to go forth and make disciples of all the nations (Matthew 28:19). Hence, in the New Covenant, God replaces the antagonism of the Old Covenant with a fraternal vision of nations as belonging to a supra-national family, historically called Christendom. Such a fraternal vision, however, does not eliminate the need for national distinctions, but presupposes it.
Nationhood, far from being at odds with Christianity, is at the very heart of its teaching on how Christ’s redemptive mission must unfold. In this context, the case for nationhood must not be confused with the ideology of nationalism, which denotes the pathology of treating the nation as some kind of idol. And certainly, the Christian teaching on nationhood does not entail a strictly binary conception of nations that would see no possibility for someone of one nation to join another. Indeed, after the ascension of Christ, the head of the Church, Peter the Apostle, emigrated to Rome; Thomas to India; James to Spain; Mary Magdalene to France; and most importantly, Joseph of Arimathea to Somerset.
Even in the Old Testament, in fact, we find the figure of Ruth the Moabitess, who having married an Israelite, says to her mother-in-law: “Where you go, I will go … your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Book of Ruth 1:16). Ruth, then, is the cultural appropriator par excellence.
Cultural appropriation—widely considered a great sin in our age—is in fact what is required to conserve national identity during times of population movement. The willingness of immigrants to appropriate the culture of the land to which they come is precisely the disposition needed to prevent them from falling into pariahdom and adopting an insulated, ghetto culture. It is to this issue of cultural appropriation that I will return, for, above all, I am convinced that the reason immigration has become a primary political issue in recent years is because the large number of immigrants coming to the UK have generally been very poor cultural appropriators. Hence, now, according to YouGov, 61% of Brits feel that immigration is too high, and one cannot help but wonder how many of the remaining 39% belong to immigrant communities. But more on that in a moment.
But for now, I only want to convince you that Christianity accepts and supports national distinctions. The vision of fraternally related but distinct nations which we call ‘Christendom’ was the most enduring social order in history. Christendom’s ideal of fraternal charity between nations, though often falling short of that ideal, was nonetheless observable in international collaborative projects such as the creation of hospitals and universities, as well as the offering of refuge to members of neighbouring countries in times of war or persecution, and the ransoming of slaves captured by north African pirates from the 9th-16th centuries. (As it happens, I have often wondered if Morocco should pay reparations to the Cornish … but I won’t hold my breath for that.)
The standard vision of our civilisation, founded on the high ideal of interpersonal charity—or agape—between the corporate persons of the nations, was a massive achievement, even if always imperfectly realised.
Christian charity, however, is not the same as sentimentalism or superficial emotion, nor does Christian charity neglect to consider the harmful effects of otherwise good intentions. So, let us consider a few things that are not only not required by Christian charity, but may be altogether contrary to such charity.
It is not charitable to incentivise people from other countries to make treacherous journeys in unstable vessels, often having to pay extortionate rates to criminal trafficking rackets. It may be retorted that the number of people approaching our shores in such vessels remains relatively small, but that is to miss why the public conversation about immigration has increasingly focused on such arrivals, namely because the small vessels are now symbolic in the British mind of a situation that has spun completely out of control: the regulation of who comes into the country.
It is not charitable to drain struggling or war-torn countries of their younger and often more economically privileged members, who leave at home the underprivileged population who don’t have the means to travel or pay traffickers, to then struggle in rebuilding their lands with fewer human resources.
It is not charitable to incentivise young men to make a new life for themselves, leaving behind the women and children in the lands they’ve fled—for it has not gone unnoticed that 90% of those recorded arriving on our shores in small vessels are male, with 75% of them aged 18-39.
It is not charitable gravely to disrupt the lives of settled people, by, for example, placing large numbers of newly arrived young males in economically deprived areas of the UK, where routinely vulnerable British girls of disadvantaged families are preyed upon. (In fact, it is noteworthy that these large contingents of immigrants are never placed in the protected villages of the Cotswolds, for example, where so many of our political class have their second homes.)
It is not charitable to flood British towns and cities with recently arrived populations, throwing into disarray the settled way of life of those communities, many of whose members have been there for centuries. For example, it is wrong that the English people of Leicester—who still comprise 35% of that city’s population—should watch their city turn into a battleground for hysterical militias of the Hindu and Muslim inhabitants, as happened only two years ago.
It is not charitable to cripple economically the already struggling UK taxpayer in order to direct an eye-watering £1.5 billion per year into housing immigrants in hotels, many of whom have entered the country illegally.
It is not charitable, when facing those with legitimate concerns about our current immigration policies and the lack of consultation of British communities that are being adversely affected, to shout ‘bigot’ and ‘xenophobe’—phrases that have long been deployed to quash any public conversation about what is going on in our country.
Since 2004, more people have arrived in the UK each year than in the entire period between 1066 and 1950. Brits have concerns that are wholly legitimate regarding this rapid transformation (some would say, destruction) of their indigenous, British culture—concerns that would be roundly deemed entirely reasonable were they expressed by any other people on the planet. Even referring to the English as the indigenous people of England is sufficient to cause many of our power-holders to froth at the mouth. For some reason, which remains obscure to me, one gets the impression that the people of these isles are the only indigenous people without a right to exist.
Do the points that I have raised entail that all immigration is problematic per se? Well, I hope not, given that such a case’s widespread acceptance would likely mean the expatriation of my own wife, which could introduce some tensions into our marriage. In any case, that is not what we’re debating this evening; we are debating whether we, as Christians, should welcome stricter border controls.
Obviously, there is no hard and fast rule when it comes to this issue—and it’s no good trying to appeal to some supposed ‘innate right’ either to conserve one’s nation or to join another nation. Rather, one must consider what a concrete settled people are prepared to accept in their shared territory. And that is an ongoing conversation. That conversation will largely be determined by the historical epoch, the relations of that people with populations of other countries, the type and quantity of immigrants who wish to come and settle, and the unwanted or—conversely—the desirable consequences of such immigration.
But that conversation was for decades shut down by our political and media elite, and now in recent years the frustration has so mounted that people are insisting on having this conversation even if it means exclusion from polite company. Having insisted on this public conversation, people have discovered that, all along, they belonged to a silent—or silenced—majority.
And this brings me back to the matter of cultural appropriation. Speaking very generally, it seems that a key reason why immigration has become a primary political issue in recent years is because the large number of immigrants who have come and continue to come to the UK have proven themselves to be very bad at cultural appropriation.
My grandfather, Janusz Mazierski, came to England, aged 5, as a Polish refugee during World War II. He arrived with his mother Stanislawa, and they were later joined by his father Roman, after Roman was liberated by the Allies from the concentration camp where he had hitherto been imprisoned. By the end of the War, this penniless immigrant family had put down roots, and they knew they would not be going back to Poland. England was now their home. Thereafter, they sought to induct themselves into English society and appropriate English culture. My grandfather won a scholarship to Dulwich College, later trained as an architectural engineer, and spent his life designing and building houses in Kent. In that county, he purchased a farmstead, where he enjoyed shooting gamebirds and keeping horses. My grandfather always treasured his Polish pedigree, and yet in early adulthood he applied for—and was granted—British citizenship, a status of which he remained immensely proud for the rest of his life.
That little story presents a very different attitudinal stance to that of so many immigrants in Britain today. Just visit Birmingham, Luton, or Bradford. Entire cities no longer appear British at all. People coming to this country, not learning the language, not embracing the established culture, and forming ghetto communities which eventually swell to encompass whole towns and cities, all betrays an attitude that was utterly objectionable to my Polish grandfather, who strongly believed that one should only seek to settle in another land with the kind of gratitude towards it that he both felt and exercised.
Whilst it is certainly true that many who are concerned by immigration are worried by the sheer numbers, I think they are predominantly concerned by the concrete effects: their country no longer feels like their home. Just as the Israelites were promised a land in the Old Testament, so every nation has a moral claim to enjoy its land, which, after all, is its only home.
The people of Britain increasingly feel that their home has been, and is continuing to be, taken away from them. It behoves us Christians, who believe in nations and national territories, to invite a thoughtful and dispassionate conversation about how, practically, we might undo this damage and prevent further damage—and not to accept terms like ‘bigot’ and ‘xenophobe’ to be thrown around in the face of very reasonable concerns.
This is a modified version of an address delivered at the Trinity Forum Debate on “Should Christians Welcome Stricter Border Controls?” which took place in London on the 6th of April, 2024.
