I recently read a post on Twitter (it is and shall forevermore be called thus) that regurgitates a pretty common liberal argument in favor of unfettered illegal immigration. The argument goes something like this:

And, yes, the Bible has a lot to say about immigrants (or sojourners) that we as Christians need to pay close attention to, but the (secular) left really doesn’t care about that. What they really want to do is take a few passages, mostly out of context and completely devoid of any proper hermeneutic, and shame Christians into silence. What the Bible actually says is of little importance to them, and it’s really easy to prove.

The most prominent example is abortion. I’ve lost count of the “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” arguments, the vehement denunciation of theocracies, the rants from the “freedom from religion” crowd, etc. That’s because, of course, no pro-life argument could ever be made that wasn’t rooted in someone’s religion, right? (Narrator: Wrong.) But as soon as a professing Christian states his/her opposition to the in utero murder of babies, banners are furled over the Walls of Separation of Church and State and bleeding hearts take their places on the ramparts to defend our secular democracy from the ravages of the theistic, unwashed hoi polloi in the motte below.

Take any moral issue: homosexuality, modern gender theory, even divorce. Even think of discussing the issues with any sort of religious information and we’re immediately shouted down and told not to force our morality on them (funny how that goes only in one direction). We’re clinging to millennia-old ideas that modern society, has outgrown, and we should get with the times.

My advice, then, if a clearly non-Christian interlocutor wants to debate how the finer points of Christian theology and doctrine intersect with modern American politics, or at least the topics where he or she feels you can be bullied around, don’t take the bait. It is, in my experience, not a good faith effort at discussion and little good will come of it. And if it helps, the fine folks at Luther Satire even have a jingle for you: