Travis Wussow (vice president for public policy and general counsel at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention) lectured at Providence Magazine’s Christianity & National Security Conference on Nov. 2, 2018.

Thank you, Mark. I know we’re a little bit behind schedule now, and I would make a half-hearted attempt to help get us back on track, but I think we all know that lawyers from Texas can’t be trusted to do that.

The other thing I just wanted to address at the outset is the title of my talk is “Southern Baptists in the World.” I did not select that title. In fact, I did push back against it. Mark came back and said, “No, no, no, this is great. It will be really interesting,” which in turn raises its own questions, like why would that be interesting? Are we that peculiar of a sect?

Anyway, so what we’re going to do is sort of two things. I’m going to talk about some of the Southern Baptist resolutions that are passed each year and draw some observations about our approach to thinking about the world, conflict, our nation’s places in them. Then I’m going to use that as a springboard to discuss immigration and offer a couple of responses to Mark and Stutz’s book Just Immigration. I’ll show it to you since I’m responding to it.

I might as well give him a book plug. I believe he’s here but speaking about this book on Capitol Hill right now, so unfortunately he’s not in the room today, but next week, interesting. Okay, well, I’ll have to go check it, maybe I’ll throw him some fast balls from the audience.And then end with some observations on moving forward.

Southern Baptists gather every summer. This coming year, we’re gathering in Birmingham, Alabama for our annual meeting where we carry out business, report on numerous committees, task forces, and other groups of people. One of the things we do is consider and pass resolutions. We’ve done this since 1845, and all of our resolutions are searchable on our website going back to 1845 if you find yourself with any spare time or deranged interest.

Over the last 20 years, the SBC has passed resolutions dealing with international affairs, the persecuted church, war, and peace. From these, I want to draw out three broad themes: our approach to thinking and just war within a just war framework, religious liberty, and communitarianism.

Resolutions issued after the conservative resurgence consistently work within a just war framework. The conservative resurgence was a period in the 1970s and 1980s when theological conservatives took control of the Southern Baptist Convention entities. Through these committees, just as a quick sidebar, our resolutions during the Vietnam era and Korean War are different from current thinking, certainly going back to the beginning of the war on terror. My focus will be on those.

The first notable resolution I want to mention is the resolution on the genocide in Sudan in 2000. The SBC passed a resolution calling the situation in Sudan a genocide and describes it in detail. The focus within the resolution is on humanitarian aid and relief for victims of the conflict. The last paragraph urges the administration and Congress to use appropriate means to compel the government of Sudan to stop these atrocities and ongoing violations of religious freedom.

This is not a rich discussion of the Just War theory, but as I’ll show with the next couple of resolutions passed in 2002 and 2003, this framework is assumed in Southern Baptist thinking. In 2002, the SBC passed its first resolution since 9/11, grounding the purpose of government in Romans 13, applauding President Bush’s use of the term “evildoers” to describe the hijackers and terrorists.

The resolution doesn’t systematically address elements of the Just War framework but addresses core concerns for the intervention in Iraq, such as self-defense, addressing a serious ongoing threat, proper authority, and right intention. Interestingly, the resolution also lays a predicate for support of Operation Iraqi Freedom by referencing the threat of terrorist-supportive nations and the quest for weapons of mass destruction.

In 2003, the SBC issued a resolution offering a retroactive blessing on the war in Iraq that had just begun. Richard Land drafted a letter in October 2002, which did contain a point-by-point application of Just War principles to the situation in Iraq. The 2003 resolution summarizes that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a warranted action based on historic principles of Just War.

A shift in opinion about just causes or the applicability of Just War theory isn’t a shift over the last few years, but rather concerns about a reasonable likelihood of success. Russell Moore stated this explicitly in 2013 when the US contemplated intervention in Syria over chemical weapons.

The SBC focused on religious liberty in response to the Arab Spring, calling upon political, diplomatic, and military leaders to make religious liberty a priority in foreign policy and international aid. The title of this resolution, “Religious Liberty in a Global Society,” wouldn’t suggest a direct reference to the Arab Spring.

I don’t mean this as a criticism of non-interventionism in Syria, but what’s happened over the last few years is not a shift in opinion about just causes or the applicability of Just War theory, but rather concerns about a reasonable likelihood of success.

In fact, Russell Moore stated this exactly explicitly. My boss, Russell Moore, stated this explicitly in 2013 when the US was contemplating intervention in Syria over Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. What he said then was, “You know, look, there’s no shortage of just causes when you survey this conflict, but I think the question we have to grapple with is, is there actually a reasonable likelihood of success?”

In an effort to say and do something, what the ERLC chose to focus on in this particular situation was religious liberty, which is one of the key issues of all of those issues and certainly of the conflict still going on in the Middle East and North Africa today. This sort of serves as a transition to my second point, which is a global focus on religious freedom. That, frankly, was kind of surprising to me to see just how much this came through in our resolutions.

Religious liberty, of course, has long been an issue for Baptists. After all, religious liberty is my organization’s middle name. We’re the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. The salience of this issue for Baptists is really our history, which is spending time in colonial jails for refusing to get permits and licenses to preach and championing the idea that the United States must avoid establishing a state religion. But it’s also a matter of core theological conviction.

In 1995, a resolution on religious liberty and world evangelization not exactly good optics these days, pairing those two things up together. But anyway, it stated, “We reaffirm our Baptist heritage in supporting the right of freedom of conscience in religious concerns and the right to convert or change one’s religion not due to coercion, but due to alteration of conscience and conviction.” This history was again reaffirmed and elevated in the 2011 resolution that I mentioned a moment ago.

In response to the Arab Spring, I’ll just highlight one section from that which says, “This conviction is grounded in the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, who declared that His kingdom is not of this world and therefore He has not authorized any earthly realm to advance His kingdom by the power of His sword.” And indeed, even our resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2002 features this idea of religious freedom very prominently when calling upon the Israeli and Palestinian peoples to promote peace, but lists religious freedom actually first before peace.

This brings me to the last point I want to talk about, which is kind of a Southern Baptist view of the modern Westphalian international system of sovereign nation-states. Some of our resolutions on this sort of paint a picture that Southern Baptists believe that each nation is sovereign, that while international organizations have a role to play, there are several positive references towards treaty bodies, towards the work of the UN, particularly when it comes to protecting religious minorities and other persecuted groups of people. But there is still a skepticism towards international organizations that serves pervades our resolutions.

The most prominent of this, of course, is a resolution that’s titled using language that really, unfortunately, hasn’t stood the test of time. It’s titled “On the Threat of New Age Globalism” in 2002. And in the interest of time, I won’t read from this one extensively, but as you can imagine, it lays out a fairly robust vision of national sovereignty and skepticism for the UN. The 2002 Middle East peace resolution I mentioned earlier does the same thing with recognizing explicitly the sovereignty of the State of Israel, implicitly a future state of the Palestinian people.

In 2015, there was another resolution dealing with human rights violations in North Korea, and the messengers adopted a resolution that was critical but also approvingly referenced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several processes within the UN. But the place actually where our view of national sovereignty and particularly the protection of our borders is most clearly illuminated is with our three resolutions that deal with immigration.

The first of these was in 2006, an immigration title on the crisis of illegal immigration. This resolution begins with laying out kind of a two-kingdoms approach. I’ll read from this: “Whereas Christians have responsibilities in two realms, citizens of the nation and citizens of the heavenly kingdom.” And then going on to say, “Citizens of the nation, Christians are under a biblical mandate to respect the divine institution of government and its just laws. But at the same time, Christians have a right to expect the government to fulfill its ordained mandate and enforce those laws.”

A 2011 resolution on immigration took this a step further, touching on the issue of border security specifically, saying, “The governing authorities of a nation have the right and responsibility to maintain borders to protect the security of their citizens.” And then a 2018 resolution passed this last summer reaffirms and furthers all of these ideas. So, I want to use this as a starting point, this idea of national sovereignty, border security, the right of every nation to determine who gets to live within its territory and so forth, to interact with Dr. Han Stutz’s book Just Immigration.

Dr. Han Stutz, of course, has played an important role in the founding of the Providence magazine, and I thought he was going to be here for this conference, but I’ll have to catch up with him next week. But let me just say at the outset that I think that his book actually offers an important contribution to this discussion, and there are some things that I disagree with. His book is somewhat broad, somewhat critical of my organization’s work in the area of immigration, but I think his approach generally is pretty fair-minded and I think it helps to advance the conversation.

But I do want to offer two responses. The first is Dr. Han Stutz points out that many of the actors within the immigration debate have adopted, whether knowingly or unknowingly, a cosmopolitan view of the world and therefore migration issues as well. And one of the problems, of course, with the cosmopolitan worldview in the context of immigration is that if we accept the idea that every person has the right to immigrate, then this leads to all sorts of problems in terms of national sovereignty.

I mean, of course, I think we all would agree that every person has the right to leave their country, that is to emigrate with an ‘e.’ But whether they have the right to enter another country is a separate question that depends upon the whims and will of the country that they’re hoping to land in. Calls for open borders, I think, are undoubtedly the most significant if politically unrealistic example of this. But this kind of thinking also shows up in other ways as well. I think the conflation of refugee policy with immigration policy, that is work visas and so on, is a really good example of this, whereas the grounding of those two principles is different.

What I think is unhelpful about Dr. Amstutz’s critique is his willingness to use these communitarian, cosmopolitan labels is really a shorthand for disagreement about the details. Despite a clear written record about Southern Baptists and my organization’s views on these things, he chooses to try to read behind what we’ve said and see lurking, looming, unspoken cosmopolitanism behind our thinking. I think this is particularly puzzling because one of the most helpful sections of his book works through different worldviews in terms of how nations work and come together, talking about their various contributions.

Or another way to put this is their overlap with the Christian worldview. One of the things he says is that cosmopolitanism offers three broad areas of overlap, one of which is the idea that the primacy of the well-being of persons over states is significant. He offers a couple of others, which I won’t mention, but my point is this: Based on PRRI’s 2008 American Values Survey, they just released it last week with Brookings. It’s worth taking a look at if you haven’t had a chance to look at it. There is now basically a 40 to 50 percent gap between Republicans and Democrats on almost every major immigration issue.

So you just go on down the line: border security, what do we do with DACA recipients, what do we do with the total number of migrants—you go on down the line. We’re talking about a 40 to 50 percent delta between the two populations. This kind of polarity is not going to get us anywhere legislatively. You can’t pass legislation with that kind of polarity. So I think in this kind of environment, I think what we need to do is read each other a little bit more charitably and resist the urge to use these sorts of broad categories in order to cabin and discard the opinions of others. And I think that is happening on both sides.

The second thing I want to talk about is more substantive, and that is how he approaches what he would—the title of his book is Just Immigration. But how he talks about justice and the balancing with other values, of course, the citizens of any country have the responsibility and have the right to expect the government to carry out its God-given responsibilities, one of which is the obligation to maintain the integrity and security of the nation. Our Southern Baptist resolutions make this point clear. But our resolutions also draw another dynamic that is missing from Dr. Amstutz’s moral analysis of the situation.

When it comes to immigration, Richard Land, when he was president of my organization, was fond of saying that on our southern border, we have two signs that hang there: one which says “keep out” and another which reads “help wanted.” In other words, our economy has depended for some time now on illegal flows of immigration, particularly low-skill immigration and particularly within agricultural and food supply, although this is true for other sectors as well. And leaders of both parties, this is now a bipartisan abject failure facing economic pressure or facing pressure from the business community, have failed to enforce our immigration laws and to secure our southern border.

And so what this means is that we now have in this country a labor market where there is one set of laws in the books and we have another set of laws in practice. I’m not saying that this is good. I think that this is actually hopelessly bad, but it is a situation that we need to deal with. And I think the other thing we have to acknowledge is that I’m not going to say that there’s a reliance interest, but I think we do have to acknowledge that these unwritten rules of the game have begun to ossify. And I think that’s a question that we need to address.

In fairness to Mark, he does write at the beginning of his book that the United States has struggled to create a front door for immigration policy and has therefore tolerated a backdoor policy to provide labor supply demanded by our economy. But what’s missing from his Christian framework for immigration, which is at the end of his book and some of his work, is any discussion of this problem, any discussion of this issue when considering the justice of a policy towards deportation or when considering whether it might be just to provide some sort of status or some sort of pathway or restitutionary measures.

Let me just say, this issue of these two dual labor markets, I’m not saying it’s dispositive. All I’m saying is that it’s a factor. And I certainly don’t think that it absolves an undocumented or illegal immigrant of what they have done in terms of crossing the border or, in some cases, stealing somebody’s identity or, in other cases, falsifying documents. But it is a factor. It’s something that we have to consider when examining a solution for the 12 million undocumented immigrants who reside in the United States today.

Dr. Amstutz writes that evangelical leaders have failed to consider the demands of justice when considering immigration policy, and when I’m choosing to read in this is disagreement with our assessment of what is just and how we balance that against other factors. And let me just say, I think that’s perfectly reasonable. I think one of the most important contributions of his book is that he lays out an alternative framework in a very clear, measured way. And I think that if anything is what this debate needs, there’s an issue of just taking the issue of the 12 or 11 million undocumented immigrants. What do we do with this population? It’s one of the thorniest problems. There’s plenty of space to disagree with. And I think one of the other things that he does really well in this book is he illuminates the fact that the Bible is not especially clear. It’s not like we can go to 2nd Hesitations and, you know, immediately pull—that’s not a book, I guess, but we can’t go exactly to a verse in the Bible and have our 8-point roadmap to comprehensive immigration reform. So there is room for disagreement I think we have to allow.

So, I want to close by saying this: If we are going to move forward to a constructive place on these issues, I think we have to forge consensus on what issues are debatable, but also what issues are not debatable. And I think there are some that we can agree to disagree on. I think there are others that we can—so we’re now here, four days before Election Day. I’m pretty tired of politics, but the 2020 campaign, I think, is going to start on Wednesday. I guess it’s already started. I mean, well, anyway, I’ll reserve comment. And these issues—the fate of the House and the fate of the Senate hanging in the balance—I mean, I think we can all agree that this particular election cycle has been really heated. It’s been unusually heated.

If you look at early voting numbers—I was just looking at them before I walked over here—this looks more like a presidential election than it does a midterm election. And if you look at what the closing message of the Republican Party—this “jobs, not mobs” message—it certainly connects directly to the sort of Kavanaugh proceedings. But the issue of immigration has also taken on a dominant role in the closing argument. The opportunity to do so has been provided by a slow-moving caravan coming from Honduras and also—what I think we could regard is off-the-cuff comments on birthright or use solely citizenship. But this closing argument, particularly an ad released by the GOP that directly connects the despicable, convicted cop killer who’s headed to death row, who’s also an illegal immigrant with this entire caravan of people headed north who are coming for a variety of different reasons. I think we should be troubled by that. But all of this, this sort of closing argument, really is not all that surprising.

Again, if you just look at public opinion surveys, if you look at this 2018 American Values Survey that I mentioned before, immigration is now the number three issue for Republican voters, behind the economy and national security, which, in the context of an issue like the caravan and the way that it’s been framed, is connected to, as connected to immigration. The question asked respondents to select two issues out of a total eight. Thirty-six percent of Republicans picked immigration, only ten percent chose abortion as one of their top two issues.

So what explains this dynamic? I think there are a number of things we could point to, but certainly, cultural anxieties are one explanation. But I think another is the share of foreign-born population in the United States, which now stands at 13.7% if you look at the U.S. Census American Community Survey, which likely undercounts actually the number of foreign-born people who are living in the United States. The share is probably three to five percent higher.

This is the greatest share he’s in might have read since 1910. The tensions at that time ultimately led to the National Origins quota system in 1924, which was designed to significantly limit the number of Asians arriving in the United States on the basis of race. And I think it’s probably still uncontroversial to say that the National Origins quota system was a racist policy that now resides where it belongs, which is in the dustbin of history.

But I hope it’s also not uncontroversial to say in a room of Christian realists or people who are interested in this kind of thinking that it’s within the realm of possibility that the United States could go down this path again and pass another racist immigration law that in response to the tensions that exist within our country, that a future generation will in turn have to extract and collect and expel into that same dusty.

So what I want to say is as I’m wrapping up here, it’s just a couple of comments about where do we go. I think most of us are looking at the discourse regardless of your political opinion. One of the interesting statistics is that one of the areas in the American Value Survey is that one of one of the areas where Republicans and Democrats agree is that they feel like strangers in their own country.

And I think perhaps maybe for different reasons, but I think all of us as we’re looking around, the temperature has gotten really hot. And I think as leaders, we have to ask ourselves what is our obligation at a time like this. I think the first, so I just want to offer kind of a couple quick points in closing. First is I think we need to get clear about the identity of the identity politics arguments that are off-limits for us, totally off-limits.

And I think that’s true on both sides. I mean, I don’t want to say this is just a problem. I mean, this is a room, I’m assuming largely of conservatives, so that’s what I’m speaking to. But I think we’ve got to get really clear about that. I think we need to make a decision ahead of time about what kinds of things we’re going to be willing to say and what kinds of things we’re not going to want to say.

I think the second thing is we need to commit ourselves to debate and by the debate I mean this debate about immigration. There is a storm gathering. You know, you look at the time that it took between 1910 and 1924 when the foreign-born population peaked and when the quota system was actually passed. That’s a 14-year timeframe. That’s a long time. I’m not convinced that we aren’t at the beginning or at the middle of something rather than at the end.

So I think we need to commit ourselves to debate. And the last thing I want to say is that I think we need to preserve our witness. So on Tuesday, of course, the gavel in both chambers hangs in the balance, and that’s important. But what’s even more important than that is our Christian witness. And I know this especially acutely as a Southern Baptist. Our history, of course, we were founded in 1845 over slavery. We have, as a part of our legacy, not just the baptizing of slave ownership in this country, we also have a legacy of baptizing Jim Crow in this country.

And I think as we’re looking through, as we’re trying to figure out our obligation of navigating these next few years, I don’t want baptizing a new kind of racial animus to become part of our talk that’s given 30 years from now on Southern Baptists in the world. Thanks. [Applause]

Q&A

Question: Thanks very much for your talk. My name is Josh Mays. I’m an undergraduate at George Washington University. So I was a little bit confused, and I hope this isn’t just my lack of education showing, but I was a little confused by your use of an conception of right in your talk. You mentioned that states have a right to determine who is in their country and who is not, which of course under a Westphalian international order, that’s the legal conception. But as Christians, doesn’t moral obligations supersede right? And if we take the Niebuhrian approach of justice being the goal of Christian international affairs, which of course I know that’s going to be controversial in this room, but and we live under unjust historical circumstances, that seems like an important question to consider.

Answer: Well, I mean, I think what I’d say is that certainly the sort of Westphalian model is not the only model we’ve had on this earth. We’ve had a number of other sorts of models, but it is the prevailing one. And so when I’m saying that I think that the nation-states have the right to determine who resides or doesn’t reside within their territories, I’m speaking not in the order of shoulds perhaps, but merely describing the way the things are in our current system.

Question: My name is Daniel. I have a very similar question to that. I realize that’s really just the beginning of your talk. It’s the past, the other three-quarters of your talk, but those in the discipline for any like the time would know that the concept of Westphalian sovereignty, territorial integrity, national self-determination, indeed the very notion that the nation-state, the Westphalian nation-state itself, is a way of promoting flourishing is very contested. Those are all very contested in the field as it is. And I do wonder what the wisdom of a governing body like the Southern Baptist Convention is for commenting on it, for promoting it, for putting very public notices on concepts that are very contested that matter. Thanks.

Answer: Yeah, I’m not sure that I have a different answer than the one that I offered before. I mean, you know, I’ll be honest with you. I hadn’t thought about your question or I hadn’t thought about this issue in terms of our Southern Baptists trying to communicate that this is the way that the world should be or are they accepting this as part of the way that the world is and therefore these are part of the assumptions and rules that govern us and the way they operate in the world.

I think that I suspect that it’s the latter. Thanks.

Just to clarify for everybody, Dr. Hamstutz will be speaking next week Friday at noon on Capitol Hill, Senate Russell Building in 253. If you go to info at Faith in Law org, you can RSVP, and they’ll provide you a Chick-fil-A lunch along with his lecture where he’ll be able to tell you exactly what his view is on this. Great, thank you.