The Bible and the Border: Mike Johnson Explains It All (or Does He?)

Years ago–during Trump’s first term–I listened as clergy colleagues addressed a committee of the Minnesota legislature in a hearing to determine how the state would respond to Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant policies. One pastor’s testimony was simply a recital of biblical passages concerning love of neighbor and care for the immigrant. Because she was allotted only five minutes, she couldn’t finish the long list of such verses.

Today, even Capitol Hill journalists have caught on that the religious chest-pounding from some in this regime stands in sharp contrast with the rising chorus of defiant activists reciting biblical verses. Earlier in February, one journalist asked the Speaker of the House to address the difference, and Mike Johnson leaped at the chance, declaring that “borders and laws are biblical.” 

What Are Walls for?

Johnson’s statement is true, of course. It’s been a go-to talking point on the religious Right ever since the first Trump administration, when some evangelical scholars rushed to defend cruel and inhumane border policies by stolidly observing that “biblical cities had walls.” 

In fact, as responsible biblical scholars can attest, the most prominent archaeological remains of “biblical” walls today are their massive gate complexes. “City gates in ancient Israel (ca. 1200–586 BCE) were fortified, multi-chambered structures serving as the primary hub for civic, judicial, and economic life. . .”

In other words, one of the primary functions of “biblical walls” and their gates was to open a city, responsibly, to the world around it, as people gathered in and moved through those gates to connect with one another. 

But Johnson’s obsession with “borders” seems to have some other focus: naked partisan ambition, perhaps. Let me stipulate that a morally responsible case can be made for open borders (just a few examples here), but no one on “the Left” is advocating letting violent men swarm into U.S. cities and rampage through neighborhoods, in violation of fundamental Constitutional rights.  That’s official DHS policy you’re thinking of. 

It bears note—again—that according to the DHS’s own records, only a tiny percentage of the people seized off the streets or out of their homes,  thrown into concentration camps, or deported are actually violent criminals—a smaller percentage than in the U.S. population generally.

Love Thy Neighbor—or Not

In contrast, Mike Johnson considers just one passage, Leviticus 19:34, supporting care for the immigrant. He sniffed that “whether [radical Leftists] know it or not, that passage happens to be from the instructions Moses delivered to the Israelites when they were on their journey through the wilderness in Sinai, before they reached their own Promised Land.” 

He apparently means that because that verse occurs before anything like a bordered Israelite state has been established, it can’t be taken seriously as relevant for actual nations today. 

“CONTEXT,” he declared in all caps, “IS CRITICAL.”

If that statement had appeared in an undergraduate’s paper, I would have circled it in red, written “exactly right!” in the margin—and then asked why context mattered not at all in the rest of his exposition. 

Come to think of it, let me take off my tweed jacket, roll up my sleeves, and spend some time with this argument.

. . . 

So, Mike—may I call you Mike? —you go on to explain that verses like that one, or the “Greatest Commandment” of love of neighbor, were “never directed to the government, but to INDIVIDUAL believers.” Somehow you think that lets you, and the masked brutes prowling U.S. cities, off the hook.

Actually, you might pay closer attention to the verse you just quoted, from the King James translation (of course). Note that in its archaic, 16th-century English, the verse interweaves the singular thou and the plural you: “But the stranger that dwelleth with you [plural] shall be unto you [plural] as one born among you [plural], and thou [singular] shalt love him as thyself [singular].” Note, too, that the command continues, as so often in the Torah, with a reason: “for ye [plural] were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your [plural] God.” 

It’s hard, then, to follow your insistence that this command is addressed only to the “individual.” The “thou” here is called on as a member of a people, and called to identify with a collective experience that should draw them into empathy and solidarity with the “stranger in their midst.” 

You’re right, of course, Mike, that this command doesn’t refer to the borders of a nation. In fact, all of the narrative of the Torah takes place before any of “the congregation of the children of Israel” enter the “promised land.” 

That’s really the point. The Torah reads as God’s formation of a people, independent of their dwelling within specific geographical borders. Yes, later in the story (in Numbers 34) God stipulates just what will be the bounds of the land that the people Israel will occupy. But even later, in Deuteronomy 17, God warns the people that if—in envy of the nations around them—they set a king over themselves, they will be courting danger. Not surprisingly, that’s what happens, and the text warns in anticipation that the establishment of the nation’s borders will take place only later, after the people, who are the Lord’s focus here, have taken what the Lord describes as the wrong direction. 

Even later (Deut. 28), Moses issues a lengthy warning to the people (in the future indicative, Mike, which means the warning also functions as a prophecy of what will happen). The people will turn away from the Lord and, in punishment, “the Lord will bring a nation from far away, from the end of the earth, to swoop down on you like an eagle.” That cruel foreign invader will destroy the nation and disperse its people. Those appear to be retrospective references to the Assyrian conquest in the eighth century B.C.E., which allows scholars to date the main body of Deuteronomy. 

The climax of the book, toward which one could argue the whole of the Torah has been driving, is the solemn, countervailing promise that Moses gives to the assembled people (chapter 30): if—later, after their dispersal “to the ends of the world”—they will turn again in obedience, the Lord “will bring you back . . . into the land that your ancestors possessed” (30:4-5). 

Attentive readers will note some anachronism there. Moses seems to be speaking “over the heads” of the throng assembled before him on the plains of Moab, to address a later generation, living after the Babylonian Exile (sixth century B.C.E.), when the (relatively) more civilized Persian emperor Cyrus the Great allowed exiles to return to Jerusalem. Modern biblical scholarship recognizes the anachronism and recognizes its role in the wider cultural context (there’s that word again) of the ancient near east: a later generation addresses their own situation by revitalizing older tradition and attributing the result to an ancient lawgiver. 

It’s clear from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah that the Torah was made “the law of the land” under Cyrus’s direction. Serious biblical scholars recognize that, discussing the relationship of “Persia and Torah” and describing the final Torah as “the literature of colonial Yehud,” a phrase first popularized by the late, great Norman K. Gottwald. 

At this point, Mike, I’ll admit I don’t seriously expect you to follow this argument, because it’s so uncongenial to your commitments. You are what any contemporary Bible scholar would recognize as a literalist, probably a Fundamentalist, and not a curious one at that. We recognize your type in the classroom pretty early in a semester. You’re not really a student: you’re a provocateur, and no one is going to change your mind.

I hope I’ve not gone too far into the biblical-scholarship weeds. I just want to point out that there is a world of actual study of the Bible in its historical context, which for some of us really is critical. That means recognizing that the final form of the Torah didn’t fall from heaven into Moses’s hands; that it was created centuries later, in solemn retrospect, by people who were trying to discern the divine will in the course of their own history. It wasn’t written to speak to people living on some other continent two and a half millennia later, though centuries of white Christian Protestants have insisted that they are precisely the Bible’s long-awaited subjects. 

More directly to the point of your concern, Mike, the Torah doesn’t imagine that any people can be kept holy through strict border controls. Holiness is a matter of doing right by their neighbors—which is why the single command you discuss appears as part of what scholars call the “holiness code” in the book of Leviticus.

This is a good place to observe that the ways any of us reads the Bible always say more about us than about the Bible. You presume that the Bible provides the blueprint for a white Christian America, to which everyone else must “assimilate”—a line that received an appropriate response from Stephen Colbert. 

You present your neat division of labor as the master-key to interpreting the Bible. “The Bible,” you write, “teaches that God ordained and created four distinct spheres of authority—(1) the individual, (2) the family, (3) the church, and (4) civil government—and each of these spheres is given different responsibilities.” All that “love of neighbor” stuff in the Bible, so popular on the “progressive Left,” applies, you insist, only to the “INDIVIDUAL” (sic); in contrast, you write, “the CIVIL GOVERNMENT is established to faithfully uphold and enforce the law so that order can be maintained in this fallen world, crime can be kept at bay, and people can live peacefully (Rom. 13, 1 Tim. 2:1-2).” 

It’s interesting that you don’t cite any Bible verse  that lays out that division of labor—but not surprising. No such categorization of responsibilities ever appears in scripture. You or, more precisely, the Christian Dominionists on whom you rely made it up. The reason is pretty clear: You prefer a scheme that gives you authority over the rest of us to actual biblical teaching.

Let’s give those verses in Romans more attention than you’ve managed, Mike. (Full disclosure: I’ve written two books on the Letter to the Romans in the context of Roman imperialism, and an additional scholarly essay just on this passage, 13:1-7.) 

There is no divine “calling” or “establishment” or “authorization” of government in these verses; the Greek participle tetagmenai (rendered “ordained” in the King James Version, and “appointed” in the New King James Version) has a restrictive sense and might better be translated “set in rank,” the way a drill sergeant might snap unruly troops to attention. The punitive role of governing authorities is described in the indicative—as a matter of fact—and not as a positive value. 

You seem attracted to the calm assurance in verses 3 and 4 that “rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil”; so, the one who does right has nothing to fear. To you, as to everyone in this administration and abroad in MAGA world, that means that people like Renée Good and Alex Pretti were self-evidently evil-doers, and their deaths are their own damn fault. 

Leave aside for a moment the breathtaking indifference to brutality expressed in such sentiment. Even at the level of reading ancient biblical texts, this facile moral embrace of whatever the government does fails miserably. 

The apostle Paul knew perfectly well that government authorities were lethally dangerous to innocent people; after all, he declares that “the rulers of this age” crucified the innocent Jesus (1 Corinthians 2:8), and later in that letter, assures his readers that at “the end,” Christ will destroy “all rule and all authority and power” and thus put “all enemies under His feet” (15:24-25). Paul describes his own record of being arrested and beaten by civil authorities as evidence that he is a genuine messenger of God, which is the opposite of how you want us to use the Bible (4:9-13). 

Scholars more chastened by actual history know that reaching for Romans 13 to buttress government authority has been the ploy of governments that have no intention of acting virtuously: Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, any number of other brutal dictatorships since. The passage remains something of an enigma, but over the last half century, scholars have observed the following:

1. Paul thinks his hearers have good reason to be afraid of the civil authorities (the words “terror” in v. 3 and “fear” in v. 7 are the same word in Greek, phobos). That good reason is precisely that the authority “does not bear the sword in vain” (v. 4). (Paul wrote that line at a time when the new emperor, the teenage Nero, was requiring his speechwriters to insist that he had brought peace throughout the Empire without even touching a sword.)
2. The Roman sword remains a constant lethal danger, as Paul affirms earlier in this same letter: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter” (8:36).
3. Precisely because Roman authorities had proven themselves a deadly blunt instrument in putting down tax protests in nearby Puteoli, then again in a mass expulsion of Jews from Rome in a habitual over-reaction to civil unrest, Paul knows his own people are at greatest risk if the civil authorities crack down over any disquiet. 
4. And that’s why, in unfortunately stereotyped language, Paul here urged his (non-Jewish) readers to keep their heads down and their noses clean—advice he himself usually did not practice. 

The Bible for Thee, Not for Me

All of this is relevant historical context, yet none of it seems to matter to you, Mike, so I want to ask a few more questions.

If you took seriously the division you outlined between biblical instructions for “the individual” and those for “civil authorities”—why wouldn’t you accept the first as decisive for yourself?  Sure, you’ve been elected to the House, and your colleagues have made you Speaker, but if you had known what the Bible commanded you as an individual, why would you ever have sought public office? Indeed, why would you aspire to be an “agent of wrath,” instead of a righteous lover of mercy, as the Bible does expressly command? 

It seems to me that no Bible verse or biblical commentator is quite as important for your “theology” as the logic of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a favorite of self-styled right-wing intellectuals like Peter Thiel (and his protegé J. D. Vance). For Schmitt, what made a nation was sovereignty, and what constituted sovereignty was the power to declare a state of exception to the laws that everyone else had to follow. That’s why you want to be in government, Mike—especially in this government, where declaring national emergencies is the most convenient way to ignore Congress, the courts, and the Constitution.

And why else, Mike, would you reach for the Bible to explain your eager participation in this regime? Even if you were right about the Bible’s authorization of government as God’s “agent of wrath,”  nobody asked you to serve the Bible. 

Instead, you were asked to swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, which begins, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

I know that’s loaded with all sorts of language you’d prefer was not there: “domestic Tranquility”? “general Welfare”? “the Blessings of Liberty”? It’s pretty obvious you would rather be doling out punishment to “bad guys,” so you prefer to think that’s what the Bible authorizes you to do. 

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan taught us to recognize how often “the medium is the message.” The principle has no more apt illustration than you addressing a roomful of journalists and, over their heads, the American people, to tell us that the Bible authorizes you and your Republican colleagues to ignore the basic morality and decency to which so many of us feel bound. That moment—the medium of your self-righteous little Bible study—is the message you find in the Bible: you and your people decide, we obey. 

Fantasies of self-righteousness and the divine power to punish wicked others, fed by apocalyptic texts in the Bible, are rife in the present regime. More attentive readers of Revelation, or the prophecy in Matthew 25, will notice that no government officials, no military commanders appear in biblical visions of heaven, or heaven on earth. It is clear enough from the Beatitudes Jesus pronounces in Matthew 5 that the blessed are not those who have used force to assert their will but the poor in spirit, the meek, those who hunger for justice, those who make peace.

Don’t worry, Mike–there’s still time to read up.