From Root to Fruit - A Genealogy of "Radical" Hospitality
Chapter One, Pt.1
[Continued from Preface]
“No Borders! No Walls! Or No Heaven at All!”
Just two years prior to the publication of The Gospel Comes With a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World, Professor Emeritus in Hospitality Studies Conrad Lashely wrote the following —
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the study of hospitality as a social phenomenon. This interest has tended to arrive from two communities. The first comprises hospitality academics interested in exploring the wider meanings of hospitality as a way of better understanding guest and host relations and its implications for commercial settings. The second comprises social scientists using hosts and guests as a metaphor for understanding the relationship between host communities and guests as people from outside the community – migrants, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.1
This growing interest in hospitality among academics prompted the publication of The Routledge Handbook of Hospitality, a compilation of academic essays examining the concept of hospitality from multiple academic perspectives. While Butterfield’s book doesn’t look at the market importance of hospitality, it does touch upon how Christians are to understand “the relationship between host communities and guests as people from outside the community – migrants, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.”2
Lashley and Butterfield published their books, respectively, in 2016 and 2018, before and during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, a man whom corporate media outlets had persistently argued was a xenophobe and racist. Anti-Trumpism among democrats, progressives, and RINO crowds was constantly being peddled to the public. Whether it was Trump’s stance on Black Lives Matter or immigration policy, it was taken, they argued, because he was a xenophobe and racist.3
The historical context in which these books were published was one riddled with accusations of xenophobia and racism against President Trump primarily because of how his anti-leftist and anti-globalist positions were being portrayed by the corporate media. Neither was the conflict that raged at this time between conservatives and progressives limited solely to the civic domain, but was equally observable in the American Christian subculture of which Butterfield was already a part.4 In TGH, Butterfield writes —
…on January 30, 2017, President Trump closed the borders to refugees for four months. All hell broke loose, both nationally and in my neighborhood. My neighbors and I grieved differently over this, but we met over a meal at our house to discuss it. We had already broken ground on hosting, so when a crisis was presented, my neighbors knew it was safe to ask and safe to come and safe to cry.5
It is somewhat of an understatement to say that Butterfield’s book, like Lashely’s, arrived at a very opportune time.
In a section of TGH titled “Solve the Big Problems,” Butterfield writes —
We live amidst a worldwide refugee crisis, the worst this world has seen since World War II. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) noted that illegal border crossings increased by 277 percent in 2014—many illegal crossings made by orphans. The experience is harrowing…
Who should take responsibility for this global humanitarian crisis?
Is it safe to get involved?
Are refugees terrorists?6
Is it responsible to use the Bible to guide our actions?These are hard and good questions. But one thing is clear: desperate people do desperate things. Christians are not called to be desperate people, even in desperate times. The psalms bear witness to this. Christians are called to do God’s work in desperate times.
It is deadly to ignore biblical teaching about serving the stranger—deadly to the people who desperately need help and deadly to anyone who claims Christ as King. Membership in the kingdom of God is intimately linked to the practice of hospitality in this life. Hospitality is the ground zero of the Christian life, biblically speaking. A more crucial question for the Bible-believing Christian is this: Is it safe to fail to get involved?
Jesus says, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Matt. 25:35–36). When we feel entitled to God’s grace, either because of our family history or our decision making, we can never get to the core sentiment behind Jesus’s words. What would it take to see Jesus as he portrays himself here? To see ourselves? Is our lack of care for the refugee and the stranger an innocent lack of opportunity, or is it a form of willful violence? Is it a reasonable act of self-preservation, or is it obdurate sin?
[…]
The risk is laid bare: when we fail to see Jesus in others, we cheapen the power of the image of God to shine over the darkness of the world. When we always see him in others, we fail to discern that we live in a fallen world, one in which Satan knows where we live. Discernment doesn’t build walls, however. Discernment doesn’t renege on our command by God to practice hospitality.7
What Butterfield lays out here is nearly identical to the “sermonette” later voiced by “Terry” during the time when Trump “closed the borders to refugees for four months.” Butterfield writes —
Terry marched in with a sermonette, declaring that because Jesus was a refugee, any government and any people who support closing the borders to refugees are not being Christian.8
Butterfield gives a superficial nod to the need for discernment in our dealings with others, because “Satan knows where we live.” Nevertheless, she makes it clear that the Christian must not build walls. Logically, she is equating “building walls” to “reneging on our command by God to practice hospitality,” leaving Christians without a choice in the matter. According to Butterfield, if you are a Christian, then you are necessarily practicing hospitality (i.e. following the progressive narratives about, and plans for dealing with, mass immigration and the refugee crisis). If you fail to do so, then you are probably not a member of the kingdom of God.
[Continued in Chapter One, Pt.2]
The Routledge Handbook of Hospitality Studies, ed. Conrad Lashley (New York: Routledge, 2016), i.
ibid. (emphasis added)
For a small sampling of this kind of rhetoric see:
Lopez, German. “Donald Trump’s win tells people of color they aren’t welcome in America”, Vox, Nov 9, 2016;
Neuhauser, Alan. “Racist Outbursts in U.S. in Wake of Trump's Election”;
Lyn Pesce, Nicole. “Racism piles up on ‘Day 1 In Trump’s America’ Twitter feed”, N.Y. Daily News;
Younes, Ali. “Black Americans fear racism, police violence post-Trump”, Aljazeera, Nov 11, 2016;
Gray, Rosie. “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protestors: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides’”, The Atlantic, Aug 15, 2017;
Thrush, Glenn & Haberman, Maggie. “Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost”, The New York Times, April 15, 2017;
Relman, Eliza. “Black Lives Matter founder likens Trump to Hitler: He is ‘literally the epitome of evil’”, Business Insider, Aug 25, 2017;
Verla, Julio Ricardo. “Trump's border wall was never just about security. It's meant to remind all Latinos that we're unwelcome.”, NBC News, Dec 28, 2018;
Austin-Hillary, Nicole. “Trump’s Racist Language Serves Abusive Immigration Policies”, Human Rights Watch, May 22, 2018;
Raghunathan, Suman. “Trump’s Xenophobic Vision of America Is Inciting Racist Violence”, The Nation, Jan 27, 2018.
Discussions about President Trump had already, in fact, been going on among many prominent evangelicals. For instance, in 2015 the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission published several articles trying to sway readers from supporting Donald Trump. See, for instance:
Barber, Brett. “The Way that Religious Liberty Ends”, ERLC, Dec 8, 2015; Haanen, Jeff. “Driving Back the Cloud of Fear: A Christmas Meditation”, ERLC, Dec 24, 2015; Walker, Andrew T. “Religious Liberty in 2015: A Year in Review”, ERLC, Dec 28, 2015.
TGH. (emphasis added) [N.B. Butterfield describes her home as a safe space where those traumatized by the actions of a conservative political figure can “grieve.”]
While Trump did not say that all refugees are terrorists, this is what leftist media outlets falsely and repeatedly attributed to him. For instance, see Ghosh, Agamoni. “Donald Trump calls Syrian refugees ‘terrorists’, vows to send them back”, International Business Times, Oct 1, 2015.
TGH, (emphasis added)
ibid. (emphasis added)