No, the Bible does not command America to take in Syrian refugees

Is Jesus telling America to open its borders? To read the secular and religious Left — and to hear President Obama speak — you’d think that American Christians who argue against welcoming Syrian migrants to our shores are hateful, bigoted hypocrites ignoring clear scriptural imperatives of openness and compassion. In reality, however, Christians who urge that we care for Syrian refugees abroad rather than here at home are responding wisely to national leaders who’ve failed in their own God-ordained duties. We can be compassionate from afar, and we’d be wise to do so.

But don’t tell that to the Left. Writing in the Guardian, Giles Frazier declared that there is “no respectable Christian argument for fortress Europe, surrounded by a new iron curtain of razor wire to keep poor, dark-skinned people out.” His theological argument is that both the Passover and the Eucharist are a call to “re-live basic human solidarity” with the refugee “in the face of existential fear and uncertainty.” Indeed, Jesus’s flight to Egypt was “deliberately sampling” the “basic foundational myth of Exodus.”