Christian responses to the migrant crisis have been radical and traditional

Refugees, Christianity and Europe

Christian responses to the migrant crisis have been radical and traditional

Churches often provide shelter. What more should they be doing?

ACROSS most of Europe, a majority of people declare some loose attachment to Christianity, while a much smaller percentage actively follow that faith. As a result, churches and their adherents have some influence over European affairs. People expect them to react when the continent is faced with great moral challenges, such as the recent, desperate influx of migrants by sea and land. Ghastly as they have been, the human consequences of that influx would surely have been worse still without the efforts of churches and religious charities to help destitute newcomers. Across Germany, nearly 400 churches have provided shelter for migrants who fear deportation.

But what else should Europe’s Christians do or say? In almost every European country there exist hard-line political movements whose declared aim is to protect the continent’s Christian heritage against alien influences. Religious leaders generally regard these parties as embarrassments or worse. 

Even when you move a bit closer to the respectable mainstream, there are as many shades of opinion in European Christianity as there are denominations. That emerged in the glorious diversity of a gathering earlier this week in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, hosted by Dutch and Greek think-tanks (and at which your blogger co-chaired a session), where views ranged from the radical to the traditional. Broadly, their task was to look at Europe’s economic and refugee crisis from a Christian point of view. 

According to Ulrich Duchrow, a theology professor emeritus from Germany’s Heidelberg University, Christians ought to protest at the American-led interference in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which he sees as the main drivers of the migration crisis. In the fiery octogenarian’s view, churches and migrants should join secular radicals to challenge Western foreign policy. Above all, he claims, churches should be steering their flock away from xenophobes who see migrants as the enemy.

One of the continent’s few transnational Christian political groups voiced different ideas. The European Christian Political Movement (ECPM) speaks for small, socially conservative parties across the continent, urging “pro-family” policies and opposing the march of federal power in the European Union (EU). It has half-a-dozen representatives in the European Parliament who line up with the British Conservatives. In the spirit of anti-federalism, it defends the right of central European countries to limit the intake of migrants; migration, like national security, should be a matter for sovereign governments, it insists.

Paul Mills, a British economist and church elder who is close to the ECPM’s thinking, said spiritual principles could transform the relationship between the EU’s rich heartland and its poor periphery. The aim should be a healthy market based on law, transparency and the avoidance of extreme inequality. Transactions between the continent and new arrivals should also be fair and contractual, and include the migrant’s duty to obey the host country’s law.

Sallux, a Dutch think-tank linked to the ECPM, saw some hope in the emergence in bits of northern Syria of a de facto administration where Arabs, Kurds, Muslims and Christians could live together with a degree of religious freedom. People were less likely to flee from such places, it believed. 

Other speakers came with a specific worry: the fate of the small share of migrants who profess or convert to non-Muslim faiths, including Christianity. Such newcomers were often harassed on reaching their destination by fellow refugees who followed Islam, and UN agencies took little account of this, several speakers said. A vote in the Dutch parliament had told the government to pay more attention to religious and sexual minorities among migrants, but those who identify as Christian faced harsh questioning from Dutch officials about their religious history, said a lawyer from the Stichting Gave, a legal watchdog; non-Muslim refugees were often wary of telling their story through Muslim interpreters, he and others noted.

For the Greek clerical hosts, the whole gathering was an unusual experience. As was noted by one clerical academic, when the Greek Orthodox church raises its voice, it is often in defence of its own interests or over national questions, like who has the historic right to use the name Macedonia. People admire the role of Greek Orthodox parishes (along with the country’s tiny Catholic and Protestant minorities) in providing basic aid to newcomers and needy locals. But the church has not done very much to analyse the root causes of economic crisis or speak truth (about corruption, say) to political power.

That may change, according to a booklet circulated at the conference. In it Bishop Ignatios of Demetrias, who runs a theological academy, notes that the crisis-stricken Greek state has less money now to pay Orthodox clergy, who are mostly civil servants. Far from harming the church, he thinks this could force Orthodox Christians, clergy and laity, to find their own feet, rely less on state largesse and become more independent. If Greece’s national church ever heeds that advice and decides to speak more freely on matters like economics or migration, Christian Europe’s infinite variety will offer it plenty of ideological positions to choose from.