I had the opportunity recently to see the documentary “Between
the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” http://deepblueseafilm.com
on its recent National Tour. I found viewing it a confronting experience, with
its interviews with asylum seekers in Indonesia, because I had to watch the
faces and listen to the voices of real people, whose fate I was to learn at the
end of the documentary. At the end of the documentary I wandered out into the
sunshine, wiping the moisture from my eyes reflecting on the meaning and moral
significance of the term “border protection” in current political debate. Why
aren’t we concerned with protecting people rather than borders? Why do
“borders” need “protecting” anyway?
There is I know a verbal ambiguity in the phrase “border
protection”. In current political rhetoric it carries the connotation that
borders protect us, the citizens of Australia, though exactly what we are being
protected from is never made explicit. The phrasing suggests that if borders
are crossed by people without our prior permission, the border is therefore
violated, and we as Australian citizens are vulnerable to some unspecified
threat. What damage is done, or threatened by the crossing of the border is
never clearly explained, merely hinted at.
This ambiguity in the usage of the term “border protection”
has a whiff of the sacred surrounding the phrase. The “border” offers “protection”
and at the same time must not be violated and therefore stands in need of
protection. The ambiguity is consistent with the attachment of a sacral
character. You can’t define the sacred or it will no longer be sacred and lose
its power. How are then to ‘protect’ the “border’, and at the same time
ourselves?
Lo we have solved the problem, and protected the sacredness
of the border from profanation by redefining what counts as the border of
Australia for certain categories of persons, specifically those seeking asylum.
It has been decreed by the passing of a law that the borders for certain
purposes cannot be crossed by asylum seekers, because the map has been drawn to
exclude Australia from having a border that asylum seekers could cross, while
at the same time the border for all other purposes remains in existence, and is
therefore “protected”. Ye verily this is as great a magic as ever has been exercised
by the wizards, the defenders of the sacred character of the state, known as
lawyers. The border is protected and its sacred character is saved from profanation
by those who might seek to cross it in search of asylum from persecution.
Borders are clearly of human invention, though attracting
the character of the sacred in political rhetoric, and media commentary. They are
without feelings, passions and bodies. Asylum seekers on the other hand are of
flesh and blood, capable of being killed, tortured, starved, made to feel fear
and pressed to act against conscience with respect to matters of political
belief, faith commitment and practice.
Why do we wish to “protect” borders, or be protected by
borders, which are when stripped of their sacral character simply legal
creations set up to assist human flourishing and well being at the expense of
causing suffering to actual human beings by not welcoming those in search of
freedom from persecution?
Christians and church communities need to answer this
question with reference to the life and teaching of Jesus if they wish to give
substance to their identification as his followers.
Who or what would Jesus “protect”? A reading of the Gospels
with an eye for this theme makes it abundantly clear that Jesus did not have
much time for ‘borders’ whether they were of geographical, legal, or religious character
where they were inimical to human well being and healing. Jesus had much to
say, of a critical character about the privileging of laws at the expense of
human beings under the cover of religion. The Sabbath he observed was made for
humanity not humanity for the Sabbath. He commented pungently on the use of
legal definitions by the well off to enable them to reinforce that privilege
and he regularly transgressed the borders that that were used to keep society
“safe” from “dangerous” and “different” people.
For Christians to take a stand on this issue will probably
result in our coming put into conflict with a majority of Australians for whom
the sacredness of borders overrides other moral claims that arise for
Christians from their commitment to following Jesus. The call to discipleship
means that we cannot get out of difficult situations by ignoring his teaching.
There is another consideration here that reinforces the
point I am trying to make that can be expressed in terms of the primary
identity for Christians that arises from their baptism. Baptism inducts us into
a community broader than the nation state. The borders of the community into
which we enter through baptism are not coterminous with those however legally
defined and manipulated of the Australian state. Immigration and refugees admit
of no policy package that will solve the problem. The issues are structural and
rooted deeply in the dynamics of global capitalism and the exercise of
neo-imperial power by a range of nations.
The Christian church has little choice, I would argue, as to
what its priority should be if it is to take its transnational character and
the expansion of its borders through baptism seriously. People need protection
not borders. Baptism, properly understood is a subversion of the borders of the
nation state. Christians should be prepared to live out that subversion in
refusing to acknowledge the claim to the sacredness of borders at the cost of
the lives and wellbeing of flesh and blood people. People need protection, not
borders.
Doug Hynd
PS. My thanks to Jessie Taylor, those responsible for the
documentary particularly the asylum seekers who shared their stories and to
Michael Budde for his collection of essays reflecting theologically on the
Christian Church and globalisation, The
Borders of Baptism: Identities, Allegiance and the Church (Cascade Books,
2011).
