Truth, Hospitality, and our Haitian Neighbors
On TikTok, it’s a source of entertainment: the words of a candidate, absurd falsehoods about migrant populations abducting and consuming pets, set to a dance beat. It makes us laugh, or perhaps just allows a moment of relief from the unending tension of a high-stakes election season.
But for the people of Springfield, Ohio, especially its growing Haitian community, there is nothing to laugh about. The white-hot national focus on this community has resulted in fear, intimidation, and very real threats of violence.
“Stop spreading misinformation and memes,” wrote Bishop Kristin Uffelman White to the people of Southern Ohio, our Episcopal siblings to the south. “The situation in Springfield is dangerous, and joking about it only exacerbates the tension on the ground and gives credibility to the conversation.” In Springfield, Bishop White joined the people of Christ Church and Covenant Presbyterian Church this week to offer support to Haitians who have become scapegoats for our pathologically unresolved anxiety around immigration.
In recent years, the population of Springfield has grown to 80,000 due to the migration of between 12,000-15,000 Haitians. Though they are in this country legally, there is no denying the strain that can place on a community, from housing to education, even if such immigration can indeed improve the long-term hopes of declining rust-belt cities.
As Christians – and I believe as Americans – we must do our best to welcome the stranger, not demonize them. The work of welcome is long-term, committed work that reflects both our resolve and our cultural commitments. Our willingness to offer hospitality says much about what is in our hearts.
What clearly does not help is turning our new neighbors into scapegoats, memes, or projections of our anxiety. Some of the most dangerous movements in human history have used xenophobia as an easy fuel to power movements of hatred, turning the very real challenges of migration into tools of division.
The result is the threat of violence, which far too often leads to real violence. One writer for the British publication The Guardian has gone so far as to suggest that public figures who double-down on racist fabrications – declared false by Ohio leaders of their own party – run the risk of “inciting pogroms.”
That’s strong language that should give us pause. In today’s cultural and media environment, inflammatory words hold immense power to cause harm.
Christians are called to resist the seduction of violence and the lure of falsehoods. We are also called to love our neighbor and welcome the stranger. That isn’t necessarily easy and rarely points to clear answers about how a community shares the burden of immigration, but it does call us to speak and act lovingly, hopefully, and above all, truthfully.
I came most recently from Greensboro, North Carolina, a city with a decades-long history of being a place where immigrants found welcome and a new beginning. We saw that play out in daily life in our children’s public school, which had evolved to include a significant population of children from all over the world.
The principal said that our school performed consistently well because it was “a community of hope,” filled with students whose families were working hard to create a new life in our community. To be sure, it presented challenges, and it relied on a sometimes-delicate balance between the middle-class population and a higher-need community who shared the school. But it usually worked, and it was something beautiful.
That’s a story that we’ve lost amid the misleading and violent rhetoric of the day, which seems to me precisely the point.
We must support and protect those innocent people who’ve been recklessly placed in harm’s way. But our highest calling may be beyond that. As Christians we honor and celebrate the journeys to places of safety, dignity, and hope that allow us to better see the image of God in one another.
Bishop White concludes: “As Episcopalians in Ohio, we must stand strong and use the words and stories Jesus taught us. Together, we can confront this hate with love, this fear with compassion, these words of evil with the words of the Good News: that the way of Jesus is the way of God’s boundless and never ceasing love.”
How we welcome the stranger, how we show hospitality to those in need, says everything about who we are, and who we worship.
Faithfully,
The Very Rev. Bernard J. Owens