At the heart of Christianity’s rapid spread has been the movement of migrants.
On January 15, 2024, Columnist Philip Bump published a disturbing article for The Washington Post wherein he highlighted the results of a survey conducted by CBS-News – YouGov. It showed that over 50 per cent of people in the United States “agreed with Trump that immigrants entering the United States illegally had the effect of ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country”. This article prompted Peter C. Phan, a Vietnamese-born US Catholic theologian, to write an essay for America: The Jesuit Review (June 2024 issue) entitled “Migration has always been at the heart of Christianity”.
Phan starts off by arguing that a sizeable proportion of those people who supported this racist pronouncement about immigrants to the United States are Christian. He then set about exploring, with the help of biblical texts, the beginnings of Christianity and argued that many of the early Christians were migrants. In doing so, Phan arrived at what he calls two axioms. “First, Christian mission induces migration, and, conversely, migration fulfills Christian mission. Second, there is a reciprocal cause-and-effect relationship between Christian mission and migration. The more Christian mission expands, the more migration of Christians occurs, and the more migration of Christians occurs, the more Christian mission expands.”
This raises the question of how the history of Christian Mission has been written. There was a tendency to believe that the work of mission was largely carried out by popes and bishops, and monks and saints. We read about a team being sent to a particular part of Europe with the blessing of a pope and under the direction of a bishop. But, as Peter Phan maintains, this top-down view of history “ignores the indispensable on-the-ground contributions of rank-and-file Christian migrants, male and female, whose work has not been recorded in the official annals of missions. Without these mostly anonymous migrants, Christian missions would not have borne permanent fruit”. Next, Phan looks at the remarkable expansion of early Christianity. “By the beginning of the third century, Christians were estimated at 0.35 percent of the population of the empire; by the year 250, about 2 percent; by 300, 10.5 percent; and by 350, 56.5 percent.”
Again, historians tended to emphasise the role of Church leaders in bringing about this expansion. However, it cannot be denied that a key factor in this growth was the work of migrant Christians who made their way around the Mediterranean world and far beyond. Phan quotes David W. Kling who, in his book A History of Christian Conversion (2020, Oxford University Press), argues that “the faith spread primarily through personal contact among family members and friends, between slaves, at social events, in the army, in the workplace, through travel and trade, and even during war.”
Phan concludes his essay with these two telling statements: “To be a migrant was to be a missionary, and migration promoted conversion.” Finally, he writes, “We Christians eat Christ’s body and drink his blood sacrilegiously, to our damnation, if we allow the bacteria of anti-immigrant rhetoric to introduce poison into that body and blood. Left untreated, that racist poison will be fatal to Christ’s body, the church”.
Columban Fr Tom Rouse is the Regional Councillor for New Zealand.
Mission Intentions
March - For families in crisis: Let us pray that broken families might discoer the cure for their wounds through forgiveness, rediscovering each other's gifts, even in their differences.
April - For the use of the new technologies: Let us pray that the use of the new technologies will not replace human relationships, will respect the dignity of the person, and will help us face the crises of our times.