On 13 August, the main floor of the New Haven People’s Center was characteristically hot and unusually crowded for a late summer evening. About half a dozen lawyers, nonprofit workers, and labor union staff were there for a meeting of the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance. So, too, were scores of rank and file members of the New Haven Workers’ Association – Unidad Latina en Accion (a group that I worked with as a white co-conspirator for three years and am very thankful to for giving me permission to write this article, as well as some guidance as to its content). The subject of the meeting was ICE’s new “Priority Enforcement Program” (PEP), the latest instantiation of information-sharing between immigration and local law enforcement, which now threatens to make not only police stations, but also probation offices, drug treatment programs, and other elements of the criminal (in)justice system unsafe places for immigrants, places where they could easily be handed over to immigration and taken away from their family in chains. “It can happen to anyone” and “it can happen anywhere” were the twin themes of the evening.
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To me, and to a growing number of Jesus-followers in this country, it is patently obvious that the complex of policies, institutions, discourses, and practices known collectively as “the immigration system” violates every possible standard of hospitality—not to mention basic justice—that could conceivably be adopted within a recognizably Christian social ethic. Excellent work has already been and is currently being done to flesh this out by far more able theologians than me. A prime example of this is the excellent documentary Trails of Hope and Terror recently written by Iliff School of Theology professor Miguel de la Torre. This work – and the particular directions that the system is moving, especially in the ways that it is drawing local police into the task of “enforcing” the racialized boundaries of American civic life prompt another question: just what are the theological claims borne within the system itself? What theses about God, about morality, and about the nature and good of the human person are being articulated in concrete and barbed wire, and in the laws and practices that legitimize and empower these technologies of violence? And how does this question relate to the theological problem of race in America more generally? And how might practices like grassroots community organizing and direct action pose alternative claims that are in greater conformity to the gospel of Jesus Christ?

Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony
by Paul Kivel
New Society Publishers, 2013

What do post-Christendom and the “War on Christmas” have in common? They both acknowledge that Christian authority is being challenged in the Western world. For the post-Christendom camp this is a welcome change, since Christianity has been severely compromised due to its collusion with empire throughout history. For those concerned about the War on Christmas, it is an affront to their faith and their understanding of what it means to live in the United States. 

In his book Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony, Paul Kivel challenges readers to deepen their analysis. Deeper than post-Christendom and the War on Christmas is the massive system of Christian hegemony. Whereas the former ways of thinking acknowledge that norms are shifting, an awareness of Christian hegemony unmasks the framework that created and perpetuates the norms.