Opponents of Alabama’s immigration law rally in Montgomery, Ala., on Feb. 14. A leader in the conservative Southern Baptist Convention is calling for more fairness for illegal immigrants, including a path to citizenship for immigrants who will pay penalties.Twice before, the Southern Baptist Convention has called for the federal government to do something about illegal immigration.
But recent comments by Richard Land, a Southern Baptist leader and local pastor, at a recent evangelical conference on immigration mark one of the strongest calls yet from inside the denomination for fairness for undocumented immigrants.
“As Christians we confront the issue, ‘What does the Bible say about what are my responsibilities as a citizen? What does the Bible say are my responsibilities to the stranger in our midst?'” Land said in an interview following the G92 South Immigration Conference at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala.
G92 comes from the 92 references to “the stranger” — the immigrant — in the Old Testament. Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and interim pastor at Red Bank Baptist Church, was the keynote speaker.
“There at least 12 million undocumented workers because they came here and found work and we’ve allowed them to stay here for many years, and it would be unfair and not right to all of the sudden say, ‘We’ve changed the rules in the middle of the stream and you’ve got to go home,'” Land said. “We believe that they should have an opportunity to work their way through a probationary period to permanent legal status.”