The news on both sides of the pond, of late, from both legacy media and social media, has been a bit grim. Both the U.K. and the U.S. have been roiled by reports of crimes against women and young girls, crimes committed by men from other lands. Here in the U.S., just as an example, Fox News reported that a woman was kidnapped by a Honduran gang member, tied to a tree and threatened both with forced prostitution and with being murdered and having her organs sold.
In the U.K., there is a huge outcry as reports emerge of rape gangs terrorizing young girls for years, with claims of either neglect or outright malfeasance of the authorities when it came to how the situations were handled. Here is just a bit from that story, also from Fox News:
“The U.K. has for years been dealing with the revelation that a number of grooming gangs, often consisting of men of South Asian or British Pakistani heritage, exploited children for decades across the north of England in cities and towns including Rochdale, Telford, Manchester and Rotherham. A 2014 independent review of grooming in Rotherham found that the majority of perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage and said that it was ‘hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered.’
“They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone,” the report said. “Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.
“That report found that around 1,400 children were abused between 1997 and 2013. It also stressed that abuse ‘is not confined to the past but continues to this day.'”
One of the most twisted things to be espoused in all of this has been the idea that if people do not open their lands to anyone from everywhere, they are refusing to obey Christ’s command that we love our neighbors.
An idea that foolish and biblically illiterate gives me a two Tylenol and three ibuprofen headache.
In the account of the Good Samaritan given in Luke 10, Jesus told of the time that a man went on a trip and was accosted by criminals along the way. Those evil men robbed him, stripped him naked and beat him so severely that he nearly died. Shortly thereafter, a priest came by, and then a Levite. Both passed on without helping the victim. But then a Samaritan came by, and he tended to the man, put him on his own beast, brought him to an inn and paid for him to be taken care of. And Jesus gave this account to his own countrymen, people who often despised the Samaritans, to remind them that they were to act as neighbors even to people of other races.
So far, so good. But when that account is misused to teach that we are to be open and hospitable to those who hurt others, it misses something glaringly obvious: Jesus never said or indicated that his people, or anyone else, should be open and hospitable to the evil men who robbed, stripped and nearly killed an innocent man. The victim was a good guy/neighbor in the story, the Samaritan was a good guy/neighbor in the story, the criminals were bad guys and the exact opposite of neighbors, and Jesus had nothing good to say about them.
It is not gangs of rapists we should be neighborly to; it is the girls and women they would prey on that we must be neighborly to by making sure they never get that chance. It is not gangs of Central American thugs we should be neighborly to; it is the innocent citizens they seek to prey on that we must be neighborly to by making sure they never get that chance.
I watched a recent video of two Islamic scholars explaining that it is appropriate for Muslim men to conquer and make sex slaves of “infidel” women. Do I think all Muslims believe that? No. But not a single one who does should be allowed into any country that actually cares about the women and girls who live there.
There is a huge difference between neighbors and predators, and you will find nothing in Scripture that indicates we should treat those two categories of people in the same manner other than in approaching them all with the Gospel. And anyone who advocates for opening their society or neighborhood to predators is not being kind or neighborly and is certainly not being Christlike. When Jesus spoke of those who would harm children, he did not advocate being neighborly; he advocated a millstone around the neck and a deep body of water.
If you truly love your neighbors, it will necessitate you being against the predators that would harm them.
Bo Wagner is pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church of Mooresboro, North Carolina, a widely traveled evangelist and the author of several books available on Amazon and at wordofhismouth.com. Email him at 2knowhim@cbc-web.org.