Immigration, Discipleship, and Moral Responsibility

In “Divided by the Sermon on the Mount,” legal scholar David Skeel argues that contemporary public conflict is not merely political but theological, rooted in divergent interpretations of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek and love their neighbors, was he offering guidance for personal behavior, or was he revealing a vision of justice meant to shape society itself? Different answers to that question, Skeel argues, have produced competing Christian visions that still shape our politics and our churches today.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, advocates of what became known as the Social Gospel took Jesus’ teachings seriously as a public moral standard. Figures like Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch believed the kingdom of God Jesus described was not only about saving individual souls, but about transforming society. Caring for the hungry, the poor, and the exploited constituted a moral obligation. If Christians were serious about loving their neighbors, they had a responsibility to bring those commitments into public life, including political and legal reform.

Their critics argued that the Social Gospel misunderstood Jesus’ mission. In their view, Jesus was a savior, not a social reformer. The Sermon on the Mount was meant to expose human sinfulness and guide the moral life of believers within the church, not to serve as a blueprint for society or a mandate for political engagement. Mixing faith with public justice, they warned, risked diluting the gospel itself.

Though the term “social gospel” has fallen out of common use, this tension has persisted, simply reappearing in new forms. Contemporary conflicts, including sharp divisions over Donald Trump, reflect this same underlying theological fault line. One side understands Jesus’ teachings as primarily inward and private, oriented toward personal righteousness and church life. The other insists that discipleship must be evident in how Christians respond to suffering, injustice, and the misuse of power in the world.

What is striking is that many conservative Christian interpretations that have emphasized the Sermon on the Mount as a guide for private virtue rather than public justice have nevertheless remained deeply entangled with political power, particularly when social change threatened established hierarchies. That same dynamic continues to shape patterns of selective engagement, in which political involvement tends to be framed as appropriate when it supports institutional stability or cohesion, but approached more cautiously when it would require naming harm in ways that risk internal division or conflict with public power. It is in this context that arguments like the one offered in Public Square Magazine can be seen as reflecting one side of the divide, rather than as a neutral defense of institutional restraint.

For example, the article argues that expectations for the Church to act as a moral or political corrective misunderstand its mission. Drawing on Jesus’ refusal to directly challenge Roman imperial power, it frames Christian responsibility as primarily personal rather than structural. Jesus’ ministry is presented as one of individual dignity, spiritual redemption, and eternal justice, not social reform. As the article puts it, “The Church is not trying to save the world, however much we want it to, but rather the people of it,” because Christ’s kingdom was “not of this world. That distinction may sound modest and faithful, but it is not apolitical. When salvation is framed primarily as personal, structural injustice is recast as a condition to be endured and spiritually redeemed rather than confronted. This theology reallocates moral responsibility away from institutions with power and toward individuals who live with the consequences of that power.

Public Square goes on to ground their position in the global character of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, cautioning against American-centered statements. That framing, however, raises a serious question: can silence function as an “avoidance of parochialism” when the harm itself is transnational? Cuts to humanitarian aid, immigration policy, and militarized enforcement reverberate globally, often with lethal consequences for the poorest and most vulnerable. Research suggests that cuts to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding has already contributed to significant preventable loss of life and, if sustained, could result in more than 14 million deaths worldwide by 2030, including approximately 4.5 million children under the age of five. 

The disagreement among Latter-day Saints over how the Church should respond to public injustice ultimately turns on a deeper theological question about Jesus’ teachings. When suffering is visible and harm is foreseeable, how does Jesus define moral responsibility? In Jesus’ eschatological vision of judgment (Matthew 25:31–46), the decisive question is not private belief, personal purity, or even the formation of disciples, as articulated in Public Square’s argument for institutional non-intervention, but whether care was extended to those who were hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned, or excluded. The failure condemned is not overt cruelty, but omission, the failure to act. Jesus does not ask whether his followers preserved unity, avoided controversy, or protected the integrity of their institutions. He asks whether they recognized him in the vulnerable and responded accordingly.

This logic is consistent with Jesus’ articulation of the greatest commandments: love God, and love your neighbor. When pressed on who counts as a neighbor, Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan, where moral responsibility is defined by concrete action in response to visible harm. The Samaritan does not deliberate about jurisdiction, institutional mission, or unintended consequences. He sees suffering, and he acts. Likewise, throughout the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly centers the moral life on how people respond to those pushed to the margins: the poor, the sick, the stranger, and the socially despised. Love of neighbor is not framed as a private sentiment, but as an embodied obligation.

Read together, these teachings suggest a vision of discipleship that is unavoidably social. Salvation is not reduced to political activism, nor is the importance of personal transformation denied. Rather, love of God is understood to be made visible and evaluated through response to human suffering. This is the interpretive tradition with which I most resonate, grounded in the conviction that discipleship cannot remain confined to inward formation when harm is public and borne by identifiable people.

Seen in this light, the argument offered by Public Square Magazine reflects one side of this longstanding divide. Its emphasis on building disciples prioritizes inward formation and locates moral response primarily at the local and individual level. I find myself on the other side of this divide, persuaded that Jesus’ teachings stand within a prophetic tradition that calls not only individuals but communities and institutions to speak with moral clarity in response to suffering. For me, Matthew 25, the Great Commandments, and the parable of the Good Samaritan together suggest that what is left unaddressed shapes disciples as powerfully as what is proclaimed. 

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*In using the term “prophetic tradition,” I am referring to the biblical understanding of prophecy as a public moral witness, in which figures such as Amos confront injustice, challenge institutional complacency, and insist that covenant faithfulness cannot be separated from justice for the vulnerable.

Sources

Brueggemann, W. (2012). The practice of prophetic imagination: Preaching an emancipating word. Fortress Press. 

Heschel, A. J. (2007). The prophets: Two volumes in one. Hendrickson Publishers.

Heschel, S. (2018). A Friendship in the Prophetic Tradition: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr. Telos, 182, 67-84.