The Stranger and the Gospel:
An Open Letter to Tucker Carlson
Dear Tucker Carlson,
I am struck by the tension between calling oneself a Christian and repeatedly describing foreigners in the United States and Western Europe as an “invasion,” as though nationality or legal status could diminish their fundamental humanity.
The Christian tradition offers a very different moral starting point. In Matthew 25:35–40, Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” and then makes the meaning unmistakable: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
This is not an abstract principle. According to Matthew 2:13–15, Jesus himself began life as a child whose family fled to Egypt to escape Herod’s violence. The Hebrew Scriptures likewise command, “You shall love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33–34). And in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus places compassion above the boundaries of ethnicity, community, and belonging.
But for those of us fortunate enough to live in prosperous societies, perhaps Christianity asks an even more demanding question.
When people leave behind their homes, families, and memories because of war, persecution, poverty, or despair, should our concern begin and end with how to prevent their arrival? Or should we ask why they were forced to leave—and what we can do to make it possible for them to remain safely and with dignity in their own countries?
And if our governments, economic interests, foreign policies, or past actions have contributed to their suffering, should that not deepen rather than diminish our sense of responsibility?
The Christian response to suffering cannot be merely to protect the prosperity we have inherited. It must also ask what our prosperity obliges us to do for those who have been denied the possibility of living securely in their own homes.
Perhaps the most Christian question is therefore not simply:
“How do we keep them out?”
but rather:
“What can we do so that fewer people are ever forced to leave home in the first place?”
That, to me, is the deeper challenge of the Gospel: not merely to decide how we treat the stranger when he arrives at our door, but to consider what we can do about the suffering that brought him there.
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