Like water, like a flood, and to what, wash you away? So it seems. I shared this cap last night, and some of the people who saw it felt it was a very legitimate sentiment because, in their words, the refugees currently congregated along the US border are “bringing violence with them.” For that reason some now fear for their families due to the refugee crisis.

Here’s one thing you can say about refugee crises: they are logistically complicated, not morally complicated. It is legitimately a logistical feat to come up with a way to gin up support for an unexpected population boom. But we do it all the time. Fellow Millennials: remember hearing about the Bosnian war between 1992 – 1995? The USA took 131,000 refugees during that crisis. Right now we’re dealing with 52,000. It is plausible we’ll eventually be looking at higher numbers; these, too, will not be unheard of: Vietnamese refugees numbered over 180,000, and Soviet refugees more than doubled that number.

None of these fluxes are ever easy. Sudden migrations are rough and they are roughest on the migrants; there’s a great documentary that covers the whole gamut of problems for a couple of Somali families called ‘Rain in a Dry Land‘ I’d recommend to get a sense of placement issues, poverty, culture shock, bureaucratic headaches and so on.  Adding to the complication of this situation is that the circumstances pushing people out of their homes in Honduras, Guatemala, etc. is heavily tied up in the drug trade, which the USCCB has already suggested we take a long, hard look at in our assessment of handling the crisis as a whole. I think that’s wise.

But the handling of refugees, especially child refugees, is still not morally complicated. This doesn’t mean there won’t arise moral complications in particular cases or for particular eventualities, but to say that, as it stands, the question of how to respond to the refugee kids we currently have at the border is not morally complicated. The morally upright thing to do is to mobilize our resources for dealing with refugees to protect these people from harm and to respect their human dignity. This is straightforward*.

But it’s not really amenable to the story the rightwing media likes to peddle, and they can’t miss a chance to ride their people-from-another-place hobby horse. So to introduce a level of moral complication — creepy-crawlies always thrive best in the shadows — they’re smearing the refugees coming to the US as dangerous. The language here is the language of moral hygiene, the suggestion is that they either bring violence like a contagion by their nature, or that they themselves are a kind of violent contagion. TeaParty.org has tagged every story related to the crisis ‘Invasion USA’ on their news blog. Hannity went and rode around in boats on the Rio Grande with Rick Perry and a ton of comically large guns. Seriously, look at this pair of doughy toads. Big 180 from Perry’s DREAM days, but I guess that’s what you’ve gotta do when you’re courting that sweet sweet Republican nomination.

Selling fear is how the rightwing nutcases keep their constituencies cowed and bilked out of money: be afraid of collapse, so buy into our cash-for-gold scams; be afraid of identity theft, so buy into our overpriced and underwhelming security systems; be afraid of refugee children, so donate to our campaigns so we can rescue you.

Remember those two kids Byron Smith murdered in Minnesota, after hanging out in his basement and waiting for them? In recounting the process of that murder, Smith claims Haile Kifer, eighteen, laughed at him when his gun jammed. The audio recording taken that day in his basement reveals no such laughter, only empty, sonorous silence, shattered by a series of gunshots. After the shot that ultimately ended Kifer’s life, Smith mutters to himself: “I’m safe now…I’m totally safe…I refuse to live in fear…I am not a bleeding-heart liberal.” I listened to the audio of the murders and his interviews with police to write a story on it, and the entire time these rightwing talking points kept cropping up (“bleeding heart liberal”, “not going to be a victim”) alongside these delusional, paranoid streaks of abject terror. Was he afraid? I think so. Should he have been? Of what, two unarmed teenagers? No. But everything he’d been told by the media he consumed made him absolutely demented with fear.

And why, for what? Fear sells. You can get people to tune in with fear. You can get people to do almost anything with fear: hold a gun to someone’s head and see what you can convince them to do. This works whether or not the gun is really loaded. Rightwing media has an unloaded gun, but how are their viewers supposed to know that?

Fear is antithetical to love; therefore it’s antithetical to the entire Christian ethical project. Take it from 1 John 4:

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sisterwhom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sistersalso.

Fear has to do with punishment: this reminds us that fear has to do with loss, diminishment, uncertainty. When you’re afraid of something, you aren’t certain. Loss is on the horizon, wavering like heat distortions rising off asphalt. It might come to pass and it might not, but you’re moved to self-defense by the prospect of loss. But love is about abundance, and abundance is about certitude. All of that which we associate with God — eternity, omnipotence, love — it’s all superabundant, overdetermined in both potential and meaning, as my teacher David Ford liked to say. Love isn’t thin, love isn’t frail. Love is rich, thick, always generative, always reliable. This is why it reproduces itself: the love God first extended to us should well up and spill forth and pass on to others and others and others; that’s the sense of John here.

On the other hand, fear encourages self-interest (because it has to do with uncertainty and loss) and in that way drives out love. In that way, it’s inimical to Christian ethics. (If you’re like: hey isn’t some fear good? then read Augustine’s commentary on the two types of fear.) The nutzo rightwing fear mongering brigade is, therefore, throwing a wrench in the constitution of a considered Christian ethical culture. So long as we’re steeped in fear, we can’t found ourselves in love. And as you can see from the fringey right response to the refugee crisis at the border, we can’t reason with love while we’re reasoning in fear: even charity takes on a veneer of abuse when fear has defeated the love of others and instilled a panicky, defensive focus on the self.

The solution here is going to be complicated; refugee crises are that way. They’re unique and nuanced and you just have to approach them case-by-case. But the situation itself is not morally complicated; this is the point Pope Francis made about it:

“A change of attitude towards migrants and refugees is needed on the part of everyone, moving away from attitudes of defensiveness and fear, indifference and marginalisation — all typical of a throwaway culture — towards attitudes based on a culture of encounter, the only culture capable of building a better, more just and fraternal world.”

Amen. It is not news to you I presume that rightwing media is a bunch of human hating garbage, but I hope it doesn’t have the final word here, or ever again. As in the Byron Smith case, the victims of this fear-mongering are usually the people who are most defenseless and easiest to abuse, that is, the young and the poor.

*Note: if you think it isn’t so straightforward but aren’t involved in the response the rest of the post details, obviously this is not about you. If you would like a post about you, that can be arranged for some ca$h.