By Colby Malsbury
What’s Joel McDurmon been up to ever since leaving the equivalent of an unsavory piece of solid organic material floating in the swimming pool of American Vision? Well, as he’s a man on a mission, just like his erstwhile mentors the Blues Brothers, he had to find an alternate venue from which to make mock at his God and his forebears, so he concocted the Lamb’s Reign website, an aesthetically appealing forum (dig that panoramic mountain vid on the home page!), but one as devoid of Christian truth as any Communist front church organization of the 1930s. The leopard has not changed his spots one iota. Let’s hope the site is at least monetized, so McDurr can afford to buy comfy beanbag chairs to sulk in when the rest of us fail to appreciate his impetuous cutting edge genius.
Free from the bondage of stifling probity, McDurr now has the latitude to engage in all manner of socio-anarchic pontification to the edification of his own ego and some guy named Lamont living in a Section 32 rat-trap – because of slav’ry, no doubt – but to no one else. He has engaged the services of a stable of slathering scriveners to help in this noble effort. Foremost among this editorial board – likely because he is otherwise unemployable – is our good pal John Andrew Reasnor, the vituperative ferret who was prominently featured in a preview of the up-and-comers within the ranks of alienism a couple of years back, and who has not failed to live up to his potential since. And lo and behold, on January 10th of this year he offered up another chapter in that staple of Alienist polemic that never gets old – a rant (or, considering his tone, more of a surly mewl) on how Biblical arguments defending the concept of meaningful national borders are inevitably ‘terrible’, and how it must necessarily follow that whomsoever uses such a line of argument must be terrible himself. Reasnor has the class consciousness of Marxism down pat. All he needs now is the equivalent of the Solovetsky Islands to deport us to, and his life could be considered complete.
We know we’re in for something special from Reasnor’s opening sentence: ‘While debating immigration with fellow Christians, I have grown very used to seeing the same bad arguments over and over again.’ Let’s be perfectly clear at the outset: Reasnor does not and never will debate. Oh sure, he’ll spue forth a myriad of libertarian talking points culled from the more egalitarian columns to be found in Reason magazine and, when his opponent calls into question the mere relevancy of such a patois, will pull the ‘EK-tually, you’re stupid!!!’ card, but that hardly counts as learned discourse. It’s the worst kind of virtue signalling or, not to put the matter too delicately, epistemological masturbation. If conversing with him constitutes a ‘debate’, then so does enduring a slate of near-illiterate trash talk during a session of Fortnite gameplay at 4 in the morning. In other words: he no doubt has found his niche over at Lamb’s Reign.
Reasnor gives us five ‘terrible’ categories of pro-border control arguments from the Scriptures, and it would behoove us to refute his refutations point-by-point.
God Ordains Borders
Well, we certainly can’t accuse Reasnor of being a shrinking violet. He begins his polemic with the most salient point, and proceeds to profanely jest at it. We do get what must, for him, be a most grudging admission: that God does indeed ‘respect and honor’ boundaries, as per Jeremiah 31:17. And, in an even more amazing admission, he does admit that national borders do indeed constitute a boundary. But so as to have any kind of a case, he immediately qualifies the Scriptural admonition with a bit of libertarian blat – that such boundaries should in no way ‘restrict the free travel of non-criminals’ and that any nation that attempts to do so is engaging in ‘perpetual executive action’. Call me nit-picky, but this strikes me as being just a wee bit Pharisaical and extra-Biblical. Unless Reasnor practices what he preaches and lets hordes of negro youths cut across his property line as a short cut to the local 7-11 – provided they are ‘non-criminal’, of course. And how precisely does one check on the ‘non-criminal’ status of a potential border crosser if one is not allowed to run a check on him, anyway?
Reasnor then proceeds to claim history to be his erstwhile ally by boldly averring that border controls are a mere postmodernist construction, as back in the good ol’ days ‘crossing into Canada or Mexico was as easy as crossing from Kansas into Oklahoma’. Where to begin with this? Reasnor’s historical illiteracy must predispose him to think that the North America of a century or more ago was idyllic, and that criminals would never ever ever dream of crossing a frontier border. Well….save for the likes of Sitting Bull into Canada and the (quite literally) invading army of Pancho Villa from Mexico into the US. But as these two examples of documented fact were undeniably perpetrated by non-whites and thus tis racist to mention them, I guess they don’t count. Cheap victory your way, Reasnor. And while I can’t speak with authority on the situation in Mexico, I can say that any white Americans who wished to settle within Canada at the time were not able to permanently do so without swearing fealty to the Crown beforehand – Britain never was lax in amassing her fair share of tax revenue from her colonies, and that diligence was continued once said colonies gained their quasi-independence. To morally equate such a pattern of settlement with the banditry of marauding bands of Sioux avoiding the law by squatting in Saskatchewan for a season is frankly disgusting. Reasnor further embarrasses himself with another bold claim: ‘Europe was very much the same, so much so that the idea of presenting identification papers at a border was, for many years, considered a nefarious act associated with Nazi Germany as opposed to a normal part of life.’ I’m assuming the ‘many years’ he is referring to here are the years 1933-45, and perhaps a period of twenty years afterwards. That hardly constitutes the entirety of European history. Unless Reasnor seriously expects us to believe that Spain took a blase attitude towards border control with France during the Napoleonic era, or Austria with the Ottomans pretty much ever, or Switzerland with all its neighbors prior to its 21st century ‘awokening’? And needless to say, lax border controls enabled that great libertarian Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to travel unimpeded through Europe to the heart of Petrograd to work his wiles. As an obvious Creature of the Now, Reasnor ought not to delve into realms he does not belong in.
What happened to the Scriptural aspects of Reasnor’s case? Well, he disposes of that minor irritant in one fell swoop, with the classic claims of negation beloved of the Alienist: ‘From scripture, though we see texts honoring jurisdictional borders, we have no text prescribing any law or policy restricting the free travel of foreigners across national borders.’ This, needless to say, is Biblicist sophistry at its worst. God has a Telos to everything He creates. What Telos can there possibly be in borders rendered functionally meaningless? Just as a people is more than a social construct loosely bundled together because they all share some vague sociological philosophies and for no more innate reason, so to is the border that defines their territory more than a mere arbitrary line on a map. Reasnor has a very sterile Enlightenment understanding of what constitutes a ‘nation’. He quotes Deut. 19:14 (“Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s landmark….”), yet dares to insist that it only applies to personal private property. Does he not see how the respect shown to property bounds within the nation is a similitude of the protection God will ordain to the nation that loves Him via the bounds that define that nation’s dominion? With the corollary, of course, being that the nation who forsakes Him will be ruled over by foreigners (Deut. 28:43-44) whose criminal status, or lack thereof, is not mentioned and therefore irrelevant? Let us not overlook the still wider implications. As an example, marriage creates a defined border between a family and the rest of the world. If we are to be committed ‘free movement’ zealots, can we really be defenders of anti-adultery statutes at the same time? Could Reasnor, using his own Reason (hey, it’s his moniker, after all!) turn into a champion of open marriage some day? Given his presuppositional anarchism, it is a strong possibility.
Following the Pagan Example
Reasnor gets especially disingenuous in this section. Falsely assuming he has pwned all us Neanderthals who still think territorial integrity matters, he attempts to drop a bombshell….why, as it turns out, conservative border policy actually was practiced by those wretched Edomites, Moabites and Amorites in denying Israel free passage within their borders!!! (Judges 11:16-22). Checkmate, fascists!!!
And, uh….yeah. That’s about all Reasnor has to offer here. One little problem, though: what Israel was offering to do was anything but a free passage as Reasnor perceives such to be. Numbers 21:21-22:
And Israel sent messengers unto Sihon king of the Amorites, saying, Let me pass through thy land: we will not turn into the fields, or into the vineyards; we will not drink of the waters of the well: but we will go along by the king’s high way, until we be past thy borders.
Israel held back from marching forth gaily into Sihon’s territory without first sending forth a detailed statement of intentions, certified by Moses himself. In other words: the borders of the Amorites were fully respected, to the extent that Israel presented itself in legal fashion before the nation’s outposts, just as any traveller of good faith would at a border crossing today. I know that in Reasnor’s dreamworld of perfect anarchy the innate goodness in man would prejudge all ‘free passengers’ towards similar magnanimity, but such has never been the case, nor will it ever be so. These utopian blinders, however, allow Reasnor to illogically conclude that the ‘strict border controls’ (his words) of Israel’s enemies followed naturally from their lost pagan state. Hogwash! Polydoros of Sparta, a pagan, said “If you worship your enemy, you are defeated. If you adopt your enemy’s religion, you are enslaved. If you breed with your enemy, you are destroyed.” Is that statement to be utterly repudiated because it came forth from non-Christian lips? Particularly when we consider the words of Paul: ‘But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’ (1 Tim. 5:8) The infidel quite naturally yearns to protect his hearth and home, and that fealty also quite naturally broadly extends towards his own volk, as well. If he is unrighteous in his carrying forth this duty, he will be duly recompensed of his sin by God. By condemning all meaningful border controls as pagan, Reasnor thus throws out the baby with the bathwater. And he dares to consider himself a pro-life warrior???
The Gibeonite Vetting
This point is a rather peculiar one, and demonstrates that Reasnor had to stretch things pretty thin to get so much as five items for his masterful deconstruction. He uses the text of Joshua 9:3-18, wherein the Gibeonites used chicanery to masquerade as poor wayfarers in order to enter into a covenant of survival with Israel and to sojourn in the land, to claim that border control advocates use this example to advocate for a thorough vetting of all potential immigrants. Personally, I have never run across this position before, and I have been active in Christian anti-immigration circles for well over a decade now. But let’s give Reasnor his due and assume this to be the case. One of the primary lessons Christians are to take away from this episode is to always be on the alert for guile, lest we inadvertently find ourselves unequally yoked with strangers thanks to our thoughtless munificence. Well…is that not one of the primary reasons for border control to begin with? Or are we to take the manipulative footage of Mexican toddlers crying because it’s a bone-chilling 60° F down on the Rio Grande today to heart and give their parents all the free passage they want, lest we be accused of being ‘statist’ on top of being racist? Reasnor proffers some long-winded and pretentious folderol about how this situation cannot be considered part of the ‘normative standard of public policy’, but it’s really not worth delving any deeper into.
Sojourner vs. Foreigner
Again, this is a most esoteric argument on Reasnor’s part, in which he claims ‘some’ make a case for a very specific reading of the word ‘sojourner’ in the Hebrew lexicon denoting one who needs to attain permission to reside within a country’s borders, citing a very specific Center for Immigration Studies essay to bolster their case. Technically, these could constitute border control arguments, I suppose, but it’s not exactly being honest with one’s audience to dredge up arcane reasonings used only once or twice and presenting them as major missiles in the Kinist arsenal, I must say. Be that as it may.
The interesting thing about this section, though, is that Reasnor suddenly changes his focus in rather jarring fashion here. Up to now, his advocacy has been primarily for the allowance of ‘free passage’ across borders, vague as that notion is. Here, all of a sudden, he opens up the floodgates to inundate us with his real agenda all along: unlimited and untrammeled immigration. Thus, ‘Though there are distinctions between foreigners and converts and perhaps foreigner residents and foreigner non-residents, there is no scriptural argument for an illegal immigrant and legal immigrant distinction. Once immigrants cross the border, there may be distinctions, but none of those distinctions have anything to do with gaining permission to enter or barring individuals from entering.’ Oh really! And just how, pray tell, are these vaunted ‘distinctions’ to be perceived if a nation is not permitted to vet these wayfaring minstrels at the nation’s discretion, as you went to great pains to exhort in your third point, Reasnor? I grow weary of his legalistic nit picking in the negative sense (‘Nothing is said….’) and by this point, so should you. Fortunately, only one point left to go….
But the Walls of Jerusalem!
….Aaand I spoke too soon about legalistic nit-picking. For Reasnor truly outdoes himself in this section with an obnoxious and condescending (and needlessly drawn out) explanation that city walls cannot be defined as borders and implying that anyone who does so is a cretin. (‘Christians must do better’, ‘abuse of scripture’, and ‘one glaringly obvious trait of these walls’ are just a few of the charming phrases he bandies about here.) Autistic overstatement of a weak case might have wowed the internet denizens of 2011, but I think we’re all just a little bit more sophisticated than that to fall for this type of shock doctrine today. And a weak case it is indeed, for Reasnor never set any parameters in his article’s title that he would be exclusively addressing national border control. So let us just ignore his carpings and dwell for a minute on the efficacy of Biblical walls. It’s strange that Reasnor would dedicate an entire section to the Gibeonites in Joshua 9, and yet fail to make any mention in this section on the walls of Jericho, occurring a mere three chapters previously. Josh. 6:1 informs us that ‘Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in.’ Ergo, in previous times it was plain that the walls of Jericho were indeed a reliable organ for the repelling of invaders – which constitutes one of the primary reasons for controlling a national border. Reasnor even admits to this in roundabout fashion by pompously informing us that ancient walls were used for ‘military defense’, because I guess we couldn’t have figured that out on our own otherwise. Can God overthrow a line of defense, whether border or wall, against those His wrath builds against? Of course, and He certainly did so in Jericho’s case, with a result not unlike that found when a nation adopts an open border policy: ‘And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.’ (vs. 21) To say that this documents a normative condemnation of boundaries in general, though, is as erroneous as presuming that Jesus’s words in Luke 11:21-22 (‘When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace: But when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils.’) ushered in a prohibition on all self-defensive measures. Reasnor can kvetch about how ‘ridiculously insufficient’ the walls-as-borders argument is all he wants (and rest assured, he certainly does so), but he cannot countermand the innumerable references in the Scriptures to boundaries-as-protectors.
The ‘hedge’ that Satan complained surrounded Job in Job 1:10.
‘Thou hast thou broken down all his hedges’ in Psalm 89:40.
The hedge that the householder built around his vineyard as the first improvement in Matt. 21:33.
The shamefulness of the broken-down stone wall in Proverbs 24:31.
God’s determination to take away the hedge and break down the wall of His vineyard in Is. 5:5.
And so on and so forth. For a national border to have any substance at all, it must provide like protection to its inhabitants, as a type of our great Wall who will never fail us. Reasnor, in denigrating the spiritual aspects of this integral component of Christian nationhood, reveals himself to be steeped in paganism just as much as any Amorite.
And that’s no exaggeration, either. For Reasnor is betrothed to the untender mercies of aggressively Godless neoliberalism, entirely committed to the community-destroying creed this auld bitch demands as her just due. In the style of a Renaissance humanist, he tries to conflate the goddess unto a like place of honor beside his Christianity, but will soon enough perceive that she brooks no rivals to her affections. When that realization sets in, he will toss away the Path just as assuredly as eco-freaks/race hustlers/peddlers of uninhibited lusts of all sorts clamor to hurl the Constitution into the trash compactor when it is found to be incompatible with their pet projects. Or, more properly said, the Path shall toss him aside. Dare I say: cast him forth out of the bounds of the Kingdom. And that encompasses a lot of ground, and then some. I pray he perceives his grievous error before things come to this state.
In conclusion, all I can say is: well done, Joel McDurmon! You sure know how to pick em. I can’t wait to see what fruit your future endeavors are going to bear.