Keep Christianity out of this

As a non-Christian Maltese citizen, the blanket assumption that 'all Maltese are Christians' - and even worse, that our collective views on immigration (among other issues) should be airlifted directly from the religion we had foisted upon us as babies - is starting to get on my nerves.  

This week I lost count of arguments that began with "as a supposedly Christian country", and carried on with "we should be doing this, that or the other" (or, even worse, arguments that talk about 'morality' and 'Christianity' as if the two words were interchangeable... when so much of the evidence points in the opposite direction).

This would be annoying, even if all these arguments presented a coherent version of Christian morality. But they don't. In fact, I have heard Jesus Christ used to support arguments both for and against the proposed deportation of 45 Somali asylum seekers, without processing their application for asylum.

Examples include the former director of the Jesuit Refugee Services (a Jesuit priest) who wrote an article last week questioning whether racism is in any way compatible with Malta's 'Christian identity'. Similar arguments have been aired elsewhere, and underpinning them all is an appeal to the emotive force of Christianity as a justification for one's moral stand on any given topic.

I sympathise with these concerns when applied to racism, but it is nonetheless a dangerously flawed way of presenting the argument. Non-Christians like myself have no reason to be particularly impressed by appeals to Jesus Christ... any more than a Christian would be impressed by arguments appealing to Mohammed, Buddha or Chairman Mao.

Personally I would have thought an argument against illegal mass-deportation, in open defiance of the human rights charter, needed no religion at all to serve as a crutch. Anyone who believes in the value of human dignity of human life (not just at embryonic stage, as is the case with so many Christians I know) would conclude that the proposed deportation was by definition deeply immoral: and if Jesus Christ happened to also share that opinion... well, as far as people like myself are concerned, that's just an added bonus which doesn't really mean very much at all.

But there is a more pressing reason why this sort of argument won't go very far. No one has a monopoly on what Christ would have said on the subject if he were around today - no, not even the Jesuits - and at the risk of sounding rather blunt: even if anyone did, what difference would it make anyway? Christ's opinion may be of interest to Christians... but the rest of us have no reason whatsoever to actually give a damn.

Even if we did: not all Christians argue the same way. I have just finished reading a long argument, posted online by a self-avowed Christian who was once a candidate for the defunct far-right part Azzjoni Nazzjonali, to the effect that 'real Christians' should support repatriation of all migrants, regardless of any humanitarian concerns.

I won't go into his argument because, like I said, I don't really care what 'real Christians' (or even fake ones) think we should or should not do. But it remains a fact that Jesus himself can't possibly be expected to agree with both these diametrically opposed arguments at the same time.

So if Christians can't even agree among themselves what their own religion actually expects of them under the circumstances... honestly, why should the rest of us value one 'Christian' argument over another which takes us in the clean opposite direction?

This is why claims to the effect that Malta is somehow a Christian country, and that this should have a bearing on how we behave, become rather meaningless in the absence of any consensus on what Christianity even is.... still less what a proper 'Christian' perspective on migration should be.

So think of this, next time you try and argue either in favour or against illegal mass-deportation, by appealing to a religion that not of all us necessarily share to begin with.