Biden’s border crisis is dangerous enough already, and it may soon get worse.

But his Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandra Mayorkas, paints a rosier picture, “We are preparing for the end of Title 42….We continue to enforce the laws of this country.”

Title 42 from the Trump era stipulates that until potential immigrants are tested and shown to not have the virus, they should remain in Mexico.

Title 42 was scheduled to expire 5/23/22. The Center for Immigration Studies notes, “Title 42 is the only thing standing between the current chaos at the Southwest border, and no border there at all.”

Biden has promised repeatedly to lift this provision, abandoning testing and opening the floodgates for illegal immigrants. But for now, his plan to abolish Title 42 has been blocked by a Trump-appointed judge.

Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures on 5/22/22 that the border crisis is acute. Marshall has visited the border and wants the president to do the same. The senator said:

“Maria, this is a human tragedy here…At nighttime, it looks like a war zone. There’s a sea of humanitarian crises here every evening. And every day, it’s lived out as well.”

The numbers of illegal immigrants swarming in is staggering. Writing in the Washington Examiner (5/19/22), Paul Bedard observed: “Last year’s 1.7 million border encounters is expected to reach 2.1 million, according to Princeton Policy Advisors, an economic analysis outfit that has correctly predicted recent border surges.”

The U.S. Constitution says it exists to “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.” Do open borders for any nation help achieve such lofty goals?

On a recent radio segment, I spoke with former Congressman, Allen West, who has seen the border crisis first hand more than ten times. He told me, “Government is supposed to protect people within [our national] borders. That’s their Number 1 duty and responsibility. If we’re not going to follow the rule of law, then what are we supposed to base the Constitutional republic on?”

He added, “America is not just a piece of land in between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and Canada and Mexico. It is a sovereign nation, and it should be regarded and treated as such.” How can a nation remain sovereign if it has no borders?

Some open borders advocates imply that it’s the “Christian thing to do” to just let everyone in—yet surely these same people lock their doors at night.

Rev. Erwin Lutzer, the author of We Will Not Be Silenced, recently told our D. James Kennedy Ministries television audience: “One of the big mistakes that Christians sometimes make is that they want to apply the ethics of the church to the state. I heard a pastor saying–I’m sure that he was compassionate and meant well–when he said, ‘Of course, we should invite people into America and basically have open borders because after all the gospel is for everyone.’ Yes, of course, the gospel is for everyone, but that’s not the role of the state. The role of the state is to keep order, to punish crime, and to keep its citizens safe. That’s the role of the state.”

Lutzer added, “It is important that the church welcomes everyone. That’s the ministry of the church, but that is not the ministry of the state.”

Meanwhile, critics of Biden’s open border crisis note that known terrorists are sneaking into the country—more than 40 on the terrorist watch list slipped into the U.S. last year alone.

Also, human trafficking is taking place, and drugs are pouring in in record numbers. In fact, Chinese-produced fentanyl and other drugs are being smuggled in through the southern border, and the results are making headlines.

Earlier this year, The New York Times reported (2/13/22), “Drug overdoses now kill more than 100,000 Americans a year—more than vehicle crash and gun deaths combined.” The open borders cause this problem, or at least greatly exacerbate it.

Kerby Anderson, the host of the syndicated radio program “Point of View,” recently told our D. James Kennedy Ministries television audience why he thinks the left pushes for open borders: “I think the hope is that these might be future Democratic voters. And so what we’ll do is we’ll just kind of incrementally allow non-citizens to vote.”

Anderson points to the recent move by New York City to allow 800,000 noncitizens to vote as an example.

Senator Marshall, who said our border is like a “war zone” right now, noted that the public safety department of Texas is trying to hold the line: “All of those people are doing their best, but they’re just simply overwhelmed. This is an unsustainable crisis.”

---

This article was originally published by JerryNewcombe.com.

We are often led to believe that it is the Christian thing to do to keep the southern border open. But is that really the case? This question is all the more acute in our nation’s battle against the spread of COVID-19.

President Biden is acting as if there were one standard in dealing with COVID for law-abiding American citizens and another standard for those who break the law—as in the example of the illegal aliens streaming through our porous southern border. Gary Bauer in his End of Day Report (7/29/21) notes:

“While the CDC is forcing vaccinated Americans to mask up again, and the big teachers’ unions are suggesting our schools might not reopen in the fall, Biden is leaving our southern border wide open. Six thousand illegal aliens are pouring across the southern border each and every day….These migrants are untested. They’re unvaccinated.  Many are refusing to take the COVID vaccines. And many are infected with COVID.” Furthermore, he reports that at least 50,000 migrants have been released throughout the country. And outbreaks of COVID are being reported in border detention facilities.

Dr. William Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, wrote an open letter in late July to the Secretary for Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra: “According to recent whistleblowers, children living in HHS migrant shelters are living in subhuman conditions….After enduring a long, arduous journey, these children are sent to camps where Covid is running rampant. In the girls’ tents, lice is left untreated while the boys turn riotous because of the poor conditions they are forced to endure during their detainment at HHS facilities.”

Meanwhile, Governor Greg Abbot of Texas is trying to close the border—in part to stop the spread of COVID—and yet he’s getting direct resistance from the Biden administration. The Associated Press (7/30/21) reports:

“The Biden administration sued Texas…to prevent state troopers from stopping vehicles carrying migrants on grounds that they may spread COVID-19, warning that the practice would exacerbate problems amid high levels of crossings on the state’s border with Mexico.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, tasked by Biden to head the border crisis, says we have to address the “root causes” of why these people are coming before we can seal the borders. One may well ask, “Why is that our burden?” And besides, that could take forever. It’s like saying that before we can administer first aid to a shooting victim, we have to solve the crime first.

The founders of America made it clear when they created the Constitution that their goals were to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Clearly, Biden’s open borders violate many of these key goals.

Dr. Richard Land, president emeritus of Southern Evangelical Seminary, says,

“Open borders is national suicide. Polls show us that 170 million people in Latin America would like to come to the United States. I don’t blame them, if I lived in one of those countries, I’d want to come here too. But we cannot absorb 170 million people.”

Such an overrun of our country could ultimately cause a collapse into anarchy.

Dave Kubal, CEO and president of Intercessors for America—a group dedicated to praying for our country—notes, “We are a nation of immigrants….I completely believe in an immigration system, but it has to be legal…94% of those people that come across the border, don’t show up for their amnesty case, and so they’re just living illegally in the United States of America.”

But aren’t open borders compassionate? Gary Bauer once told me, “To suggest that because God loves all human beings including migrants, that the United States must open its borders and allow literally millions of people to walk into the country would mean that God was endorsing the end of America as we know it. This country can’t support and pay for millions of millions of people coming into the country.”

But, again, aren’t open borders the Christian position? In his book, We Will Not Be Silenced, Pastor Erwin Lutzer writes, “I reject the notion that those of us who believe in secure borders are racist and lack compassion….without enforced border control, we have in effect, lost our country. The long-term consequences are devastating.”

The left often chafes at the idea of securing the border—although I’m sure these same people lock their own doors at night. How can our country be safe and secure if the borders are wide open? Isn’t it more compassionate to keep the borders closed, especially at a time when many illegal aliens are dying or getting sick in the migration—and especially as we are experiencing new and perilous strains of COVID?

Renowned Evangelical flagship Wheaton College has been embroiled in a controversy generated by the Facebook statement from associate professor of political science Larycia Hawkins that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. She made this statement when she announced that during the entire Advent season, she would wear a hijab, the traditional head-covering required of Muslim women when in public. Hawkins viewed this as an act of “embodied politics, embodied solidarity” as opposed to what she deems “theoretical solidarity.” Wandering around America wearing a hijab was Hawkins’ rather peculiar application of James 2:26: “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.”

Hawkins also strangely believes that her claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is not a theological statement. Perhaps she didn’t intend it to be a theological statement, but it quite definitively is.

In a justifiable attempt to discern how closely Hawkins hews to the Statement of Faith that all Wheaton faculty sign, she was asked to clarify her theological beliefs and subsequently to clarify her murky “nuanced” clarification (Her clarifying theological statement has a curious explanation of the Eucharist), at which point Hawkins took umbrage, arguing that her annual signature on the Statement of Faith is sufficient. She has been suspended, and Wheaton is under attack from within and without the Wheaton College community.

Poisonous allegations have emerged from those who detest the biblical orthodoxy of Wheaton and the cultural beliefs that emerge from it that Wheaton administrators and/or trustees are treating Hawkins unfairly because of hidden or not-so-hidden racism. Less poisonous but problematic nonetheless are complaints that the culture of Wheaton restricts academic freedom and limits diversity.

Hawkins’ suspension and the debate about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God reveal a troubling fissure created by a handful of Wheaton faculty members who tilt leftward on both theological and so-called “social issues.” This divide needs to be more comprehensively and clearly exposed to all Wheaton College stakeholders, including alumni donors.

With dancing-on-pinheads complexity, Wheaton urban studies associate professor Noah Toly, Princeton systematics professor Bruce Lindley McCormick, and Yale theologian Miroslav Volf have all assured the nation that there are strong (though abstruse) arguments to defend Hawkins’ theological view of the sameness of the god of Islam and the God of the Bible. But then there are others, like president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Dr. Al Mohler, Moody Bible Church pastor Dr. Erwin Lutzer, theologian Peter Leithart, and Christian apologist for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries Nabeel Qureshi, all of whom, though acknowledging the complexity of the theological issue, argue that the god of Islam and the God of the Bible are not the same.

What is most interesting about the debate is that those Wheaton professors most ardently supportive of Hawkins’ liberal-ish theological views are also those professors most ardently liberal on social issues. Coincidence?

Two of the most prominent defenders of Hawkins are also likely sitting port-side on the flagship Wheaton: Michael Mangis and Brian Howell.

Professor Michael Mangis

Dr. Michael Mangis is a psychology professor who on Monday, the first day of the new semester, shivered around campus and to his classes wearing his academic regalia (i.e., cap, gown, hood) to signify solidarity with Hawkins and to show his commitment to “learning,” which he asserts Wheaton has lost as evidenced by their effort to ensure that Wheaton faculty affirm theological orthodoxy:

The academic robe has long been a symbol of learning. And learning requires humility and a willingness to be changed….[The] college as an institution is refusing to learn. I’m going to wear this robe as a reminder and a call to us to return to learning.

I wonder if Mangis is open to learning and willing to change.

Christian parents of Wheaton students, Wheaton donors, trustees, and administrators should be deeply troubled by the comment that Mangis left under Hawkins’ initial Facebook post: “If you get any grief at work give me a heads-up because I’ll be leading my spring psychology of religion class in Muslim prayers.” Even liberal supporter Mangis could see the problematic nature of Hawkins’ theological claim even before the imbroglio began.

A young pastor and friend who attended Wheaton for both undergraduate and graduate school asked the question that parents, trustees, and administrators should be asking: “In what universe should Christian instruction include Muslim prayers?”

In an interview about the controversy, Mangis shared that he’s volunteered to teach about “white privilege” at a student-organized “teach-in.” No need for Wheaton students to travel to the annual White Privilege Conference when they’ve got ever-learning, ever-changing psychology professor Mangis right there at Wheaton.

In a biased Chicago Tribune “news” story yesterday, Mangis whined about lack of diversity at Wheaton:

We have been entrenched in a white male evangelical groupthink for so long….We need to get out of that. It has come by bringing fresh voices and new perspectives. But when you have those fresh voices, you can’t say you don’t sound enough like a white male evangelical. [Hawkins] was not sounding enough like the old school way of doing things.

Yeah, you wouldn’t want any old-school, white, male perspectives on the nature of God to interfere with political science professor Hawkins’ fresh perspective on it.

But wait. I’m confused. Those arguing that, yes, indeedy, Christians and Muslims worship the same God explained that such a perspective is old, very, very old, and espoused by a boatload of men, many of whom had the distinct misfortune of being white.

It is true that the ideological diversity of faculty members is limited by Wheaton’s intellectual and moral commitments, just as the ideological diversity of faculty members at colleges that formally espouse liberal intellectual and moral commitments regarding homosexuality and gender dysphoria is limited. What liberals really desire is the eradication of institutional places for orthodox theological views and conservative moral views to be taught. If one exists, they seek to regulate it out of existence or infiltrate it and change it from within.

Professor Brian Howell

Mangis wasn’t alone on Monday. With his solidarity snazzily embodied, anthropology professor Dr. Brian Howell also sashayed about campus in his academic regalia. Howell first came to my attention following the resignation last July of Julie Rodgers, Wheaton College’s most recent and notable bad hire. (Interesting side note, Rodgers was standing behind Hawkins at her recent press conference.)

Rodgers is well-known for her self-identification as a “celibate gay Christian.” She was hired in the Fall of 2014 as a ministry associate for spiritual care in the Chaplain’s Office to counsel students experiencing same-sex attraction. When she was hired many people who love Wheaton College were deeply troubled because of Rodger’s perspective on and seeming flippancy about homoerotic attractions as revealed in statements like this:

When I feel all Lesbiany, I experience it as a desire to build a home with a woman that will create an energizing love that spills over into the kind of hospitality that actually provides guests with clean sheets and something other than protein bars…. This causes me to see the world through a different lens than my straight peers, to exist in the world in a slightly different way. As God has redeemed and transformed me, he’s tapped into those gay parts of me that now overflow into compassion for marginalized people and empathy for social outcasts

A year later, in July, 2015, Rodgers wrote that she had evolved and no longer opposes homoerotic relationships:  “I’ve quietly supported same-sex relationships for a while now. When friends have chosen to lay their lives down for their partners, I’ve celebrated their commitment to one another.” Rodgers then rightly resigned.

After her resignation, president of the Manhattan Declaration and Wheaton College alumnus Eric Teetsel wrote on his Facebook page that Wheaton College owed Wheaton students, their parents, and alumni an apology for hiring her. Howell arrogantly and hostilely replied both to Teetsel and to other commenters:

Eric, you are being a jerk here. Wheaton does not need to “apologize” for Julie. She did not “affirm” or counsel students into same-sex relationships. She SAYS, if you will READ it, that she assumes some, in their desire to follow Jesus, will find themselves in same-sex relationships. I knew this would happen. People who make a living stoking the fires of the culture war would throw this down. “See, told you so! Gay people! It’s how they are!” I just wish you could be better than that.…

Sometimes bad behavior needs to be called out, and this sort of culture warring is un-Christian and reprehensible. I’m not impugning [Eric’s] salvation. Yes, he is a Christian. I just don’t think he’s acting like it right now….[Eric’s] post is just a smug little victory dance and is, well, jerky.

…

For the record, Eric was a student of mine (for one class) when he was at Wheaton, so, yes, I may take a condescending tone, but I will always see him as a younger brother and former student. That’s just how it goes.

As a parent of two Wheaton grads (who married Wheaton grads), I wholeheartedly agree that the Wheaton administration owed students and their parents an apology for such a terrible hire. The problematic nature of Rodgers’ ideas about homosexuality was clear before Wheaton hired her.

Leftist arrogance is on display when Howell claims that “this sort of culture warring is un-Christian,” while apparently believing his sort of culture-warring is Christian. Howell’s implicit accusation that Teetsel is stoking the fires of the culture war is absurd. It’s pyro-“progressives” who started the fires and unashamedly fuel them. Every politically engaged conservative I know sincerely desires for the cultural conflagration to be extinguished posthaste but not at the cost of sacrificing marriage, truth, and the eternal lives of those trapped within false religions or destructive ideologies.

“Progressives,” on the other hand, seem to want the fires to die down only after they’ve engulfed the entire culture. They would like theologically orthodox men and women to pipe down while children, teens, and adults become entangled in deception and confusion. Far too many theologically orthodox Christians have been silent in response to the pernicious ideas torching the earth.

I spent some time on Howell’s Facebook page to see if I could figure out which “sort of culture-warring” is  Christian:

• He’s glad about InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s controversial invitation to a representative from the far Left, homosexuality-affirming Black Lives Matter organization to speak at a recent conference.
• He wants America to stop talking about building a fence on the border with Mexico.
• He wants Nevada to go solar.
• He wants more persons of color in academia (I haven’t seen any posts yet about the dearth of conservatives—both colorless and colorful—in secular academia).
• He supports Bernie Sanders’ position on student debt.
• He opposes palm oil plantations that harm rainforests.
• He supports more government regulation of guns.

Since Howell posts a lot about injustice, I was eager to read his posts about the most egregious ongoing injustice in America—the genocide of the unborn—which became a huge national debate following the release of undercover videos that exposed the reality of abortionists’ view of humans in utero. I managed to find one post by Howell on this unspeakable American horror. He posted a piece from liberal Jesuit magazine America that he described as “a very careful and balanced perspective.” The article is an extended criticism of the Center for Medical Progress for what the writer believes is unfair, selective editing. The following day after intense criticism, the writer added a clarification that he opposes abortion. Howell posted his recommendation of the article prior to the clarification.

So, other than opposing unfair, selective editing of the undercover videos, Howell is silent on the legalized slaughter of the unborn.

Perhaps I overlooked them, but I also couldn’t find any posts about the gross injustice represented by the Obergefell travesty that imposed same-sex faux-marriage on the entire country—a decision with grave implications for children’s rights and the First Amendment.

I did notice a couple of Howell’s Facebook “likes” that are difficult to reconcile with theological orthodoxy. He “likes” Wild Gender, “an online art space born out of gratitude for the gift of full expression. Who would we be without those who walked so wildly before? As such, WG strives to provide a space for  queer and gender-variant art makers and purveyors to share work and praxis, aiming to amplify those with intersectional identities.”

He also “likes” Rainbow Moms which invites “Proud Rainbow Moms [and] parents of LGBTQ kids! We are proud of our kids, and we are here to support each other in our new community! What is NOT welcome: Intolerance, Religious rhetoric, Anti LGBT speech or links.”

While Wheaton is under scrutiny for the doctrinal beliefs of a faculty member and cultural application of those beliefs, perhaps it would be a good time to hear with clarity what Mangis, Howell and all other Wheaton faculty members believe about issues upon which theology directly appertains, like abortion, homosexuality, and gender dysphoria.

What is really revealed through this controversy is not hidden racism, white privilege, academic provincialism, or an institutional resistance to learning. What is revealed is spiritual warfare. The nature and intensity of the criticism directed at this small private college, which stands courageously for Christ and His Kingdom in the midst of an ocean of colleges and universities that stand arrogantly in opposition to Christ and truth, exposes nothing other than old-as-the-hills spiritual warfare. Make no mistake, doctrinal fidelity at Wheaton College matters.

---

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem

We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington. Click HERE to register today!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.