The God I believe in is not angry or punitive. It does not require obedience & constrictions.

God is loving, expansive, & kind. It is not an angry man seeking vengeance, it is the feeling of hugging a loved one & the sound of my friend’s laughter. It is within all of us, all the time.

It is not normal to not care about other people. It is not normal to see people suffering & just look away. Especially when those in power try to dehumanize certain groups, we have to resist the notion that anyone else’s suffering is somehow less important than our own. It will never be true.

Using a book about a poor man of color from the Middle East who fled persecution & was displaced as a refugee to justify turning asylum-seekers away & “mass deportation” shows you that it was never about Jesus. It was always about control, power, & bigotry.

I pray that those justifying mass deportations in the name of God never have to seek refuge. I pray that you never know the pain & struggle of leaving everything you’ve ever known behind in a desperate attempt to save your family. I pray that one day, you find the mercy Jesus instructed us to have.

If you see an asylum-seeker in distress & your first thought isn’t, “how can I be of assistance to this person, as a fellow human being?”, your humanity is severely tainted. We owe each other care, simply by virtue of being human. The day we lose sight of that is the day we’ve lost everything.

Turning people away at the border isn’t Christ-like. Jesus welcomes all, loves all, & commanded us to do the same. This is shameful.

EJI is proud to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Just Mercy. Named one of the most influential books of the decade, Just Mercy is a powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us and a call to fix our broken justice system.

Jesus was an advocate, not a bigot.

The fact that millions of evangelicals were convinced that a serial assaulter, pathological liar, violent racist, & hate-filled narcissist was the “Godly” choice will always be baffling & heartbreaking.

There’s no overstating how dangerous this rhetoric is, especially right now.

Anti-abortion groups really want you to believe that the only appropriate care for a dying pregnant woman is the induction of labor or a c-section. Anything else is ‘elective’ (ie, selfish) care.