It's in the Code ep 160: “No Human Is Illegal, Pt.3”
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Allie Beth Stuckey tells us that our views on immigrants, immigration, and borders must be shaped by an awareness that God is a god of “order.” But what does “order” mean for her? And how does this shape her understanding of immigrants and immigration? Are there other ways to understand order? And what if god is understood in terms of compassion, or love, or redemption, or justice, rather than “order”? How might these notions shape our attitudes in different ways? Take a listen to this week’s episode as Dan takes us through these issues.
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Axis Mundi www.feyyaz.tv Hello, and as always, welcome to It's in the Code.
Series, as part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller.
I am very pleased to be with you.
And as always, I want to begin by saying thank you for taking the time to listen.
Thank you for supporting us and the work that we do with Straight White American Jesus and Access Monday Media in so many different ways.
And thank you in particular for this series.
It goes because of you.
You can reach me, Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller, SWAJ at gmail.com.
I keep this series going because of ideas and concepts and topics and themes that you bring up, feedback that you offer to episodes and so forth.
So we're coming up in the end of this particular series.
I've got a direction for where we're going in the next one.
I've got some ideas beyond that, but I'm always looking for more.
So folks, email me.
Let me know what you think.
Let me know what you think about this episode, these episodes, this series, you get the idea.
And as always, thank you in particular to our subscribers.
Thank you to all of you who joined us for our latest bonus episode, joining us live as we record.
We just can't do it without you.
And just want to acknowledge that and say thank you.
I want to dive in this week because as always, we've got a lot to talk about.
And I want to move through it in a relatively quick way, because I know we all have other things we have to do in our lives.
We've been, just for context and background, in case maybe you're you're coming in new to this, we've been continuing our dive into the right wing assault on empathy of all things.
And if this is not something you're familiar with, you're like, why in the world would anybody criticize empathy?
Invite you to go back, take a listen to some of the other stuff that we've been doing.
But we've been exploring the claim that essentially what's wrong with America is that we're just too damn empathetic.
We just care too much about other people.
And it's a discourse that I think is proving useful to some people because it really ties together conservative high control Christianity on one side, Christian nationalism on another, and also just the pet culture war topics of the right, because you don't have to argue your position.
If you can just say, well, the mistake is that you're identifying with those people at all, that you're listening to them at all.
It's a way of trying to basically just sort of short circuit any actual debate.
So it it ties together a lot of these discourses under a common target, which is essentially empathy rung run amok.
And of course, we've been tackling this theme by looking at Ali Beth Stuckey's book Toxic Empathy, which again to remind us, because I'm reading it, so you don't have to, right?
It is structured around what she defines as five lies that toxic empathy leads us to accept.
And as a reminder, I accept all of those lies as truth.
The things that she sees as lies.
And in this episode, we are concluding our exploration of the fourth of these lies, the fourth chapter of her book, exploring the quote unquote lie that no human is illegal.
This is her chapter on immigration.
This is the chapter where she advances, you know, sort of draconian, draconian, very, very strict immigration policies.
And as we've emphasized throughout, I'm looking at Stucky, not because she's stucky, not because she's popular, not because she has her own podcast, all that stuff.
I mean, the stuff's there and it's significant, but we're looking at her because she's not unique.
We're looking at her because lots and lots of people listen to her and take stock of what she says, and she gets big name blurbs on her book and so forth.
Why?
Because what she says isn't about her, it is typical of these broader right-wing discourses.
And that's why she's relevant to look at.
So I want to pick up here.
And in the in the last episode, we looked at what she gives as the biblical basis for advocating hardline xenophobic immigration policies.
And just as a reminder again, in the introduction, you know, I tell my students all the time with a book, like don't skip the introduction.
Read it because it tells you where the author is going.
And she says that her book offers a perspective on these issues through a quote unquote biblical lens.
She is speaking as a Christian and says that she's working through a biblical lens.
And we've seen time and time again as we work Through these chapters, that despite this claim, she doesn't actually spend much time talking about the Bible.
And again, folks, if you have engaged a lot of high control Christians and Christian nationalists and people in your world, you'll know that this is the case.
They will claim that what they're doing is all about the Bible, but they don't actually spend a lot of time talking about it.
She doesn't.
And when she does discuss it, it often comes really late in the chapters that she's working on, right?
So we've got these like 30-page chapters, and it'll be like 27 pages, 27, 25 pages in, and it's a couple pages of that chapter.
Like that's the kind of treatment she gives this.
And what we saw in this chapter, though, when she got, we looked at the biblical stuff, was particularly telling because she defended, excuse me, she devotes most of her effort, trying to give a rationale for why we can basically ignore what the Bible has to say about welcoming and supporting the foreigner, quote unquote among you.
And as I mentioned in the last one, there, there are a lot of verses about this in the Bible, and particularly the Hebrew Bible, many more than there are about anything related to queer identity or abortion or what have you.
And to recall her argument was basically this.
She's basically like, well, yeah, you know, the Bible says to welcome and care for the foreigner among us, and yes, it says to care for them as if they were one of your own.
But, but here's the caveat, right?
Here's the way of undermining the significance of that claim or that command.
But that has to be read against the backdrop of she says, God's character.
In other words, if we understand God's character, what God is like, and that's our sort of interpretive lens.
We're going to find that we don't really need to pay that much attention or hang that much weight on these verses.
Why?
Because for her, the defining feature of God's character is order.
That's what she highlights.
So what she argues is that God's order imposes a limitation on how we should understand or apply these commands regarding the foreigner.
Now, I pointed out in in that episode, the last episode, that the word order is not self-evident.
But Stuckey and those like her appeal to the word as if it was, as if saying, Well, God's a God of order, as if that tells them, well, okay, but what does order mean?
What does that require?
What does that look like?
How do you operationalize that?
What's kind of society is quote unquote ordered and what isn't, and so forth.
And what she and people like her do is they effectively impose their definition of the word as if it was the only definition, as if it was sort of self-evident that the way they define and use the word is how the word has to be used and defined, and it's a kind of again a way of stopping an argument.
So that way, what they do is they use their ideology to effectively color how they read the Bible.
So, and then this is a theme I bring up all the time, right?
When they claim that the Bible is anerrant or without error and is authoritative, it's not really a claim about the Bible.
It's just a way of legitimizing their own perspectives as beyond question as having authority and so forth.
Okay.
I rehash all of that because I promise that in this episode, we take a closer look at what order is for Stucky.
How does this word operate?
How does she understand it?
How do we fill it in?
And so here we go.
Okay.
And here's the long and short of it.
Within high control Christianity, within the kind of Christianity out of which Stuckey is working and speaking and in which she is influential, order names a structure of authority and submission.
Okay.
Order is about the exercise of power on the part of those with authority and acquiescence to that power on the part of those who are subject to that authority.
And you can map issue after issue and theme after theme of high control Christianity, and you can see this.
Whether we're talking about gender or sexuality or patriarchy or race or anything else.
And we've all heard the old saying that if your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
The same thing is true for this notion of order.
When we define God in terms of order, this is the defining characteristic of God for Stucky.
And when we define order as the authoritative imposition of will of what someone wants, and when we define order as requiring obedience on the part of others, this breeds a cycle of violence.
Anything that registers as an impediment to the smooth and unquestioned imposition of will is a challenge to authority and therefore a disruption of order.
And the only legitimate response is the enforcement of that order at any cost.
And anything like discussion or collaboration or negotiation or a change in direction, any of those kinds of things, those can only register as an abdication of power and authority because you are always giving in to someone else.
If you actually listen to them, be disgusted, if you rethink your position, you are not exercising absolute authority because you are acquiescing to somebody else, somebody who is supposed to be submissive to you.
You can't do that.
That's an abdication of power and authority.
And this would be, again, a violation of order.
Well, on the flip side, as all of us know, the experience of being subject to unquestioned, unreasoning, absolute authority, it breeds resistance.
Which breeds what?
A firmer imposition of authority.
You resist, they push back harder, you resist more, they push back harder, and we're often running in that cycle.
And this is precisely what we see in the immigration policy on the right, which is advanced by Stucky.
We have seen how she suggests that all undocumented immigrants and even legal immigrants are potentially threatening and dangerous, no matter how benign they may appear.
That is why the right right now is focused on limiting legal immigration and removing legal immigrants because they are all a potential threat.
All immigrants are potentially threatening.
They are all a threat to order, and so order must be a reasserted with force.
And on one hand, within this broad framework, okay, Stucky appeals to a lack of knowledge tied together with fear mongering to present the framework for this.
And again, I highlight this because this is so typical of the right.
This is what she says is on page 105 of her book.
She says, quote, as of 2020, there were fewer than 20,000 border patrol agents, many of whom are patrolling the border, rather than checking the backgrounds of detained immigrants.
The simple fact is we have no way of knowing how many terrorists, traffickers, or other criminals have infiltrated the United States.
End quote.
We hear the fear mongering.
We hear the concerns, you know, about violence and so forth.
We've talked about that.
I mean, you could say this.
We also don't know how many creative artists are entering the country, or how many potential entrepreneurs, or how many future Nobel laureates, or how many people who are going to contribute to the economy or whatever else is?
We don't know how many of them are entering, but that's not the focus.
Terrorists, traffickers, other criminals.
Here's a stat that stops people in their tracks.
You ready?
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So that's the fear mongering piece.
But within this, what is her response?
What does what does greater order look like?
Right?
Notice this.
She talks about checking the background of detained immigrants, greater detention, greater repulsion.
What would greater order look like?
And here's the key.
Would greater order be, for example, pouring money into the immigration courts so that asylum claims and other immigration cases could be adjudicated more quickly?
That would be a way of imposing order, but no, that's not what she talks about.
Would it be increasing staffing of the border patrol not to close the border, but to carry out all those background checks so it doesn't turn into a backlog and people aren't released, all that stuff?
Nope, she doesn't talk about that.
Would it be a more robust foreign policy engagement that works to change conditions in the countries from which people are fleeing to the U.S.?
Nope.
And she even dismisses that out of hand.
There's a sentence in her chapter where she's like, well, you know, we just we don't have enough space to even talk about all the things that could go on there.
It's just a way of evading it.
Is she interested in reexamining the past of U.S. foreign policy and colonialism and things like this and looking at how that might have contributed to conditions in those countries that are causing people to flee?
Nope, not interested in that.
Is she interested in involving in pouring resources into the education system and support systems to ensure that those immigrants already in this country can quote unquote assimilate and contribute to our cut to our common social well-being and help build this country?
Nope.
So none of those are what she means by order.
All of those would be ways of imposing order, if that's what we want to stay with for the sake, you know, for the sake of argument.
In other words, somebody could say, okay, like sure, I'm all for order, but here's how I think we should do it.
There's no discussion of any of that.
She's not interested in any of that.
Nobody on the right is interested in any of that.
And we could also point out, of course, she defines God's character as having to do with order.
Lots of other Christians say, well, you know, maybe God has other characteristics that are more important, like mercy or justice or compassion or redemption or restoration.
You want to draw on that theological tradition, there's a lot to draw on there, but none of those define Stuckey's God or the God of high control American Christianity.
Nope.
Order is about exercising power to enforce one's will, and what is right is right because it is an expression of will.
So order for Stuckey, it is only about keeping immigrants out and purging the country of those who are already here.
That's all it is.
And what better expression of this is there than wait for it, walls.
Because of course, Stuckey decides to spend her time talking about walls.
And in her discussion of walls and choosing this as her model for order and for border security and so forth, she blatantly works to baptize a favorite right-wing image of order by reading it into the Bible that she claims is so central in her thinking.
She's going to ignore all those verses about welcoming the foreigner and so forth.
She's going to focus on walls.
So she offers a few verses of preamble to illustrate what it means to say that God is a God of order.
And she concludes that by saying this, quote, God blesses his children by ordering our footsteps and bringing order to nations, end quote.
And then the next sentence, with no transition, no further qualification, nothing like that, transitions to walls.
Next sentence she says, Scripture depicts walls, both literally and metaphorically, as a defense against disorder and evil.
And here the pieces come together.
Here we find the linkage of the trope.
Foreigners are evil.
Right?
Walls are a defense against disorder and evil, right?
Walls keep foreigners out.
They keep disorder and evil out.
The move here is to say foreigners are disordered and evil.
And walls are the solution.
So in predictable fashion, if you know the Hebrew Bible, if you know how these discourses work, she cites the book of Nehemiah and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.
She cites some psalms and proverbs about walls.
She notes the metaphor of God's salvation as a wall or a bulwark.
And then she says this, okay?
And I'm quoting her because I really I want to make sure that we know this.
This is not implicit.
This is the stuff that people like Stuckey say.
She says this.
She says, I'm not offering these passages as precise policy prescriptions for American immigration law, but I do hope to demonstrate how highly God regards order, peace, and security for nations, and that walls or any form of strong borders are representative of them.
So here she is.
She's like, hey, you know, I'm not saying we need walls.
I'm just saying that walls are basically the only scriptural image that should inform our understanding of order or inform our view of immigrants.
You're like, if you're not saying the walls are the thing, then why focus on walls?
Why pull those verses out, many of them again, out of context and so forth?
Why pull those verses out?
Especially in the contemporary context we are with a president who wants his big beautiful wall and all that stuff.
Okay.
So I want to sum all of this up here.
What are we talking about?
When she is confronted, when Stuckey is confronted with one of the clearest teachings in the Bible, the command to welcome and affirm the foreigner.
She marshals all of her rhetorical resources to carry out the theological and biblical gymnastics in order to try and argue that the Bible actually commands essentially the opposite of what it says in such passages.
The effect of her reading of the Bible here is to dismiss all of those passages that command those who would call themselves Christians to care for the foreigner, to welcome them, to affirm them, to help them, and so forth.
It is for me a transparent attempt to baptize standard right-wing xenophobia as a core Christian teaching.
It's very clear that is the work that the concept of order is doing in her book.
Okay.
Now there's one more issue that I also want to get into related to this, just briefly, and it's pretty wonky.
You know me, I'm I'm a college professor, and I can put my wonky hat on.
So just stick with me for the next few minutes.
But I I think it's I think it's important.
And it would take a lot more time than we have here to develop this.
And I would love to hear from folks about whether or not this is something that's worth spending more time in in some context, whether it's here in a bonus episode, whatever.
Okay.
But here it is.
Stuckey makes another move in all of her discussion that is also typical of broader right wing discourse.
What she does is this she links divine sovereignty, the idea that God is sovereign or all powerful, that you know what is right is what God wills and so forth.
That's how sovereignty is typically understood within these discourses.
She links divine sovereignty to the sovereignty of the nation-state.
Just as God is sovereign, the nation-state is supposed to be sovereign.
So, in other words, God's sovereignty is expressed through the imposition of order, the imposition of will.
And the analog to this is that nation-state sovereignty, the sovereignty of a country like the United States, is expressed through the maintenance of firm borders and the regulation, effectively the cessation of immigration.
And here's a great statement of this, why this matters to her.
This is on page 117.
And I want you to just listen to the way that this flows.
She says, if a country has no borders, it has no sovereignty.
If it has no sovereignty, it has no legitimacy.
If a country has no legitimacy, it has no authority to create laws.
If it has no laws, chaos ensues, rights are lost, and citizenship means nothing.
A country without any meaningful citizenship isn't a country at all.
End quote.
Now we can see the exaggeration that starts this off.
If a country has no borders, right?
Standard right wing tabloid there.
This suggests that the U.S. has no borders, that they're just simply open.
It's just simply not true.
And from there, it's often rolling to the slippery slope that essentially your country just dissolves.
Now, setting aside the fact that the suggestion that the U.S. has no borders is nonsense.
It's utter nonsense.
Setting that aside, the point I want to make is that she is highlighting the standard modern conception of political sovereignty as it relates to nation states.
In other words, this is a question you probably never thought of.
I talk about it in classes sometimes.
Like, what makes a country a country, a modern nation-state a nation-state?
There are certain certain criteria.
And what makes a nation-state sovereign is that it has clearly defined borders, and that everyone within those borders is subject to its authority, that it is able to exercise a uniform authority within, you know, upon everybody within its borders.
Which is also, and I said this in the last episode, that's also why immigrants in the U.S. are subject to U.S. law, as are tourists and people from other countries who are here for other reasons.
Okay.
Now, this is such a basic idea that it will seem completely natural to us.
And Stuckey takes it as completely natural.
This is what a nation is, period.
This is what a country is, period.
But here's the issue.
This is where it gets wonky.
I'm not going to dive deep.
Okay, but here's the issue.
This is not what political sovereignty has always looked like.
This is a distinctly modern notion.
This is a notion, an understanding of political sovereignty that takes shape in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it's often dated or sort of marked as sort of fully coming into its own or really being, you know, sort of concretely, most concretely inaugurated in the Treaty of Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, so 17th century.
Those developments mark the emergence of the modern nation state as we know it.
And obviously, the nation state is now the dominant geopolitical unit in the context of global politics.
It is completely naturalized.
There are very few places you can go in the world and escape the structure of the nation state or being under the sovereign authority of some nation state or another.
But prior to this time period, prior to the 17th century, the nation state as we understand it, folks, it didn't exist.
And here's the kicker.
Neither did political sovereignty as we understand it.
And we don't have the time or the space to get into a further discussion of this.
I write about it in differing models of what's called territoriality in in my book, Queer Democracy.
If somebody's really bored and wants to go take a look, I'd love to talk more about it, as I say, if that's something folks would be interested in.
But what I want to highlight here is why this is a problem for Stucky or anyone who just wants to make the easy move of justifying their political or social positions by appealing to what they claim is a timeless, unchanging religious text.
Okay.
Remember, Stuckey says what she's saying is not just politics.
It's not just social theory, it's not just white identity, it's biblical.
So here's the issue.
Despite the fact that there are terms in the biblical text that are sometimes translated as sovereign, the kind of political sovereignty that currently rules the world is foreign to the biblical world.
Folks, it didn't exist.
Whatever the biblical text says, it cannot reasonably be referred or read as referring to a geopolitical configuration that had not yet even been imagined.
And so what?
Why does that matter?
Why is that significant?
Why am I walking us down this wonky path?
Because it shows, once again, that those who appeal to a supposedly inerrant, unchanging Bible, aren't actually drawing their views from the Bible.
To be clear, that is their claim, but it is not their practice.
Because if they were, they would have to either acknowledge that the Bible has no concept of political sovereignty as currently exercised, which they're not going to do, or acknowledge that the teachings of the Bible actually aren't unchanging.
Then whatever the Bible is, its meaning changes with the needs of the people reading it.
They can't acknowledge that.
And they can't acknowledge that the teachings have to be modified to apply to the present.
So instead of doing those things, they simply transpose a completely foreign and anachronistic set of concepts onto the Bible and then claim biblical authority for them.
So once again, we are not dealing with the teachings of a supposedly inerrant Bible, nor are we encountering the quote unquote word of God.
No, we're just getting right-wing ideology under the guise of this is what the Bible says.
The Bible says God is sovereign.
The Bible says God likes order.
Therefore, current contemporary political sovereignty means the imposition of order and firm borders.
You just can't make that move the way that she's making it.
Not if you pay any attention to the Bible that you say you believe in and affirm and to which authority you say you would submit.
And that's why we never, in my view, we should never let those kinds of claims stand unchallenged.
So all of that, that's a lot of stuff that she's doing with the with the concept of order.
And if we decode this, if we look at everything that's going on when the word order is thrown out, we see how much work is going on, how much ideology is smuggled into this, how many perspectives are there, we see it all.
Okay.
So there are a lot of moving parts to kind of tie this together.
There are a lot of moving parts within right wing anti-immigrant discourses, and they all aim at basically the same thing.
They aim to mask the fact that they are about maintaining the white Christian identity of America.
That's the real aim.
And they all aim to mask that by getting a veneer of legitimacy to those discourses.
Hey, I'm just, you know, I'm just saying that we we need an ordered society.
You don't have an ordered society of chaos, you don't have a society at all.
There's the false either-or reasoning, but we talk about all the time with somebody like Stucky.
Okay.
What I'm trying to highlight in this episode in particular is how appeals to order, or we brought that out to law and order, how they feed into this.
They are not truly about peace or order in the sense of just sort of non-chaos.
They are about order in the sense of how American society should be ordered, how it should be structured.
And they aim to maintain what those on the right are convinced is the true, authentic, proper, and even God given order of the U.S. That is what their aim is.
That is what quote unquote order is about.
And there's a punitive dimension to this that I talk about all the time.
It is about punishing all of those whose very existence or presence is perceived to challenge that proper order.
That is why the emphasis is always about enforcement.
It's about men in masks and unmarked cars swooping in and scooping people up.
It is about enforcing border policy.
It's about expelling people.
It's that's why.
It's punitive in nature.
And once again, Stuckey provides a useful window into a discourse that goes far beyond our own her own, excuse me, articulation of it.
If you're listening to this and you haven't read Stuckey, you don't know anything about her.
You say, well, God, I feel like I see that all the time on the news.
I feel like we've seen this for the last 10 years.
I feel like this is like MAGA World Immigration Policy 101.
Yes, it is.
And she is just part and parcel of that.
Need to sign off here.
I want to again thank everybody for listening.
Thank you so much.
If you're not a subscriber and that's something that you would consider doing, I would invite you to do so.
Really do invite you, Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller S W A J at Gmail.com.
Also hover around the Discord.
We've talked about this.
We're we're hoping in the future to start doing sort of what we might call like office hours on Discord where we're sort of there and engaging and people can ask questions and things like that.
Keep the questions coming.
We're almost done with Stucky.
We've got one more chapter.
I'm going to pick up on another book after this that somebody recommended to me.
Book about masculinity and masculine identity.
Take a look at that.
Again, I welcome your thoughts for what comes next.
So many ideas, so many things sort of stored up and mapped out.
Please keep those ideas coming.
Daniel, Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller, S W A J at Gmail.com.
