What Would Jesus Do?

A Christmas Reckoning

The Christmas story is about a frightened family, a hunted child, and a desperate flight to safety.

Christmas is not about comfort.

It is about a scared and desperate family who crossed a border to save their child. It is about love, mercy, and devotion to one another. The family’s allegiance was to something higher than borders, paperwork, or imperial permission.

If parts of the Christmas story no longer trouble us, no longer compel us to look past nationalism and tribe, then something has gone terribly wrong.

“I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.”

I am not a Christian. I do not attend church. I do not pray. I do not believe in miracles, resurrection, or divine intervention. But I am not unfamiliar with Christianity. I spent years inside it, and it has spent years around me. I know its stories, its poetry, its moral claims. And because of that familiarity, I feel compelled to speak plainly, even as an atheist, especially as an atheist.

This Christmas is about children.

Children separated from their parents.

Children terrified by armed men in uniforms they do not understand.

Children held in cages, facilities, and detention centers that insist on gentler names and kinder environs.

Children crying themselves to sleep in places where comfort has been replaced by procedure.

This is not metaphor.

This is not rhetoric or hyperbole.

This is happening now.

And it is being defended loudly and confidently by my fellow Americans, many of them claiming to follow the teachings of Jesus.

That is where the problem begins.

“What Would Jesus Do?” has been reduced to a slogan, a moral bumper sticker that can be affixed to whatever policy needs blessing. But taken seriously, it is not a slogan at all. It is a moral stress test. And when applied to the treatment of migrant children, especially the deliberate separation of families, it does not produce a complicated answer.

It produces an indictment.

The Christian story itself opens with a child in danger. An infant survives because his parents flee state violence and cross a border to save him. There is no paperwork. No lawful pathway. No careful weighing of precedent. There is urgency, fear, and the absolute priority of protecting a child. Whatever else this story is meant to convey, it does not depict hesitation in the face of a child’s peril.

That alone should end the discussion.

Instead, we are offered a sentence designed to anesthetize the conscience: their parents shouldn’t have put them in this situation.

It sounds reasonable.

It sounds adult.

It sounds like accountability.

It is none of those things.

It is a moral escape hatch.

Jesus does not attach conditions to children. He does not sort them by nationality, legality, or parental judgment. He does not ask whether their parents made wise decisions before deciding whether they deserve safety. Children are not policy variables in his moral universe. They are moral absolutes. To harm them, frighten them, isolate them, or force them to bear the consequences of adult systems is treated not as unfortunate, but as profoundly wrong.

His language on this point is not gentle. It is severe, because he understands how easily cruelty disguises itself as necessity.

When modern defenders of these practices retreat to “law and order,” they reach for something Jesus never confused with righteousness. Laws existed in his world too. They were enforced with Roman efficiency. They were legal. They were often brutal. His criticism was not of rules themselves, but of the habit of hiding behind them. Justice, mercy, and faith were the weightier matters. When those are abandoned, the law becomes a shield for cruelty rather than a guide for humanity.

Blame completes the transformation. If suffering can be assigned to someone else’s bad choices, then responsibility evaporates. Jesus addresses this instinct directly in what may be his most devastating story for the self-satisfied: the Good Samaritan.

A man is beaten, stripped, and left for dead on the side of the road. Two respected figures pass by him, see him clearly, and keep walking. They have reasons. They have obligations. They have rules that explain their distance. Then a Samaritan arrives. A foreigner. An outsider. A man despised by the audience Jesus is speaking to, then and now.

The Samaritan does not ask why the man was traveling. He does not inquire about fault. He does not calculate whether helping will encourage future violence. He stops. He binds wounds. He carries the injured man to safety. He pays for his care.

When Jesus asks who proved to be a neighbor, the answer is unavoidable.

Not the ones with reasons.

The one who acted.

That is the story. And that is the indictment.

Not why the man was there.

Not what mistakes led him to danger.

Not whose fault it was.

The neighbor is the foreigner. Everyone else has explanations for why compassion was impractical.

And then there is the passage many would rather not read aloud: I was a stranger and you did not welcome me. When confronted, the defense is instantly familiar: When did we see you like this? Jesus’ answer removes all ambiguity. What you did or did not do to the least of these, you did or did not do to me.

The most chilling parallel is not the tyrant who orders violence, but the patriot who allows it. Pilate does not strike the blow. He washes his hands. He distances himself. He chooses order over justice and calls it neutrality. History has never struggled to identify the moral failure in that posture.

I do not believe Jesus was divine. But I believe he articulated a moral vision with devastating clarity: people before systems, mercy before procedure, children before abstractions. If your Christianity can watch a child suffer and feel justified, then that vision is not being followed.