GOP Kingmaker and Chief Recruiter for the Left

Bryan Fischer may be creating his own category:
GOP Kingmaker and Chief Recruiter for the Left
As Right Wing Watch notes, last week the American Family Association did damage control for the third time on a Fischer-penned article. First, Fischer wrote:

Allowing Muslims to immigrate into the United States, a Christian nation by origin, history and tradition, without insisting that they drop their allegiance to Allah, Muhammad, the Qur’an, and sharia law, is to commit cultural suicide. We believe in freedom of religion for Muslims like we do for everybody else. But if they insist on clinging to their religion, they will need to exercise their freedom of religion in a Muslim country which shares their values: death for those who leave Islam, the beating of wives by their husbands, and the labeling of Jews as apes and pigs.
Immigration is a privilege, not a right, and our policy should be to admit to our shores only those with a commitment to a full assimilation to American culture, adopting our faith, our heroes, and our history. Someone with a Muslim background who wants to become an American had best be prepared to drop his Islam and his Qur’an at Ellis Island.

So ancient Israel offers a paradigm of what a sensible and sane immigration policy looks like. It’s simple: don’t break the law (that is, come in through the front door instead of breaking in through a window), convert to Christianity, fully assimilate (become an authentic American, not a hyphenated American), and support yourself. If you commit to those things, you are welcome here. If you don’t or won’t, perhaps it’s best for you to stay home.

But then someone changed it to read:

Does this mean that folks need to convert before they immigrate? No, but at a minimum, it would mean making sure that immigrants to the United States affirm and believe in the superiority of the Judeo-Christian system of values and truth claims over alternative value systems such as sharia law.
Immigration is a privilege, not a right, and our policy should be to admit to our shores only those with a commitment to a full assimilation to American culture, adopting our values, our heroes, and our history.

So ancient Israel offers a paradigm of what a sensible and sane immigration policy looks like. It’s simple: don’t break the law (that is, come in through the front door instead of breaking in through a window), fully assimilate (become an authentic American, not a hyphenated American), and support yourself. If you commit to those things, you are welcome here. If you don’t or won’t, perhaps it’s best for you to stay home.

There is so much left to work with that I may need another post but please note that hyphenated Americans are not authentic to Mr. Fischer. Also, I would like to hear him grapple with this verse:
Deuteronomy 10:17-19

For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.

So anyway back to the Christian nation stuff – do immigrants need to convert or not?
I actually got an email from a reader who speculated that perhaps Mr. Fischer is a plant of the left because he is doing such a good job pushing moderates that way.

14 thoughts on “GOP Kingmaker and Chief Recruiter for the Left”

  1. Over at Right Wing Watch, they addressed the notion that, when is the AFA going to say, ‘enough, is enough already.
    And Fischer, of course, pompously proclaims that he stands by everything he has said.
    I wonder what he’ll do if the AFA cans him?

  2. Pardon my French, but… Holy merde! Fischer’s ignorance is like some mythical horn of plenty that never empties…
    The reference to “ancient Israel” is particularly galling — because despite the confident assertions of some Townhallers that religious liberty was a Christian innovation, the Jewish concept of a semi-assimilated “virtuous pagan” who was allowed to dwell in Israel and to be treated (mostly) as an equal without converting to Judaism was around long before the time of Jesus.
    To be sure, in ancient times a ger toshav was subject to a lot of restrictions that are incompatible with modern standards of “religious liberty” — they certainly would not have been allowed to construct a shrine to their foreign gods (even strictly for their own use), and there was an expectation that they would adhere to most (but not all) regulations of kosher food, etc. Nonetheless, it was understood that they followed a foreign religion and were not expected to convert, and yet they were entitled to the protections of the Jewish legal system because they had assimilated to Jewish ethical norms.
    (The Hebrew phrase ger toshav, by the way, literally means something like “a wanderer who has settled”, and hence “resident alien,” but has often been translated “righteous Gentile.” However, it should not be confused with the 20th-century usage of “righteous Gentile” in reference to non-Jews who helped save Jews during the Holocaust. According to wikipedia, the Hebrew phrase for “righteous Gentile” in that specific sense is totally different: Chassidey Umot HaOlam.)

  3. You could rewrite this Fischer statement:

    Immigration is a privilege, not a right, and our policy should be to admit to our shores only those with a commitment to a full assimilation to American culture, adopting our faith, our heroes, and our history. Someone with a Muslim background who wants to become an American had best be prepared to drop his Islam and his Qur’an at Ellis Island.

    As this:

    Immigration is a privilege, not a right, and our policy should be to admit to our shores only those with a commitment to a full assimilation to American culture, adopting our faith, our heroes, and our history. Someone with a Roman Catholic background who wants to become an American had best be prepared to drop his Catholicism and his Popery at our shores.

    And you would be back 160 years in the thinking of the Know Nothings. On the left coast you could put the Chinese and their traditions into those slots. But not one of my ancestors would have come to America had the Know Nothings held sway.
    I think Bryan Fischer quite well fits into the mould of a Know Nothing.

  4. How?

    would mean making sure that immigrants to the United States affirm and believe in the superiority of the Judeo-Christian system of values and truth claims over alternative value systems such as sharia law.

    Citizenship requires allegiance to the constitution, immigration does not. Even then, it is unenforceable.

  5. (The Hebrew phrase ger toshav, by the way, literally means something like “a wanderer who has settled”

    In the verses that Fischer quotes (Deuteronomy 24:19-22), instructing the Israelites to leave some unharvested crops for “strangers, orphans, and widows,” the word ger appears without the modifier toshav — and similarly in Deut. 10:18, which Warren mentions.
    Thus, while the ger toshav (i.e., a foreign pagan who had significantly assimilated but had not converted) enjoyed a legal status close to that of a Jewish Israelite, a plain ol’ ger (implying minimal assimilation) had an inferior status but was nonetheless a human being to be treated with dignity and charity.

  6. Oh come on, Warren, that’s easy!
    While the Bible commands to love, it leaves open room for “tough love”. Just like love your neighbor really means do whatever you like to your neighbor under the premise that you love him, you just hate his sin. Anything at all that you do to him isn’t done to him, you see, but to his sin.
    So Fischer can “love” the foreigner living among us just exactly the same as he loves the homosexuals, the Native Americans, or anyone else. He just hates their sin.

  7. (The Hebrew phrase ger toshav, by the way, literally means something like “a wanderer who has settled”

    In the verses that Fischer quotes (Deuteronomy 24:19-22), instructing the Israelites to leave some unharvested crops for “strangers, orphans, and widows,” the word ger appears without the modifier toshav — and similarly in Deut. 10:18, which Warren mentions.
    Thus, while the ger toshav (i.e., a foreign pagan who had significantly assimilated but had not converted) enjoyed a legal status close to that of a Jewish Israelite, a plain ol’ ger (implying minimal assimilation) had an inferior status but was nonetheless a human being to be treated with dignity and charity.

  8. Pardon my French, but… Holy merde! Fischer’s ignorance is like some mythical horn of plenty that never empties…
    The reference to “ancient Israel” is particularly galling — because despite the confident assertions of some Townhallers that religious liberty was a Christian innovation, the Jewish concept of a semi-assimilated “virtuous pagan” who was allowed to dwell in Israel and to be treated (mostly) as an equal without converting to Judaism was around long before the time of Jesus.
    To be sure, in ancient times a ger toshav was subject to a lot of restrictions that are incompatible with modern standards of “religious liberty” — they certainly would not have been allowed to construct a shrine to their foreign gods (even strictly for their own use), and there was an expectation that they would adhere to most (but not all) regulations of kosher food, etc. Nonetheless, it was understood that they followed a foreign religion and were not expected to convert, and yet they were entitled to the protections of the Jewish legal system because they had assimilated to Jewish ethical norms.
    (The Hebrew phrase ger toshav, by the way, literally means something like “a wanderer who has settled”, and hence “resident alien,” but has often been translated “righteous Gentile.” However, it should not be confused with the 20th-century usage of “righteous Gentile” in reference to non-Jews who helped save Jews during the Holocaust. According to wikipedia, the Hebrew phrase for “righteous Gentile” in that specific sense is totally different: Chassidey Umot HaOlam.)

  9. How?

    would mean making sure that immigrants to the United States affirm and believe in the superiority of the Judeo-Christian system of values and truth claims over alternative value systems such as sharia law.

    Citizenship requires allegiance to the constitution, immigration does not. Even then, it is unenforceable.

  10. You could rewrite this Fischer statement:

    Immigration is a privilege, not a right, and our policy should be to admit to our shores only those with a commitment to a full assimilation to American culture, adopting our faith, our heroes, and our history. Someone with a Muslim background who wants to become an American had best be prepared to drop his Islam and his Qur’an at Ellis Island.

    As this:

    Immigration is a privilege, not a right, and our policy should be to admit to our shores only those with a commitment to a full assimilation to American culture, adopting our faith, our heroes, and our history. Someone with a Roman Catholic background who wants to become an American had best be prepared to drop his Catholicism and his Popery at our shores.

    And you would be back 160 years in the thinking of the Know Nothings. On the left coast you could put the Chinese and their traditions into those slots. But not one of my ancestors would have come to America had the Know Nothings held sway.
    I think Bryan Fischer quite well fits into the mould of a Know Nothing.

  11. Over at Right Wing Watch, they addressed the notion that, when is the AFA going to say, ‘enough, is enough already.
    And Fischer, of course, pompously proclaims that he stands by everything he has said.
    I wonder what he’ll do if the AFA cans him?

  12. Oh come on, Warren, that’s easy!
    While the Bible commands to love, it leaves open room for “tough love”. Just like love your neighbor really means do whatever you like to your neighbor under the premise that you love him, you just hate his sin. Anything at all that you do to him isn’t done to him, you see, but to his sin.
    So Fischer can “love” the foreigner living among us just exactly the same as he loves the homosexuals, the Native Americans, or anyone else. He just hates their sin.

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