155: The MAGA Case for Open Immigration by Ammon Bundy - Gracearchy with Jim Babka

what's interesting to me is that there were people willing to call out the previous bad behaviors.

Amon Bundy is confused because he thought they were all fighting for the same thing. They were

all calling out the same bad behaviors. And all the sudden, those bad behaviors have been blessed

and he's wondering, wait, what happened? Instead of conflict and aggression,

here's governance built on grace. Welcome to Grace Arkey with Jim Bakka.

Welcome to Grace Arkey. Once again, it's kind of nice to have that live sense of it, isn't it?

Bill Protsman here with Jim. Today, we want to speak to a very specific segment of voters in the

United States. We want to speak to people who voted for Donald Trump twice. And maybe that's

just once, but we definitely want to talk to Donald Trump voters. And we want to do that because

we're going to make a Christian and constitutional case for protecting people who come to America.

This isn't entirely up to us. We've had a lot of help here. And Jim, I want you to talk about

Amon Bundy and remind people of who he is and why he's important to this. Yeah, I was going to

talk about a manifesto. It's a six page plus another four pages worth of footnote, six page

manifesto that he wrote. This is a guy who, you know, they made some, he and his family made

national news about 12 years ago. And we're not going to focus on that part of it. But the type of

national news basically pitted him kind of in that militia, almost wing of the right. So here's

a guy that believes that should believe 100% that, okay, well, Donald Trump's our guy.

And we did an episode where we talked about the Tea Party has betrayed itself. Right, right.

And this is another evidence of that whole thing coming on because Amon is looking at what's going

on with ICE and with the immigrant. And he is having a extreme pang of consciousness. And all the

people who looked at him as heroes in the 20 teens have left him. They've left him. They think

his Jesus slid off his cracker. If not worse, some of them are actually angry at him. And the

Atlantic did this whole profile about him. So the document that we're going to go through is called

the stranger. And we are going to put a link to the show notes. We are not going to sit here and

read it to you. All I want to do is go through the points as many of us we can in the a lot of time

we have. There are at least eight things in this list to cover here today. I hope we get to

them all. But I want to hit some of them as many of them as we can. And I just want to say a

thing or two about each one of the points. But it's a six page memo. You have time to read this

chances are, but it's going to be in the show note. And I want you to go into the show notes,

grab the link for yourself, pull it aside, print it out maybe even so you can sit and read it at

your leisure sometime between now and the coming weekend. That's not a hard read, but it's very

direct. It demands attention, right? You need to spend time with it just a little bit. Yeah,

okay. So what I was going to ask you why he wrote great question. Let's all great question. He wrote

this because he there's this drive this human drive to be understood. And here he thought he was

fighting for a particular cause. He's gone one way. Everybody else went another. And he knows that

he's still on the principal path. And he's kind of wondering, wait a minute, did these people ever

get it? Like he's trying to appeal to the ones he thinks understand the ones who have some

principal left. The Donald Trump voters that he thought were his friends. Yes, so it's compelling.

And I think it's something very, very important to digest because the things that he states here,

well, they're timeless. And if you are a constitutional conservative, particularly of the Christian

variety, these should have been the positions you were holding, not just in 2020 or 2014 when

Amon first became famous, but in 2026. Okay, let's jump in. Okay. One of my favorites, the godly

right to migrate. Yeah, you know, what I found interesting about this section is he started his

entire essay in the very same place we start this show. We have a couple of metaphysical

priors that we bring to the show. The very first one on the list is where he starts. Genesis 128

talks about basically a dominion mandate to be fruitful and multiply. We were made in the image

of God. This Amago Day and this commissioning that we're given. The Amago Day is our premise.

And here he's saying, hey, everybody is part of this created order. Every human being has been given

this command to be fruitful, to multiply, to replenish the earth, to manage it. And that's where he

chooses to begin. And this section, he actually titled God's Law in the unalienable right to migrate

because what he's saying is that it is the case that we should have a strong preference

for the Sojourner, the stranger, as he's calling them here, we should embrace those people coming

here and show special Christian love towards them. The Bible repeatedly suggests that people that

are different from you, the Samaritan, yes, yes. And this theme comes up here. And I want to point

out a verse because there is this thing that happens. And it's part of the reason that I really don't

personally consider myself a conservative anymore. There is this thing that happens where they'll say,

well, the book of Leviticus says that it is wrong to be gay. Okay, all right, all right,

maybe we should take that seriously. If you're going to take that seriously, would you also read

this verse with the same degree of literal reading, okay? And if a stranger sojourn with the

in your land, you shall not vaccinate him, but the stranger that dwell with you shall be onto you

as one born among you. In other words, as if he's an American. And thou shalt love him as thyself.

Now, what people do in these situations that come with artful dodges to get away from this point,

they'll go, well, that was only to the people of Israel. Okay, but why was the other verse?

There's another verse about tattoos. Why was that for like we could, you know, there's about the

types of foods you can eat and the fabrics that you can wear. And there's a whole host of things,

right? You're supposed to have send your wife out to the tent when she has her monthly cycles.

She's not allowed to be in the house, right? There's all these things that we, that, that,

are we going to hold that with the same degree of literalness? And if you are, like if you're saying,

oh, well, I believe what the Bible says, well, here it is. It's as black and white as it can possibly

be. But somehow or other, this one gets dropped off the list. And I think it's good that he brought

it up. This is this is really important for for Christians who think to consider what what

level of meaning do you ascribe to these words? Yes. Is this a do it or don't? Is this a justice

kind of a prescription or is this a love prescription? Yeah. And to be clear for me personally,

although it's not important, we're really talking to the Trump people today. For me personally,

this would be one of the ones that should have stuck, right? Because it is about following the

way. Yeah, it's about grace. It's the continuing grace message. So you could have gone back

through and looked and said, which one of these things really have a lot to do with grace? And which

ones? Oh boy, oh boy, they really are about grace. And this would be one of them. This would be one.

Yep. Okay, undocumented pilgrims at Plymouth. Yeah. The second point in his statement is

America's founders and the reality of unauthorized, unauthorized settlement. Yeah, there are no visas

back then. No visas. You know, the pilgrims just came and other people continue to come. And

this happened right up until the 19 until 1920, right up until 1920 in American history,

with the exception of the Chinese exclusion acts in the 1890s. But even in 1920, there's still no

documentation. There's no passports in existence at this point. There's no the level of background

check that's going on is like nothing, right? Come here. You're well just came here. They just came

here. And but the thing that he's choosing to point out here that is uniquely important and

relevant to Christians who are of a conservative bent is that their forebears were the ones that came

here first. Puritans Quakers, Baptist, Huguenots, these were all what he calls religious refugees.

And it's interesting because I am not familiar with this book, but he actually recommends Charles

Carlton coffins the story of Liberty, which tells a 1607 story about a congregation of separatists

who first tried to go to Holland and then eventually came here and what they went through

between here and there. In fact, at one point, the men had left first to kind of go get set up

and the women and children were trapped by the English government from leaving.

And if they had stayed, they would have been punished up to the point of life imprisonment

and even execution for their dissenting religious views. But they fled. Now, this is by the way,

this is before the King James Bible has been written. 1607, that's a couple years before the King

James Bible. Like, this is the middle, this is the the Reformation battles going on in all Europe.

Big deal. And they come here. They come here. And how did they come? How did they come?

That was a hard way without permission. Yeah. Just under duress. We like to think about

immigration. Oh, well, my family immigrated from Germany or whatever, but they didn't immigrate

from Germany under the threat of persecution by the Germans. Some of them did. Some of them did.

But here, he's saying your tradition, your history is without permission. Yes. Completely without.

Okay. The third point here in Bundy's essay is protect persons, not papers. That is our

constitution protects people, not stuff. Yeah. And this is really super, super important.

Going back to that first point about the Amago day, you know, my view on immigration is not

open borders. Because to me, that's focusing on the wrong thing. I am about humans being able to

make and establish the relationships they want for themselves without interference from other

humans. Okay. People are allowed to make the friends they want to make. They're allowed to do the

business activities and the relational activities they want to do with each other so long as they

don't harm others by so doing. And by harm, I mean, materially, you lost something, you lost

property. You could show damages. You've been victimized physically. You have some kind of crime

to person or property. You don't have those things that they should be left alone. And it's

interesting because the focus that so many people have in this discussion is, well, my parents

came here legally as if there's some kind of special thing that they did, which in many cases,

they did not. As we've already indicated before 1920, these, the whole papers regime didn't exist.

And there were no immigration laws until the 1890s, having to do only with the Chinese.

The idea that a paper is the thing that's needed, that the papers, the important part, there's

people focusing on the border, the process, the papers, rather than the persons made in the image

of God. And he's making this clear here. He's going one step further. He is making a claim

that the fourth and fifth amendments, when they use language like persons and not citizens,

which is the way the majority of the document works. If you go out word hunt for citizen,

you find that in the amendments after the Bill of Rights. You don't find it in the founders

version as much. It might have been mentioned, but it's persons, persons, persons again and again

this is, this is really super important that if we focused more on the persons and we recognize

the constitution as personal rights or personal liberty, we would have to be inviting. It'd be the

only way that it would work. But what has happened to this person's ideas that lost in the sauce?

Do we have too many rules that I think that's one of the things we have to do here? I think we

have to revive it. And it is one of my quests, so to speak, to get people to think about this

better. So I just reject out of hand any arguments that say, well, we have to have some process.

I'm willing to compromise because I would like to make the situation better. But I'm not going

to ever give up on suggesting that it's persons seeking relationship. It doesn't matter if you can

spend what is it? What's the current price for a citizenship? There's been a bunch of

different proposals thrown out there. I'd stay off the Twitter for that reason, I guess.

Historical moral losers. We're not talking about people here, people.

No, but you know, he's saying that you can learn from America's moral failures and they have been

many. So you know, if we sit and talk about a Chinese exclusion act right now, how many people go,

oh, hurrah, right? They're like really for that. Like, that's, we recognize that's wrong.

They're the Japanese government. I mean, we don't say bad things. Okay. And then he tells a story

probably because he has some connection being out west to the Latter-day Saints and how they were

driven across the country. But even more relevant to this particular debate, Italian immigrants,

Irish immigrants, Japanese American internment, every single time one of these things happened,

they first, the first point to make is that they were a law. And just because it's a law,

does it mean it's moral? Right. And the second point is we're embarrassed. We're embarrassed by it.

So he lays out a standard. He says true crime is the deliberate injury of another's rights

and peaceful existence. Your very existence is a human being. We say the words illegal alien,

illegal alien. He says peaceful existence is not a crime. And that is a statement of principle.

And he, in fact, we're going to, I'm not going to, you know, the Catholics, the Mormons,

the Irish, the Mexicans, the patterns been the same. He lays out a four-step pattern that I

encourage people to check because once again, this document is linked down in our show notes.

I have to just quickly tell people about my experience of visiting one of the replicas of the

Japanese internment camps in Idaho. There are a few people out there who dedicated to maintaining

these sites, at least with some dignity to honor the people. And if you have a chance, if you

happen to be in one of the areas where you might encounter a camp like this, go, go. Read what it

is talking about. Allow it to work on you. And the next time that you see someone of Asian descent,

I'll remember the experience. Punish harm, protect, liberty.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, you know, we just finished with a point that was very similar

to this that peaceful existence is not a crime. But there's this wave that he does back and forth

where he's bringing the constitution in, which not long ago, people on the right,

professed fealty to, they really said they strongly believed in this.

And scripture, which in this case, he quotes Romans 13, Tan, which says,

love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.

Does no harm fulfills the law. There's a concept we covered this at the Zero Aggression

Project called equal liberty. Equal liberty means that you have all the freedom to do anything

that you want, anything that you want. So long as you don't do some harm to me in the process,

we have a line between us. There's a line that you can cross. When you cross that, we call it

harm. And then we start to talk about what the damages are. But up until that point, you're,

you're free to live. You're free to choose the life that you want. And so he's suggesting that there

is one standard, regardless of where you're born. Now, this is an interesting thing. We have

borders all over our country. State the state. So whether you're born in Texas or Mississippi or

Ohio or California, your rights are the same. And he's saying, yes, and whether you're born in

Brazil or Spain or Italy or China or Kenya. Yeah, pick a place. Your rights are the same.

When you come here, you should be under the Constitution. And the reason for the Constitution,

which he also talks about in this section, is to limit power of government. The reason that you

have laws is because there are times when people do harm other people. And we need a system or a way

of addressing that. But the law, all the rest of the time is love.

That's it. That's as far as it ever needs to go.

Ever needs to go. So I wish that the things that I was told my entire life, 50 some years

before this current administration. And by the way, every single one of them had been

violating the Constitution all along. And terribly worse and worse, as times gone by in my lifetime,

I'm not singling out one guy. What's interesting to me is that there were people willing to call

out the previous bad behaviors. Amon Bundy is confused because he thought they were all fighting for

the same thing. They were all calling out the same bad behaviors. And all the sudden, those bad

behaviors have been blessed. And he's wondering, wait, what happened? Where did love does

no harm to a neighbor? Can you not see the harm on the screen? America's inspired heritage.

Okay, we're focusing on the glass half full here. Well, there are a lot of people who believe,

I don't happen to share this view just to put my priors out front. But I understand where people

are coming from. It was raised in a world where this happens. And I know, especially my

Mormon friends think this way. And there are other denominations that do as well,

that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are basically inspired by God.

These were godly documents were given down to us. America is a Christian nation.

Now, again, we said we're talking to a specific group of people here today. I am not asking

anybody to agree to that premise. I'm not interested in debating that premise. We've discussed

that issue in other episodes. What I want to say here today is that when you have a statement

that says, all people are, quote, created equal and, quote, endowed by their creator with certain

and alienable rights. And quote, this is something that we still to this day aspire to. These are

ideals that we are supposed to be constantly reaching for. Just as we are constantly reaching for

spiritual goals and spiritual attainment, we are to be constantly praying for these things, hoping

for these things, and living for these things. And he argues, and I think a lot of people misuse

Romans 13. But there is one thing that you could say about the Romans 13 argument, which has to

do with whether or not God ordained government. And it says it was specifically designed to punish

wrongdoing, wrongdoing, actual wrongdoing. Well, we've already defined what wrongdoing is.

You harmed another human being. We can identify them. But if it's simply going about living your life,

like they've, they've taken to calling people who have immigrated into this country

invaders. They've routinely taken something that was basically the equivalent of a traffic

stop in terms of its level of criminality and called it a crime. They've chucked out these

divisions that we've made between police serving people locally under a code we all understood and

appreciated applied equally to all of us and mixed in the definition of every type of military

and bureaucratic innovation. They've federalized these things. They've constantly been stepping away

from a constitution that he is arguing was designed to help us live like Christians.

So the very device that is supposed to be there to help us, this is my problem. I don't think

it does make us better. But the very device that you claimed to believe was here by God's will,

made us a city on the hill is now being turned misused, abused and stretched by people that he

believed understood this question. See, again, you may get up hung up on the fact that, oh,

you're criticizing Trump. I'm not talking about him at all. I'm talking about you that claimed to

believe that these institutions that we have were Christian in their very nature. If, frankly,

they no longer are. And it's your fault. It's your fault. What's the action here?

No, your representatives. Repentance. Simple repentance. Repentance means to turn your way to go

wait, wait, okay, something's wrong here. I had it wrong. I had it wrong. And I want forgiveness,

and I want to move forward in a better fashion now. I want to be different. I want to be better.

God's judgment on America, on our nation.

This is a theme that the conservative Christians talk about a lot.

The judgment of God, the coming of the revelation of God, the nations of the earth being trapped

under an anti-Christ. The Old Testament prophets spend an awful lot of time on the judgment of

nations, particularly of Israel. Like, how does God view nations? And what do these consequences

arrive? I believe, and I think I can tell that Amon does too, that natural consequences arrive

for behaviors that are wrong, and that this is how God intends it. And I have argued that

my position as a mercy is the normal state of God. We don't get anywhere near what we deserve

for the things that we do wrong. It's the ways that we harm other people. But after a point,

it's like it builds up so much pressure that the system just kind of pops.

Judgment is now going to flow. And at this point, it's not God that sent it. It was God that was

holding it back all this time, and he's not really holding back anymore. He's allowing consequences

to arrive. Okay? And I kind of get the sense, I don't want to speak for Amon that he's saying the

same thing. And we don't have time to make all of his points here. But the first area that he says

this happens is there's moral consequences. Isaiah 10, one and two equals, woe to those who make

unjust laws and that right grievousness, which they have prescribed. We have this happening all over

the place right now. We have laws that are oppressive in nature. And then we are surprised when

people react badly to those laws. We are surprised when they are defiant. Wait, we just, you know,

we are the greatest people in the world. And we obviously meant so much good, right? And it

wasn't so long ago that we recognized as Christians, in many cases, that this was being done during

let's say the pandemic and in the way schools were being run in a host of other institutions where

you felt ignored, rejected, and even repudiated. And then you get the power. And instead of taking

that lesson with you as people who were once the stranger in your own land, you decide to make

another group of people the stranger. And it's not even a powerful group of people. It's not even

a people that deserve any of the blame for the political battles that we had. It's a group of people

that have virtually no power, so to speak. And then he talks about how God always spoke up for the

oppressed. So he quotes Jeremiah 7, where it speaks of the stranger, the followers, the widow.

These were the people that were supposed to be cared for. Remember this name of this document,

this manifesto is the stranger. And then again, he says that he quotes Jesus himself. These are

red letters here in Matthew 25. I was a stranger and you took me in and you clothed me not sick and

imprisoned and you visited me not, which by the way, quotes in the King James, so that even the most

conservative of evangelicals in this country will recognize that he is one of them. Okay? So these

people have forgotten the stranger and imposed grievous laws instead. And there's consequences to

this. Then he talks about social consequences and how this begins to break, how a nation begins to

break. This section alone is worth reading all by itself in the document. Then he speaks of

withering freedom. How freedom goes away and gets replaced by injustice. But he spells out a note

of hope and suggests, a month suggests that the blessing can be restored. The blessing can

be restored and he quotes Isaiah in so doing. So he comes back to this theme of equal protection

before the law that is that is he sees it not merely not merely recognize human beings for who

they are as they're pursuing their dreams is not merely a legal principle. It's an act of worship

in his opinion. The nation's acknowledgement that every human being bears God's image,

I got to ask the how question. Do you have any idea how to call for that practice?

I mean, we could say grace, right? But what does that mean? Let's give me an example.

I'm relating to this in a large degree and was moved by what he wrote because A, I come from a

tribe of people who thought this way, I've known scores, if not hundreds of them over the course of

my lifetime. And when I was attending Tea Party events and speaking to them, there were a lot of

those kind of people in the crowd and they loved what I had to say. Obviously, I don't believe that

all this artifice at the state makes us kinder and nicer to each other. So on a broad macro level

bill, I believe that we should not have the state, okay? Because what it means is that there's some

force, it's a pot of power and money that are very, very attractive to the average filled and

average is the root of all evil that corrupts our culture in many significant ways. People try

to grab that and use it as a shortcut as opposed to serving God. But I also think that you,

on a practical down home level, the most important thing that could happen in the entire immigration

debate is for people to get to know other people who could be impacted and affected by the situation.

Now, you notice I didn't say go run out and protest, although I do think it's been evident that

that has made an impact in Minneapolis. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm saying the thing that

matters, the thing that I think changes the heart in the inside. And I do believe, and I think

Amon shares this view that this is a hard issue, that if you got to know real people who would be

impacted by these circumstances, in fact, if you went one step further and served them,

served them, then I think your whole attitude about this would be much more biblical and much more

constitutional than it is at present. It would change you. And then you would see them

the way your Heavenly Father sees them. So what you've said is personal experience for me,

because when I moved to San Diego in 2010 and started going to the local coffee shops,

as one does, there's a local coffee shop, a chain, maybe three of them that are owned by an

Italian man. And when you go to his coffee shop, all the people behind the counter are here on

work feces and summer from Italy and other parts of Europe and summer from Central Africa.

And I got to meet one of these people, I met a bunch of them, but I got to meet this guy and

he was the coolest dude, right? He didn't speak English very well, but he always knew my name,

and we kind of like formed one of those relationships. So it's like, oh, good to see you this morning.

Well, at time pass. So in the 15 years that I've known this guy, he's gone from working behind

the counter of a coffee shop to being a business owner in his own right and becoming a US citizen,

together with his wife, who's also now emigrated a naturalized citizen and their two young kids.

And Jim, when you get to know somebody that way, and I don't know them well,

but I have been able to watch the progress of their lives together and their influence in the

community and their, you know, valued business owner members of the community now. And that,

to me, is just beautiful to be a part of that, you know, on the sidelines of that, that really speaks

to me. So here's the call, the call to action, right? It's really a call to an internal sort of

action though. Yeah, he kind of pulls everything together as you tend to do in a conclusion from

the time that people cross the Atlantic to come here, that religious tradition that he spoke of.

But that every person is coming basically to live out these image-bearing responsibilities,

the stewardship that we are all given as human beings to care for the world that we're in

and the people they're in. He's reminding us of this call, even from Jesus himself,

to love the stranger. And then he quotes a verse from Paul, and I think it's a really good place

to land. You are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and

members of his household. This is from Ephesians 2. And the importance of this statement,

which he doesn't spend time elaborating on, but I'm going to do it for you here, is that when you

attend a fellowship of believers, it's not slave and master, it's not male and female, it's not

races, it's not all these other things that we divide people up into categories for, and that people

even seem eager to be divided up into categories too. What should be happening in a space of worship

is a special nation is being organized, where all those things are put aside and the thing that

matters most is the humanity of the individuals in the image of God redeemed by Christ, coming

together to be part of a fellowship that wants to be like Jesus, not like a group of flags.

I have been, I have the saying that when I walk into a church and I see a flag, little on flags

on display or on the stage, I already know there's a problem here, because once again, the thing

is being emphasized is a nationality, for example, in this case. But that's not the design of the people

of faith. The people of faith recognize that everyone poor or rich, everyone, regardless of descent,

maybe they're even a Samaritan, can be good, and that the call is not to see people as

Bundy points out, as trespassers, but as neighbors. And the Bible is explicitly clear about this,

it's summed up in the second great commandment that covers the entire law,

love your neighbor, as yourself.