My church has a mission partner group where we welcome and help house and settle newcomers. Some of our congregation have even let them live in their basement units, helped them with finding housing, furniture, etc, and just helped them navigate how to do life here, like doctor's appointments, banking, school, etc. It makes us absolutely livid that doors are closing to newcomers.
Yea, this meme is an overall sentiment, but the church members that participate in missions are rarely the ones against immigration (from my limited experience, anyway).
This is funny, but would be more accurate if it said "MAGA Christians" instead of "White Christians".
I'm an atheist and most of the Christians I know are pretty accepting. It's almost as if they respect the teachings of Jesus and aspire to be more like him, unlike all too many MAGA Christians.
You know how they like to run around and call people who don't tow the company line RINOs, they are CINOs. Why, because as always with everything Republican, every accusation is a confession. Too be honest with you, I think calling them all CINOs would drive them absolutely bat shit crazy, but that's just me.
Much the same in Australia, though we now have more American style churches appearing and I'm not yet willing to judge the people who attend those
It's nice that when Australia's equivalent of MAGA came to Canberra (our capital) to protest, and they had far far fewer than our last workers rights protest
It refers to people generally supportive of things, but not where they live.
Typical topics are energy/transport infrastructure or housing for refugees/homeless people.
Missionary trips are often glorified vacations. “Voluntourism.”
High school/college kids come over, build a school and then bounce. It would be better if that money was spent hiring local people to build that school. It relies on this racist thinking that somehow those poor Black or South American or whatever people are too stupid to know how to build things/survive, and they need some random white kids to come in and safe the day.
It’s for show, it’s to make the “missionaries” feel good about themselves and get some nice profile pictures instead of actually doing anything.
There are cases of “hospitals” being started by random people with no medical training - one I’m thinking of killed lots of babies. Somehow a random unqualified white person is just better and smarter, that they can fix all the problems.
It’s such a fucking farce. The real problems of the global south are that the centuries of exploitation and colonialism destroyed those countries economies and ways of living. The pseudo charity does nothing but exist as colonialism lite.
(I am excluding the rare groups of actually qualified people. I’ve talked to nurses and such who have done good work in places like Haiti. But they also did the same kind of work here - the kind of people I met assembling fentanyl test kits.)
A lot of this is rooted in the media and politics of the community. I've watched older peers fall down the FOX News rabbit hole, becoming increasingly paranoid and hostile towards practically everyone outside the conservative base.
Churches that see Republican politics as a way of raising money will happily play along, further deluding their neighbors.