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Sure? I'm not saying that those historically Catholic countries don't have amnesties or allow illegal migrants. I'm saying that they don't do that noticeably more often or more enthusiastically than similar non-Catholic countries.
To be honest, I don't really disagree with you. Open borders ideology is really downstream of christianity in general, rather than just catholicism. What we really need is western shintoism.
Again, sure. I don't agree with that understanding of Christianity, but I am very conscious of what I might term the 'neo-pagan right' or the 'post-Christian right', and the accompanying wish for a faith more robustly nationalist or even racialist than Christianity.
Christianity is fascinating for... well, a lot of reasons, and obviously the most important one is that it's literally true, but putting that aside and speaking more sociologically, Christianity is simultaneously individualist and universalist. God is the creator of all things and all people and the faith has a universal scope. Nothing is excluded; God is not parochial. At the same time, God is always encountered as an individual, and individual piety, and the unique relationship that God forms with every single person is likewise at the heart of the faith.
Where does that leave intermediate institutions? Elsewhere in the thread we have the start of a discussion about what this means for the church, and there's also a very rich well of Christian reflection on the concept of nations. What are 'the nations' as a theological category? Are they a problem, something merely temporary and to be abolished in the eschaton, and at worst occasions of idolatry? Or are they in some way intended features of God's design, or vectors of blessing?
I am more sympathetic to the latter view, and have talked about this before, but even granting, as I would, that the nations and their various searches for God are intentional features of his design (cf. Acts 17:26), the question of what their precise role in design is remains heavily contested, and that's where I'm going to end up in pretty fierce dispute with the new paganism, as it were.
It doesn't matter if you think nations should exist or not. You are not getting away from help thy neighbor, your choices are one world order or letting everyone who wants in. You quote Acts 17:26, I raise you Acts 17:27: "God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us"
I don't follow? What are my choices meant to be?
I think you can make a Christian argument for the existence of nations and national cultures being a positive good, and in fact I would make an argument like that. I'd say also that there is a universal moral law to which nations no less than individuals must conform, and that this implies particular moral obligations about how nations relate to each other. I think that means I can robustly support the existence of a community of nations. I am not obligated to endorse some sort of one world government, and I am certainly not obligated to endorse open borders.
What does Acts 17:27 have to do with that? That is indeed a justification for why God would set many nations and many peoples upon the Earth - that we would each seek him and reach out for him and perhaps find him. That is good and entirely compatible with the continued existence of nations.
And of course Revelations 13:7 is popular with the anti-NWO crowd at pointing precisely against this kind of thing. And depending on your reading of the Tower of Babel story, either God punishes hubris by scattering the nations, or God intervenes benevolently to scatter the nations for our long term health.
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