Fact check: No — Jesus was not a refugee

There’s a narrative that circulates in progressive “Christian” circles every time Christmas rolls around: Jesus was born a refugee.

Not only does this take the focus from Jesus’ ultimate identity — the Son of God and savior of mankind — and channels it toward a destructive political agenda, but it’s also just false. Jesus was not a refugee by today’s standards.

On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie Beth Stuckey debunks this ridiculous argument that uses toxic empathy to push open borders.

“We can have a separate biblical defense of defending refugees and how many refugees we should accept and which refugees we should accept from what countries. That’s fine,” says Allie, “but the argument should not be based in the idea that Jesus Himself was a refugee. He was not a refugee in the same sense that we are defining refugees today.”

A refugee in the modern sense, she explains, is “someone who is leaving one country and going to another country to take refuge.”

But that doesn’t describe Mary and Joseph at all. They were simply obeying a Roman census decree that required them to travel inside the empire they already belonged to. This was an internal journey within the same province, not an international border-crossing or asylum-seeking flight comparable to modern refugees entering the United States.

Then after Jesus was born and Herod ordered the massacre of all boys under 2 in Bethlehem, the family — acting on an explicit divine command from God — fled to Egypt, which was also a Roman province at the time.

Mary and Joseph’s travels were never “a breaking of the law,” says Allie.

She reads from Matthew 2:13-15: “Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child and destroy him.’ And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.”’

It’s a “completely different scenario” than progressive “Christians” would like us to believe. Jesus’ family’s flight to Egypt was prophecy fulfillment, obedience to the Lord, and deliverance from a murderous tyrant. And it all happened “within the same empire,” meaning no laws were broken, Allie counters.

The progressive “Christian” argument that anyone who doesn’t support refugees — which today means anyone “who wants to come here from a poorer country” — is somehow against Jesus because He was a refugee is just pure manipulation, she says. It employs “toxic empathy” to get well-intentioned Christians to denounce “enforcement of sovereignty and borders,” both of which are biblical.

“You understand that God created laws and governments and borders and sovereignty for our good, for our protection?” Allie asks.

But there’s another part of the Christmas story progressives conveniently forget: Jesus and His family went home. After Herod died, God told Joseph to “take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel” (Matthew 2:20), but because Herod’s son, another brutal tyrant, was on the throne, they returned to Nazareth, where it all began.

That’s the opposite story of the modern refugee experience, where people often never return home because they can’t or just won’t.

What progressive “Christians” are doing, Allie explains, is reading the Christmas story through a modern, politicized lens. Their version is not only historically inaccurate, it exchanges the “good news of great joy” for a manipulative political strategy that cons people into supporting open borders.

They’re “not getting more into the heart of Jesus and more into the reason for Christmas,” she says. “[They] are instead trying to extract meaning out of the Christmas story in order to accomplish [their] political ends, and in so doing, are very distracted from what it really means.”

To hear more of Allie’s argument, watch the episode above.

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