“Why Silence Is No Longer Holy.”

Minister Dearest Price, M.Ed

America is drifting into a darkness that feels painfully familiar. The kind of familiar that echoes the 1960s, when hatred was spoken freely and laws were weaponized against people who simply wanted to live. Today we are watching an American president use racial slurs against Somalis, Haitians, and immigrants from African nations and the country absorbs it like background noise. ICE raids in Minnesota intensify, communities live in fear, and somehow, we have grown numb.

But the Bible refuses to let believers become numb. Scripture rings louder than politics, louder than prejudice, louder than the cruelty we are witnessing today. God has always spoken clearly about the immigrant, the foreigner, the displaced, and the vulnerable. There is no ambiguity in His Word. He commands love, justice, compassion, and memory, memory of our own experiences, our own ancestors, our own history of bondage and deliverance.

In Leviticus, God says the foreigner living among you must be treated as your native-born and loved as yourself. That is not a suggestion; it is the heart of God. In Exodus, He reminds His people that they themselves were strangers in Egypt, that oppression once bruised their backs and uncertainty once filled their nights. Forgetting that history is a spiritual sin. And in the story of Christ Himself, we see a young family fleeing for safety into Egypt, raising the Son of God as a refugee in a foreign land. Jesus, the Savior, knew what it meant to be unwelcome.

The prophets warn us that God judges nations based on how they treat the vulnerable. Oppression is not a political position; it is a moral failing. When leaders mock entire nations, strip people of their dignity, and use government power to intimidate the powerless, it is not “policy.” It is evil. And evil must be confronted.

This moment is not about politics. It is about moral warfare. When Somalis are called names, when Haitians are insulted, when African immigrants are reduced to stereotypes, when families hide in fear from ICE, we are witnessing the normalization of cruelty. Cruelty is never from God. And the church cannot shrug its shoulders and call it “the way things are.”

We must speak. We must write. We must march. We must organize. We must push the truth into the world with conviction and compassion. Silence is not spiritual maturity. It is complicity. Comfort is not Christlike. Courage is. The prophets of Scripture did not whisper when kings did wrong; they stood boldly in the face of power and declared the truth.

The Gospel demands that we stand with the immigrant. Not because it is progressive or popular, but because it is biblical. Because it is holy. Because it is the heart of God. The Kingdom we belong to, not the country we live in, commands us to protect the vulnerable, welcome the stranger, defend the poor, and honor the dignity of every human being made in God’s image.

What we are seeing in America today is wrong. It is wicked. It is a spiritual assault on compassion and justice. And if the world is sliding back into the 60s, then the people of God must rise with the same fire our ancestors carried, prayerful, powerful, united, and unafraid. This is not the time to shrink. This is the time to remember who we are.

We stand with our Somali brothers. We stand with our Haitian sisters. We stand with our Hispanic family and every immigrant seeking safety. We stand with every child whose heart pounds when they hear a knock at the door. We stand because God stands with them first.

May the Lord strengthen our hands for this work. May He give us courage to speak truth, compassion to reach souls, and boldness to confront the darkness spreading in our land. May we not grow numb. May we not grow silent. May we rise in love, justice, and holy resistance.

Amen.