The Responsibility of the Church to the State in an Era of Mass Migration: The Leadership of Pastor Marc Boegner in Occupied France

Our current era of cross-border mass migrations raises complex questions about the protections that citizenship, naturalization, refugee status and asylum seeking do and do not afford. Policies for dealing with genuine immigration challenges can become vehicles for the prejudicial singling out of particular groups or inflaming latent xenophobia and racism. Christians, in the midst of this confusion, have had to reckon with their responsibilities, to their governments, to the displaced, and to the Gospel. This essay examines the response of the French Reformed church, under the leadership of Marc Boegner, to its government's antisemitic legislation, round-up and deportation of Jews to their deaths during German occupation from 1940–44. The Vichy regime of Pétain defended its singling out of immigrant Jews as a necessary solution to France's immigration problems of the 1920s and 1930s. Boegner was the first religious leader to protest the anti-Jewish legislation of the Vichy regime. The French Protestant church's acts of direct protest to the highest levels of government and its numerous acts of spiritual resistance—caring for immigrant and native Jews at great cost and personal risk—constituted a refusal to abjure their faith and Christian duties in the face of the state's violation of its own God-given responsibilities. Though this essay is descriptive, not prescriptive, the witness of the Protestant church under Boegner lays out some of the broader possibilities and limitations that inform the church's responsibility to the state on the matter of immigrants.