Strangers in a Strange Land

While the expression Stranger in a Strange Land is usually attributed to Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote a highly popular science fiction novel by that name (Heinlein 1961), its roots are deep within Judaic and Christian thought traditions. The expression itself originates with the King James Bible (2008/1769) translation from the Book of Exodus in the Torah, the primary Jewish text that Christians sometimes refer to as the Hebrew Bible. In the passage in which it appears, Moses bestows a name on his newborn son to signify his people's experience of captivity in Egypt. Recalling how the Israelites managed to escape in search of the Promised Land, the naming is designed to emphasize a fundamental message deeply embedded in both faith traditions. “You shall not wrong nor oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). “The strangers who sojourn with you shall be to you as your citizens, and you shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33–34). It is a theme that the text returns to repeatedly, and through the emphasis of these repetitions, adherents of both faiths are meant to understand as a fundamental moral principle that they are expected to be compassionate to those who have been displaced from their own land. Further, if we look beyond these two religions, the related theme that we are meant to “love thy neighbor”—including extending kindness beyond your own community to encompass foreigners, strangers, and even enemies—is a foundational ethical principle expressed in some form in almost all of the world's major faith traditions (Lohr 2023). At this current moment in history, we are witnessing egregious violations of this principle. Across many parts of the globe, we see the enactment of policies legitimizing acts of forced migration, deprivation of freedom, health, or even life itself to members of population groups different from the social, cultural, ethnic, or religious identity of those holding power. Land-based claims of entitlement (in many instances disregarding issues of who originally occupied said land) and/or fear-based claims about “other” religions are being used as a pretext for all manner of mistreatment of those deemed unworthy of full human rights. Indeed, as Fowler and Reimer-Kirkham (2012) remind us, “…both good and evil have been and will continue to be done in the name of religion. Religion has been used to mask personal ambition; to legitimize slavery, colonialism, patriarchy and imperialism; and to subjugate peoples on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender” (p. 28). However, although we see religion being politicized in this manner far too often in these current times, it does not logically follow that we should try to precipitously distance ourselves from our own profession's historic roots. Rather, for as much as these religious roots may have positioned us within a dominant societal worldview that we now distrust to a certain extent, they have also served to solidify within our profession some enduring and pervasive core values that transcend time and tradition. Nursing's relationship to the presence of severe social injustice in our world is and always has been clear. We hold a profound professional obligation and duty to recognize injustice, to find ways within our sphere of influence to prevent or resist it, and to reach out to the strangers in our midst to offer compassion and care. These are fundamental and enduring ideas, core values that have been central to our professional identity for as long as we have understood nursing as such (Thorne 2017). It can be helpful to consider some of the diverse ways in which this idea of these enduring core values in aid of the stranger has shown up over the course of our professional history, across time, cultural, and national contexts. While nursing theorists of the 1960s and beyond tried to distance nursing's theoretical foundations from the overtly religious traditions within which they were first formally articulated, the idea of nursing as a compassionate response to the needs of humanity was never abandoned (Pesut 2012). Indeed, the idea that nursing cherishes a respect for the value of all life, including the idea that everyone has equal rights, has been described as fundamental to nursing's moral sensibility (e.g., Jormsri et al. 2005), and we have routinely referenced caring as our profession's moral imperative (e.g., Levy-Malmberg et al. 2008). The sense of responsibility we assume for our fellow humans, including assuring them respect and dignity, is universally acknowledged as is evident in the inclusion of these ideas across all of our nursing codes of ethics and regulatory frameworks (e.g., Jormsri et al. 2005; Shahriari et al. 2013). This “duty of care” is ubiquitously referenced as a fundamental basis for our practice. And, as Water et al. (2017) point out, although the duty of care is “regulated by legal, ethical and professional obligations” it “equally includes a moral commitment to care” (p. 8). Across the nursing world, even as it evolves and changes, we uphold that sustained commitment to the ideals of health equity and social justice, and understand both as central to the values that define our profession (e.g., Rudner 2021; Thorne 2014). And this is not simply upheld as a lofty theoretical ideal. As Slemon et al. (2025) explain, social justice is nursing's form of resistance against a world that “overlooks underlying structural, institutional, and cultural factors—such as oppression and domination—that reproduce inequalities” (p. 1). The more fully and deeply we understand these dominant hegemonic forces at play within our various societies, the more strategic and sophisticated our forms of professional resistance are becoming. The immigration crisis in the United States has galvanized nursing to take stock of its values and find new and creative ways to enact its fundamental commitments. The death of Minnesota ICU nurse Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026, at the hands of US Customs and Border Protection officers amidst a peaceful protest against the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) toward that city's immigrants (Silverman 2026; Wikipedia 2026) triggered shockwaves among nurses and nursing organizations around the world. In their expressions of outrage, they noted that this was a nurse doing his job, doing what nurses do when confronted with a social injustice, exemplifying that sense of moral duty we all believe in. The conviction across the profession was that this participation in an act of resistance was not an incidental choice, or a matter of personal politics, but rather fully representative of the core values we nurses seek to uphold in all of our lives and work (Chinn 2026; Freborg 2026; Laskowski-Jones 2026; Regalado 2026). Clearly, nursing refuses to normalize that which should never be normalized. And while most nursing acts of resistance do not appear on the world stage, they are occurring quietly, every day in every care setting, in how we engage with those we serve. In a social and public health crisis such as the current crackdown against immigrants in the United States, it is important to acknowledge nursing's resistance as not simply a fashion of the day, or a selective act of solidarity with one community or another. Rather, these are times to remember our roots—even the very deep and sometimes inconvenient roots that evolved out of the tenets of the faith traditions that have always recognized what constitutes responsible and moral action in the world: loving our neighbor and resisting oppression of the stranger in a strange land. It is our privilege and our pride to draw upon these core values unflinchingly, and to make manifest their aspirations with our actions. The author has nothing to report.