"Lord, help us."

Someone I went to high school with recently posted a photo of a young child clinging to the bars of a cage—ostensibly in a border detention center—crying. The caption with the photo was, “This is what we’ve become. Shame.” One of my high school teachers commented, “This has been going on for wayyyyy too many years. I can’t even think about it. Lord, help us.”

Now, of course there are problems with the original post. The proliferation of decontextualized photos, memes, and Twitter posts that are sensationally shared and are treated as news or reputable analysis is highly problematic. An example of this was the 2019 viral video of the Covington Catholic High School student shown standing in front of a chanting native activist which has more going on than what is shown in the video but was immediately interpreted as the smugness and white supremacy of MAGA adherents. Complex issues such as U.S.-Mexico border relations, American immigration policy, the treatment of indigenous peoples, and white supremacy are incredibly nuanced discussions that cannot and should not be boiled down to 280 characters or fewer. We have no way of knowing that the photo in the original post was from a border detention center; we do not know when the photo was taken; we do not know why the child was crying; and hell, the caption doesn’t even clarify that this is referencing poor treatment of immigrants at a border detention camp!

But the primary focus of this blog post is the response from my former high school teacher. For the purposes of this argument, I will assume that the photo is indeed from a border detention center, and the child has indeed been separated from his parents, which is the reason for his crying. (It actually doesn’t matter if I assume this—my former high school teacher has almost certainly assumed this.)

The “Lord, help us” is what gets me. What the hell is the Lord supposed to help us with in this situation, exactly? Help us not put children in cages? What, pray tell, would the Lord’s intervention even look like? Begging for the Lord’s intervention in this manner suggests that our natural human impulses lead us to cage immigrant children, and there is nothing we can do by ourselves to prevent that from happening. It diverts all responsibility for this horrific action, denying that we are also responsible for fixing the solution. It treats the circumstance as inevitable, unavoidable. But this was entirely preventable. Calling upon the Lord to supernaturally fix the problems we created for ourselves is giving up.

 

 

Evangelical Christianity stresses the concept of humanity’s total depravity, which more or less means that we default to wicked behavior from the time we are born. This ideology helps explain the sense of powerlessness behind, “Lord, help us.” As a corollary, evangelical Christianity also teaches—whether directly or indirectly—that you cannot claim any credit for anything good that you do. Instead, God receives all the credit for anything good in the world. This follows from the concept of total depravity; if our default impulses are wicked and destructive, then how could we possibly ever create anything good? This ideology fosters a dependence on supernatural intervention to rectify the world’s brokenness, resulting in our cries of, “Lord, help us”. It also rings of hopelessness and futility—why would we bother trying to fix the world if everything we do is evil?

But, none of it actually matters anyway, because Christians are in the world but “not of the world” (John 17:16). Ultimately, evil in the world doesn’t particularly matter because Christians are to “set your hearts on things above, not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:8).

Christians should not be asking the Lord for help, but should be crying, “Lord, have mercy.”

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)