American morality has never been uniform, but it is now perhaps as fractured as it has ever been. Still, there are moments when all the atomized outrage can condense and roll, together, in one direction. Such unifying events, these days, tend to require video that can be shared on social media. A horrifying act is caught on camera, and then, in the millions of posts that follow, we clumsily try to work out what feels like a consensus. Outside of the Super Bowl, these shaky cellphone videos are the only thing the entire country watches together. Somehow, we have become a nation that defines its morality through the interpretations of snuff films.

I’ve been thinking lately about how we react to these videos, and what they suggest about the value of life. In particular, I’ve been struck by a refrain that has been repeated, in some form, thousands of times on social media: that because “leftists” celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, the right no longer has a responsibility to care when someone like Renee Good or Alex Pretti gets shot dead in the street. This is crude, reactive, and memetic, of course, but, what’s more, it suggests that the fundamental belief that all human beings were created in the image of God and are worthy of dignity is conditional on what one’s political opponents say.

I started this series on religion and its role in organized dissent in part because I have been struggling with the question of how we value life at a time when so many of our interactions with our fellow human beings take place on screens. This floating and isolated existence has made it far easier, I believe, to forget or ignore the dignity of human life. Although I understand that it sounds obvious and even trite to point that out, I also believe that we will not climb out of the current political nightmare without a forceful reconnection with that basic principle. The politics of abject cruelty we now see—such as five-year-old children in cubbie hats being left out in the snow and then shipped off to faraway detention centers—will not otherwise be repudiated. A revival of faith, whether it takes place in a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque, seems like the only cultural force powerful enough to get people off their screens and into an actual space with other human beings who, whether through song or ritual, are at least gesturing toward a better, unmediated vision of humanity.

These thoughts and the current battle over immigration brought me to the work of the Reverend Dan Groody, a Catholic priest and a professor of theology at Notre Dame, who spent years working in Latin America. In 2009, Groody published a paper titled “Crossing the Divide: Foundations of a Theology of Migration and Refugees,” in which he grappled with Imago Dei, the idea found throughout the Bible that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. “On the surface it may seem basic to ground a theology of migration on imago Dei, but the term is often ignored in public discourse,” Groody writes. “Defining the migrant and refugee first and foremost in terms of imago Dei roots such persons in the world very differently than if they are principally defined as social and political problems or as illegal aliens; the theological terms include a set of moral demands as well. Without adequate consideration of the humanity of the migrant, it is impossible to construct just policies ordered to the common good and to the benefit of society’s weakest members.”

Last week, I talked with the activist Wayne Hsiung about some of the practical assets—physical infrastructure, collective belief—that religious communities bring to progressive activism. The point Hsiung made was that we cannot actually build movements without institutional support, which, at least in this country, still has to come from faith. My conversation with Groody was more philosophical, focussed on how we think, in the most foundational way, about other people, and how essential this is to political change. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell me how you became involved in working with migrants?

I fell in love with the people I lived with in Latin America. I lived there during three dictatorships. When I came back, I worked in parishes. I was interested in the life of faith of the Hispanic community, but I also realized that many of the people that I was working with were immigrants themselves. And then I realized that I didn’t have a theological framework to really even understand some of what they were going through.

In “Crossing the Divide,” you write that migration has been addressed by economics and politics, but not really by theology. Why did you feel this needed to be addressed by theologians?

I knew instinctively, as a pastor, that something of God was interwoven in their stories. And as I began to look even more closely to the Scriptures and other places, I recognized that Jesus himself was a migrant. Jesus himself was a refugee. In fact, I use this almost as the organizing understanding of God, who migrated to our human race, who in turn reconciled us to God, so that we can migrate back to our homeland and become naturalized citizens again in God’s kingdom, if you will. So there’s a way in which migration frames and can frame the whole understanding of the Scriptures from beginning to end. We come from God. We’re called to return to God. Migration is a metaphor that can be used to understand what it means to be human in this world. If that be the case, none of us are fixed or stayed and none of us have a permanent residence here in this world.

When I was working with refugees in Lebanon and Turkey and the Iraqi crisis, Rwanda, other places—you know, when everything’s taken away from you, God is all you have left. So we need a way to speak about who God is and who we are before God, and I think theology gives us a way of doing that.

I’ve noticed something similar in debates around homelessness and immigration: the church does enormous amounts of work on the ground, but theological questions seem to have been pushed out of the broader public discourse.

I did my graduate work at Berkeley, so when I was in California, I can remember one day I woke up and, literally, on the other side of the bed where I slept, outside the window, was a homeless person. And for me that began a long journey of trying to understand theology from the other side of the wall—not just from the perspective of a library or a room but from the streets and from the people who are living on the edge.

What you see in the church’s teachings called the seamless garment of life runs through homelessness, runs through immigration, runs through the elderly, runs through all other life issues. When I spend time speaking to migrants at borders around the world, I often ask them, What is it that you would want people to hear? Or if you could preach on Sunday, what would you want people to know? And often it’s about dignity. It’s about saying, We’re human beings here, and you’re treating us like we’re dogs.

The issue is these people have become nonpersons. I mean, they’re just not even seen. And I think part of the work of the church is saying, Actually, these people belong in a human community, and they belong to be seen, and therefore they belong in the discourse as well.

You make this core argument that all people are created in the image of God, Imago Dei. That’s something that many people would say they believe. But when you see the news right now, the horrific videos coming out, the responses to them—do you feel that idea is in crisis?

What we’ve also included in that understanding is that in the fall, we lost the likeness, but we never lose the image. There’s a deep core within us that’s indestructible—our worth and our value before God.

One of the things I often say is that if we can’t see in the immigrant or in the homeless or in people who are considered different from us something of ourselves, we’ve lost touch with our humanity. So I think that’s what’s at stake. We’ve deported our own soul, if we’ve really lost touch with our own humanity.

You argue that every person should have everything necessary for living a truly human life. What does that look like in practice if it’s not simply open borders?

The church recognizes that nations have the right to control their borders, but it’s not an absolute right. It’s subjugated to a larger sense of what’s called the universal destination of all goods. And what does the church mean by that? In practice, that everything belongs to God, and when we die, we’re gonna have to give up everything anyway. So there’s a way in which we’re, at best, stewards in this life, not owners of anything in an absolute way. And even our nationalities and our national identities have only a relative importance in light of a larger vision of what the kingdom of God is about.

The question is, what’s the narrative that shapes our consciousness on this? If the narrative is, This is my stuff, this is my country, this is where I belong, this is what I own, and I have to defend it and protect it—that’s one way of understanding it. But if the narrative is, Everything I have is a gift, and when I die, I’m going to give everything up, that I’m a steward and not an owner, and I can be judged by how I use what I’ve been given—that’s a different way of inhabiting the world. If the narrative is about how do we move closer to communion with God, and in closer connection with each other, with a life and a faith that does justice, in terms of caring for one another, that’s a very different way of inhabiting the world.

How do you turn an idea like that—this theological understanding of migration—into actual change in how the country thinks about migrants?

I remember, when I was about eight years old, I found this pamphlet on the floor of a rest area, and it said, “Did you realize you could actually miss Heaven by 18 inches?” And it went on to say that the distance between the head and the heart is only eighteen inches, and that God was more than a concept to understand, but someone to encounter in the depths of our hearts. Years later, I was giving a talk at the Mayo Clinic, and this nurse came to me and said, Actually, the carotid artery connects the head and the heart. And the point was, ideas have to move from the head to the heart—and Indigenous communities have said from the head to the heart to the feet and back again.

So how do we change the way we think about it? How do we change the way that we relate to it, in terms of our hearts, and how do we change the way we act in relation to that? One of the arguments I make in the theology of migration is that the dominant political discourse right now is from our oneness as a human community to otherness. These people are other, therefore we have to do X, Y, and Z. But the dominant theological narrative is really from our otherness to oneness. So in technical theological terms, what God is trying to do is to bring Humpty Dumpty back together again. And that’s really the fragmentation of society.

Have you seen the footage of clergy in Minneapolis praying or showing up at protests?

Yes, and I think it’s very much putting into practice the very things we’re talking about. It’s saying, This is where we stand. These are the people we serve. We believe God cares about these people. We believe what’s happening to them is not fair and it’s not just, and, therefore, I think they’re trying to express that through protest.

What about the role of the church in dissent about the policies being proposed or existing right now—five-year-old kids separated from their fathers, detention centers filling up? What do you see as the church’s role in any sort of movement of dissent against that?

Pope Benedict says this very well in one of his documents: the role of the church is not to replace the state. Our job is not to do the work that is legitimately in the hands of elected political leaders. But, at the same time, it’s not to stand on the sidelines when injustice is at stake. The church recognizes that there is a legitimate rule of law—in fact, some people are fleeing countries because the rule of law is not working there. So there is a legitimate exercise in the rule of law at the same time that law must constantly be examined. There are laws, but then there are deeper natural laws at stake as well.

I think the church is always trying to say, Is the life we’re living, the society we’re creating, really reflective of the God we believe in? And when it’s not, that’s when it protests and says, We can do a lot better.

What would be the ideal role of the church in a moment like this?

The ideal is that people don’t have to migrate. The ideal is that they actually have enough food, enough protection, enough space to work that they can create families in their homelands. At the same time, the role of the church is to build bridges and not walls, and to create connections instead of alienating people. So the role of the church is continually to proclaim a God of life and to build a civilization of love. That means caring for the vulnerable. That means recognizing that Christ is somehow present in a mysterious way among the least and last of society. So it’s standing in solidarity with them and, in some sense, standing with them, because God does. That’s what we believe.

How should people reconnect with the idea of Imago Dei right now? Many completely secular people are saying, “Maybe I should go to church—there’s got to be something else here that’s going to remind me of basic moral truths.” What would you suggest?

It’s a time for deeper reflection—to look at the society and say, Is the society that we’re becoming the society we want to become, and am I becoming the person I want to become? I teach this course called Heart’s Desire and Social Change, which tries to look at the deepest desires in the heart and the needs and challenges of the world. And probably one of the things in shortest supply of students and people today is taking the reflective space to say, Are the narratives that I’m being given in the world today consistent with the narrative I really want to develop in my own life? When you start going into that question, you say, Who am I? What is my identity? Where do I belong? What’s the purpose of my life? And, when it’s all said and done, what does a life well lived look like? That gives you a lot of space to say something is off course here. ♦