(RNS) — Barber made the challenge during a Thursday (Feb. 5) interview for 'Complexified,' a Religion News Service podcast created in partnership with Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture. The episode will be released Monday.
The Rev. William Barber II, left, and House Speaker Mike Johnson. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins; AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
RNS staff
February 6, 2026
(RNS) — Longtime activist and anti-poverty advocate the Rev. William Barber is challenging House Speaker Mike Johnson to a theological debate over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, taking up the Republican congressman’s open-ended offer earlier this week to discuss the topic “with anybody at any time they want to.”
Barber made the challenge during a Thursday (Feb. 5) interview for “Complexified,” a Religion News Service podcast created in partnership with Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture. The episode will be released Monday.
“I want to have that debate with him,” Barber told “Complexified” host the Rev. Amanda Henderson.
Barber’s challenge came after Johnson was asked during a press scrum on Wednesday to respond to criticism of Trump’s immigration policies levied by Pope Leo. Like his predecessor, Pope Francis, Leo has directly criticized Trump’s immigration policies on multiple occasions: In November, he cited Matthew 25:35 while expressing concern about the president’s approach to immigration, noting that Jesus “says very clearly, at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, ‘how did you receive the foreigner?’”
However, Johnson, a Southern Baptist who spent years working for the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, offered a different interpretation on Wednesday. While acknowledging the Bible calls on believers to “welcome the sojourner,” he insisted the command is “an admonition to individuals, not to the civil authorities.” He argued that Romans 13 describes civil authorities as “agents of wrath to bring punishment upon the wrongdoer,” and that “assimilation” of immigrants “is expected and anticipated.”
“Sovereign borders are biblical and right, and they’re just,” Johnson said. “It’s not because we hate the people on the outside, it’s because we love the people on the inside.”
The speaker then added: “I’m happy to have this lengthy debate with anybody any time they want to.”
Later that day, Johnson posted a longer version of the argument to his X account.
But Johnson’s argument is at odds with a rising number of religious leaders who have grown increasingly vocal in their criticism of Trump’s mass deportation effort. That includes Barber, who derided on the “Complexified” podcast the speaker’s position.
“He reveals that he doesn’t know the Bible,” Barber said, referring to Johnson. “He reveals that he certainly doesn’t know Jesus. There’s no Jesus in anything he just said.”
Barber, who is also known for his leadership of the Poor People’s Campaign and support for a wide range of policies primarily embraced by Democrats, pointed out that Johnson’s position appears to focus on the interpretation of Hebrew Bible passages, instead of what he was initially asked about: words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament.
“Let’s talk about what Jesus said: Welcome the stranger. End of story. Case one. Drop the mic,” said Barber, a Disciples of Christ minister. “And he didn’t say it to individuals — he said it to the nations.”
Barber later added: “Why would the state have killed Jesus if Jesus wasn’t challenging the state?”
Representatives for Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Barber’s challenge, but the pastor has been floated as a potential debate opponent for prominent conservative religious thinkers before. In 2017, Barber, along with longtime collaborator the Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and others, published an open letter challenging leaders of Liberty University, a conservative evangelical school, to a “peaceful debate” over differences in political theology. In late 2019, the school’s newly established Falkirk Center challenged Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove to a debate on the topic “Was Jesus a Socialist?” Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove rejected the premise of the debate and argued it should focus on a broader topic, but the effort ultimately fizzled.
Trump’s mass deportation effort has sparked an unusually robust response from faith communities over the past year, with religious leaders across the country organizing to resist the administration’s efforts. In addition to outcry from Pope Leo, pastors in the U.S. have been shot with pepper balls and pepper rounds by federal agents while protesting Trump’s immigration policies, and around 100 clergy and faith leaders were arrested in Minneapolis last month while protesting the influx of Department of Homeland Security agents into the city. Hundreds more flocked to the city to be trained on how to resist the president’s immigration agenda, and dozens of religious denominations and groups have filed lawsuits over the past year against various aspects of the president’s policies.
Opinion
Mike Johnson's biblical defense of US border policy ignores the Bible's stance on power
(RNS) — Christian Scripture must be read alongside Israel’s long experience of exile, Jesus’ execution by the state and the New Testament’s recurring suspicion of imperial power.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., gestures as he meets with reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Michael DeLashmutt
February 6, 2026
RNS
(RNS) — In the middle of a recent 3 a.m. doomscroll — yes, we clergy are as susceptible as anyone — I ran across clips of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, invoking the New Testament to defend U.S. border policy against Pope Leo XIV’s comments about the moral obligations Christians bear toward migrants.
Johnson’s argument was a familiar one, citing Paul’s Letter to the Romans to suggest that Christians are called to submit to governing authorities, whose responsibility it is to preserve order through law. That Scripture, Johnson claimed, means migrants are to be welcomed, yes, but only on the condition that they assimilate.
RELATED: The emperor’s gospel: Donald Trump and the power of Christianity
Unable to fall back asleep, I did what Anglican clergy do when the night runs out: I turned to Morning Prayer. As if by providence — or perhaps irony — the Old Testament reading appointed for the Daily Office that morning was the Book of Genesis, chapter 23, in which Abraham negotiates for a burial plot for his wife, Sarah, in a foreign land.
Reading it with Johnson’s appeal to Romans fresh in my mind, the story landed with particular force. Abraham, after all, is a refugee by any reasonable definition. He has left his homeland in Ur of the Chaldeans in response to a divine call, journeying into territory that is not his own. When he approaches his new Hittite neighbors in Canaan to request a tomb, he identifies himself plainly: “I am a stranger and an alien residing among you.”
Abraham is welcomed, albeit cautiously, and permitted to purchase land in order to bury his dead according to his own customs. He negotiates publicly, honors local legal norms and yet remains recognizably other. His presence is tolerated, even respected, without being absorbed.
In light of Johnson’s call for immigrant assimilation, this detail matters. The patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is not a settled landowner defending borders, but a migrant negotiating space for grief in a land not his own.
In the long line of descendants of Abraham, his story is hardly an exception. Moses flees Egypt. Israel becomes a nation in exile. Jesus begins life as a displaced child, fleeing political violence. The Prophet Muhammad’s defining journey — the Hijra — is an act of migration. Across the Abrahamic traditions, religious identity is forged through displacement, not secured against it.
This does not mean Scripture has nothing to say about law, order or political authority. The Letter to the Romans does describe governing authorities as instruments through which God restrains chaos in a broken world. Yet the context in which this letter is read matters greatly. Paul is writing to fragile house churches living under imperial surveillance, not to Christians wielding state power, and his concern is pastoral and pragmatic: how believers survive under empire without inviting unnecessary repression. It is not a blueprint for Christian governance, nor a timeless endorsement of every policy enacted in the name of law and order.
To lift Romans wholesale into a contemporary political theology — particularly one that treats the state as the primary moral agent — is to ask the text to bear more weight than it can sustain. Romans (along with the rest of Christian Scripture) must be read alongside Israel’s long experience of exile, Jesus’ execution by the state and the New Testament’s recurring suspicion of imperial power. The Bible offers no simple equation between God’s purposes and the interests of any given government, even one that claims Christian privilege.
This is where, for me, a concept from 20th-century ecumenical theology proves helpful: missio Dei, the mission of God. Emerging in Protestant and Catholic conversations after World War II, the term names a simple but profound conviction: God’s work of reconciling the world does not belong to the church. It belongs to God.
The church participates in that mission but does not control it, define it exhaustively or contain it. God’s purposes precede ecclesial institutions and, at times, exceed them.
Seen through this lens, the relationship between church and state becomes more complex, and more honest. The state can, at times, participate imperfectly in God’s reconciling work. Modern welfare systems that provide health care, education and shelter may well reflect, however partially, Christ’s command to care for the least among us. That such work is carried out by governments rather than (or in addition to) churches need not be interpreted simply as the failure of Christianity. It may also be evidence that God’s mission extends beyond the walls of the church.
But the reverse is also true. If both church and state can participate in God’s mission, then both can also act against it.
Policies that treat migrants primarily as threats rather than neighbors, that reduce human beings to problems to be managed or that invoke Scripture to sanctify exclusion should trouble Christians deeply. Not because borders are inherently unbiblical, but because the Bible resists being pressed into service of any political project that confuses control with faithfulness.
The question before Christians, then, is not whether states may enforce laws or maintain borders. It is whether our reading of Scripture serves God’s reconciling work in the world, or whether we are interpreting it merely to allay our anxiety about losing power, identity or security.
Abraham’s story suggests that God’s covenant people are, more often than not, strangers negotiating space rather than rulers enforcing boundaries. Paul’s letters remind believers to live wisely under imperfect authorities, not to confuse those authorities with the reign of God.
When Scripture is invoked in debates over immigration, it matters not only that the Bible is quoted, but how it is read, and to what end.
Mike Johnson's biblical defense of US border policy ignores the Bible's stance on power
(RNS) — Christian Scripture must be read alongside Israel’s long experience of exile, Jesus’ execution by the state and the New Testament’s recurring suspicion of imperial power.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., gestures as he meets with reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Michael DeLashmutt
February 6, 2026
RNS
(RNS) — In the middle of a recent 3 a.m. doomscroll — yes, we clergy are as susceptible as anyone — I ran across clips of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, invoking the New Testament to defend U.S. border policy against Pope Leo XIV’s comments about the moral obligations Christians bear toward migrants.
Johnson’s argument was a familiar one, citing Paul’s Letter to the Romans to suggest that Christians are called to submit to governing authorities, whose responsibility it is to preserve order through law. That Scripture, Johnson claimed, means migrants are to be welcomed, yes, but only on the condition that they assimilate.
RELATED: The emperor’s gospel: Donald Trump and the power of Christianity
Unable to fall back asleep, I did what Anglican clergy do when the night runs out: I turned to Morning Prayer. As if by providence — or perhaps irony — the Old Testament reading appointed for the Daily Office that morning was the Book of Genesis, chapter 23, in which Abraham negotiates for a burial plot for his wife, Sarah, in a foreign land.
Reading it with Johnson’s appeal to Romans fresh in my mind, the story landed with particular force. Abraham, after all, is a refugee by any reasonable definition. He has left his homeland in Ur of the Chaldeans in response to a divine call, journeying into territory that is not his own. When he approaches his new Hittite neighbors in Canaan to request a tomb, he identifies himself plainly: “I am a stranger and an alien residing among you.”
Abraham is welcomed, albeit cautiously, and permitted to purchase land in order to bury his dead according to his own customs. He negotiates publicly, honors local legal norms and yet remains recognizably other. His presence is tolerated, even respected, without being absorbed.
In light of Johnson’s call for immigrant assimilation, this detail matters. The patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is not a settled landowner defending borders, but a migrant negotiating space for grief in a land not his own.
In the long line of descendants of Abraham, his story is hardly an exception. Moses flees Egypt. Israel becomes a nation in exile. Jesus begins life as a displaced child, fleeing political violence. The Prophet Muhammad’s defining journey — the Hijra — is an act of migration. Across the Abrahamic traditions, religious identity is forged through displacement, not secured against it.
This does not mean Scripture has nothing to say about law, order or political authority. The Letter to the Romans does describe governing authorities as instruments through which God restrains chaos in a broken world. Yet the context in which this letter is read matters greatly. Paul is writing to fragile house churches living under imperial surveillance, not to Christians wielding state power, and his concern is pastoral and pragmatic: how believers survive under empire without inviting unnecessary repression. It is not a blueprint for Christian governance, nor a timeless endorsement of every policy enacted in the name of law and order.
To lift Romans wholesale into a contemporary political theology — particularly one that treats the state as the primary moral agent — is to ask the text to bear more weight than it can sustain. Romans (along with the rest of Christian Scripture) must be read alongside Israel’s long experience of exile, Jesus’ execution by the state and the New Testament’s recurring suspicion of imperial power. The Bible offers no simple equation between God’s purposes and the interests of any given government, even one that claims Christian privilege.
This is where, for me, a concept from 20th-century ecumenical theology proves helpful: missio Dei, the mission of God. Emerging in Protestant and Catholic conversations after World War II, the term names a simple but profound conviction: God’s work of reconciling the world does not belong to the church. It belongs to God.
The church participates in that mission but does not control it, define it exhaustively or contain it. God’s purposes precede ecclesial institutions and, at times, exceed them.
Seen through this lens, the relationship between church and state becomes more complex, and more honest. The state can, at times, participate imperfectly in God’s reconciling work. Modern welfare systems that provide health care, education and shelter may well reflect, however partially, Christ’s command to care for the least among us. That such work is carried out by governments rather than (or in addition to) churches need not be interpreted simply as the failure of Christianity. It may also be evidence that God’s mission extends beyond the walls of the church.
But the reverse is also true. If both church and state can participate in God’s mission, then both can also act against it.
Policies that treat migrants primarily as threats rather than neighbors, that reduce human beings to problems to be managed or that invoke Scripture to sanctify exclusion should trouble Christians deeply. Not because borders are inherently unbiblical, but because the Bible resists being pressed into service of any political project that confuses control with faithfulness.
The question before Christians, then, is not whether states may enforce laws or maintain borders. It is whether our reading of Scripture serves God’s reconciling work in the world, or whether we are interpreting it merely to allay our anxiety about losing power, identity or security.
Abraham’s story suggests that God’s covenant people are, more often than not, strangers negotiating space rather than rulers enforcing boundaries. Paul’s letters remind believers to live wisely under imperfect authorities, not to confuse those authorities with the reign of God.
When Scripture is invoked in debates over immigration, it matters not only that the Bible is quoted, but how it is read, and to what end.
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