“If you’re looking for the divine, look to the margins.” The words of Mattie Mae Motl, a Bible scholar, cut sharply into the debate raging in Massachusetts, Illinois, and beyond where churches have reimagined the Nativity to confront the realities of immigration enforcement. At St. Susanna Parish in Dedham, the familiar figures of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus were replaced with a stark sign: “ICE was here.” Another declared “The Holy Family is safe in The Sanctuary of our Church,” alongside a hotline for an immigrant justice network.
Father Stephen Josoma, parish priest, refused to remove the display following orders by the Boston archdiocese. “The Vatican itself displays different themed Nativities each year highlighting social issues to contemporary life,” he explained. “Our hope was to similarly evoke dialogue around an issue that is at the heart of contemporary life.” The parish’s history includes politically-charged Christmas tableaux like a caged baby Jesus in 2018 to protest family separations at the border.
Critics-many of them aligned with pro-ICE and MAGA nationalist views-have labeled the display “despicable” and “sacrilegious.” In response, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons labeled Josoma “activist reverend” and said such imagery serves to embolden violence against ICE officers. Yet parishioners and their allies say the display is in keeping with scripture. “This parish follows the words of Jesus: ‘Welcome the stranger’ and ‘Feed the poor,'” one member wrote online. “Christ ALWAYS ‘mixed religion and politics.'”
To Motl, the controversy reveals something far more profound: “Jesus, with his mother and father, is presented through the gospels as refugees fleeing to Egypt to avoid political violence. The messiah is tenuous not only in his physical state of being an infant, but even his citizenship status is threatened as he seeks asylum in a foreign country.” Malynda Hale of The New Evangelicals agrees, saying such displays “make the story honest again” by depicting Jesus “among the oppressed, which is who he ended up advocating for.”
That framing is an uncomfortable mirror for MAGA-aligned Christians, Hale says, because it “reveals what they’ve chosen not to see.” As she puts it, “When Christians call something ‘sacrilegious,’ what they usually mean is, ‘This challenges the version of Christianity that benefits me.'” To her mind, faith intertwined with nationalism and hierarchy resists the gospel’s call to defend immigrants and confront injustice.
The tension is nothing new. Progressive congregations have deployed public religious art for policy challenge, from Nativity scenes dramatizing ICE raids to the installations of Jesus in rubble as pleas for peace in Gaza. These acts resonate with historical traditions like medieval “Herod plays,” dramatizing the massacre of the innocents and giving voice to mothers confronting soldiers over their murdered children. This made visible the violence beneath the surface of everyday life much as today’s activist Nativities do.
At the core of this fight is a struggle over how to read the Bible. Scholars like Brian Kaylor chronicled the way that Christian nationalists selectively elevate Old Testament passages while sidelining Jesus himself, twisting scripture into a political bludgeon. The chasm between high views of the Bible and low biblical literacy enables this rewriting to thrive. Motl describes increasing biblical literacy as “an act of political resistance” since it empowers believers to interrogate passed-down dogma. That refugee narrative-wherein people of faith are called to move in solidarity with the marginalized-is bolstered by historical context.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph and Mary flee Bethlehem for Egypt to avoid Herod’s slaughter of infants, a journey into foreign territory that is seldom removed from the parallel of displacement experienced by migrants today. Archaeological and historical records affirm that Jewish refugees more often than not sought safety in Egypt, joining established expatriate communities amid hostility by the local authorities. It was this lived reality of flight and resettlement that formed Jesus’ ministry-one marked by dependence upon the hospitality of strangers and in solidarity with the marginalized.
Progressive faith leaders around the country are putting that ethos into practice. In Oklahoma City, prayer vigils outside of ICE offices have expanded into immigrant-justice training, walking communities through legal rights and accompanying detainees to hearings. In Los Angeles, clergy members stood between protesters and the National Guard, preventing violence from escalating. The kind of activism that puts into practice Hale’s conviction that “Christians are very clearly called to protect the vulnerable, confront injustice, and use our voices for good.” For supporters of the St. Susanna display, the manger sans holy family is less an absence than a presence-of truth, of solidarity, of a gospel unwilling to decouple faith from the lived struggle of the oppressed. The question it suggests is as simple as profound: Are we reading the same Bible, or just the version that benefits us?
