One Christian leader is calling out the Department of Homeland Security for using Bible verses to promote the operations and tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, joining other faith leaders who have opposed the Trump administration’s use of Christianity to promote policies that have caused harm to communities.
Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance and an ordained Baptist minister, has used his platform to call on Congress to stop funding ICE. His organization consists of a network of people of diverse faiths, with the mission to “build a resilient democracy and fulfill America’s promise of religious freedom and civil rights not just for some, but for all,” its website states. He said that DHS posting Bible verses as recruitment ads on social media is “blasphemous” and a “betrayal.”
“That is a terrible betrayal of the faith,” he told HuffPost. (Raushenbush was formerly the executive editor for HuffPost’s Religion section.)
Raushenbush believes President Donald Trump’s administration attacks people, of any faith, who don’t align with their political agenda — and when the administration advocates for religious freedom, “they don’t mean it.”
Instead, Raushenbush argued that the administration uses faith to “legitimize” violence.
