Karen Clark Ristine, who is the “Senior Minister” of Claremont United Methodist Church in California, says she was “stirred to tears” after her church put up a nativity scene depicting Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in cages.

“What if this family sought refuge in our country today?” she writes, “Imagine Joseph and Mary separated at the border and Jesus no older than two taken from his mother and placed behind the fences of a Border Patrol detention center as more than 5,500 children have been the past three years. Jesus grew up to teach us kindness and mercy and a radical welcome of all people.”

Liberal and progressive churches along with the progressive movement in the Southern Baptist Convention have been pushing the narrative that Jesus and his parents were “refugees” — Southern Baptist ethicist, Russell Moore, even went as far as to say he was an “illegal immigrant” — when they fled to Egypt under Herod as a means of promoting illegal immigration and open borders in the United States.

As pious as it might seem to use the story of Jesus’ flight to Egypt during his infancy to make a political plea against the “white guilt” of millions of Americans who actually care about the security of our nation, such a depiction is blasphemous. Besides being the savior of the world, the sovereign God, and the second member of the godhead, Jesus was a lot of things. A political pawn he was and is not.

Of course, the left’s ignorance when it comes to this issue is unsurprising — they are not stirred by facts and statistics, but emotions and falsehoods. To say that Jesus was somehow an “undocumented immigrant” or a “refugee” is to imply that Jesus and his family had to break the laws of sovereign nations in order for God to carry out his will.

Jesus’ family did not break any laws nor were they undocumented. It’s simply asinine to say such a thing. But it makes for a good political narrative, doesn’t it?