Let’s Talk About Ethics and Power
Over the last few years, many of us have been distancing ourselves from Christianity — and I understand why. The harm done in the name of the church, and the way Christianity has been co-opted by white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and empire, is real and deeply painful. That said, I’ve made a personal decision: I refuse to walk away. I refuse to let white supremacy and empire steal Jesus, and claim ownership of him, and do their work pretending that it is with his authority. Jesus remains central to the way I understand justice, ethics, and the world. One of the most formative books I’ve read on this is Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins by Miguel De La Torre.
Here’s what I want to to focus on: the current discourse around right and wrong, morality and ethics, and the moral outrage around immigration. Right now, society is framing the people who are simply trying to survive as the problem. But survival is not the problem — the system they are trying to survive is. And instead of scrutinizing the system or the people with the power to change it, the moral spotlight keeps falling on the most vulnerable.
This obsession with individual morality is deeply embedded in Western Christianity. It trains people to focus on personal sin while ignoring structural injustice. So we end up with politicians condemning undocumented people, and Christian Nationalist using the language of law and order to support the demonization of immigrants. However, they remain silent about the immigration system itself — the exploitation of labor, the greed of billionaires, and the policies designed to deny people dignity and belonging.
It’s the moral equivalent of churches fixating on the bra straps of 13-year-old girls without interrogating 2,000 years of violent patriarchy that continues to shape the church. The focus is always on regulating the powerless rather than examining the systems built by the powerful.
HOW WE READ THE BIBLE
This kind of thinking is reinforced by how we’re taught to read Scripture. Take, for example, the story of Rahab. In a sermon, John Piper asks whether it was ethical for Rahab to lie to the king’s soldiers. That’s the question he poses — not about the soldiers themselves, not about the military threat they represent, not about the genocide Rahab is facing, but whether she lied.
To summarize the story: the Hebrew people, after years of wandering in the wilderness, send spies into Jericho. The spies end up in the home of Rahab, a sex worker — and when soldiers come looking for them, Rahab hides them and lies about their presence.
Bar girls in Vietnam. Sex work and war have always gone hand in hand. The important ethical questions is about a imperialism, war, obssessive militarism, and the normalization of sexual violence in war times. The moral question is not… are sex workers wrong to lie to soldeiers who hold thier fate and the fate of their families in their hands.
We could ask: why did the spies end up at the home of a sex worker in the first place? They are supposed to be out doing some military recon, but somehow they think this sex workers house is the best place to do their research. Maybe a better question to ask is- “Is it ethical to seek the services of sex worker one day while planning to annihilate her, her family, and entire community the next day?” It appears that the Kings soldiers also know where she lived, and its pretty obvious why. Perhaps we should ask, “Is it ethical for a military force to coerce a woman into cooperation under threat of annihilation?” Because those in power have shaped ethics- the militarism, coercion, violence, war, and genocide in the situation are erased and made invisible as ethical problems. The questions is focussed on the choices of the least powerful person in the situation, and judging her response to trying to survive a situation created and built on patriarchal violence.
That’s what ethics shaped by power does — it focuses moral scrutiny on the most vulnerable people in a situation while absolving or ignoring the violence of those with power. That’s a distraction. And it’s a dangerous one.
In Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins, De La Torre argues that ethics is not ultimately about abstract principles or personal virtue. It’s about power — how it is used, misused, and abused. So instead of asking whether an individual is “illegal” or “immoral,” we must ask: Who holds the power in this system? Who created the conditions for this suffering? Who benefits from the current structure? And what are they doing with the power they hold?
ICE agents in 2025. What is of great moral concern- a government who enables its police to enact violence and arrests without due process, respect for the Constitution, or appropriate over sight? Or people who have committed the civil offense of being undocumented.
Power shapes systems. Survival adapts to them. Ethical thinking must be primarily concerned with the powerful, not with punishing those doing what they must to survive.
Let’s apply that to our context.
Trump, Christian nationalists, and large swaths of U.S. evangelicalism are declaring it a sin to be undocumented. But here are some better questions:
Is it more unethical to cross a border to feed your family, or to design a system where poor people have no legal path to citizenship?
Is it more unethical to live and work in the shadows, or to exploit undocumented labor while denying people legal rights and basic humanity?
Is it worse to be undocumented, or to hoard billions built on the backs of child slace labor in the Congo, and underpaid labor in the United States.
Is it worse to slip across a border to survive, or to write tax laws that allow billionaires to avoid contributing to the collective good, then turn around and blame migrants for draining public resources?
Crossing a border out of desperation is not a moral failure. But caging children, tearing families apart, exploiting workers, and weaponizing the law to dehumanize — that is a moral failure. That is where our ethical attention should be.
Ethics is not about punishing the desperate. It is about confronting the powerful.