Out here on the border, social change and spirituality seem to be
closely linked. Almost all of the migrant aid centers on both sides of the line
are organized by churches, and while the group I’m with, No More Deaths, is
secular, it has its roots in Tucson’s Unitarian Church and Catholic liberation
theology. This is nothing odd—there’s a long history of religion inspiring
social work and activism. Jesus was pretty clear about that whole “the first
shall be last and the last shall be first” thing, and there have been no
shortage of church-organized homeless shelters, Catholic orphanages and some
pretty radical priests talking shit about capitalism since then. Worldwide,
it’s not all Christians, either, and if I were better informed about other
religion, I’m sure I could come up with dozens of other examples from all over.
The desire to help the less fortunate in the world is often seen as a key part
of a deep spiritual calling.
My companions for these two weeks are all Christian. I’m with one other
No More Deaths volunteer—a Unitarian minister from Georgia named Jeff—and the
shelter we’re working with is run by a guy named Phil who lives here in Agua
Prieta and is Episcopalian. I asked Phil yesterday about the preponderance of
faith-based aid out here, and told me that in his experience, people who don’t
come from a faith tradition tend to burn out doing this work faster.
“Why?” I asked him.
“I think it’s hard to deal with the suffering out here without some way
to make sense of it,” he said.
He’s not wrong. Last time I was on the border, I was out in the desert
putting out water and food for migrants crossing. I went out there expecting to
find tragedy, a misguided series of policies which united in a particularly
deadly way in the Altar Valley of southern Arizona. What I found instead was
deliberate cruelty, overt racism and a series of policies which were explicitly
designed to funnel people into the desert, knowing they would die there. Many
No More Deaths facilitators describe the Arizona borderlands as a low-intensity
war zone, and that’s how I felt during the brief time I was there.
When I went home, it was hard to process all of this. I withdrew from
my friends and spent a lot of time drinking while trying to write about what
I’d seen. I had days where I couldn’t fathom the thought of being happy,
because it seemed so wrong, knowing what I’d seen, knowing that what I had seen
was such a small chunk of the whole picture. And I absolutely had nights where,
lying in bed with tears running down my face, I thought, “I really wish I
believed in God right now. I wish I had some way to convince myself that this
would all be okay.”
That’s the thing about being an atheist. Because I don’t believe in
God, I also don’t believe in absolute justice. I believe all kinds of evil
people die and get away with the evil things they did. I don’t think Ted Bundy
and Adolf Hitler are spending eternity in hell being punished for the lives
they took—they’re just dead. I don’t think those who have been made to suffer
in this life have any greater reward waiting for them, and I don’t think the
scales balance in the end. The suffering I see on the border isn’t part of
God’s plan or the result of our sin. It’s just awfully, cruelly wrong.
For me, knowing there’s nothing after death makes fighting for this
world all the more important. Religion was used in the Middle Ages (and still
is by some people today) to justify poverty, to keep the poor from rebelling by
telling them that if they just stayed quiet and accepted their fate, they’d be
rewarded beyond their wildest dreams once they got to heaven. I would argue
that religion still fulfills that function in many parts of the world, at least
for some people. For me, this world is all we have, so we’d better make damn
sure it’s a good one for everyone. We’re not going to get a second chance.
There’s no heaven waiting for us, nothing perfect after we die, so it’s that
much more important to keep working towards a better earth.
It’s this thought that keeps me going, and it’s that thought that’s
going to make these weeks a challenge. I think partially because of their
belief in the afterlife, a lot of Christian work is centered around aid and
charity. Feed the poor. House the homeless. Minimize suffering. Run a shelter.
Here in Agua Prieta, I’m going to be working in a shelter which provides
services to migrants who have just been deported. It’s important work, and I’m
grateful that people are doing it. Putting water in the desert is important,
life-saving work, too. But none of it gets at the structural, the systems that
make these things necessary in the first place. Food banks are awesome, but
anyone who thinks they’re solving hunger or poverty is naive at best.
This is the challenge of activism in the world today, and it’s all the
more stark for those of us who think that death is just death. We need to make
sure people have food today and migrants have a place to get medical care
today. But if that’s all we do, we’re not making any progress. We have to find
some way to make life better, measurably, systematically. I don’t know what
that looks like yet, and I don’t know if the next two weeks will give me many
ideas. What I do know is that as long as this wall is here, as long as we build
our nation on racism, exclusion and the backs of poor people the world over, what
we’re doing is absolutely, unequivocally wrong. It’s because of, not in spite
of, my atheism that I feel called to work for as long as I need to to change
that.
