America’s elites always seem a bit anxious about the fact that there are large numbers of sincere Christians and often feel compelled to explain why these believers are allegedly slowing America’s progress. The latest round features Pope Leo, The New York Times, and interpreters of conservatism for the Acela corridor: David Brooks and David French, whose columns influence elite perceptions of faith and politics.
Their moral framework feels overly sentimental and almost Manichaean — dividing the world into those on the path to enlightenment and those mired in arrested development.
I do not wish to dismiss Brooks and French as bad-faith scolds. I don’t think that’s true. I respect both men as writers and thinkers, a confession that I know is not especially popular in some circles. They are serious people, and I believe they genuinely want more civility and thoughtfulness in American politics and society. But that is precisely what makes their recent arguments troubling. Their moral framework feels overly sentimental and almost Manichaean — dividing the world into those on the path to enlightenment and those mired in arrested development. And because they write for The New York Times, that framework inevitably bends toward readers’ expectations. As The Dude put it, “You gotta feed the monkey.”
Brooks, in his recent column “How to Replace Christian Nationalism,” packs a complicated personal, cultural, and religious undercurrent into a piece designed to reassure loyal Times readers that the MAGA base is a deeper threat to American decency, as they have “swept in and made us a frightened nation, stagnant, callous and backward.” John MacGhionn’s essay, “David Brooks Can’t Hide His Contempt for Ordinary Americans,” captures Brooks’s intentions well. (RELATED: David Brooks Can’t Hide His Contempt for Ordinary Americans)
In David French’s recent essay, “A Christian Answer to Trump and Trumpism Is Finally Here,” he seems to invoke the same us-versus-them narrative. French begins by citing Pope Leo’s recent warning that Catholics cannot oppose abortion while supporting “the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States.” The Pope’s statement is not controversial. It is self-evident that no faithful Christian condones the inhuman treatment of any human being. That sentiment runs counter to any understanding or adherence to Christ. (RELATED: Catholic Cognitive Dissonance)
French backs up his argument with reports of Venezuelan nationals deported from the United States to El Salvador and tortured in that country’s infamous CECOT mega-prison. Allegedly, more than 250 migrants suffered beatings, sexual abuse, and starvation in conditions described as “hell.”
If the reporting is accurate, this is a scandal and deserves a serious investigation. Human Rights Watch documents alleged systematic abuse and notes that the U.S. government paid millions of dollars to El Salvador to fund the detention. If American officials knew — or reasonably assumed — that they were effectively outsourcing torture, that is a grave moral and political failure. No question.
But let’s pull the telescope back a bit and frame this debate. Former ICE director Tom Homan, who served under presidents of both parties, has been blunt about what changed at the border under the Biden–Harris administration. During his January 2024 testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Homan stated that the Biden administration’s “failure to enforce and uphold the laws as written by Congress are not just matters of legal debate but have led to unimaginable suffering and death for Americans and migrants alike,” due to the scrapping of Trump-era policies that had driven illegal crossings to a forty-year low. (RELATED: The Four Rings of Terror — How Violence Targets Conservative America)
That shift created an incentive structure that enabled suffering on a grand scale for some of the most vulnerable populations in the Western Hemisphere — causing smuggling deaths, bodies smothered in tractor-trailers, drownings in the Rio Grande, and unspeakable horrors endured by women and children. (RELATED: The Human Ledger: How Cartels Reduce Migrant Women to Line Items of Profit)
Focusing on one horror while ignoring the predictable consequences of a poorly managed border policy is a form of willful distraction, not insight.
If The New York Times is going to speak the language of moral complicity, we must apply the same standard to Biden-era policies that enticed lethal journeys as we do to policies that deport people. Yet this connection is lost when moral outrage is applied selectively: focusing on one horror while ignoring the predictable consequences of a poorly managed border policy is a form of willful distraction, not insight.
French, however, essentially sets that inconvenient side of the ledger aside and uses the CECOT episode as a blunt instrument against those who favor national sovereignty and border enforcement. That is not sober moral reasoning; it is emotional blackmail.
No person of conscience, whether Christian or otherwise, supports the “inhuman treatment of immigrants” or any human being. The Catholic Catechism is clear about the dignity of every human being, including the undocumented. But to say that a nation has the right — indeed, the duty — to enforce just immigration laws is not the same as cheering on cruelty. The phrase “inhuman treatment” quietly does a lot of political work. It is designed to put people on their heels. Is detention for an illegal migrant, per se, “inhuman”? Deportation? A wall? Is it somehow un-Christian to insist that people use legal ports of entry rather than risk deserts and rivers under cartel control? What are the limiting principles of this line of reasoning?
If everything short of open borders gets relabeled “inhuman,” then the use of the Pope’s statement ceases to be a call to conscience and becomes a muzzle on honest domestic-policy debate. Yet French, a staunch free-speech advocate, seems to want readers to leap to the conclusion that immigration enforcement — a complex business in the real world — equals opposition to Christian virtue.
If America’s paper of record truly cared about migrants, it would have used its considerable journalistic muscle to investigate the rationale behind the Biden administration’s open-border policies as they unfolded. Instead, the paper largely ignored the blood money the cartels made, the women trafficked, the children packed into car trunks, and the ranchers and small border towns that were overrun.
This is what puzzles me about Brooks and French’s recent arguments. They write as if there are only two options: open borders, baptized as compassion, or a nightmarish regime of jackboots and cages. Yet ordinary Americans, including many Catholics, know there is a third way: a real border, laws enforced with dignity, and clear, humane, and consistent pathways for entrance into the United States.
As a Catholic, I do not want to see a single innocent migrant harmed. I also refuse to ignore the suffering caused by a de facto open-border regime that has enriched traffickers, empowered cartels, and put desperate people at the mercy of the worst villains in the hemisphere.
The Christian mission is more arduous and more honest than that: care and love the most vulnerable among us, yes — but also love your neighbor, your community, and your country enough to demand laws that are both just and enforced. Anything less is not compassion; it is naïve.
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, 2025-11-19 03:04:00, 
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