This paper is prompted by two impulses. First, there is my own interest in biblical
law, and second by the changing demography of Britain. The UK like other parts of
Europe has seen such a collapse in the birthrate in recent decades, that the only way to
keep the economy running is to encourage mass immigration. This policy in itself is
of questionable morality as it involves draining the poorest countries in the world of
their best educated citizens, those who would have most to contribute to their own
country's development, to prop up the lifestyle of the affluent West.
But it is not this aspect of immigration that I want to examine from a biblical
perspective: it is rather what approach should be adopted to immigrant groups within
the UK, once they have become established in European society. In the past when
immigrants arrived in Britain, they usually came from came from basically Christian
countries such as Ireland, Italy, Poland or even the West Indies. These foreign groups
posed no challenge to the dominant British culture and gradually merged into British
life. But in the last two decades, there have been many migrants from the Middle East,
Africa, and especially the Indian sub-continent, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
Their lifestyle and religions as well as their colour more sharply differentiates them
from the host community than previous immigrants from other parts of Europe.
It then poses the problem of whether these immigrants should be allowed to retain
their own traditions and identity, or whether like earlier immigrants they should be
encouraged to identify with and merge with the host community. British policy for
the last few decades has been firmly for the first option, multiculturalism, whereas
French policy has been strongly for the second, integration. Thus in England
schoolgirls are allowed to wear Islamic clothes to school, whereas in France it has
been banned. This is a trivial symptom of a fundamental principle. Obviously we
cannot turn to Scripture to solve the issue of school uniform, but does it say anything
that bears on the issue of how far immigrants should conform to biblical norms of
religion and lifestyle?
However it is not just non-Christian immigrants who pose a problem. 70% of Britons
profess to be Christian, but only 10% are regular churchgoers, so by comparison to
the USA we are a very secular society, and secularists dominate the media, education,
and politics. And their war cry is of course that minority Christian values cannot
dictate the morals of the majority. Thus we should not object to euthanasia or gay
marriage for those who wish to live or die this way. This puts Christians in all walks
of life on the defensive and makes them reluctant to push biblical principles in
society.
These are the current issues that have triggered this paper. I hope to show that the Old
Testament does not just set out laws that should apply only to Israel, but that it has a
view on how all humans should behave and how far immigrants should conform to