Birthright and Belonging
An Embodied Christian Theology for Speaking Truthfully in a Time of Legal Uncertainty
Introduction
In the U.S., we are once again nearing a time when law will catechize the nation. It will instruct us, quietly and forcefully, who matters, who belongs, and whose presence will be treated as a gift versus a problem. Birthright citizenship, the longstanding practice of recognizing children born on U.S. soil as citizens, is facing its most consequential legal challenge yet as of early 2026. Recent controversy surrounding this guarantee has been exacerbated by an executive order issued on January 20, 2025, that calls for the federal government to cease recognizing certain children born in the U.S. as citizens based on the legality of their parents’ presence (The White House, 2025). Courts across the country have hindered or limited enforcement in various capacities, and the Supreme Court has granted certiorari to hear arguments regarding the extent of birthright citizenship, a question that dates back to the Fourteenth Amendment and is historically grounded in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). A question that could affect many US Citizens and will undoubtedly challenge Christians.
For Christians, the question is not “Are we political?” The question is “What kind of people are we becoming as we speak?” Our words and silences, our reflexes and assumptions, all form a moral imagination. And in a polarized culture, Christians are often tempted to speak in a borrowed register, either the language of partisan power or the language of technocratic management. Embodied theology refuses both reductions. We are not disembodied minds trapped in a universe of legal abstractions. We are creatures of flesh, blood, and breath, born into dependency, sustained by relationships, and made for communion with God and neighbor.
We make a radical claim that there is no country for our God. As Paul reminds us, in Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This Pauline verse emphasizes spiritual unity and equality in Christ, transcending social, ethnic, and gender barriers, and serves as a summary of Christ’s teaching on neighbors.
This essay offers a theological frame for how Christians can talk about the legal challenge to birthright citizenship without collapsing into tribalism, without baptizing fear, and without denying the legitimate complexity of law.
My claim is simple: efforts to restrict birthright citizenship are not merely legal interpretations; they are moral proposals about what kind of neighbor the child born among us will be allowed to become. Today’s legal challenges attempt to move belonging from an embodied fact, born here, among us, to a conditional status mediated by documents, lineage, and suspicion. When that happens, we are not only changing citizenship rules; we are changing how a people learns to see a human being. We Christians are not catechized by our US citizenship but by our belonging to the kingdom of God in Christ Jesus.
What Birthright Citizenship Is, and Why the Fourteenth Amendment Matters
Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment begins, “…All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States…” (U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1). For well over a century, it has been presumed that “born in the United States” confers citizenship on virtually all children born in the country, save for some narrowly defined and well-known exceptions (such as children of foreign diplomats, or, in the past, hostile occupying forces). The Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that a child born in the United States to parents who are not American citizens (in that instance, parents who were Chinese) is nonetheless a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment. (United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898).
As the Hon Sir Nigel Sweeney KC, former member of the High Court in the UK, quipped on another topic while walking with me in the Middle Temple one late evening, “We don’t just change law that has been on the books for over a hundred years.” So it is that I hope to convince you that this is not a minor point of constitutional trivia for our country or for the Christian.
The Citizenship Clause was forged in the aftermath of slavery and the denial of personhood. It functions as a guardrail against the creation of an inherited caste system, an embedded system where certain people can live their entire lives “among us” without being “of us.”
The present controversy has been intensified by Executive Order 14160, issued January 20, 2025, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which asserts a narrowed understanding of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and instructs federal agencies to treat certain U.S.-born children as not citizens (The White House, 2025; Trump, 2025). Multiple lawsuits followed. Courts issued injunctions and class-based relief; press reporting has described repeated judicial blocks, along with the Supreme Court’s earlier procedural decisions regarding the scope of nationwide injunctions in related litigation (Associated Press, 2025; Politico, 2025). At the time, I made several statements expressing concern for all American citizens if this were to continue as the law. In late 2025, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a birthright citizenship case for argument in 2026 (SCOTUSblog, 2026).
A parallel legislative effort also exists. The “Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025” (H.R. 569) was introduced to redefine the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States for purposes of citizenship, typically tied to the status of at least one parent (Congress.gov, 2025).
Christians need not become constitutional lawyers to speak faithfully. But we do need to speak truthfully about what is being proposed. And we must realize that underneath every legal theory is a moral imagination: a vision of who is inside the circle of belonging and what kind of human we are to one another. Law is never just law.
The Issue Beneath the Issue: Belonging, Embodiment, and the Child
Embodied theology begins where modern discourse often refuses to begin: with the body. A child is not an argument. A child is a life. A child is a human being.
A newborn does not arrive as an ideological project. A newborn arrives as a neighbor, first to a family, then to a community, then to a people who share schools, clinics, streets, workplaces, and futures. The child is born into a web of relationships that existed before they could consent, achieve, earn, or prove anything. This is not sentimental. It is metaphysical. A human being is not primarily a self-constructed individual; a human being is a creature constituted in relation: received, named, held, fed, taught, and formed by others. This is an essential understanding to my offering.
In Christian anthropology, this is not an inconvenience. It is revelation. The Gospels show that the Kingdom repeatedly manifests as vulnerability. A child in the arms is not only a private family event; it is a public sign that life is given, not seized. The moral test of a society is whether it treats vulnerable life as a gift to be protected or a threat to be managed.
So when the state asks, “Is this child truly one of us?” based not on the child’s birth but on the parent’s legal category, the question is not merely administrative. It is a question of what kind of moral world we are creating. It shifts the child from being a neighbor to being a derivative status, an inherited suspicion.
This is where Christians need spiritual sobriety. The temptation is to speak in abstractions: “immigration,” “border security,” “incentives,” “loopholes.” Yet Christian speech, if it is to be credible, must discipline itself to return to the actual person. Not the caricature. Not the slogan. The person. A baby born in a hospital. A mother exhausted. A father afraid. A community uncertain. A child who will grow up with language, friendships, education, and a sense of belonging, or a sense that belonging is always provisional.
The question is not whether a nation can regulate borders. Nations can and do. I would argue that it is essential for a nation to maintain secure borders. The question here is different: Should a society create a class of people who are physically, socially, and culturally formed “among us,” but legally constructed as perpetual outsiders from birth? Once that is normalized, it is no longer a narrow immigration policy. It becomes a template for conditional personhood.
“Neighbor” and the Christian Refusal of Inherited Exclusion
Christians do not define neighbor by paperwork. We do not define neighbor by bloodline purity. We do not define neighbor by the moral worthiness of a parent. We define neighbor by the presence of a human being whom God has placed within reach of our responsibility.
The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) is not a gentle moral story; it is a theological disruption and a return to the Old Testament's earlier teachings. Jesus refuses the premise that “neighbor” is defined by tribe, affiliation, or deservedness. The neighbor is the one you meet on the road, the one whose suffering becomes a claim upon your life. In other words, the neighbor is disclosed in embodied proximity and moral responsibility, not in a category.
This is precisely why a political project that restricts birthright citizenship is, at its root, an attempt to redefine neighbor. It is not only saying, “We interpret ‘jurisdiction’ differently.” It is also saying, “Some bodies born here will not be treated as belonging here.” That is a radical move because it does not merely regulate entry; it reconstructs birth itself as morally insufficient for belonging.
It also normalizes an inherited logic: the child is not simply who the child is; the child is a legal echo of the parent’s status. That logic is spiritually dangerous. Christianity does not deny that histories shape us; it denies that histories imprison us. The Gospel interrupts inherited destinies. It refuses to allow sin, violence, or social labeling to be the final word about who a person is.
In my own work on embodied apologetics, I have argued that faith cannot remain at the level of proposition; it must become visible in the way we see persons and act in public life—through hospitality, justice, and the refusal of dehumanizing narratives (Doyle, 2024). When the public imagination is being trained to see certain children as “not really ours,” Christians must recover the moral clarity to say: a child is not an enemy; a child is not a tactic; a child is not a loophole; a child is a human person.
Biblical Theology Applied
When we place John 9 alongside the birthright citizenship debate, the theological interruption becomes clear. In John 9, Jesus refuses the assumption that a man’s condition at birth is the result of inherited guilt. The disciples ask the predictable question: Is this blindness the consequence of his sin or his parents’ sin? Jesus dismantles the premise itself. Birth is not moral contamination. Suffering is not an ancestral debt. The man’s life is not a punishment transmitted through a bloodline.
We as Christians have in the past argued that the above reading of the bible had no effect on the ownership of slaves. We were wrong to argue that if born a slave, you were a slave by ancestry. It was wrong then, and it is wrong to apply the same poor logic again today.
Instead, Christians need to follow Christ Jesus, who reframes birth as the beginning of a story in which God’s work will be revealed.
Jesus’ shift matters profoundly for how Christians speak about citizenship and belonging. Efforts to restrict birthright citizenship often rest, implicitly, on inherited status, on the idea that a child’s standing is morally and legally determined by the parent’s condition. The child becomes a legal extension of the parent’s deficiency. But the logic of John 9 resists precisely this move. The son does not bear the iniquity of the father (Ezek. 18:20). Birth does not transmit guilt like a genetic stain. It marks the arrival of a person whose life stands before God on its own terms.
Even Romans 5, so often cited to support inherited sin, ultimately explodes the language of inheritance with the overwhelming free gift of righteousness. And 2 Corinthians 5:21 affirms that embodied life is not intrinsically corrupted by ancestral transmission; Christ’s sinlessness stands as testimony that embodiment itself is not moral sewage flowing through generations.
Taken together, these texts undermine any theology or civic logic that treats birth as an inherited liability. Scripture refuses to see children as carriers of parental status, whether moral or legal. Birth is not a bureaucratic problem to solve. It is the beginning of a human life in which God may act.
So when Christians consider policies that would deny full belonging to children born among us because of their parents’ status, we must recognize what is being rehearsed theologically: a return to inherited guilt, a suspicion attached to birth itself. John 9 will not permit that. It insists that the child’s life is not defined by ancestral deficit but by the possibility of revelation.
Biblically, birth is a gift before it is categorized. And any civic vision that trains us to see children primarily as extensions of parental fault runs against the grain of the Gospel.
Principalities and Powers: When the Nation Demands the Church’s Homage
There is another layer that Christians often avoid because it makes us uncomfortable: the spiritual gravity of nationalism. In our Anglican and broader Christian tradition, the principalities and powers are not merely “bad people” but living institutional realities, ideologies, images, and systems that demand allegiance and offer identity in exchange for complicity (Stringfellow, 1964/updated ed.). He argued that “the nation” is among the most persevering of these principalities, because it seeks the Church’s blessing for whatever it defines as national self-interest, backed by sanctions ranging from ridicule to marginalization (Stringfellow, 1964/updated ed.).
This matters here because the birthright citizenship debate is often framed as a test of national sovereignty, who “we” are, who is “one of us,” and who is “inside.” Christians cannot see life lived together simply as a political community with a quasi-sacred body whose purity must be defended. Once that occurs, the child becomes the state's collateral property.
Christians must resist the nation’s demand to treat vulnerability as a threat. That means Christians and non-Christians must refuse to let the nation become a god. When the principalities speak, they always speak in a certain register: fear, scarcity, threat, survival. The Gospel speaks differently: mercy, truth, responsibility, communion.
Here is one of the most important Christian disciplines in public speech: do not let fear become your doctrine. “Fear not” appears 110 times in the Bible as a reminder of precisely this point. Fear reorients faithfulness from God to other idols. Fear can make any cruelty seem reasonable. Fear can make inherited exclusion sound like common sense. Fear can lead Christians to forget that our primary loyalty is to the Kingdom of God, not to the sanctification of a national boundary.
Likely Consequences: The Moral Injury of a “Permanent Sub-class”
Critics of restricting birthright citizenship argue that such a shift risks creating a durable subclass of people born and raised within the country who remain legally excluded, potentially vulnerable to statelessness in some cases, and subject to chronic evidentiary burdens throughout life (Associated Press, 2025; Congress.gov, 2025). Even when the term “subclass” is debated, the lived social dynamic is not hard to anticipate: if your belonging is not settled at birth, then belonging becomes something you must continuously demonstrate.
The arguments regarding slave births in the nineteenth century led to continued Jim Crow laws and electoral poll proofs, as the long tail of racism has continued to plague our country.
From an embodied-theological standpoint, this is not an abstract policy impact; it is a formation of the soul. The child who grows up under conditional belonging internalizes instability. Families and communities become habituated to anxiety. Ordinary life becomes a negotiation with surveillance. And neighbors learn to treat one another as potential legal problems.
Here, the Church must be especially attentive: the Christian moral vision is not only about outcomes but about formation, what kind of people our practices make us. A policy environment that normalizes inherited suspicion forms a people in mistrust. It encourages a culture of documentation over a culture of neighborliness. It erodes the sense that we are responsible for one another as fellow human beings.
And this is precisely where Christians must talk carefully. We can acknowledge that immigration systems need reform, that borders are real, and that states have responsibilities. But we must also insist on a moral boundary: do not build a civic identity that rests upon the exclusion of children born into our common life. That is not merely harsh; it is corrosive. It leads to a place this country has been before and one we do not wish to return to. It forms us as an idolatrous nation.
Why This Is Not Only “About Immigrants”: Conditional Belonging Spreads
One of the reasons Christians should not treat this debate as a niche immigration issue is that conditional belonging rarely stays contained. Once you normalize the idea that birth on U.S. soil does not settle citizenship, once you shift the criterion from embodied place to inherited status, you create a precedent for belonging as a revocable administrative grant.
That should concern any citizen, regardless of political affiliation. A society that trains itself to doubt the belonging of those born within it can be trained to doubt anyone’s belonging. The methods of exclusion, documentation demands, administrative discretion, and shifting criteria do not remain morally neutral tools. They become habits. They become instincts.
This is not speculative paranoia. It is an observation about how power works. When the state develops mechanisms that can unmake belonging, those mechanisms do not disappear when their initial target changes. They become available as a tool. They become precedents. And they shape how the public imagines citizenship: not as a stable common bond, but as a privilege mediated by the regime.
Christians should be the first to see this, because we know the spiritual danger of identity built on exclusion. The people of God are constantly tempted, throughout Scripture, to treat election as superiority rather than vocation. The biblical pattern is always corrective: if you are chosen, it is for service; if you belong, it is so you can bless; if you are given identity, it is so you can act as a sign of God’s mercy in the world.
How Christians Can Speak in Public Without Becoming Partisan Mouthpieces
So what might Christians say? Not in an abstract ideal world, but in actual conversations, in parish halls, at dinner tables, and online.
I propose six disciplines for Christian speech and action in this moment:
1) Begin with the child, not the ideology.
Christian moral clarity starts when we refuse to speak about babies as strategies. A faithful sentence might sound like: “Whatever we decide about immigration, we cannot make children into permanent outsiders.”
2) Separate border policy from child-status.
A person can believe strongly in border regulation and still oppose inherited civic exclusion. This is a crucial distinction because it prevents the conversation from being trapped in the false binary of “open borders versus cruelty.” The Gospel rarely gives us permission to think in false binaries.
3) Refuse dehumanizing language.
Terms that reduce a child to a tactic (“anchor baby”) do violence to the Christian imagination. The first Christian act in public discourse is often simply to stop speaking in a way that trains contempt.
4) Tell the truth about tradeoffs, not only intentions.
If someone claims that birthright citizenship must be restricted, Christians should ask: What will this do to the child? What layers of bureaucracy will she inherit? What attitudes of fear will this normalize? Public theology that refuses to name consequences has virtue is cowardice.
5) Speak in a Christian register that is intelligible.
You don’t have to talk like an insider to the Church. But our Christian moral imagination does require certain theological vocabulary: dignity, neighbor, mercy, truthfulness, justice, fear and love, responsibility, and common good. My work on embodied apologetics emphasizes that Christian witness is most persuasive when it is coherent: when our speech matches our ethics, and our communal practices tell the same story (Doyle, 2024).
6) Offer tangible practices of solidarity.
If the Church talks about neighbor but refuses to be present with our literal neighbors when they are under stress, our words become white noise. The Church can prioritize funding and volunteerism for legal aid ministries. We can provide accompaniment for families navigating the documentation process. We can cultivate cultures in which fear does not isolate us from one another. Embodied theology always asks: What does love look like with feet?
A Christian Conclusion: Birth Is a Gift, and Belonging Is a Responsibility
The debate over birthright citizenship isn’t one about competing theories of “jurisdiction,” it’s a conflict between moral imaginations.
There’s an imagination that says belonging can be earned or waived, inherited or rescinded through paperwork. That imagination tends toward suspicion.
There’s another imagination, one informed more by the logic of the Gospel. It states that embodied presence creates responsibility within the community; neighborliness is not a bureaucratic fiction. To deny the child born among us citizenship is to deny their place in our common life, and we are responsible for the kind of world we make for them.
Christians should not pretend that we have clear guidance on the legal issue; we do not have a revealed constitutional theory. What we do have is a revealed moral vision. That vision doesn’t map easily onto modern constitutional categories. But it does demand, again and again, that God’s people resist inherited categories of exclusion, that we stand with and for the vulnerable, and that we refuse identity rooted in fear. This will not be easy. It will require listening patiently, speaking clearly and principally, and allowing ourselves to be misunderstood. Again: that’s what Christian public witness has always required.
Were the Supreme Court to rule in summer 2026 in a manner that narrows birthright citizenship, Christians will have an intensified pastoral problem: an increasing number of children will be born into our communities only to live with diminished recognition and heightened precarity. That will shape the generational mission for the church.
Were the court to rule in a manner that preserves broad birthright citizenship, Christians will still face the deeper challenge of culture: the temptation to treat the neighbor as a conditional status, instead of a person. That has been true since before the days of Jesus, and the Bible can help us remain faithful witnesses, supporting speech as strangers in a strange land.
Either way, the directive remains clear: speak truth about what it means to be human. Refuse rhetoric that dresses cruelty up as prudence. And affirm, both in word and deed, that the child is not a problem to be solved, but a neighbor to be welcomed.
References (APA Style)
Associated Press. (2025). Fourth federal judge blocks Trump’s birthright citizenship order.
Associated Press. (2025). Judge blocks Trump’s birthright order nationwide in fourth such ruling since Supreme Court decision.
Congress.gov. (2025). H.R. 569 – Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025.
Doyle, C. A. (2024). Embodied apologetics: Faith, action, and witness in a connected age (Manuscript draft).
Politico. (2025). Judge blocks Trump’s order revoking birthright citizenship.
SCOTUSblog. (2026). Trump v. Barbara (Birthright Citizenship) – Case file and coverage.
Stringfellow, W. (1964). Free in obedience. (Course excerpt/document).
The White House. (2025, January 20). Protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship (Presidential action).
Trump, D. J. (2025, January 20). Executive Order 14160—Protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship (Published in the Federal Register).
United States Constitution, amend. XIV, § 1.
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).