Why Birthright Citizenship is Unbiblical, and Contrary to God's Own Law

The Mosaic Civil Code might be abrogated, but it's still profitable for reproof and correction. And it's squarely on Trump's side.

The Supreme Court heard arguments this morning on whether being born inside American borders automatically makes you an American, and the “experts” say Trump is going to lose. We don’t have much power over what the court will decide the 14th Amendment is supposed to allow. But for those claiming that Trump’s position is “immoral” and waving their Bibles in the air, we can do something about that. We’re going to make the case that the legal system God gave Israel - and the wisdom it loans to us - is actually on Trump’s side. The Bible is squarely on the side of ending birthright citizenship.

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This morning, Donald Trump sat in the United States Supreme Court and watched his own Solicitor General get worked over like a speed bag by justices whom he himself appointed. The case, Trump v. Barbara, pits the administration’s executive order ending automatic birthright citizenship against a wall of lower-court rulings, 14th Amendment precedent, and a nine-justice panel that appeared deeply skeptical of the executive order’s attempt to end the practice. Trump’s order, signed on day one of his second term, would end automatic citizenship for children born on American soil to parents who are here illegally or on temporary visas.

The ACLU brought in Bruce Springsteen for the occasion, because nothing says “constitutional law” like a guy who sang a song about being an American once. Trump was the first sitting president to attend oral arguments since basically forever, and watched Justice Neil Gorsuch grill his legal team about whether Native American babies born today would even qualify as citizens under the proposed standard. It was, by all accounts, a rough morning. A decision is expected by early summer, and the smart money says the Court will hand Trump a loss. That’s the legal landscape we have to look forward to, as America continues to be replaced by what is very emphatically not America. Our nation is being lost daily to a foreign people who’ve found a loophole in the law, and we’ll likely continue losing it because our Supreme Court justices consider court precedent to be more binding than the original intentions of the law’s authors.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CASE

The government’s argument hinges on four words from the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The clause reads that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens. The amendment was ratified in 1868, explicitly to overturn Dred Scott and guarantee citizenship to freed slaves. That much is not disputed. What is disputed is whether that clause was ever intended to confer automatic citizenship on the children of foreign nationals with no lawful permanent attachment to the country.

The Trump administration argues it was not. Legal scholars, going back to Congressman John Bingham, one of the primary architects of the 14th Amendment, noted in floor debates that the clause was never intended to cover aliens whose allegiance belonged to a foreign power. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” was understood by many of its drafters to mean “not subject to a foreign allegiance,” or “not subject to any other jurisdiction,” which would naturally exclude temporary visa holders and illegal aliens.

The counterargument, and the one that currently holds the weight of precedent, rests heavily on United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), in which the Court held that a child born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a citizen. That ruling has been the cornerstone of the expansive reading ever since. Whether the Court will disturb 128 years of precedent is looking unlikely.

The legal argument may lose. But the moral argument is a different matter entirely. What NXR has observed in recent days is a host of evangelical Leftists calling birthright Citizenship - and its continuance - a moral issue. For example, the bishops of Rome’s American franchise filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, calling Trump’s executive order “immoral.” Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, went further, accusing White evangelical Christians who support the administration of “acting completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” which is a remarkable charge from an organization that supports murdering infants in the womb. Unfortunately, these are the people setting the moral terms of the debate.

WHAT GOD ACTUALLY DESIGNED

The pearl-clutching class of evangelicals may lose their mind over this, but the morality of this issue actually lies on the other side. The Scripture - all of it - is “profitable for reproof, correction, and training in godliness.” Thankfully, the Mosaic Civil Code, handed out by God Himself, speaks directly to this issue. Although the U.S. Supreme Court does not base its decisions on Biblical interpretation, it’s still true that the Bible is “the only infallible rule of faith and practice” and speaks candidly about which side is morally right. And it’s not that of the modern Catholic church or Sojourners.

Every third tweet in your timeline this week probably featured someone describing Trump’s position as cruel, xenophobic, morally indefensible, or some creative hybrid of all three. The opponents of any restriction on birthright citizenship want you to believe that the very idea of linking national membership to parentage rather than geography is a barbaric throwback to a darker time in human history. It does not. In fact, the opposite position has grounding so ancient that it predates the United States, the Roman Empire, and every post-Enlightenment theory of liberal citizenship by well over a thousand years. The Mosaic Civil Code, the body of law God gave to ancient Israel, had a great deal to say about who belonged and how belonging was established. And not one syllable of it suggests that the magic of geography confers citizenship.

The distinction or classification of “citizens” in the Mosaic system is not between the native-born and the foreign-born individuals. It is between three categories of persons, all of whom might be physically present within Israel’s borders at any given moment. The ezrach was the full native citizen, the man of the household with legal standing in the covenant community of ancient Israel. The ger was the resident alien, the sojourner who had formally attached himself to Israel, lived under its laws, shared its obligations, and was on a trajectory toward full inclusion. The nokri or zar was the foreigner, the man passing through or dwelling at the margins without covenant attachment.

What is striking about this system, given by God Himself, and what makes it so directly relevant to the current controversy, is that the ger status was not automatic. It was not conferred by birth on Israelite soil. It was acquired through the covenant obligation of a person into the life of the community. The children of a nokri did not automatically become gerim simply because their mother went into labor on the wrong side of the Jordan River.

What ger status actually required in practice is found in Exodus 12:48, and it stipulates that before a sojourner could participate in the Passover - the central national feast, the defining memorial event of Israel’s identity as a people - he had to be circumcised. Every male in his household had to be circumcised. This was not a paperwork requirement. It was a costly, irreversible, and physically permanent act of covenant entry.

In fact, the sojourner who wanted to eat at Israel’s table had to put something permanently on the line. He had to mark his body with the sign of the covenant people. He had to demonstrate, in the most unambiguous biological terms available, that he was not passing through, not hedging his bets, not keeping one foot in Moab. The case law for this kind of covenantal naturalization is Ruth, and her declaration to Naomi in Ruth 1:16 is the ancient world’s naturalization speech. “Where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” In other words, Ruth did not become an Israelite by walking into Bethlehem. She became an Israelite through an explicit verbal covenant, through the deliberate abandonment of her prior national identity, and through her attachment to a people and their God as an act of will. She is celebrated precisely because genuine belonging requires genuine commitment. She didn’t stumble into citizenship. She chose it at personal cost.

THE MOSAIC CASE FOR EARNED MEMBERSHIP

Deuteronomy 23 plainly states that certain peoples were excluded from the assembly of Israel for up to ten generations. The Ammonites and the Moabites were barred because of their conduct toward Israel during the wilderness wandering (they hired Balaam, failed to provide bread and water on the road from Egypt, and were hostile to Israel’s national project at its most vulnerable moment). The Edomite and the Egyptian were given a shorter path, three generations, before their descendants could enter the full assembly. What this passage establishes is that national membership was tracked generationally, that it followed lineage rather than zipcode, and that the geography of one’s birth was not the operative factor in gaining Citizenship. A man born in Jerusalem to Moabite parents was still a Moabite for purposes of membership in the assembly of Israel. The soil he entered the world on was irrelevant. The people he came from mattered enormously.

But notice what the same chapter does with the Edomite. “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother.” The generational exclusion is not raw bigotry. It is a calibrated, historically grounded, relationship-sensitive framework that distinguishes between peoples based on their actual kinship with Israel. The Edomite gets three generations because he is kin. The Moabite gets ten because he hired a prophet to curse Israel’s children in the wilderness. The system is not cruel exclusion for its own reasons. It is national memory institutionalized into law, and it treats the question of Citizenship with the seriousness it deserves. Absolutely no one became a Citizen of Israel because they were born there.

The Gibeonites offer another example. In Joshua 9, they deceived Israel into a covenant of protection by posing as distant travelers rather than local Canaanites. They were physically present, they had been incorporated into the community through a binding agreement, and Joshua honored the covenant when Saul’s descendants later violated it. But the Gibeonites were given a subordinate role in the community (hewers of wood and drawers of water), and their descendants inherited that lowered status. They were not even fully assimilated into the assembly automatically by virtue of living among Israelites for generations. The principle at work here is that Citizenship is constituted, not stumbled into. It requires an act of incorporation, not just a biological event in a convenient location.

The erev rav, the mixed multitude of Exodus 12:38, is perhaps the most dramatic illustration in the whole Old Testament of what happens when you treat physical presence in a nation as the functional equivalent of Citizenship. These were the non-Israelites who attached themselves to Israel during the Exodus, swept along by the momentum of what happened during the chaos. They were there because the door was open, the plagues were terrifying, and Egypt was no longer a comfortable place to live. Their loyalty wasn’t to Israel. They were just there because it was better than Egypt. They were the ones who, in Numbers 11:4, wept at the door of their tents, demanding meat, who remembered the fish and cucumbers of Egypt with a nostalgia that revealed that their hearts belonged to Egypt. And then, the golden calf catastrophe can be traced back to this same group who sojourned with Israel, who had joined the march out of self-interest and then manufactured a new god out of gold. Their presence made the Israelites forget their god; they were there only for their own self-interest. People whose attachment to a community is purely situational, who are here because it’s nicer than from where they came, do not make good Citizens. They make passengers. But they weren’t Israelites, not in their heart. And at their first convenience, they led Israel to sin and forget their God.

COVENANTAL CITIZENSHIP VERSUS ACCIDENTAL CITIZENSHIP

The deeper principle running through all of these cases is one that’s self-evident in Mosaic Law. Membership in a national community is covenantal, not geographical. It is constituted by commitments, understood obligations, family lineage, and formalities, not by the accident of which patch of ground a woman’s water broke on. The Israelite who went abroad and whose son was born in Egypt did not produce an Egyptian. The Egyptian whose daughter married into Israel and whose grandchildren were born in Canaan did not automatically become an Israelite, at least not for several generations, and not without the work of assimilation and covenant attachment that genuine membership required.

Yes, we’re aware that the Supreme Court of the United States does not consult Leviticus when deliberating on the 14th Amendment. We know that. We are not arguing that the Court should hand down a ruling because Numbers 11 exists. The point is not that biblical law is binding American positive law (at least, not yet). The point is that when critics of Trump’s position dress their argument in the language of morality, when they tell you that restricting birthright citizenship is “immoral,” they are making a claim that contradicts the Law that God Himself gave ancient Israel. That would mean that God Himself is immoral. But that’s heresy, so we wouldn’t recommend saying it.

If you want to argue that the concept of earned, covenantal, lineage-based national membership is inherently immoral, you are arguing against the civil governance structure God himself designed for an actual nation. That’s a difficult position to hold for anyone who takes the Bible seriously. Trump’s executive order may well lose in the Supreme Court, and probably will (although we’ve all been surprised before). But the morality of ending birthright Citizenship is obvious because God never wrote it into the Law He Himself wrote. It is, by one very Biblical standard, a law of God’s own design.