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White evangelicals are among President Donald Trump's strongest supporters. Seventy-two percent approve of his administration, according to the Pew Research Center. But some national evangelical leaders have been critical of the president's immigration policies. Marianna Bacallao from WPLN in Nashville reports on how immigration has created divisions between the pulpit and the pews.
MARIANNA BACALLAO, BYLINE: The Sunday before the Tennessee legislature voted to pass a sweeping immigration bill, State Senator Brent Taylor walked out of his home church in Memphis. That's because during the preservice announcement at Trinity Baptist Church, Pastor Matt Crawford had this to say about Trump allowing immigration and customs enforcement to make arrests inside churches.
MATT CRAWFORD: I hope that we can believe both in the rule of law and feel that we don't want worship services disrupted by that. I hope that me saying that doesn't anger you. But I wanted to address that. Hopefully, we can talk about things with unity and nuance and even differences of opinion because it's on the hearts of some of our people.
BRENT TAYLOR: Yeah, I did walk out. It was because I didn't show up to church that morning to hear a political speech.
BACALLAO: Senator Taylor says, immigration is largely a secular issue, but...
TAYLOR: Heaven has an immigration policy, and hell does not. There's a certain way you get to heaven. You can't climb the wall. You can't dig a hole and come in under the wall. You can't present fake documents to St. Peter at the gate. Hell, on the other hand - you can get there any number of ways, and you don't have to have documentation to get in there.
BACALLAO: Taylor has sponsored a slew of bills ramping up immigration enforcement, including one that would hold churches and nonprofits liable if they house someone who goes on to commit a crime.
TAYLOR: They believe that helping somebody who is here illegally - that somehow they're going to get some credits to get into heaven. I just don't view it that way.
BACALLAO: Neither do a lot of evangelical Christians, Taylor says. He cites the number of congregants nationwide who voted for Trump. Lifeway, a publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, paints a more complicated picture of how evangelicals view immigration, says, Galen Carey from the National Association of Evangelicals.
GALEN CAREY: The vast majority of evangelical Christians - they support border security, but they also support pathway to citizenship.
BACALLAO: Earlier this year, the Presbyterian Church in America gave advice to church members without citizenship on how to interact with ICE, something the PCA later retracted and apologized for following backlash from some of its congregations. But for one PCA church in Nashville, the issue isn't as polarizing. David Gaston hosts a Sunday night Bible study and dinner for the congregation of City Church in East Nashville. The PCA is a conservative denomination. But in the more artsy neighborhood of East Nashville, this particular congregation is more of a mixed bag. Tonight, they're sitting around a fire in Gaston's backyard, eating dinner off of paper plates.
DAVID GASTON: Meals like this, people gathering from all different sides of life, all different parts of the political spectrums and just talking together - in some ways, it's a little bit of an active resistance in our current climate.
BACALLAO: That kind of resistance is why Jeremiah Sunshine drives in from the next county over to attend city church. As Gaston chops firewood for tonight's bonfire, Sunshine is standing by as the church's resident tree expert.
JEREMIAH SUNSHINE: When I started in the industry 25 years ago, we were tree surgeons. Now they call us arborists.
BACALLAO: Sunshine's tree service employs a number of people, including immigrant workers.
SUNSHINE: We need people to come into the country. Not only are they a wonderful blessing socially and culturally, but they strengthen the workforce. You know, they do all kinds of wonderful things.
BACALLAO: But Sunshine says he also believes in law and order and supports President Trump's approach to immigration enforcement.
SUNSHINE: Any country needs - it needs a border, an actual border that functions as a border. If you don't have a border, you don't really have a country.
BACALLAO: Other members of Sunshine's church, like Alice and Matthew Smith, have a different outlook.
ALICE SMITH: There are specific Old Testament passages about loving the foreigner and the widow and the orphan among you, leaving the grains of your field unharvested on the edges so that foreigners and people who are traveling sojourners and strangers can have food when they are in poverty.
MATTHEW SMITH: It even says that if someone falls into poverty among the people of God, treat them as you would the foreigner. And that means care for them. That means help provide for them.
BACALLAO: Matthew Smith says, the Bible doesn't specifically outline an immigration policy, so Christians can disagree about what reform should look like.
M SMITH: Hopefully, we can disagree kindly, even though I feel like America as a whole has lost the ability to have conversations in a civil manner.
BACALLAO: Those kinds of conversations are part of the reason Sunshine's family makes the drive out to East Nashville every Sunday. He says, churches closer to home were too afraid to talk about these issues.
SUNSHINE: It concerns me how little discussion there is about it. Like, it grieves me how little discussion there is about it.
BACALLAO: But around a bonfire, the Smiths and the Sunshines can talk about these things, even if they, like the rest of the church, never reach a true consensus. For NPR News, I'm Marianna Bacallao in Nashville. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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