A Catholic Theologian Signs Up for Mass Cruelty: Yet another thinker puts his faith in the service of monstrous deportation policies (Gabriel Schoenfeld, 10/03/26, The UnPopulist)
A lesson from the 20th century is that intellectuals sometimes choose to serve monsters. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all found thinkers willing to sing their praise even as they murdered millions. On the spectrum of evil and death, Donald Trump, a crass, ignorant would-be authoritarian, is not in their league. And yet already, under Trump’s rule, people have died—and already lives are being ruined by the tens of thousands. As all this happens, crankish right-wing intellectuals have been drawn to Trump’s scepter as moths to a flame.
A case in point, not exactly a household name but not entirely unimportant, is Chad Pecknold. […]
What is the chief source of this threat? You guessed it: Immigration!
America, Pecknold tells us, “is not an idea, it is a PEOPLE.” With the unchecked influx of strangers, that “PEOPLE” is facing disintegration. The migration crisis, he writes, has “thrown the very concept of American citizenship itself into doubt.” In its rejection of America as a creedal nation in favor of one defined by heritage and inheritance, postliberalism slides inexorably into nativism.
The source of the trouble, in Pecknold’s view, is that “American Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, have been so captivated and captured by the implicit open borders theology of liberalism that too many have forgotten how to think like Christians—and like Americans.” Contrary to the precepts of liberalism, statesmen have a “sacred duty,” he says, to restrict who may remain in a country. Accordingly, he maintains, we must reject the constitutional precept of birthright citizenship under which anyone born here, including to parents lacking documentation, is automatically a citizen. At stake is nothing less than whether “our laws permit Americans to have a country or not.”