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A single Bible verse was enough to set off one of the more heated arguments in the evangelical world this year. In February 2026, theologian and longtime pastor John Piper posted on X an Old Testament passage about how God’s people should treat immigrants and strangers. Within hours, some of the most recognized names in conservative Christian media were publicly disagreeing with him, and with each other.
Piper is the author of dozens of books and served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis for 33 years before stepping down in 2013. He now serves as pastor emeritus and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary, and remains one of the most widely read voices in Reformed evangelicalism, known for his decades of preaching and for popularizing the phrase “Christian hedonism.” He has also had his share of very public friendships and disagreements over the years, including a much-discussed lunch with Beth Moore that both later described warmly despite their theological differences.
Piper’s post paraphrased Leviticus 19:34, a verse in which God instructs the Israelites to treat the foreigner living among them as one of their own, to love that person the same way they love themselves, and to remember that they themselves were once foreigners in Egypt. Piper added his own gloss on the verse in his post, writing that Christians know the misery of the bondage all of humanity once shared.
The replies came quickly, and they did not agree with each other any more than they agreed with Piper.
Southern California pastor Jack Hibbs, known for his conservative politics and for at times endorsing Republican candidates from the pulpit, offered a reading closer to Piper’s. “The foreigner who came among the children of Israel, were to be accepted in as converts, and not to be mistreated, but to be treated as brothers, even though they were immigrant foreigners,” Hibbs wrote. “It was their faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that was the criteria.”
Daily Wire reporter and bestselling author Megan Basham pushed back with a distinction she argued Piper had skipped over. “Not every stranger who comes to your country is a Sojourner,” she wrote. “Some respect our system of laws and come to be a blessing to their host nation. To work hard and raise strong families. But some come illegally. And they do not come to work hard. Some come to live off the system, and to exploit the generosity of their host nation. Others come to engage in destructive practices that harm the citizens of the host nation. Biblical wisdom requires us to discern the difference.”
Arizona pastor Dale Partridge went further, arguing that applying Israel’s covenant law directly to modern American immigration policy misreads both. “To correlate these instructions to Israel with the circumstances facing America is simply irresponsible theology,” he wrote. “Israel was never expected to allow such a number of foreigners that it would overtake the existing population, replace the Jewish people, their culture, or import paganism.”
Partridge’s follow-up post used sharper language still. “America is facing national theft through demographic replacement. Foreigners are violating the eighth and tenth commandments by coveting our land and envying our children’s inheritance. They are stealing from us and exterminating us through systematic assault,” he argued. “Immigration without biblical assimilation is a form of invasion. To apply the scriptures of orderly and just immigration to the chaotic and evil immigration of our day is not befitting of a man of Piper’s theological prowess.”
Worship leader and activist Sean Feucht wrote that he “never imagined a theologian I once looked up to would became so unbelievably WOKE while weaponizing scripture to justify the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.” Texas pastor Joel Webbon was blunter still: “John Piper has always been a pietistic leftist.”
Strip away the social media back-and-forth and the underlying disagreement is an old one in biblical interpretation: how much of Israel’s specific covenant law transfers directly to a modern secular nation, and how much of it is meant to teach a broader posture of the heart. The Old Testament repeatedly commands care for the foreigner. God is described as one who defends the cause of the foreigner, and the instruction in Leviticus that Piper quoted sits alongside similar commands throughout the Law. The New Testament carries a version of the same theme forward. Jesus tells his followers that welcoming the stranger is part of how they will be judged, and the Gospels record that his own family fled to Egypt as refugees when he was an infant.
None of that settles the policy debate on its own, and that is exactly where Hibbs, Basham, and Partridge parted ways with each other as much as with Piper. Hibbs’ reading emphasizes that Old Testament immigrants were expected to join the faith and community of Israel. Basham’s reading distinguishes legal from illegal entry as the operative moral category. Partridge’s reading argues the analogy breaks down entirely at national scale. All three claim to be taking Scripture seriously. That is worth sitting with, because it means the disagreement here is not really between people who care about the Bible and people who do not. It is between people applying the same texts to very different assumptions about nationhood, law, and covenant.
Scripture never addresses immigration law in the modern administrative sense, since ancient Israel had no equivalent of a visa system or a national border patrol. What it does address repeatedly is the treatment of the outsider already living in the community, regardless of how that person arrived. That is the exegetical gap at the center of this entire dispute. Readers who emphasize continuity between Israel and the modern nation-state, like Partridge, tend to read the text as primarily about identity and assimilation. Readers who emphasize the command to love the stranger as the timeless principle, closer to Piper’s framing, tend to read the text as a call to personal and church-level hospitality regardless of what national policy ends up being.
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Last modified: July 19, 2026
