“Here am I,” says Isaiah, ”Send me,” in reply to the question of the Holy One,” “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”––Young’s Literal Translation

Christian Nationalism is a Parasite

Propaganda is a parasite. It can’t live without a host. ‘Christian Nationalism’ sucks the blood out of sacred texts. Few biblical texts are as beloved as the calling of Isaiah. In the original Hebrew text, Isaiah speaks in the present tense: “In the year that king Uzziah died, I see the Lord, high and lifted up, and his train is filling the temple.” He sees the seraphs flying above the throne, singing “Holy, holy holy, [is] Jehovah of hosts, the fullness of all the earth [is] his glory.”

A Homeland Security promotional recently featured an ICE recruit attributing his sense of call to become an ICE agent to Isaiah in the temple, “Hear am I, Send me.” The Homeland Security promotional [since taken down from X] turns Isaiah’s call into a parasite that sucks the blood of compassion from its host. “We will cut you down,” the voice-over of a helicopter sighting two migrants moving through the night toward the U.S. southern border, displaces the “Holly, holy, holy.” The whole earth that is full of God’s glory is shrunk to the parcel of earth.

An Autobiographical Reflection

It was in college that the calling of Isaiah took hold of me. I don’t remember who put Frederick Buechner’s The Hungering Dark in my hands, but I’ve never forgotten the impact of Buechner’s reflection on the call of Isaiah (Isaiah 6:1-8). I was not in the Temple in Jerusalem; my dormitory room was not filling with smoke; I knew nothing of seraphim, let alone seen them flying overhead or heard them calling to each other their song of praise for God’s holiness. No seraph had touched my lips with a hot coal from the altar. Even so, I knew this story the way a child ‘knows’ a story before the codes of reason ridicule its sense of wonder. Like Isaiah in the year that King Uzziah died, the foundations of what I once thought to be solid were trembling. The world was a mess. So was I. I was a man of ‘unclean lips’ living among ‘a people’ of unclean lips.

The summer before reading The Hungering Dark, my foundations had been shaken by the daily trips on the Red Arrow bus and Philadelphia subway that took me back and forth between where I lived and the squalor of Opal Street in north Philadelphia. Two landmark institutions gave stability to north Philadelphia: the Pennsylvania State Penitentiary and Corinthian Avenue Chapel. The eight homeless men with whom I had spent the afternoons that summer had been guests of the penitentiary before they were released to the streets. Corinthian Avenue Chapel, the empty shell of a once thriving Presbyterian church, vacated by white flight, was three blocks north of the prison.

It was a game of dodgeball with the kids who lived in the tenements on Uber Street that introduced me to the men of Opal Street and set the course for the rest of the summer. There was no traffic on Opal Street. My focus shifted from working with kids to an altogether unexpected summer with “the Brothers of Opal Street.”

An errant throw sent the dodgeball through the circle of ‘winos’ (their designation, not mine) who gathered every afternoon, seated on wooden orange crates, in the middle of Opal Street . After apologizing for interfering, I continued walking to the far end of the block. Like the condemned tenements that lined the east side of Opal Street, the far end of the street was blocked by a boarded-up fence. The chalk outline of a body was still fresh on the pavement

When I returned with the ball, the men asked what I was doing there. When I spoke of games for the kids, one of them drew laughter when he asked, “Do you have any games for us?” “I do,” I said. “Any of you ever play quoits?“ “Quoits?” Again there was an uproar of laughter. “Well, how about horseshoes?” Corky had played horseshoes in the Army. The next day I set up the Quoit stakes on the street. Every afternoon, we played Quoits until the men could no longer stand.

On my last day with them, the men wanted to have “a little talk.” I had expected the sharing of good-byes. What happened was something else. In retrospect it was life-changing, A one-of-its-kind Isaiah in-the-Temple moment. No seraphim flew above us, singing “Holy, holy, holy.” But there was smoke, a red-hot coal striking my lips, and a realization that I was a man of unclean lips among ‘a people of unclean lips’.

“Why did you come here?” they asked. “Don’t come back here. ‘Your people’ own this place. Look around. You don’t see any white faces. Your people never show up around here, but they own this place. It’s too late to help us. But the kids? If you want to make a difference here, go back to ‘your people’ and change things there.”

I had come to Opal Street as a disciple of Jesus, wanting to be of service among the “less fortunate,” like the good Samaritan who crossed the road to show compassion to the man who’d been left half-dead in the ditch. It had seemed that simple at first. I had assumed the western Main-line suburbs and Opal Street were worlds apart. One was wealthy, the other was poor. One was white, the other was black.

Now, after a long, hot summer, the ‘winos’ and ‘junkies’ of Opal Street had shattered the myth of separate worlds. Power and powerlessness, parasites and hosts live in the same world. I returned to college, confused, at sea, questioning everything I had been taught, and threw myself into contemporary philosophy and political science in search of answers to questions that have lasted a lifetime.

Years later, Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans provided a sociological framework that deepened my understanding of why and how we human beings ‘other’ each other. Cultures need deviants, outsiders, stereotypes who threaten the majority’s view of itself. Witches became the scapegoats that served to define what the majority was not. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was Christian and moral; witches were neither. The witches of Salem, the banishment of Mr.s Anne Hutchinson and the execution of Mary Dyer, served to save the Bay Colony’s religious–racial consensus from fraying further.

A BURNING COAL melts ICE

The Department of Homeland Security likening the call of Isaiah to a call to join ICE is chilling. It’s bad theology, bad faith, and bad patriotism. But heat always melts ice. Isaiah’s calling is remarkable for its sense of holiness and wonder. The Homeland Security rendering of “Here am I, Send me” is a call to cruelty and unmatched power over the ‘other’. It confuses divine calling with a call to dominate. In the ICE propaganda, there is no sense of the young man feeling lost, no sense of woe, no awareness of unclean lips or of one’s own people as a people with unclean lips, no hot coal from the altar burns away the sin. ICE’s adaptation of Isaiah is a parasite. It replaces the burning coal with an ice cube. Where the seraphim sang of the whole earth filled with God’s glory, border patrol helicopters buzz overhead migrants seeking a better life with the message, “We will cut you down!”

Every person of honest faith and good will is being called in this moment of American history to answer “Here am I, Send me!” Isaiah’s call is not past tense. It is now.

Gordon C. Stewart, Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor and public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), writing from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, August 6, 2025.