One of the high points of my year is attending the Christian Sociological Association’s annual conference. I’ve attended its June meetings — except when disrupted by global pandemics — for almost 25 years. Sociologists, and especially Christian sociologists, are an odd (yet delightful) bunch that look at the world in an unusual way. Over time, and through interacting with these valued colleagues, I’ve concluded that much of sociology is focused on looking for strangers, listening to them, and taking their needs seriously. For example, consider the way sociologists think about social stratification.
Typically, stratification develops in three overlapping social arenas: race, gender, and social class. In each of these domains, we find insiders and outsiders; those who belong and those who are marginal or “strangers.” We’ve all had experiences in groups where we belong, and experiences where we stand outside of the in-group’s protection and resources. How good it is to belong. How awful and sometimes dangerous when we don’t. So much of our lives is spent trying to belong — from our earliest experiences with friends in preschool, to negotiating relationships in nursing homes at the end of our earthly lives. And, if we’re honest, we also expend a great deal of energy barring outsiders from our own in-groups and resources.
Our June 2022 sociology conference was hosted by Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario, which is close to Toronto. In addition to presenting and responding to academic papers, our group typically goes on an outing of interest to sociologists. This year our Canadian host took us on a guided tour of a long-closed Mohawk Institute Residential School for First Nations (Indigenous) children in Brantford, Ontario. These and other similar Canadian schools came under public scrutiny when mass graves containing the bodies of Indigenous children were found in British Columbia and Saskatchewan in 2021. Though no such graves have yet been located at the Mohawk Institute, the adjacent field was littered with little orange surveying flags that were part of an ongoing search for remains using ground penetrating radar.
The tragic reality of what happened at schools like these brought some of us to tears and all of us to deep contemplation. Our First Nations guide told us the facility had functioned more like an agricultural work camp than a school. Residential schools like the one we toured were part of a 19th-century national program that forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes and families to “educate” them and make possible their assimilation into mainstream society.
Indigenous writer/filmaker Katarina Ziervogel writes, “At the time, it was an attempt at erasing the Indigenous people’s heritage, traditions and language starting with the children. Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald’s initiative for the final result of residential schools was to ‘take the Indian out of the child’ an infamous quote linked to the history of residential schools.” Canada’s residential schools for First Nations children were, arguably, cruel instruments of “cultural genocide,” a term employed in the final report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
On the tour, we learned how Indigenous children would do farm work most of the day, before receiving a couple of hours of substandard schooling in the afternoon. Speaking in their native languages was strictly forbidden, and this was brutally enforced. Small children were put in dark isolation closets for days at a time, and sexual abuse by those who ran the schools, including religious authorities there, was rampant, suppressed, and ignored. Our guide walked through one hallway quickly and in silence, haunted by his knowledge of what had happened there. These things should not be.
More than once, our guide commented on the food the children were forced to eat. Frequently the food was oatmeal porridge that had become spoiled. Onto this porridge was poured reconstituted powdered milk. Our guide puzzled over this and remarked, “This really bugs me. Why would they give the children powdered milk when the farm connected with the school was a dairy with 25 or more milk cows?” We puzzled over this too. Powdered milk would need to be purchased, while milk from their dairy would have been essentially free.
I may have an answer. Powdered milk could have served as an identity marker in this setting. While withholding fresh milk may have represented cruelty for cruelty’s sake, powdered milk certainly served to remind the children that they were outsiders — strangers — in addition to reinforcing for teachers and other nonnative persons, the crucial distinction between insiders and outsiders, we and they, those who belong and those who don’t. Powdered milk, arguably, functioned as a symbol separating insiders from “strangers” in that place — a 19th-century Canadian variant of the separate drinking fountains for Blacks under Jim Crow laws in the American South. If I’m right, those who ran the Mohawk Institute Residential School preferred to pay a little more to keep their symbolic universe intact — a universe where outsiders knew their place and dared not drink their powdered milk on the wrong side of important school, community, and national boundaries.
As a Christian sociologist, I’ve spent time examining strangers from both sociological and theological perspectives. The strangers I’m interested in are not the mythical, nefarious ones we warn our children to steer clear of, but rather the individuals and groups we position against as we cultivate in-group identity. “Our” superiority in contrast with “their” inferiority functions to affirm our dominant and desirable position in the social hierarchies we inhabit. But cultivating identity through downward social comparison grates against the Christian ideal of identity that is in Christ. This is a problem.
To adopt and live out an identity in Christ requires we dispense with stranger-making and scapegoating, replacing those defensive identity props with hospitality and neighborliness.
To adopt and live out an identity in Christ requires we dispense with stranger-making and scapegoating, replacing those defensive identity props with hospitality and neighborliness. After all, Jesus was the sacrificial scapegoat who decisively, once and for all, ended our need to scapegoat others. The gospel of Jesus Christ offers good news to strangers (outsiders), as it offered good news to us (insiders) while we were yet strangers to God. Rather than stranger-making and scapegoating, the people of God are called to herald the good news of the gospel.
Evangelism as the embodied practice of the people of God is about searching for, engaging with, and drawing into fellowship, while changing and being changed by strangers. Insularity, in-group favoritism, and exclusionary self-serving practices should find no home in the church or among God’s people. It’s not about us — it’s about them, the strangers. Consider what missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin wrote regarding the doctrine of election:
It is election, not simply to privilege but to responsibility. God’s people have constantly forgotten that fact both under the old covenant and under the new and have therefore brought the whole idea of divine election into disrepute. … The end [of God’s plan and purpose in election] is the healing of all things in Christ, and the means therefore involve each of us from the very beginning inescapably in a relationship with our neighbour. Salvation comes to each of us not, so to say, straight down from heaven through the skylight, but through a door that is opened by our neighbor.
Our world has an oppositional cast. The current political climate reverberates with insults denigrating the “other.” Headlines to news stories entice us with inflammatory verbiage such as “Trump mocks …,” “Pelosi rips …,” “Biden blasts …,” “DeSantis attacks …” and we take pleasure when “our” side gains the upper hand. The American populace remains deeply divided on matters of race, gender and sexuality, immigration, the environment, energy, health care, gun violence, and a host of other issues both serious and trivial. Amid the looming threat of the Covid-19 pandemic, insults and violence erupted between maskers and nonmaskers, and nowhere was this conflict more intense than among churches.
Social media intensifies our differences, and “cancel culture” threatens to erase anyone who writes or says the wrong thing in a moment of abandon. People generally offer little by way of forgiveness or genuine apology, lest they give up ground and edge toward their enemies rather than away from them. In such a world, we are poised to become strangers and always ready to make strangers of others. Many promote walls, borders, and barriers — both physical and symbolic — as solutions to our human problems, distinguishing “us” from “them,” which further distance us from others. What drives our predilection for stranger-making? Is this the sort of world we want? As Christians? As humans? Does our own stranger-making activity commend us as the people of God?
The result of much of this “otherization” is that oppositional relationships come to structure and define our lives. Among these are citizen/illegal immigrant; Christian/non-Christian; Ford owner/Chevy owner; the Tennessee/Alabama football rivalry (a near-religious divide in much of the American South); Apple/Android user; Republican/Democrat; Black/White; male/female; blue collar/white collar . . . and those who recycle versus those who don’t! We construct our identities around such bifurcations through what social psychologists call downward social comparison. Racism, gender bias, and the social class divisions that deeply cleave our society all manifest this fundamental we/they division.
Social identity theory offers a general explanation for how we construct and maintain our identities — our sense of self. The theory explains that we identify not as individuals but as group members, and we do this by establishing contrasts between “us” and other groups with whom we compare favorably. Thus, to identify as Republican is to “not” be a Democrat, to be a boy is to disdain that which is “girly,” to identify as Presbyterians involves at least a tacit “thank God we’re not Baptists,” and to teach at a residential school for First Nations children meant thinking of yourself as vastly superior to the children you should have nurtured and defended.
Not only do we look for groups we appear better than, but we actively construct inferior groups to oppose in situations where they aren’t readily available.
The theory goes further. Not only do we look for groups we appear better than, but we actively construct inferior groups to oppose in situations where they aren’t readily available. Identity, so conceived, requires a constant, restless scanning of the social environment to locate or create relevant and inferior outgroups. In effect, our identities depend on a continual supply of strangers whom we oppose, disdain, disparage, or for whom we feign pity. We are, because they aren’t. Stated differently, “we are who we are not.” This densely woven tapestry of oppositional relationships works at odds with the idea that we Christians are the people of God for the world. Arguably, the logic of evangelism rests on making neighbors and friends of those who were once far away — of those who were strangers.
As God’s people, we are called to seek out the marginal, learn to see them in new ways, and by so doing to see ourselves anew. Identifying with Jesus requires an openness to strangers — some quite near that we’ve never before noticed. As we learn to edge toward rather than away from strangers, sociology can help us better understand why we work so tirelessly to keep “them” away from “our” drinking fountain. Being entrusted with the good news of Jesus Christ requires a different posture toward others, and a different basis for identity.
The gospel itself is a story of how strangers became neighbors and friends — it’s a story culminating in a great wedding feast (Revelation 19) to which all are invited, in a city whose gates are always open (Revelation 21). If we’re in the habit of stranger-making, engaging in downward social comparison, and keeping “them” away from “us,” we offer but a pale gospel to a desperate and identity-impoverished world. What’s more, we’ll miss many of the good things that “strange” others can bring into our lives. We are the people of God not for ourselves, but for the world — a world we must know, embrace, love, and nurture.
Jesus exhorts God’s people to avoid the “patterns of this world.” Finding identity at the expense of others — by making strangers of them, denigrating them, guarding resources for ourselves, and taking the seat of greater honor — is the dominant pattern of this world. It’s the pattern at work, in sports, in our neighborhoods, in international politics, at church, in school, and just about everywhere else. Opening ourselves to others in new ways can make for a safer and more just world, and it moves us closer to the “in-Christ” identities that commend us as the people of God. Know strangers, know God; no strangers, no God.
There are books about strangers written by sociologists. There are books about strangers (immigrants, women, racial minorities, and so on) written by Christian writers and theologians. I’ve found that these seemingly disparate approaches can be mutually reinforcing. Insights from the social sciences can illuminate the church’s call to love the stranger amid the complexities of the contemporary world, just as sociology with its generally secular and humanistic slant can benefit from biblical insights into human identity, community, and God’s call to “love the stranger.”
Furthermore, an integration of theology and sociology has great potential to help people of faith learn to see those on the margins as Jesus sees us all, and to understand more fully, what it means to be the people of God for the world. After all, we journey to a city with gates that are always open — a city without strangers. A city where no one cultivates identity at the expense of another, and where, by the power of God, strangers have become neighbors and friends. In this city, no one drinks powdered milk.
If you’re looking for Jesus, look among the strangers and aliens — He most always eats supper in their company. Find your identity in Christ, and not in the oh-so-prevalent patterns of this world — patterns that root identity in oppositional relationships, in downward social comparison, and by taking the seat of greater honor.
“So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19).
Matthew S. Vos is professor of sociology and chair of the department at Covenant College, where he has taught since 2000. He serves as vice president for the Christian Sociological Association and as an associate editor for the Journal of Sociology and Christianity.
This article is adapted from Vos’ new book “Strangers and Scapegoats: Extending God’s Welcome to Those on the Margins,” published in August 2022.