(Daily Signal)—As Americans insist on law and order and a restoration of sovereignty, a concerted effort unfolds among prominent church leaders and theologians. These church officials quite brazenly seek to “guilt” believers into accepting a lax immigration agenda—and even the lunacy of porous borders.
But guilt is not gospel. Emotional manipulation does not flow from authentic pastoral authority.
So, what are the actual, legitimate principles of Christianity that should guide the consciences of Gospel followers when it comes to this foundational issue?
First, as a 2,000-year-old faith, we always harken back to the timeless wisdom of the ages, rather than fixate on the latest headlines or a prelate’s social media posts. In this regard, Thomas Aquinas provides particularly valuable insights, as one of the most esteemed fathers of the Church.
In “Summa Theologica,” Aquinas wrote: “Man’s relations with foreigners are twofold, peaceful and hostile, and in directing both kinds of relation the Law contained suitable precepts.”
He knew that for a society to pursue national benefit, civil leaders must employ prudential judgment in setting immigration standards that promote the common good for existing citizens.
Aquinas understood that immigration is not an unquestioned noble goal. He sought to balance the prerogatives of citizens against any arguments for indiscriminate openness. His Thomistic vision gave weight to the timeless maxim that “charity begins at home.” Aquinas observed: “Man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country.”
On the question of when and how foreigners are to be integrated, Aquinas warned:
“If foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down… many dangers might occur, since the foreigners, not yet having the common good firmly at heart, might attempt something hurtful to the people.”
For Aquinas, the highest priority is not the preferences of foreigners, but the obligations owed to one’s own citizenry.
Among Christian believers, this moral clarity resonates. Consider the 2024 presidential election.
Immigration enforcement and border control formed the backbone of the Trump campaign, and it delivered: now-President Donald Trump carried every swing state and won the popular vote—the first Republican to do so in 20 years.
He romped among Christian believers. White evangelicals made up 29% of his voter base, with Trump winning 84% of church-attending evangelicals. Among Catholics—the largest denomination in America—Trump jumped from a tie in 2020 to a decisive +12% margin. That surge powered his popular vote victory.
As CatholicVote aptly noted: “The American people sent a clear message: the disaster at our southern border, and its shockwave effects throughout the nation, cannot continue.”
What many church officials present as virtue often devolves into suicidal empathy—the impulse to feel generous without regard for order or consequence. But real compassion is never a blank check. And it must never override a nation’s duty to protect its people.
Unfettered access to the United States is not a human right. Open borders are not necessary, not smart, and not sustainable. No serious country leaves the barn doors wide open for one and all. That’s not compassion—it’s recklessness from a government charged with defending its citizens in every way: physically, economically, and culturally.
At the heart of any functioning nation is a solemn covenant between government and citizens: protection in exchange for allegiance.
This bargain isn’t abstract. People count on this protection. They build their lives, raise their families, and work under the belief that their leaders will guard their safety, borders, and national integrity. When government abandons that duty in favor of globalist sentimentality, it breaks the bond of trust.
Lax immigration practices bring human suffering—from contraband smuggling to the sexual exploitation of trafficked children. A mass zone of lawlessness violates the Christian understanding of civil order and undermines the national benefit we are morally obligated to preserve.
In my latest battleground poll of North Carolina, Trump’s immigration approval rating among Protestants is +21%. Among the religiously unaffiliated (“nones”), it’s -22%.
That’s the divide: Those grounded in tradition demand enforcement; those adrift in secularism reject it.
And increasingly, Americans see immigration enforcement as an affordability solution. After the damage of Bidenomics, working families are struggling. But thanks to 2.5 million illegal aliens leaving during Trump’s first year, real wages began climbing, and rents hit a four-year low.
These are pro-family, pro-worker results—fully aligned with a Christian vision of national stability.
America has every right—and every obligation—to guard its borders and expel those who enter illegally. That is not only constitutional. It is Christian.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.