A Chicago suburb church is making a political statement with its nativity scene this year, depicting the infant Christ with zip ties around his wrists and Roman soldiers as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Lake Street Church of Evanston, Illinois, is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA) denomination and practices “a progressive Christian theology that embraces people from all different religious denominations and religious traditions.”
The church is actively involved in advocacy work for immigrants and racial justice. On Nov. 14, Rev. Michael Woolf, the church’s pastor, was one of 21 individuals detained during a protest at an ICE facility in Broadview, another Chicago suburb.
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On Nov. 25, Lake Street Church posted images of its nativity display to Facebook. In the images, the figure depicting baby Jesus is lying in a manger with his hands zip-tied together. The infant is wrapped in what appears to be an emergency blanket. Mary and Joseph are standing near the manger wearing gas masks. And the young couple is flanked by three Roman soldiers who are wearing sunglasses and vests emblazoned with “ICE.”
“This installation reimagines the nativity as a scene of forced family separation, drawing direct parallels between the Holy Family’s refugee experience and contemporary immigration detention practices,” the post’s caption read.
The post continued:
By placing the Christmas story (Christianity’s central narrative of refuge, sanctuary, and sacred family) within the visual language of immigration enforcement and detention, this work asks viewers to confront the disconnect between professed religious or moral values and immigration policies. The emergency blanket references the actual materials used in detention facilities. The zip ties on the infant’s wrists directly reference the children who were zip-tied by agents during a raid on a Chicago apartment building earlier this year, where most residents were U.S. citizens: a stark reminder that enforcement terror does not discriminate by documentation status.
The church said that the nativity scene is intentionally “not subtle because the crisis it addresses is not abstract.”
“We hope viewers will join the conversation about what sanctuary means when families fleeing violence are met with separation, detention, and dehumanization,” Lake Street Church said. “We further hope that conversation will move people to action, regardless of faith or philosophical background.”
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“The Holy Family were refugees. This is not political interpretation, this is the reality described in the stories our tradition has told and retold for millenia,” the post concluded. “By witnessing this familiar story through the reality faced by migrants today, we hope to restore its radical edge, and to ask what it means to celebrate the birth of a refugee child while turning away those who follow in that child’s footsteps.”
