The Responsibility of the Church to the State in an Era of Mass Migration: The Leadership of Pastor Marc Boegner in Occupied France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our current era of cross-border mass migrations raises complex questions about the protections that citizenship, naturalization, refugee status and asylum seeking do and do not afford. Policies for dealing with genuine immigration challenges can become vehicles for the prejudicial singling out of particular groups or inflaming latent xenophobia and racism. Christians, in the midst of this confusion, have had to reckon with their responsibilities, to their governments, to the displaced, and to the Gospel. This essay examines the response of the French Reformed church, under the leadership of Marc Boegner, to its government's antisemitic legislation, round-up and deportation of Jews to their deaths during German occupation from 1940–44. The Vichy regime of Pétain defended its singling out of immigrant Jews as a necessary solution to France's immigration problems of the 1920s and 1930s. Boegner was the first religious leader to protest the anti-Jewish legislation of the Vichy regime. The French Protestant church's acts of direct protest to the highest levels of government and its numerous acts of spiritual resistance—caring for immigrant and native Jews at great cost and personal risk—constituted a refusal to abjure their faith and Christian duties in the face of the state's violation of its own God-given responsibilities. Though this essay is descriptive, not prescriptive, the witness of the Protestant church under Boegner lays out some of the broader possibilities and limitations that inform the church's responsibility to the state on the matter of immigrants.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".