On the second of July, a few blocks from Independence Hall, the bell at Philadelphia's Christ Church rang out more than fifty times, once for each person who has died in ICE custody since January of 2025. People stood in the churchyard and read the names aloud.[^1] Two weeks later, Religion News Service ran a piece with a title that would have been unthinkable in too many pulpits a decade ago: "A faithful call to abolish ICE."[^2]
Let's sit with a word that hovers over all of this: illegal. This word gets attached to human beings so casually that it's moved into semantic satiation territory. We barely hear it anymore. An illegal immigrant. An illegal alien. As if illegality could be a property of the person, like height or eye color, rather than a status someone manufactured and then assigned.
The concept of illegality exposes something the American church is spectacularly bad at seeing: sin that no single individual chose, running through systems that keep grinding whether or not anyone intends them harm. Most of us were handed an anemic theology of sin that only has one dimension: personal. You lied, you lusted, you coveted, you repent. That dimension is real. It's also far too small to explain the world we actually live in.
A doctrine the church misplaced
The Bible is not nearly as individualistic about sin as we are. When Paul reaches for the enemy, he doesn't name a person. "Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness" (Ephesians 6:12). Kosmokratoras. World-rulers. Paul describes something bigger than any one sinner and older than any one villain.
For my first couple decades of faith, I read language like that and understood it solely as literal personal demons, perhaps satan himself. In my next decade or so of faith, I read that language and filed it under first-century superstition. Nothing to take too seriously.
The person who broke that habit for me was Walter Wink, in his trilogy on the Powers. Wink's argument is simple. The "principalities and powers" of the New Testament are neither pure metaphor nor little devils flapping around the sky. They are real, and they are the inner and outer life of the institutions we live inside—governments, markets, agencies, corporations, systems. Every institution has an outer form (buildings, budgets, personnel, software) and an inner spirit (a culture, a logic, a drive). The Powers are both at once.
Wink argues the Powers were actually created as good, but are now fallen, and therefore can be redeemed. An institution can be doing genuine good and be captured by an idolatrous logic in the very same breath. Which means evil is not only what bad people do. It's also what good people participate in without ever realizing it.
The system is greedy on our behalf
Wink has a passage I've returned to many times. Picture a business owner who has a real change of heart and genuinely wants to treat her workers well:
She cannot raise salaries sharply and still remain competitive when a factory owner in Taiwan or South Korea is making the same product with a teenage girl laborer paid one-tenth of the salary and working twelve or fourteen hours a day, six days a week. The system is greedy on her behalf, and if she rejects the system's values she may be ejected by the system.
The system is greedy on her behalf. She doesn't have to be personally greedy. The greed has been outsourced to a structure that will do it for her, and will discard her if she refuses to let it. Her individual conversion is real and almost beside the point. The Powers have their own appetite.
This is what I mean by structural sin. Structural sin is not an idiom for a lot of people sinning at once. Rather it's a genuine moral reality that lives within the machinery — in the incentives, the code, the policy, the default settings — and that produces harm no one at any desk has to intend. An almost literal ghost in the machine. You can be a decent person and still be fed, clothed, and made comfortable by arrangements that are devouring someone you'll never meet.
We built the maze, then blamed the mice
Which brings us back to that word illegal. For the majority of people who come here without papers, it's as though they "skipped the line." There was no line. Don't picture an orderly queue and a paperwork slacker who refused to stand in it. That queue doesn't exist. If you have no close family who are citizens and no employer willing to sponsor a visa that almost certainly isn't available to you anyway, there is no form, no fee, no patient decade of waiting that ends in legal entry. For whole categories of people, the wait is measured in decades or is simply infinite.
And it was designed that way. Congress set the caps, wrote the categories, and starved the system of the capacity to move anyone through it. Then, having built a maze with no exit, Americans stand at the center and call the people trapped inside criminals. The illegality isn't a fact about them. It's a decision someone made about them, and then hung around their necks, pointed, and said, "Arrest that criminal."
That is structural sin made nakedly obvious. No single border agent has to hate anyone. No one voter has to be cruel. The Power does the cruelty on our behalf, and most of us benefit — cheaper food, cheaper construction, cheaper care for our kids and our parents — without ever having to feel like we chose it. The system is greedy, and now the system is cruel, so we don't have to be.
The stranger already has a name
Scripture has a word for the person we call illegal, which is not a slur, believe it or not. It's ger (גֵּר), showing up more than ninety times in the Hebrew Bible. It does not mean "foreigner" in general. Hebrew has other words for that — nokri, zar — the true outsider, the one who belongs to another land and stays there. The ger is different. The ger is the one who has left home and now lives among you: the resident immigrant, dependent, vulnerable, without the protections of kin or citizenship. Precisely the person our own laws render illegal.
The Torah does something startling with this person. It does not tell Israel to tolerate the ger, or to process the ger, or to verify the ger's paperwork. It commands love.
The ger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the ger as yourself, for you were gerim in the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 19:34)
Over and over the ger is bracketed with the widow and the orphan—the triad of people with no structural power, the ones a just society is measured by. "You shall not oppress a ger; you know the heart of a ger, for you were gerim in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 23:9). Israel is commanded to remember, in its body, what it is to be the person without status. And when Jesus stands in Matthew 25 and says "I was a stranger and you welcomed me," the Greek word is xenos — the stranger, the foreigner. He identifies himself, personally, with the one at the door.
Conservative readers like to point out that the ger was a lawful resident in Israel—not someone who crossed a border in violation of the law. So, they argue, the biblical command applies to legal immigrants, and says nothing in favor of the undocumented.
However, ancient Israel had no machinery for manufacturing illegality. There was no visa lottery, no thirty-year backlog, no category of human being invented by statute and then criminalized for existing in it. The ger was simply the outsider living among you in need of protection—which is exactly who the undocumented immigrant is. Our legal system didn't discover a moral distinction the Bible honors. It created a new status the Bible never imagined, and then used that status to withhold the very love the Torah commands. The objection, followed honestly, indicts the system rather than the stranger.
Structural sin wears a spreadsheet
Immigration is the sharpest example right now, but it's hardly the only one. This same summer, NPR reported on the computer systems that decide who keeps their Medicaid — systems built and run by private contractors like Deloitte, paid millions in taxpayer money to rework state eligibility software on a tight deadline to comply with the new federal law.[^3] In Michigan, the software failed to register that certain people were disabled and declared they earned too much to qualify. In Tennessee, a federal judge ruled in 2024 that a Deloitte-built system that "does not reliably test for eligibility" had violated both federal law and the Constitution. Now the same kind of overhaul is being rushed nationwide, part of a law projected to strip Medicaid from roughly 7.5 million people by 2034. The result is ordinary people losing their coverage not because anyone reviewed their case and judged them unworthy, but because a database timed out, a form auto-generated wrong, or a threshold got miscoded. No villain, just a Power, doing what the Powers do, to people who will never find a human being to appeal to.
That's the tell of structural sin. There's no single person to blame, which some can mistake for no one being harmed. But the prophets never made that mistake. When Isaiah thunders "Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees" (Isaiah 10:1), he is not talking about a merely personal failing. He's talking about legislation. Sin you can vote for. Sin you can automate.
What repentance looks like when the sin is a system
The gospel I was handed could only ever tell me to clean up my own heart, and a clean heart is good, but a clean heart pays taxes into a machine that is cruel on its behalf and calls it a day. If sin were only personal, personal repentance would be enough. It isn't, so it isn't.
The work Jesus does with the Powers is not to help us feel less guilty. It's to unmask them—to strip the aura of inevitability off arrangements we've been told are simply the way things are, and to name them as the fallen, redeemable things they actually are. "That's just the law." "That's just the economy." "That's just how the system works." No, it's not just at all. And we have a duty to name it, resist it, and change it.
So repentance, for those of us insulated by these systems rather than crushed by them, looks like more than a clean conscience. It looks like refusing to call a person illegal. It looks like ringing a bell fifty times and reading the names. It looks like the unglamorous, structural work of changing what the machine is allowed to do—because the machine will never repent.
[^1]: "At Philly's Christ Church, elected officials and interfaith leaders call for end to ICE raids," WHYY, July 2, 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/philly-interfaith-vigil-ice-raids-immigrants-christ-church/
[^2]: "A faithful call to abolish ICE," Religion News Service, July 17, 2026. https://religionnews.com/2026/07/17/a-faithful-call-to-abolish-ice/
[^3]: "Deloitte-run systems denied Medicaid to disabled people. New laws could make it worse," NPR, July 20, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/07/20/nx-s1-5896359/medicaid-disabled-patients-denied-deloitte-michigan
