(42) Comfortable Christianity: The Use of Christian Rhetoric in German Immigration Policy

     Since 2015, the Syrian refugee crisis has dominated political discourse across Europe. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been a leader in the movement to integrate refugees into countries of asylum, all the... [ view full abstract ]

     Since 2015, the Syrian refugee crisis has dominated political discourse across Europe. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been a leader in the movement to integrate refugees into countries of asylum, all the while representing her political party, the Christian Democratic Union. The Christian Democratic Union has historically been allied with the leading Bavarian political party, the Christian Social Union, which is contrastingly opposed to the entry of refugees into Germany. Considering the names of each party, my research explores the role of Christianity in each and how it is used to defend or refute the presence of refugees in Germany. To conduct my research, I selected three German newspapers; two that are based in the CSU’s Bavaria: Die Abendzeitung (The Evening Newspaper) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Southern Germany Newspaper), and a third from Hamburg, in northern Germany: Die Zeit (The Times), which typically remains loyal to Chancellor Merkel of the CDU. I then selected articles from each newspaper that cover Chancellor Merkel’s September 2015 declaration of Germany’s open-door policy and, from later that year, the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne. Then, to analyze each article, I noted the language used in discussing refugees, Chancellor Merkel, and the perpetrators of the New Year’s Eve assaults. Doing so revealed a trend of the use of logistical, or scientific language from the opposers of Germany’s open-door policy, while the proponents of Chancellor Merkel’s initiative relied more on Christian rhetoric. Such findings are indicative of the role religion is playing in the ongoing discussion of foreign policy in the face of the refugee crisis.