Foreigners, Immigrants, Prejudice, Imprisonment
Reflections on the Lectionary (and America) for June 1st
Unjust imprisonment and cruel punishment. Blatant xenophobia. Economic protectionism born from the desire to profit from exploitation and enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labor. Violence under the surface of everything, starting to bubble over.
Are these today’s headlines, or the lectionary for Sunday? It’s both, as it turns out.
The lectionary this week continues the story of Paul’s visit to Philippi, which was begun last week. This week we find a “we” group (Paul and some companions, including Silas) returning to the same place where they were in last week’s passage, the place of prayer by a river where Paul had met Lydia. On the way, the group encountered an enslaved girl who possessed a spirit of divination. I want to pause for a moment and say a few things about this person’s identity, because she represents a very rich nexus of belonging.
This enslaved girl is a paidiskē in the Greek, a word that refers to an enslaved girl or woman. It can also refer to a female child generally, but it probably implies enslavement either way. Paidiskē is used a dozen times in the New Testament, and four of the usages are by Luke—two in the gospel and two in Acts. It seems to be a favorite way for Luke to frame stories and identities. But this enslaved girl is special; she is described with a strange word, often rendered in English as “pythonic” or “Pythian.” The NRSV and NRSVue translate this word as “divination,” but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The word specifically refers to an association with the cultic site of Delphi, with its famous oracle and its temples. The “spirit of divination” that the enslaved girl possessed was probably connected to the cult of Apollo or some other divinities at Delphi; she was, in some way, gifted with the ability to speak for deities. In the encounter described in Acts 16:16-18, the enslaved girl seems to be doing just this—announcing a true oracle about Paul and his companions, saying that they were “slaves of the Most High God.”
Paul didn’t like that, and he ordered the spirit of divination to leave her, which it did. This was a strange thing to do, since the girl appeared to have been telling the truth about Paul and his companions, at least from Paul’s perspective. They were “slaves of the Most High God,” in Paul’s own view. But the girl annoyed Paul with her constant announcements, and he sent the spirit out of her, causing her to lose her abilities and therefore her economic value to her owners. Acts doesn’t pause to consider the consequences for the enslaved girl herself; she likely would have been relegated to a much worse life once her abilities in fortune-telling were gone. But the story proceeds with the girl’s owners lodging a protest over the damage done to their property; the girl wouldn’t make them any money without her gift of soothsaying, and they were angry about it. The next part of the story is the part that could pass for one of today’s headlines.
These Philippian slave-owners made their living off the exploitation of others. They depended on their control of other people’s labor to support themselves—at least this girl’s labor, and probably the labor of others too. This kind of arrangement is familiar to us today, often (but not always) in milder forms. Most of the goods and services we enjoy are subsidized by forms of exploitation—workers toiling away in faraway factories for less money and worse conditions than we would accept to do the same job, people mowing our lawns or grilling our burgers for wages far below what it takes to survive, gasoline bought without consideration for all the external costs to the environment that nobody pays for. Our relatively cushy lifestyles are propped up by the economic power of our social locations, which is in turn propped up by the military power of the United States. It might be unsavory to think of ourselves in that way, as analogous to the Philippian slave-owners, but most of us have much more in common with them than we do with the enslaved girl.
The slave-owners became angry when their livelihood was threatened—when their ability to profitably exploit someone else came to an end. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the slave-owners, faced with this situation, “dragged” Paul and Silas “into the marketplace before the authorities,” as it says in 16:19. The Philippian slave-owners wanted their case heard, and they knew that the best place to find sympathetic ears would be in the marketplace, where profit reigned supreme and threats to commerce would be met with fury. We see something similar today; Donald Trump ran for president three times on the claim that immigrants threaten American prosperity. “They’re going to be attacking,” Trump said at a rally in 2024, “and they already are, Black population jobs, the Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too.” He continued, “so when you see the border, it’s not just the crime. Your jobs are being taken away too.” As a matter of economic truth, this is absurd, as even many conservative commenters pointed out; immigrants tend to do jobs that others wouldn’t want (there’s that exploitation again), and they create a great deal of value for the economy, rather than “attacking” jobs, as Trump suggested. But truth doesn’t usually matter in this kind of economic populism. All Trump (and others before and alongside him) has to do is to drag the question into the marketplace—just like the Philippian slave-owners did—and a special kind of anxiety will be triggered.
Notice how this happens, though. In Trump’s language last fall, he did what he often does, describing money and identity and belonging in all-or-nothing, in-or-out terms. In his words then and at many other times, immigrants represent a threat to “Black population jobs,” “Hispanic population jobs,” and “union jobs.” Unstated in that moment, but very much the center of Trump’s platform, is the idea that immigrants represent a threat to “White” jobs too. In Trump’s view, money rightfully belongs to certain kinds of people and not to others, and foreigners (and specifically racially-othered foreigners) are the ones threatening that ownership. This is precisely the position of the Philippian slave-owners. “These men, these Jews,” they said in the marketplace, “are disturbing our city, and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us, being Romans, to adopt or observe.” I’m reminded of a Trump surrogate’s warning, during the 2016 campaign, that if Hillary Clinton won the election there would be “taco trucks on every corner.” The horror.
The Philippian slave-owners’ appeal to ethnic and political nationalism is not accidental; it’s one of the most effective, tried-and-true ways to hoard wealth that the world has ever known. Describing Paul and Silas as “these Jews” (or “these Judeans” if we emphasize the geographical and ethnic meanings of Ioudaioi) is a dog whistle to the marketplace crowd; it’s a way to say these foreigners are not like us real Romans. It’s a way to create insiders and outsiders, and to rally support for themselves as they try to exact revenge on the foreigners. It’s a way to incite violence.
Violence did ensue in the Philippian marketplace. “The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods,” it says in 16:22. Having been identified as foreigners, Paul and Silas were suddenly vulnerable to violence in a way that they had not been before, and in a way that doesn’t seem to apply to anyone else in the story. The combination of economic threat and ethnic and geographical protectionism drove the Philippians to immediate and severe forms of viciousness. The slave-owners had been smart to drag Paul and Silas to the marketplace, and they had been savvy to describe them as foreigners. The combination had the desired effect, and suddenly a mob was beating up their enemies, doing their dirty work for them.
In stories like these, prejudice quickly turns to othering, othering quickly turns to accusations, and accusations turn to violence. In the final step, violence turns to either death or imprisonment and a loss of freedom for the people who are deemed outsiders, foreigners, or immigrants. This passage from Acts ratchets up its violence and control slowly, starting with the “dragging” to the marketplace and then proceeding to the othering and the violence of the mob. But it reaches its obvious and inevitable endpoint in imprisonment, in verse 23.
Christian imaginations of this story often focus on the part where Paul and Silas are praying and singing in jail, in verse 25, and the Christian tradition surrounds this story with sentimental ideas about piety under hardship and God’s deliverance beginning in 16:26. But if we remember that back in verse 22 Paul and Silas had been stripped of their clothing, and that in verse 24 they had been put “in the innermost cell” with their feet “fastened…in the stocks,” a different image emerges. Paul and Silas had been othered so fully, and they had been painted as invasive foreigners so effectively, that their experience of imprisonment was one of dehumanization. They were naked, and they were housed in the most isolating form of incarceration possible, as far removed from friends and family as could be managed, and they were chained like animals.
It’s hard to read this story of Paul and Silas in prison and not think about the ways the United States is currently carrying out imprisonment and deportations (and has been carrying them out, Trump or no Trump, since the early 20th century, under the guidance of both Republicans and Democrats). Immigrants—many of whom are in the country legally, and most of whom are no threat to anyone—are being rounded up and imprisoned. The people who have been detained often disappear from their regular networks quickly, so that it can be difficult to find out where they are, and even politicians with a lot of power have a difficult time visiting them. And of course some immigrants—among them people who have protected legal status—have been deported, and some have even been sold into imprisonment in other countries. It might be difficult to believe the story of Paul and Silas as told in Acts 16, if we weren’t seeing something very similar play out in our own time and place. The possession and control of someone else’s body is the ultimate form of power—just ask a Philippian slave-owner or a guard at an ICE jail.
Those of us who oppose what’s happening to immigrants in the United States these days have done a lot of protesting about it, and we have won many victories in the courts. Judges up to and including the Supreme Court justices have affirmed that the Constitution affords due process rights to all persons (and not just citizens, as the right-wing commentariat has begun to claim), and that the Constitution also affords power to the other two branches of government, not just the Executive Branch. Many courts have found in favor of the detainees. But this is a hollow victory and an empty form of power; most of the people who have been rounded up and imprisoned and deported and sold into foreign custody are still not free. Like Paul and Silas, they find themselves stripped and confined, with little hope of freedom.
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It’s worth noting that although this story in Philippi ends with Paul and Silas being miraculously freed by a divine earthquake, Paul ends up in prison a few more time in Acts. He spends a couple of years detained in prison without progress on his case (Acts 24:25-27) because a corrupt governor was using Paul’s case to curry favor and trying to personally profit from his incarceration. And Acts ends its story, in chapter 28, with Paul imprisoned in Rome, awaiting an appeal to the emperor. Paul is never heard from again, and local tradition has it that he was murdered by the empire. We will likely never know precisely what happened to Paul in Rome, or how exactly he died. But it’s safe to say that imprisonment was an important part of the story of his death, and that the power-hungry prejudice that put him in prison in Philippi was very much like the power-hungry prejudice that kept imprisoned in Jerusalem, Caesarea, Rome, and elsewhere.
If you oppose forms of discrimination and prejudice, and if you think it’s wrong to exploit people and to imprison them without cause, you’ll find a lot of support for your positions in the Book of Acts. And if you think what’s happening in the United States right now is good and just, you’ll find that you have a lot in common with the villains in the Book of Acts. Acts—the second half of the book in particular—tells Paul’s story through a series of prison cells and corrupt authorities, shuffling Paul’s body from one trumped-up form of custody to another. Acts is a send-up of Rome’s supposed justice; it’s a slow unmasking of the ways the empire covers its domination and its disregard for human life with a veneer of law-and-order. The courtroom and prison settings of the second half of Acts are a sustained and devastating critique of Rome’s self-interested self-righteousness, and in many ways the story of Paul and Silas imprisoned in Philippi sets the tone.
The author of Acts didn’t know anything about America in 2025, and neither did Paul or Silas. They lived in a wholly different time and place. But if they were to be transported here somehow, into a world in which the United States is using detention and imprisonment to weaponize prejudice and xenophobia, they would immediately recognize our cruel systems of domination and our craven bigotry veiled as economic anxiety. They would understand the othering, the seizure and possession of bodies, and the scapegoating of foreigners. They would see our current moment for what it really is: power groping for ways to serve itself at the expense of innocent people.