Let me present you with a thought experiment:

You live in a country where there is heavy suspicion surrounding a particular religious group. Your country is actually under the control of another nearby nation, and their occupying police force has demanded a registry of anyone professing that religion. Oh, don’t jump to conclusions; their names are just being kept on a list as a matter of public safety. Of course, it’s not long before the law is changed, and now adherents of that religion are required to wear identifying patches as well. On seeing the patches, many businesses won’t interact with them, and they are greeted with angry slurs in the streets. Some of your neighbors are Christians like you, but as an act of support for the other religious group, they have begun wearing the patches and have asked you to do the same. They argue that Jesus always stands with the oppressed, but you have concerns. First of all, wearing another religion’s patch could be seen as a denial of Christ, and Jesus was pretty adamant about that in the Bible. Also, let’s be practical here: putting on the patch could mean disastrous ramifications for you, your business, and your family. So what would you do?

The situation above took place in The Netherlands in the 1940s. The occupying force was Nazi Germany; the religious group were the Jews; and your outspoken neighbors were the ten Boom family, who sheltered Jewish refugees in their home until their own imprisonment for being Jewish sympathizers. Corrie ten Boom survived the Holocaust and helped her neighbors rebuild their lives after the war. We lift her up today as an icon of peaceful resistance and sacrificial charity.

I bring all this up because of the political talk I’m seeing lately. One of Donald Trump’s scarier campaign promises was a registry of American Muslims, a move that has invited comparisons to Japanese internment in WWII, if not to the Holocaust itself. Realistically, the American legal system will probably prevent this campaign promise from ever being realized. The First Amendment states that Congress cannot pass any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, so such a registry would probably be ruled unconstitutional almost immediately. In the unlikely event Congress passed it, organizations like the Baptist Joint Committee and ACLU would certainly get in the way and take it to court. Still, the promised registry is prompting discussion.

Imagining a nightmare scenario where such a law actually passes, Daily Show host Trevor Noah called for all Americans to register as Muslims to render the law ineffective and protect our Muslim neighbors. And so now we’re back to Amsterdam and the ten Boom family and the initial dilemma of this post:

Christians are called on to champion the oppressed.
Christians also cannot deny Christ or profess anyone else as savior.
If all this actually happened here, what would you do?