Did John Piper Go Woke?

John Piper recently made a splash on X, which is impressive because John Piper doesn’t use X the right way. The right way to use X is to post hot takes, react in real time to current events, dunk on your political opponents, and make sure the whole internet knows what you think on a given topic. Actually, most people use X to watch a small handful of people do those things, but for someone who posts all the time, Piper is pretty boring. His feed consists of verses of Scripture with brief devotional thoughts. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the kind of content the algorithm rewards. For that reason, Piper’s account rarely gets noticed. Until a couple of weeks ago, that is.

What happened that has people all over the internet crying “woke”? Well Piper, who is, don’t forget, a pastor in Minneapolis, posted the following: 

“‘You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.’ Leviticus 19:34 

Christians know the miserable bondage we were all in.”

The backlash was pretty intense. The post racked up nearly 2,000 replies and has almost 2 million views. The betrayal was real. This was “foolish” according to some. This verse shouldn’t be applied to the modern situation, there are too many differences, according to others. So is this another example of a high-profile evangelical going soft? Is this a prophetic voice speaking an unpopular message to the Republican party, one that they need to hear? Or is it… neither? 

 

What Did Piper Mean?

If you look at the post itself, I don’t think there’s anything particularly controversial about it. It’s a Bible verse, which I think we all agree is a good thing. Piper makes a brief applicational comment that Christians have been in miserable bondage, which seems to spiritualize the verse more than anything. It’s not so much what the post itself says, but what many people think Piper means by what he said. In other words, some see this as a subtweet directed at ICE, or Trump. It’s a dog whistle, as others would say. “Let the reader understand,” to use the Scriptural idiom. But is it? What did Piper mean by these words? 

Honestly, I don’t know. I can’t read John Piper’s mind. He might have been reading Leviticus for his devotions that morning, read the statement about bondage, thought to himself, “boy, I know what that’s like,” and written a post saying just that. He might have been thinking about immigration raids, said to himself, “You know, whatever else we might think about immigration, we do at least need to take time to consider what the Bible says about it. This verse might not be super popular right now, but maybe that means we need it more.” And of course, he could be a secret open border fanatic who was thrilled that Biden refused to enforce the border and is trying to be the fifth column taking out the conservatives from within by posting out of context Bible verses. I highly doubt the last one, but I don’t know. 

I don’t know, and in the end it doesn’t really matter. Because as we look at this situation, I think it tells us a lot more about the conservative movement than it does about John Piper. 

 

What Does This Show Us About Ourselves?

I still remember the first time I felt cognitive dissonance on the immigration issue. The year was 2016, and the Republicans were trying to figure out who would face off against Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump was running, which at first seemed more like a joke than a real possibility. His big pitch at the time was building a wall to keep people from migrating illegally, with a “big, beautiful door” to let people in through legal migration. This was the immigration issue that America had been hashing back and forth for quite a while – how do we keep Latinos from coming in illegally?

My college was hosting a discussion panel where all the candidates were going to be discussing the issues in Greenville, SC. I was walking around in a sea of people when someone handed me a pamphlet trying to whip up resistance against Obama for letting Syrian refugees into our country. I remember being very confused by this handout. I honestly wondered for a brief second if this was a Democrat walking around trying to stir things up, because I couldn’t understand why someone on my side of the political aisle would be opposed to letting refugees into our country. 

I didn’t know my Old Testament nearly as well as I should have, but I knew enough to know that over and over the Old Testament talks about having a heart of compassion for the foreigner and the sojourner. Those passages were pretty straightforward, or so I thought (and by the way, there are a lot of them. In the Pentateuch alone we have Exodus 22:21; 23:9; Leviticus 19:10, 33-34; 23:22; 24:22; Numbers 9:14; 15:14-16, 29; 35:15; Deuteronomy 1:16; 10:18-19; 16:11, 14; 24:14, 17, 19-21; 26:11-13; 27:19; 29:10-12). Now, over time I came to understand the rationale behind the criticism of bringing in Syrian refugees. “They have a harder time assimilating here. Let them go to a place with a similar culture and language.” Fair enough, but I still felt a little uneasy. After all, my sacred texts instruct me to care for the outsider, and these were people running for their lives. I felt conflicted. 

Fast forward to 2026. We find ourselves in an awkward spot as a country. Millions of people entered the country illegally over the past several decades, but especially over the last five years. Many of them are forming large communities that are intentionally self-contained and resistant to integrating into American culture and values. Some of them have committed massive fraud. Many are receiving forms of governmental aid that are costing taxpayers money. So where do we go from here? Every modern country has borders and has a right to enforce those borders. So what does that mean for Leviticus 19:34?

Well, as many of Piper’s critics have pointed out, this is not a verse giving us a blueprint for modern nation states’ immigration policy. Piper didn’t say it was. This verse is not saying that nations don’t have a right to enforce their borders. Piper didn’t say that it was. This is a verse giving a general principle—God wants you to treat the outsider well—and giving Israel a specific reminder for why they should do that. 

When thinking about these kinds of verses, I have found the distinction between policy and personal to be helpful. As a policy, American voters and their elected officials need to decide what they are going to do about immigration, legal and illegal. They will need to decide who can be let in, and what must be done about those who come here when they are not given permission. On a personal note, though, Christians need to be warm and welcoming to everyone they come across. We don’t have to narrow our eyes when we see someone from another country and think, “I wonder if they are legal or illegal. I need to find out.” As individual Christians, we should show warmth and acceptance to everyone, especially those on the outside or those who are disadvantaged. 

To be frank, some of the responses to Piper’s post are a little unsettling. A number of them try to claim that the foreigner in Leviticus is only a converted Israelite, but that isn’t what the text says. The Hebrew word that is most often used here, ger, simply means a foreigner. Nothing is implied about the conversion of the person in question to the faith of Israel. To me, this line of argumentation sounds dangerously close to the expert in the law who asked Jesus, “But who is my neighbor?” “You want me to love my neighbor? Okay, no problem. That’s easy so long as I can define my neighbor as everyone I like.” In response, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. Jesus’ answer is the person you dislike the most and who dislikes you is your neighbor. That’s the person you are supposed to love.

I honestly think conservative Christians need to do some soul-searching if a single verse sets them off like this. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “The conservatives do protest too much, methinks.” To put it bluntly, if reading a verse from a pastor who regularly posts Bible verses to X is enough to get you worked up, I don’t think your problem is with John Piper. Your problem is with Scripture. I’m not advocating for open borders, and I’m not saying the government can’t deport people who are here illegally. I am saying that as individuals we are clearly called on by God to love people we would dislike were it not for the gospel. I am saying that the Bible calls on us to love the outsider, and we don’t get to play games where we decide which outsiders count and which ones we don’t actually have to love.

I don’t know if John Piper has gone woke, although I highly doubt it. But I think it says something about us that it took him posting one verse for us to jump to that conclusion.

 

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Ben Hicks is the Associate Pastor at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis. This article originally appeared on his Substack.