The Guardian view on refugees: who is our neighbour? | Editorial
(The Guardian Germany)

The migration crisis in Europe is increasingly being understood in religious terms. This can make the incomers seem impossibly alien and makes it harder to understand, and deal with, their problemsThe crisis in German politics has been postponed for at least a fortnight. Angela Merkel has rescued her coalition by promising to negotiate a deal within the wider EU about the settlement of refugees. The CSU, the Bavarian party in her conservative parliamentary grouping, had threatened to close the border to refugees trying to re-enter the country after being denied asylum once; this will not now happen until a more general deal has been reached. The crisis goes to the heart of the question - both moral and political - of what are the obligations that the settled world owes to the migrants who come to our frontiers.The question is increasingly being posed in religious terms. The Bavarian state government, which has been in the hands of the CSU since 1966, started to display crosses on the front of all public buildings - a move opposed by the Catholic Church in Germany, even though the CSU identifies as strongly Catholic. The CSU claimed that the cross was not in this context a theological symbol, but a marker of culture. This is not entirely disingenuous. Religion and culture cannot be completely disentangled from each other: a religion that is not nourished by cultural practice will die in a generation. Continue reading...