The Stranger and the Moral Life of a People

A recent Vox interview with psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, timed to the release of her new book Once Upon a Stranger, offers a modest and welcome claim: talking to strangers is usually better for us than we think. We tend to overestimate the awkwardness, underestimate the rewards, and allow a nervous inner monologue to keep us from simple acts of human contact. Sandstrom’s larger argument is that small conversations can widen a life, ease loneliness, and strengthen human flourishing.  

That is sensible advice for an anxious age. But the biblical tradition has always pressed the matter further. In Scripture, the stranger is not merely a possible contributor to our well-being. The stranger is a test of public morality.

That is a stronger claim than modern therapeutic language usually permits. We prefer to talk about social connection in terms of mood, confidence, resilience, and mental health. Those are not unimportant matters. But the Jewish and Christian traditions have long understood that what a society does with strangers reveals something more searching than its psychological condition. It reveals its moral and spiritual condition. A people may speak eloquently about freedom, dignity, family, and faith. But the test comes when the unfamiliar person appears—the foreigner, the newcomer, the one who does not know the cues, the one who stands outside the natural circles of kinship, tribe, and ease.

What happens then?

The Torah’s answer is both simple and demanding. “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Deuteronomy says much the same, grounding that command in the very character of God, who “loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing,” and then commanding Israel: “You shall also love the stranger.”  

This is not an incidental biblical theme. It lies close to the heart of Israel’s moral memory. The command to care for the stranger is rooted not in vague niceness but in historical recollection. You know what it is to be vulnerable, displaced, at the mercy of powers larger than yourself. Therefore you may not build your common life on forgetfulness. Compassion, in this moral universe, begins as memory.

The New Testament intensifies rather than softens that claim. Jesus does not simply tell his followers to be kind to outsiders. In Matthew 25, he identifies himself with them: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” The line is among the most searching in the Gospels because it leaves no room for religious self-congratulation detached from public responsibility. Christ is not only in the sanctuary, not only in the sacrament, not only in the inward life of the believer. He is also mysteriously present in the one whose face and story are unfamiliar to us.  

That biblical witness throws a harsh light on modern public life. We have become adept at speaking of strangers in categories of management, threat, utility, and optics. The stranger is a demographic, an issue, a burden, a voter, a border problem, a cultural irritant, a suspicious figure in a parking lot, a person to be screened, sorted, monitored, or ignored. Even when our language is less overtly political, it is often no less reductive. The stranger is background scenery in the drama of the self.

Here Sandstrom’s psychology and the biblical tradition meet in an illuminating way. Her research suggests that everyday interactions with strangers tend to go better than we expect and that such contact contributes to a fuller human life.   Scripture would add that the issue is not only whether these interactions benefit us. The deeper issue is whether we have become the sort of people, and the sort of society, for whom no obligation is felt beyond familiarity.

That is what makes the stranger a test of public morality. The measure of a society is not only how warmly it treats its intimates, its achievers, or its loyalists. The measure is what happens at the edge—where affinity thins, where familiarity disappears, where instinctive sympathy does not come easily. If public life cannot sustain any moral seriousness about the stranger, then its talk of justice and dignity is already hollowing out.

This is not a plea for sentimentality. Not every stranger is safe. Prudence is a virtue too. Neither biblical faith nor common sense asks for naïveté. But there is a great difference between prudence and a moral imagination organized entirely by fear. Fear narrows the world until only “our own” count as fully real. The stranger then ceases to be neighbor and becomes, at best, a tolerated inconvenience.

Something similar happens in our churches as well. Congregations often speak earnestly of welcome, but the true test is rarely found in what they print on a sign or post on a website. It is found in the look on the face when someone walks in who does not fit the unspoken script. It is found in whether anyone crosses the room. It is found in whether the newcomer is treated as a guest to be managed, a problem to be solved, or a person whose presence may disclose something about our own discipleship.

Perhaps that is why the stranger remains such a potent figure in the religious imagination. The stranger interrupts our self-enclosed stories. The stranger exposes the distance between our ideals and our habits. The stranger reminds us that moral life does not begin and end with those we already know how to love.

Modern psychology is right to tell us that talking to strangers can be good for us. But biblical religion makes a harder claim: strangers are not merely good for our emotional health. They are one of the places where a people’s soul is revealed.

And perhaps, if the tradition is right, one of the places where it may still be healed.