What does it mean to be human?

Over the last few months, as the national debate on immigration reform has moved from legislative chambers to the streets, religion has played an important role.
Encouraged by such leaders as Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, some protesters have relied on religious motives for wanting a kinder and gentler immigration system. They have spoken of justice, of hospitality, of meeting the needs of people in trouble.
All of these are worthy motives rooted in religious values common to many faiths.
But there's a deeper lesson religion should be teaching in the immigration issue. It should do that by raising these more fundamental questions: What does it means to be human? Are we not human first and American or Mexican or Honduran second (or third or sixth)?
If so -- and religion generally would declare it to be so -- what are the implications for the human creations we call nation states? Aren't the borders we draw and the laws we pass to regulate life within them simply a recognition that we live in a fallen world, a world in which people simply cannot be trusted always to do what is moral, ethical and, in a word, right?
Recognizing the common humanity of which religion speaks should be easier today than it was 100 years ago, when there was no TV, radio, Internet or phone service. And in some ways it is easier.
But we seem so locked into nationalism -- which is not, at its root, a religious idea -- that it's hard for us to think of ourselves first as citizens of the world and, thus, as brothers and sisters of others in the world. Rather, we often think of ourselves first as Americans or Indians or Japanese. When we travel we must carry passports and get visas. We must negotiate our way through different languages, customs and cultures.
But to the extent that religion is of divine origin and not a creation of fallible humanity, it can offer a liberating word about all of this -- one that asks us to remember who we were created to be. Consider, for instance, the experience of the late civil rights activist Malcolm X.
When he was a young man, he preached that white people were devils who inevitably would try to enslave black people. But in 1964, after he left the radical Nation of Islam, he took a pilgrimage to Mecca where, as he later described in his autobiography, he met "blond-haired, blue-eyed men I could call my brothers."
Ah-ha moment
It was an ah-ha moment -- the kind of epiphany religion should be offering to everyone.
Islam, the religion that Malcolm X joined, tends to de-emphasize nation states and to pay more attention to what it calls the ummah, the global community of Muslims. In some ways, this approach has contributed to Islam's failure to use the reality of nation states to improve the lot of its people. More often, predominantly Muslim nation states are run by oppressive rulers who are at best nominally Islamic.
But that failure is no reflection on the validity of the idea that humans of all races and backgrounds can be brothers and sisters.
Followers of many other religions have tried to live out that belief. For instance, you will find Buddhists and Hindus of many nationalities. Even Judaism, with identifiable roots in a Semitic stock of people, today includes Ethiopians and others with markedly different racial, ethnic and national backgrounds.
And the world's largest religion, Christianity, includes people of nearly every race and nation. This is in harmony with what Jesus said when he was speaking to a crowd and someone interrupted to say, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you." His answer: "Who are my mother and my brothers? ... Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."
As long as nation states are a reality of life (and they will be for a long time, even though in some ways they already are breaking down), it will be necessary for each one to defend its borders and create rational ways for people to move across those borders -- whether temporarily or permanently. To make sure those rules are fair and just, people of faith should continue to offer their views.
But as that happens, religion should not lose site of its broader vision of humanity, one that transcends artificial lines drawn on maps.
Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.