Infiltrators, Imposters, or Human Beings? The Slovenian Socio-Political Imaginary, Christianity, and the Responses to the 2015–2016 Migrant Crisis

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the discourse within two Christian communities in Slovenia: the Roman Catholic Church (majority) and the Seventh-day Adventist Church (small minority). Among their responses to the 2015–2016 migrant crisis in Slovenia, we could find attitudes and arguments that were particular to the Slovenian context. Those attitudes and arguments had to do with the Slovenian socio-political imaginary and cultural memory, which includes anti-Muslim tropes, Slovenian political dynamics, and the Slovenian experience with Bosnian Muslims. A clear tension between a Christian-humanitarian attitude and an anti-Muslim identitarian Christianity brought a significant disunity into the Catholic response, while the Adventist response remained almost consistently Christian humanitarian. The main difference, however, was not along the denominational lines, but between those Christian responses that were theological and those that moved away from theology into securitarian and identitarian discourse.