But what a lot of xenophobic Christians miss, besides the brutally obvious racism, is this: Jesus himself came from an undesirable foreign place that could credibly be called a “shithole.” Nazareth was a remote enclave of a few hundred people, a typical agricultural community where people worked hard and lived simply. Archaeological excavations in Nazareth have revealed small stone homes with no public buildings or infrastructure, indicating it was a modest, isolated rural settlement, smack in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t along any major trade routes and was not a place of any political or
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