Within hours of taking office, Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders that together signal a nation determined to shut out those seeking refuge here. Yii-Jan Lin, associate professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, says Trump’s description of immigrants as invaders continues a long tradition in this country that draws from language in the Bible, and specifically the Book of Revelation. “Revelation is useful when you want to call someone out as an enemy and to seek their destruction,” says Lin. She spoke with EMS Editor Peter Schurmann. (Feature image via Flickr)
What first brought you to look at the links between the Bible, and specifically the Book of Revelation, and immigration?
I started thinking about this project in the Bay Area. I was teaching at the Pacific School of Religion, part of the consortium of theological schools in Berkeley, and they asked me to lead a seminar on some biblical texts in the context of immigration and the AAPI community. Place names in the Bay Area are quite heavenly. There’s the Golden Gate. Early Chinese immigrants first called San Francisco “Gold Mountain.” Angel Island is where arrivals from Asia would be held. That got me thinking about the United States, its self-conception as a shining city on a hill, an apocalyptic destination of sorts.
What do you mean by apocalyptic and how does that apply to immigrants?
Apocalyptic in the ancient meaning suggests a revelation, like an unveiling. And that could be good or bad, depending on what side you’re on. In the ancient Jewish and ancient Christian mindset, it meant showing the believer the reality behind everything. In the 1st Century context, if you believed that God’s justice will come down on your side, then you’re in a good spot, right? But if you are revealed to be God’s enemy, then all of God’s wrath—in the form of plagues, earthquakes and floods—will be visited on you. And that relates to the way we describe immigrants, either as welcome, coming to this golden, shining place of refuge, or rejecting them as enemies of God.
You’ve described the Christian journey as akin to the immigrant experience. Can you say more on that?
That is the Christian view, that everyone who believes is a pilgrim heading toward God’s City. In parts of the New Testament, there’s an understanding that the world is not our home. In his Letter to Philippians, Paul says your citizenship is in heaven, not on any place on Earth. So, there is that feeling of being an alien, a citizen of another place.
What do biblical sources tell us about immigrants?
A lot of it comes from the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, where we have the Israelites as foreigners in Egypt, and then being travelers in the wilderness, and then finally reaching the promised land. Then we have the Torah, the giving of the law, in which God says, Remember, you were once foreigners in Egypt. So, you must treat the foreigner in your land with compassion, with justice. That is a huge theme in Jewish law and Israelite law. When we get to the New Testament, there’s the memory of that. So, you find in this new construction of a Christian identity that they’re still travelers on the way. It’s an important theme that gets picked up explicitly when talking about strangers or newcomers, the idea of do unto others, of having compassion or showing mercy.
That message of mercy was at the core of Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s post-inauguration sermon. On the other side are Christians who say we must defend the country from immigrants. How do we square these opposing interpretations?
They represent very different corners of the Christian Bible. The Book of Revelation is describing ultimate realities in which God’s Kingdom is finally realized. That’s it, we’ve reached the end of any mercy or compassion. Then, identifying a nation state to God’s country is especially dangerous because you put that absolute onto a place, onto a certain type of people. I would say white supremacists make that claim. That is a very different text than what we find in the Gospels, in which we have the story of the life of Jesus. They are two different genres with different purposes. Revelation is useful when you want to call someone out as an enemy and to seek their destruction. It’s not so useful to take the teachings of Jesus, who says, Love your enemies.
What is the Bible’s broader message when it comes to nationalism and borders?
That’s a huge question. If we think about it in a historical sense, the nation state didn’t exist back then, but there were kingdoms, with different categories of belonging or not belonging, and conflict between some of those identities. We have the conflict between the Canaanites and Israelites, exile and the seizing of land in Israelite history. When you get into the New Testament, you have the domination of the Roman Empire and resistance to it. Revelation is an interesting book because it’s resisting Empire, but it replaces that empire with God’s Empire, which is problematic because it’s thinking of heaven as a bigger, better Rome. God’s throne room looks a lot like a Roman imperial court. But there are places where you find a call to compassion, a call to breaking dividing walls, a call to reconciliation between different ethnic groups. Acts 2 is oftentimes held up as a point of inclusion for the different ethnicities in Jerusalem, who hear God’s Word in their respective languages. There are moments where you see multiplicity and a sense of reconciliation.
‘Uncle Sam’s Farm in Danger’: an 1878 cartoon by G. F. Keller depicts Chinese emigrants fleeing famine. The Wasp via Wikimedia Commons
Your book offers historical examples of how America leaned on Revelation when formulating its policies toward immigrants. What did that look like, specifically?
Some of the starkest examples we have are those laws aimed at Chinese immigrants, starting in 1875 and then into the 20th century. Arguments in the Senate at the time described the Chinese as heathens, of not belonging to a Christian nation, so why would we ever allow them in. They’re described as coming in large numbers. One cartoon from the time depicts Chinese immigrants as locusts, like a divine plague. Others link immigrants to disease. The worst possible treatment is at the US Mexico border, when, in the 1910s and onward, Mexicans were understood as most likely to carry typhoid. As in Revelation, where people can only enter the gates after washing their robes, workers coming in at the border had to get a bath ticket. They literally had to wash to get in the gates. But officials were also dousing them in kerosene to kill ticks or lice that they thought would carry typhoid. There was a fire that killed people because of that. They’re also spraying and dusting them with DDT and Zyklon B, absolutely carcinogenic and horrible. There’s one section of an interview where a Mexican migrant worker described being dusted with powder, joking afterwards, “I guess we’re all gringos now, right?” because of the white powder covering him.
Reporting suggests the Trump administration is now looking for a new health threat as grounds to reinstate Title 42.
It’s a repeat of history. It began with the Chinese and COVID, and then it moved to the border. It’s the same thing.
Yii-Jan Lin is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, where she teaches the critical study of ancient texts and their interpretation, especially in relation to race and gender. She is the author of Immigration and Apocalypse, which explores religious, biblical, and apocalyptic themes in American immigration history.
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