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What first led you to examine 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 Berkeley consortium of theological schools, and I was asked to lead a seminar on some biblical texts in the context of immigration and the AAPI community. Place names in the Bay Area are pretty heavenly. There’s the Golden Gate. Early Chinese immigrants called San Francisco “Gold Mountain.” Angel Island is where newcomers from Asia were held. That got me thinking about the United States, its self-conception as a shining city on a hill, a kind of apocalyptic destiny.
What do you mean by apocalyptic and how does that apply to immigrants? ?
In the ancient sense, the term apocalyptic suggests a revelation, like an unveiling. And that can be good or bad, depending on which side you're on. In the ancient Jewish and Christian mindset, it meant showing the believer the reality behind everything. In the first-century context, if you believed that God's justice would fall on your side, then you were in a good position, right? But if you are revealed to be an enemy of God, then all of God's wrath, in the form of plagues and earthquakes and floods, will fall upon you. And that ties into how we describe immigrants, either as welcomed, coming to this golden, shining place of refuge, or rejecting them as enemies of God.
You have described the Christian journey as similar to the experience of immigrants. Can you tell us more about this?
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Americans who oppose immigration, specifically from non-European countries, have long depicted immigrants in terms that draw heavily on the apocalyptic narrative found in the Book of Revelation, says Professor Yii-Jan Lin.
That is the Christian view, that everyone who believes is a pilgrim on his way to the City of God. In some parts of the New Testament, there is an understanding that the world is not our home. In his Letter to the Philippians, Paul says that your citizenship is in heaven, not anywhere on earth. So there is that sense of being a foreigner, a citizen of another place.
What do biblical sources tell us about immigrants?
Much of this comes from the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, where we have the Israelites as strangers in Egypt, and then as travelers in the wilderness, and finally coming to the promised land. Then we have the Torah, the giving of the law, in which God says: Remember, you were once strangers in Egypt. Therefore, you must treat the stranger in your land with compassion, with justice. That is a big theme in Jewish law and Israelite law. When we come to the New Testament, there is the remembrance of that. So, we find in this new construction of a Christian identity that they are still travelers on the road. It is an important theme that is taken up explicitly when talking about strangers or newcomers, the idea of doing unto others what is good for them, of having compassion or showing mercy.
That message of mercy was the focus of a sermon delivered by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde. after his inauguration On the other side are Christians who say that we must defend the country from immigrants. How can we reconcile these opposing interpretations?
They represent very different aspects of the Christian Bible. The book of Revelation describes ultimate realities in which the Kingdom of God is finally realized. That’s it, we’ve reached the end of all mercy or compassion. So identifying a nation state with God’s country is especially dangerous because you’re putting that absolute over a place, over a certain kind of people. I would say that white supremacists make that claim. That’s a very different text than what we find in the Gospels, in which we have the story of Jesus’ life. They’re two different genres with different purposes. Revelation is useful when you want to single someone out as an enemy and seek their destruction. It’s not so useful to take the teachings of Jesus, who says, Love your enemies.
What is the broader message of the Bible 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 conflicts between some of those identities. We have the conflict between the Canaanites and the Israelites, the exile and the land grab in Israelite history. When we get into the New Testament, we have the domination of the Roman Empire and the resistance to it. Revelation is an interesting book because it resists the Empire, but replaces it with the Empire of God, which is problematic because it thinks of heaven as a bigger and 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 break down dividing walls, a call to reconciliation between different ethnic groups. Acts 2 is often presented as a inclusion point for the different ethnic groups in Jerusalem, who hear the Word of God in their respective languages. There are moments when one sees multiplicity and a sense of reconciliation.
Your book offers historical examples of how the United States drew on the Apocalypse when formulating its policies toward immigrants. What did these entail, specifically?
Some of the clearest examples we have are the laws targeting Chinese immigrants, which began in 1875 and then in the 20th century. Arguments in the Senate at the time portrayed the Chinese as pagans, not belonging to a Christian nation, so why allow them in? They were said to be arriving 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, beginning in the 1910s, Mexicans were believed to be the most likely to be carriers of typhoid fever. Like in the Apocalypse, where people can only enter through the gates after washing their robes, workers entering through the border had to get a ticket to bathe. They literally had to wash themselves to enter through the gates. But officials also sprayed them with kerosene to kill ticks or lice that they thought could carry typhoid fever. There was a fire that killed people because of that. They also sprayed and dusted them with DDT and Zyklon B, absolutely carcinogenic and horrible. There's a part of an interview where a Mexican migrant worker described being sprayed with powder and joked afterwards, “I guess we're all gringos now, huh?” because of the white powder that covered him.
Reports suggest the Trump administration is now looking for a new health threat as grounds to reinstate Title 42.
It's a repeat of history. It started with the Chinese and COVID, and then it moved to the border. It's the same thing.
Yii-Jan Lin is an adjunct professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, where she teaches critical study of ancient texts and their interpretation, especially in relation to race and gender. She is the author of Immigration and the Apocalypse , which explores religious, biblical, and apocalyptic themes in the history of American immigration.
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