"A must-read for our times, this deeply original book excavates the legacies of the Book of Revelation in shaping dominant U.S. imaginations around immigration with particular attention to discourses of disease, citizenship, and the border wall." —Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, author of Latina/o/x Studies and Biblical Studies

Poetry carved in men’s barracks of Angel Island Detention Center

Book cover forthcoming

Forthcoming (November 2024) Yale University Press

America appeared on the European horizon at a moment of apocalyptic expectation and ambition. Within that context, explorers and colonizers imagined the land to be paradise, God’s country, and the New Jerusalem of the Bible’s Book of Revelation. This book begins by tracing the conceptualization of America as Revelation’s New Jerusalem from Columbus to the Puritan colonists, through US expansion, and from Reagan to Trump.

But while the metaphor of the New Jerusalem has been useful in portraying a shining, God-blessed refuge with open gates, it has also been used to exclude, attack, and criminalize unwanted peoples. After all, the Book of Revelation contains not only the golden New Jerusalem but also the condemnation and destruction of those to be kept out of it.

In this groundbreaking book, Lin shows how newspapers, political speeches, sermons, cartoons, and novels throughout American history have used the language of Revelation to exclude unwanted immigrants as God’s enemies, those who must be shut out of America, the New Jerusalem. According to Revelation, these are “the dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters,” and this is the same rhetoric used to label immigrants as bestial, sexually immoral, violent, and heathen. Lin shows Revelation’s apocalyptic logic at work in the history of Chinese exclusion, the association of the unwanted with disease, the contradictions of citizenship laws, and the justification for building a US-Mexico wall like the wall around the New Jerusalem.

Lin’s book is a fascinating analysis of the religious, biblical, and apocalyptic in American immigration history and a damning narrative that weaves together American religious history, immigration and ethnic studies, and the use of biblical texts and imagery.