How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration
“Brilliantly unsettling, Immigration and Apocalypse definitively establishes the significance of the New Testament’s closing book to the entrenchment of American white supremacy. Ranging from ancient Mediterranean and early Christian studies to U.S. immigration history, Lin’s book challenges us to divest from the murderous romance of apocalyptic exceptionalism – before it is too late.”—Dan-el Padilla Peralta, author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic
“Once you have read this groundbreaking book, you will not see either American immigration policy or the book of Revelation in the same way. Any conversation about immigration in America that aims to be helpful must now start with Immigration and Apocalypse.”—Willie James Jennings, author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race and After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging
Featured in Publisher’s Weekly Nov. 1, 2024
"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 and Revelation in Aztlán
Featured in the Engelwood Review of Books Fifteen Important Theology Books 2024
“Yii-Jan Lin creatively and astutely uses the Book of Revelation to read US immigration history, highlighting how Revelation’s New Jerusalem has functioned as a founding myth to establish and reinforce an American sentiment of exceptionalism.”—Tat-siong Benny Liew, author of What Is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? and Politics and Parousia
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.