Why is it that the U.S. has been called a nation of immigrants, but tension over border policies has dominated political discourse for decades? How did ideas of a utopian America at its founding make way for dystopian fears of outsiders today? Yale religious studies professor Yii-Jan Lin sees answers in the Bible’s Book of Revelation.

In Immigration and Apocalypse: The Revelation of John in the History of American Immigration, which will be the subject of a conference panel review, Lin argues that apocalyptic imaginings about destination, judgement, belonging, and division have directly shaped America’s self-conception as “a walled-in golden city,” where principles of exclusion reign.

Lin grew up as a child of Taiwanese immigrant parents in the Bay Area in the 1980s and ’90s, where she was surrounded by places with names inspired by heaven, such as Angel Island and the Golden Gate Bridge. “Immigration stories and religious language were baked in as part of my life,” she says.

After earning a PhD in religious studies from Yale in 2014, Lin began teaching at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. While leading a discussion about apocalyptic verses with an Asian American and Pacific Islander community, she noticed parallels between immigration and the biblical end-times. Both mark the end of one life and the start of another. “There is something apocalyptic about coming to a different place,” she says, “whether it’s the U.S. or somewhere else, where you’re changing worlds.”

Lin began researching apocalyptic thought in U.S. history by tracing the biblical roots of the phrase “shining city on a hill,” which Ronald Reagan used to describe the nation. Though the phrase comes from the Gospel of Matthew, Lin demonstrates how Puritan leader John Winthrop reimagined it through the lens of Revelation’s “New Jerusalem”—God’s sinless, golden city. Lin also notes that, long before Winthrop, Christopher Columbus wrote of his mission to spread Christianity before the world ended—an outlook fusing apocalyptic belief with ideas of America as a divinely chosen land.

What surprised Lin most, however, was not the historic use of Revelation but its modern resurgence: “In the last 10 to 15 years in the U.S.,” she says, “we’ve begun using language directly from Revelation in politics.” Revelation’s depictions of depravity and violence—once aimed at the enemies of God—are now directed at immigrants. “One place where we see this is in the intensity of who Americans are versus supposed enemies or invaders. That language has become as extreme as it was during the Chinese Exclusion era. The invasion rhetoric is very clear in the Trump administration in terms of talking about immigration.”

Still, Lin, who specializes not only in textual criticism, the Revelation of John, and immigration but also in critical race theory, gender, and sexuality, is hopeful about building a future for an American democracy “where we are all acknowledged at the foundation as equal sharers,” she says. “I think once we see the economic fallout, which we’re already seeing, and the cruelty of deporting immigrants and the treatment of them—and not just immigrants but of our own citizens or people who are legally in the country—all of this can change a populace’s mind.”

Ultimately, Lin hopes her work can offer readers an “expanded imagination about immigration and what nationhood can be,” she says. “We can know that none of these things that we’ve implemented—restricting immigration, describing people as other, the laws and bureaucracy—is essential or necessary. This has all been a recent development, so how can we think outside of that box?”

Lin will participate in a panel review of Immigration and Apocalypse, Saturday, 1–3:30 p.m. HCC 210 (second level).

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