Reimagining American Immigration: An Interview with Yii-Jan Lin
Yii-Jan Lin ’14 Ph.D. is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School. She specializes in immigration, textual criticism, the Revelation of John, critical race theory, and gender and sexuality. Her new book, Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Yale University Press, 2024), focuses on the use of Revelation in political discourse surrounding American immigration from the time of Columbus and the Puritan era to the present moment. The book investigates the American uses of the metaphor of the New Jerusalem as a way for the nation to portray itself as a shining, God-blessed refuge with open gates yet also as a citadel that excludes unwanted peoples from its walls. She is also the author of The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences (Oxford, 2016). In 2017 she participated in the nonpartisan “American Values, Religious Voices” national campaign that invited 100 scholars from a diverse range of religious traditions to send one-page letters to the first Trump administration and Congress regarding core American values and other issues of the day. In her letter, she wrote: “Mr. President, I do not believe in walls and gates. I do not need a city of gold. I prefer Jesus’ boundary-less wandering and good news for the poor, sick, and forgotten. However, if you want America to represent power and wealth, look no further than Revelation and Ronald Reagan—the iconic Republican president of the last century—for a fantastic vision of glory and fame with open gates and doors. Both the writer of Revelation and Reagan knew that inviting others in and playing host to the nations of the earth meant greater wealth and power, not less.”
This Reflections interview was conducted by Karis Ryu ’23 M.A.R., a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. Her work considers multidimensional consequences of power in constructing and imagining Asian American Christian personhoods and subjectivities. She is interested in how “race” and “religion” are taught and internalized as theological concepts in American, Korean, and transnational religious institutions in order to enforce behaviors—and how people in these contexts assert creative ways of inhabiting their personhoods. The following is an edited version of their conversation.
Karis Ryu: How did your prior work lead you into this project?
Yii-Jan Lin: This book is very much in method and conception like my first book, even though the topics are wildly different. My first book was about textual criticism in New Testament studies, which couldn’t be further from immigration. But I was tracing a metaphor throughout that process: the use of biological language to describe texts from the 18th and 19th centuries until today. Of texts belonging to a family, texts having genealogy, texts being impure, contaminated—described through racial language, genealogical language, and finally genetic language in order to talk about texts and how they’re related to each other.
The idea of a city of God, an ultimate resting place, can be comforting and liberative in many ways—but readers have to be careful about unquestioned details of that place: What is its architecture? What are its boundaries? Who does it exclude? Why?
I started to look at apocalyptic language and the metaphor of the heavenly city, or New Jerusalem, as the stand-in or equivalent of America, and how that idea of American exceptionalism, using religious biblical language, started. How being exclusive, how labeling people as not worthy of entering the kingdom of God, became part of immigration discourse. So I’m tracing the use of a metaphor, and how it shapes the ways we think about a particular topic.
The topic also came from an autobiographical place. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and was asked some years ago to reflect on some biblical texts for Asian American communities. Some of it was quite apocalyptic. I started thinking about the language of the Bay Area: Golden Gate, California as the Golden State, and “San Francisco” as Gold Mountain in Chinese. Even now, we still call it Old Gold Mountain: Jiu Jin Shan. Angel Island was the island in the San Francisco Bay where immigrants, particularly from China, would be stopped before they could enter the mainland. How else can we talk about the apocalyptic arrival of immigrants from their perspective? Is this the land of promise? Is there an American dream? Thinking about heavenly language in immigration got me pulling that thread.
Ryu: Political discourse, especially around immigration, operates through spectacle and sensationalized images. Your comments also notice how policies, statements, and turns of phrase that are normalized, mundane, and vernacular actually reinforce the same sensationalistic narrative. What kinds of images do you find more dangerous? How do you see them operating in today’s political narratives?
Lin: I think it is very dangerous to have metaphors we don’t name because they carry logic inside them that are followed without thinking. If we say that this nation is a destination, or that we’re a “city on a hill,” there is a sense that the righteous belong here. The use of heaven as that metaphor becomes really dangerous. Along with heaven, there are so many violent images that come with exclusion and get weaponized very easily—even phrases that seem pretty innocuous, like “how great our country is.” Patriotic language has a flip side to it, a dark underbelly … even if you never name it.
Ryu: These days, apocalyptic images are usually associated with the far right, but as you’re saying, it’s all these metaphors that are not named that continue to animate the American myth. How important is biblical interpretation as a tool in navigating American culture?
Lin: Revelation is spectacle. The book has highly graphic imagery, some of it very bizarre. And then there is the spectacle of immigration in the U.S. today—we are inundated with images of migrants at the border, or people waiting in lines, and all of those images feed into crisis language. That’s used in Revelation, and that’s used in immigration. It becomes so overcharged that there can be no calm discussion of immigration anymore, and it was a central factor in the November election, as we all saw. Any person who wants to win office has to talk about being strong on the border and strong on immigration. Immigration is no longer a neutral topic. It’s so charged that it has to be antagonistic.
Religion and literature scholar Abram Van Engen wrote City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, but what Van Engen didn’t discuss was the apocalyptic tone of that phrase. In Western and American history, “the city on a hill” phrase used to identify the U.S. as exceptional comes from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:15) and, in its ancient context, alludes to the city of Jerusalem. Some scholars agree that the verse also points to a heavenly Jerusalem, like the New Jerusalem of Revelation. The idea that America is God’s heavenly New Jerusalem, a shining city, has been a part of American history, and American religious history, the entire time. In The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, historian Greg Grandin writes about the end of the myth of the frontier, and he argues that American exceptionalism is dying: that with Trump, it became “America first,” and the wall. But the New Jerusalem metaphor works with many myths, including America First and the wall. In this conception, the New Jerusalem has a wall. The city is also supposed to be righteous. It also has open gates. The metaphor becomes recyclable. Because I’m a biblical scholar, I’m catching the dog whistles of biblical language that historians might not usually focus on.
Ryu: In this book, what are the stakes of your approach to biblical interpretation for the field of biblical studies, and for scholars, clergy, and laypeople?
Lin: Thinking about Revelation as a book about migration cuts across all those layers. It’s a relatively new way to view the book. More recently, people like Roberto Mata or Jackie Hidalgo have been writing about Revelation being used in Chicano movements, or understanding Revelation in terms of migration. Roberto Mata especially has written about immigration and Revelation and Exodus. People might ask, “What does Revelation have to do with immigration?” But I would say, in Revelation people are experiencing disaster, war, climate change in the extreme. People are fleeing, and then people are allowed in, or not, into the new heavens and new earth. That changes your citizenship, your status, your belonging, and tells you who doesn’t belong. The entire book can be read in that way.
On the flip side, we can use the contemporary situation to go back into the ancient context and say about the descriptions in Revelation 21 and 22, “Why is this wall so brightly lit?” or “Why is there a wall?” If this is God’s kingdom, why is there a defensive structure? Is the light there to show glory, or is it for surveillance, the way it is in Tijuana? That’s the fruit of productive comparative reading: It provides new ways to read the ancient context as well.
Ryu: I loved the phrasing, in your conclusion, of “escaping New Jerusalem,” and the necessity of that. Is there a way to imagine out of this? How might one begin to escape the eschatology that shapes political discourse?
Lin: One way is to look at the ridiculousness of the biblical metaphor for the United States. In Revelation, New Jerusalem has an absurdist architecture, and to place that onto thinking about the United States shows how ridiculous many of our immigration ideas are—building a wall that’s thousands of miles long along our southern border. The wall is not effective or practical: It is a political symbol.
To question an assumed political necessity is to remember that these structures are less than 100 years old, less than 150 years old. It wasn’t always this way. What has made it this way? How can we stop talking about it as if it were natural? If these imaginaries are constructed, we can deconstruct them. But we need to have an imagination that goes beyond what we have been told is necessary. That is the struggle. We’ve built up these structures. Now, the task is to reimagine.
Ryu: How should congregations go about the work of reimagining? How can they help change the national mythology around immigration?
Lin: For those in faith communities who are committed to the Christian canon, I would say that interpreters have to think carefully about their theology and concepts of destination, home, and belonging, especially vis a vis Revelation and its depiction of a heavenly city. The idea of a city of God, an ultimate resting place, can be comforting and liberative in many ways—but readers have to be careful about unquestioned details of that place: What is its architecture? What are its boundaries? Who does it exclude? Why? These theological ideas and ideals often connect to where people reside, their hopes for it, who they believe do not belong there.
More broadly, for residents of the U.S., we have to deconstruct explicitly and widely America’s origin myth, tied to Pilgrims, Puritans, and Christianity. That origin myth casts the nation in a Christian light and portrays it as a place of refuge and a holy site—even the term “pilgrim” adds to that construction. But that myth elides the genocide of Native peoples and enslavement of Black people. A Christian origin myth will also continue to exclude both America’s changing population and arriving immigrants.