Strangers and Orphans

Immigration is both a continual theme of the American story and a recurring point of conflict. The deep divisions of the current moment are echoes of the past the we ignore and repeat.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:41

The American religious experience has been shaped as much from behind as from what we are going toward. What do I mean? I mean that we are a product of a powerful set of forces born of people leaving some other place to come here. While they all left something looking for something else, their reasons for leaving and the circumstances they left were as diverse as their languages, religious backgrounds, and ethnic origins. According to Sidney Alstrom, who was the preeminent American church historian of a generation ago, or at least one, this was spurred by several factors. Some of this mass exodus was forced by untenable conditions elsewhere. Like the Jode family of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, generations of soon to be Americans departed from political events in Europe. So too were their dreams and hopes different from one another. If the pilgrims came in search of a Puritan state with one established religion in Massachusetts, Baptists came to escape their Anglican persecutors in Virginia, and Puritans in Massachusetts. Catholics came to flee Anglicans, and some Europeans came seeking a place free of Catholicism. Many, perhaps most, came with other motivations besides religious ones, of course. They left political oppression in Easter Europe, famine in Ireland, and economic despair in Asia. One thing united them about this quest, however. The tales they heard about an endless land of economic opportunity and plentiful land drew them to risk what little they had to come. The railroads opened up the American continent to rapid settlement in the nineteenth century. The frontier kept expanding and carrying vast numbers of people to its edges. The lure of cheap or free land and the desperate bid of employers for laborers made it a risk worth taking. The scope of this vast transplantation staggers the imagination and puts into perspective some of the sentiments of our present time against immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants. From eighteen sixty five until nineteen hundred, thirteen and a half million people migrated to the United States. Another nine million persons came in the first decade of the twentieth century. Twenty two million people in only forty five years. From eighteen twenty until nineteen sixty-nine, the United States of America welcomed forty five million strangers to its shores. This wave of immigration impacted the country in many ways, not the least of which was a shift from a rural society to an urban one. The newcomers often crowded into the cities, forming a gigantic pool of available, willing, and needy labor upon which industry could draw. It also meant the United States would face as few other societies have in such a short time, unprecedented diversity. This diversity was and continues to be one of our greatest challenges. When people are not united by national origin, language, culture, religion, habits, customs, or history, what will unite them? It has meant that the United States has suffered a kind of perpetual identity crisis. What is a good American? Do you have to be a Christian to live here? A Protestant? European? Naturally not all who got here first, not counting the Native Americans, of course, were hospitable to others who crowded in among them. Then too there were religious tensions between Christians and Jews, Christians and non Western religionists, Catholics and Protestants, and between rival versions of Protestantism. The freedom that American society provided resulted in the proliferation of religious sects, both Christian and non Christian. American religious life mirrored its economic and political life, in which rival and competitive versions of ultimate truth lived side by side, tense, often hostile and disagreeable, but nevertheless without the imbalance of state power of one over the other. Denominationalism is more than in any other place on earth a fact of American life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when he visited the United States in the 1930s, commented that it has been granted to the Americans less than any other nation on earth to realize the visible unity of the Church of God, that from Sidney Alstrom's A Religious History of the American People. These uncomfortable historical factors are at the root of many of our present struggles, the so-called culture wars, in which many Christians worry collectively that our quote family values, unquote, are being lost. Buried not too far from the surface of this concern is something very like what happened in the nineteenth century. It too was a conflict time reaction. Alstrom reports that from 1870 until 1905 there was not a single church merger in the country, only division and fragmentation. At the turn of the century, many said that the tides of immigrants coming into the country were threatening the American dream. This resulted in what has come to be called nativism. Nativism was a recurring form of nationalism in which minorities were opposed on the ground of their so-called unamerican connections. This attitude was visited most powerfully upon Catholics in the nineteenth century, and continued to be present even to the nineteen sixty presidential election. I still remember hearing my relatives worry about whether John Kennedy would turn over the control of the United States de facto to the Pope if we had the audacity to elect our first Catholic president. Nativism was always powerful during times of economic and social unrest. Between eighteen thirty and eighteen sixty, anti-Catholic attitudes were aroused as vast numbers of Catholics crowded into northeastern cities. The famous preacher Lyman Beecher, for whom the most prestigious preaching lectures in the United States are named today at Yale, launched much of this in a series of three sermons at eighteen thirty five. He likened the newcomers to an invasion of locusts in Egypt. A mob shortly after burned a convent in Massachusetts. Similar riots in Philadelphia and Louisville resulted in several deaths. Anti Catholic literature of this era told tales of priests and nuns engaged in horrible sexual depravities, even of the murders of babies born of these unions. This wave of resentment was soon overshadowed and forgotten by the passions of the Civil War. But in the final years of the century, these attitudes flamed up again, and hard times this time were blamed on Irish labor leaders. An organization called the American Protective Association claimed to have uncovered a secret papal plot for the Catholics to take over the United States government. Members of the organization had pledged never to vote for, hire, or join a strike next to a Catholic. The competitive nature of American society may account for much of this. During the nineteenth century, Protestant Christians enjoyed cultural dominance due to the large numbers of converts from the Second Great Awakening and the Revivals. The first problem that our diversity causes us is internal. Most of us hold certain convictions and beliefs to be absolute and ultimate, that is, we believe truths that are, from our perspective, essential to any sense of identity, and if we are a Christian, then our Christian identity depends on them. But how do we hold these beliefs and at the same time find a way to make room for the fact of differences that others might sincerely hold just as much as we? So the twin dilemmas of these problems are that we can either go to intolerance or relativism. That is, on the one hand, we may find ourselves misunderstanding others. On the other, we may so wish everyone to coexist and get along that we surrender any notion of truth and sink into a kind of moral relativism. Neither is necessary. What is necessary is for all genuine historical understanding to acquiesce to the standards of the good historian. The same may be said of scientific assertions and even theological truth, a basic stance of epistemic humility, and by epistemic I mean how we know what we know to be true. So a certain humility about that is needed. Quasi historical presentations have been depicted by John Fia in his book was America Founded as a Christian nation, saying they are a form of propaganda, or as the historian Bernard Balin describes it, indoctrination by historical example. The current Christian nationalists are guilty on this count, as though the appeal to the founders or some story settles the case of what we ought to believe and do in the present. Perhaps we might learn a different lesson from our past that our history is one struggle after another to translate a set of ideas and ideals into a continually changing present. America the idea was a new possibility, and expansion and slavery, white male superiority, immigration, and all the moral debates of other issues had yet to be worked through. Then the waves of immigration and the story of our responses to it can help us understand how difficult the responsibility is to deal with the questions we have now. The most ardent and militant voice of anti immigrant rage at this present moment is certainly political advisor Stephen Miller. Miller's own history is an odd background for his perplexing nativism given that his ancestors fled the pogroms of Europe for the United States. His own family is divided about him and the things he's chosen to advocate, and his consuming animosity toward immigrants is quite well documented. I refer you to the book by Gene Guerrero called Hate Monger, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Anti-immigrant sentiment is finally built upon three primal human weaknesses anxiety, fear, and anger. They are all appropriate responses to real threats in human survival, but when employed by personal blindnesses and partisan ideology, they eliminate any prospect of rational problem solving. They work because human masses are vulnerable to their momentary appeal, but they are nothing more than the appeal to the most primitive and undeveloped childish fears of human beings. A kind of psychological mass projection that requires dehumanization of the other to succeed. The failure of the American government, read leaders, to adequately address labor needs, border security, and a sane process for those seeking to immigrate leaves us in the hands of those who would manipulate us into irrationality for their own purposes. So we find ourselves repeating a familiar conversation that has reappeared at many junctures of the American story. We change positions, of course, as strangers and orphans in one time give birth to comfortable and privileged settlers later, who oddly see themselves as somehow having been entitled for all eternity to occupy this present time and place. History itself then is distorted to validate this, to eliminate in advance any intelligent requirement of asking questions of why and how it is this way or whether it should stay that way. Or in the case of fearful people of faith, it is right in the eyes of the God to treat refugees and the vulnerable with hatred and cruelty. In the latter case, we fail even to believe in our own scriptures and story, even as we claim to defend them.