How have Christians–going back to Columbus–used religion, and especially the Book of Revelation, to frame migration and immigration both by colonists (to justify colonization and genocide) and by subsequent U.S. political leaders to exclude others who were not white and European? How does this continue to this very day?
In this episode, Ami Chen Mills interviews Yii-Jan Lin, author of the book IMMIGRATION AND THE APOCALYPSE: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Yale University Press, 2024).
Yii-Jan Lin is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, where she teaches the critical study of ancient texts and their interpretation, especially in relation to colonialism, race, and gender. As a historian of ideas and metaphors, she focuses on the use of biblical imagery and concepts in the modern world.
Her recent book, Immigration and the Apocalypse, traces Christian apocalyptic thinking from Columbus to the second Trump administration, showing how the images, vocabulary, and ideas of Revelation have fueled anti-immigrant movements throughout American history.
Full disclosure: Lin is actually Ami’s cousin, and together, they share their own recollections of first visits to the western immigration portal, Angel Island, in the San Francisco Bay. This episode includes:
- Why the Book of Revelation is relevant to today’s immigration discourse
- How Chinese Americans were the first ethnicity to be broadly excluded from immigration by “race”
- How the language of disease and filth from the Bible has been used to exclude immigrant of various national origins
- Where is the hope to begin to counter this narrative and its spawn of cruel federal policies?
For more on immigration, please listen to this episode with Dr. Ann Lopez of the Center for Farmworker Families, based in Watsonville, on the “Roots of the Migration Crisis.”
