Immigrants, Refugees, and White Evangelicals (re-release)
Brad and Dan discuss immigration, refugees, and White evangelicals with Dr. Janelle Wong, Core Faculty in Asian American Studies and Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland. Professor Wong discusses her new book on evangelicals and immigration in an era of policy change.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Just a couple announcements before we get started today.
We have Sarah Mosliner's great seminar, Purity, Race, and Embodiment.
It's happening in August and September.
Spots are filling up.
We are keeping this one a little bit smaller just to kind of have an intimate environment in the seminar.
If you are interested, go to straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and look for the seminars page.
These are designed to be college level classes for anybody from any background.
And so you may be a doctoral candidate in education or in psychology, or you may be somebody who's just interested in processing purity culture and embodiment and race.
Well, this is designed for all of you.
Check it out.
We've had just great feedback from the seminars we've run in the past.
Each one comes with four weeks of seminars, meaning two-hour meetings with Sarah and other students, videos, readings, and a one-on-one meeting with Sarah herself to discuss all of the topics.
I also want to say we have Dan Miller's great series, It's in the Code, still running.
That's on Wednesdays.
And my book, Preparing for War, is now ready for pre-order.
And so if you'd like to support my project and my writing, you can check that out in the show notes.
Today, we have a re-release of an interview with Dr. Janelle Wong, who just wrote an amazing book about immigration and white evangelicals, as well as evangelicals of color.
And what you'll find in this interview, to me, This is really stunning is that white evangelicals are even more conservative than white people when it comes to really important issues like refugees and immigration and many others and she explains that in this interview.
So what you'll hear first is Dan and I discussing kind of evangelical approaches to immigration and refugees and and then you'll hear our discussion with Dr. Janelle Wong.
We appreciate all of you.
Thanks for listening.
Here is our episode.
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Welcome to Stray White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
And as always, I'm here with Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And today we're going to be talking, Dan, about immigration and refugees.
And anyone who's paid attention to the news for the last two years knows that these are issues that are at the forefront of our political debate.
They've been brought there.
By our president and some of his followers and acolytes in Congress.
And this kind of brings up something I think people wonder a lot about, which is to say, I don't understand how Christians could be so callous when it comes to immigration and refugees.
When we see, you know, this happened to me on Facebook the other day, when we see an image of a mother and her children running from tear gas.
Right.
And a Christian person says, Well, what were we supposed to do as a country?
We have to uphold our rules.
We have to uphold our borders.
I think there's a lot of folks out there who think to themselves, how can that be?
Because isn't it true?
I mean, many people who aren't Christians know that Jesus taught, do unto others as you would want done to you.
Jesus welcomed the masses and fed them.
He turned a few pieces of bread and fish into a feast for thousands.
Jesus was born, in many ways, as a refugee.
There's all these instances, it seems, like in the Christian tradition that point to a sort of robust compassion for the other, for developing a hospitality for the person who is in need, the vulnerable person.
The person without a home, the person who has to flee their home because of violence.
And so I think there's a lot of folks out there that are like, I just don't get it.
Is this just like an inhumane, callous turning in evangelicalism?
And how can people arrive at these conclusions if they also say they believe in the Bible?
Yeah.
And it's interesting because the Bible does make this, and a lot of our listeners, they may not be interested in what the Bible says or they don't Maybe they don't see the Bible as some sort of religious or cultural authority, but the point is that evangelicals do, right?
And so there is, there's this robust biblical tradition all through the Hebrew Bible.
Of course, like one of the sort of big narrative pieces of the Hebrew Bible is the Hebrew people as a stateless, sort of homeless group of people seeking a place to be, right?
They're essentially sort of One could say that they're asylum seekers.
And even if one doesn't like that language, there are dozens and dozens of references in the Hebrew Bible to care for the orphan, the widow, the stranger, which is this kind of almost programmatic collective term for the marginalized, the oppressed, the dispossessed, and so forth.
You mentioned it in the New Testament, in the story about Jesus' birth.
There's an account where he's born and King Herod feels that this is a threat and is going to try to find and kill him.
And so it says that he and his family flee into Egypt, right?
They flee political persecution into a foreign country.
And I don't know if they went through a legal point of entry.
I don't know if I imagine they didn't have the right papers, but there's this sort of central component to the Christian sort of narrative.
There's another story in one of the Gospels where Jesus says, whatever you've done for—the language is, the least of these.
And to me, it really harkens back to that prophetic tradition, the poor, the orphan, the widow, that you've done it for me.
The book of James famously says, if you say you have faith and somebody comes to you and says that they're cold and they're hungry and you say, go, basically, I'll pray for you.
I'll give you my thoughts and prayers.
Be warm and well fed, but you don't do anything that your faith is empty.
It's a central theme of biblical witness.
But it's so it's shocking to people, I think, a lot of times when that sort of seems to disappear completely.
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