How the Book of Revelation Shapes US Immigration Policy
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In this episode, Brad interviews Dr. Yii-Jan Lin, Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, about her book 'Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration.' They discuss the historical and enduring influence of biblical metaphors, such as the 'city on a hill' and the 'new Jerusalem,' on American identity and immigration policies. The conversation spans from Ronald Reagan's farewell address to the formation of the Border Patrol and the symbolism behind the border wall, culminating in insights about the exclusionary rhetoric expected in the upcoming second Trump term. The episode also touches on the historical context of Chinese exclusion and the problematic aspects of apocalyptic literature used in justifying modern immigration policies.
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The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the shining city upon a hill.
The phrase comes from John Winthrop.
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.
But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city, built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace.
A city with pre-ports that hung with commerce and creativity.
And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.
That's how I saw it and see it still.
That's none other than President Ronald Reagan in his 1989 farewell address to the nation.
As he did often, he recalls in this speech the metaphor of the United States as a city on a hill.
He traces it to John Winthrop and describes a long tradition of understanding this country as a place destined to play a special role in cosmic history.
The City on a Hill metaphor is one that many of you are familiar with.
You may know how John Winthrop cited it and how it influenced the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Puritans.
You may know that John Kennedy was fond of reciting the metaphor as well.
And of course, Ronald Reagan the Gipper recalled this metaphor every time he could.
But what if I told you that beyond the City on a Hill metaphor, beyond Matthew chapter 5, Lies another metaphor that has influenced not only the self-identity of the United States, but the ways that it's understood who does not belong here.
In today's interview, I speak to Dr.
Yijan Lin, Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School.
Professor Lin is the author of Immigration and Apocalypse, How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration.
We speak about the ways that images in the Book of Revelation and the idea of the United States not only as a city on a hill, but as the New Jerusalem, have found their way into political discourse shaping immigration policy and determining how Americans imagine who belongs here and who doesn't.
This issue is of course of the utmost importance as we anticipate a second Trump term and the promise that Trump has made for mass deportations.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, y'all.
Brad here.
And just a couple of things before I get to my interview with Dr.
Yi Jan Lin.
You can still get tickets to our events in San Diego and L.A. this week.
Check the show notes.
It is going to be a wonderful time together as we commune, we discuss, we analyze, and process.
A couple of corrections from Friday on our weekly roundup.
First of all, I was on a roll with the names and I said Susan Murkowski.
It's, of course, Lisa Murkowski, Senator in Alaska, and Susan Collins.
I also said Tammy Baldwin rather than Tammy Duckworth, and so needed to make sure we got that corrected.
Finally, just wanted to make clear that all military officers swear an oath to the Constitution.
We discussed that at the end of the episode, and there was a little bit of ambiguity there.
Appreciate all of you who wrote in to talk about that and make sure we got it right.
Now, here is my discussion with Dr.
Yi Jianlin.
As I just said, I'm here with Dr. Yi Yijan Lin, who is faculty at Yale University at the Divinity School at Yale, and somebody who's a first-time guest.
So thank you for doing this.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks so much for having me.
I saw your book on X before everyone started fleeing X and it became a wasteland and reached out to see if you would have any time to come on because I couldn't wait to read your book, Immigration and Apocalypse, How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration.
And in ways that are truly unfortunate, your book could not be more relevant than it is right now.
And we're going to get to border walls.
We're going to get to border patrol.
We're going to get to immigration and Donald Trump and all of those things.
So friends, if you're waiting for the contemporary moment, it is coming.
Don't worry.
But the very first parts of the book, I think, are so crucial and so brilliant.
And I want to start there.
You say, page two, I'm going to embarrass you and read some of your writing, particularly for the United States and its history.
Revelation, the book of Revelation, and its apocalyptic vision of the divine city, the new Jerusalem, have served as a central founding myth for America and a powerful metaphor for American identity, belonging, and exclusion.
We've talked a lot on this show about America as a city on a hill.
We've talked a lot less about the United States as the New Jerusalem as envisioned in the Book of Revelation.
Would you just help us understand how you arrived at this realization and what it unlocked for you in terms of understanding the history of this country?
Yeah, so this research began really on a hunch, as a lot of research does.
And I was born and raised in California Bay Area.
And that place is, one, a port of immigration historically, but also, two, I realized, a place with a lot of heavenly names.
So California is the Golden State.
San Francisco in Chinese is Gold Mountain.
Angel Island, the detention center for immigrants coming from the East is, you know, Angel Island.
And so there was a sense of apocalyptic arrival.
And when I began to read apocalyptic literature and think about immigration in a talk I had to give, I started wondering if there was more to that.
And the more I scratched the surface, the more I found in thinking about How really the ideation of American religious language on New Jerusalem, paradise, utopia, and a heavenly utopia at that.
So we have this idea of the United States not only as a city on a hill, but as a New Jerusalem.
I mean, it's not just Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, it's Revelation, what many people read as the last like two chapters of the New Testament, the last bits of the Bible.
But as I read your book, as I go back and read those chapters, it becomes clear that the New Jerusalem is not a place open to all.
And there's actually some pretty strict stipulations on who gets to enter and who doesn't.
And that also seems to map on to the history of the United States.
Oh, for sure.
And that section you just read from the introduction, I mean, the opening of books in The Judgment of the Dead is, you know, this bureaucratic scene in entry into the New Jerusalem.
So that's when I began to think of it as an immigration text, because they have to check records to make sure people can come in or not.
And so even that is borrowing entry, right, and vetting their immigrants, so to speak.
I'll just ask one more question on this framing, and that is, I also live in the Bay Area currently.
I've visited Angel Island.
I have done research at the detention center.
And when one arrives there, and many Americans don't know about Angel Island, you get the feeling it's a much different port of entry historically than Ellis Island.
Ellis Island is always envisioned as the place where the poor and the outcast are welcomed into the United States and given a new life.
Angel Island is not that place.
Would you just give folks listening who really don't know about it a little insight into Angel Island and the ways that people arrived there and were not exactly welcomed automatically into this new Jerusalem?
Yeah, the whole reason why Angel Island opened as an immigration center was because Chinese exclusion laws had been passed in the United States starting from 1875 on.
And so they had to, when you create exclusionary laws like that, you have to apply them.
And so to apply them, you had to start going through everybody who was arriving at port.
And they didn't have any good place on San Francisco Harbor to house these people to go through these very arduous screening processes.
And they kept them in detention centers.
They had to shut some of the women's mission house in San Francisco.
So they just and it was terrible conditions.
And also they were afraid of having Chinese immigrants on the mainland.
So a way to do that is to always isolate on insular properties like they did with Ellis Island.
But here, even more farther from the mainland and could be kept isolated, also could be screened for diseases in very invasive ways that were never performed in Ellis Island.
So that was the origin of Angel Island Detention Center was for those very reasons.
It's a much different place.
Friends, if you visit San Francisco and you take the Alcatraz tour, well, there's just another island, right?
Hop, skip, and a jump from Alcatraz, and you should go check it out, too, because all of that history is there, and virtually no one knows about it in this country.
This brings me to another sort of famous somebody.
I don't know what the right title for him is, but that's Christopher Columbus.
I think a lot of folks listening have their various opinions on Christopher Columbus and his journeys to this continent or at least this way.
What a lot of folks probably don't know is he envisioned himself as carrying out a kind of theological mission that had two kind of prongs.
One was related to the Crusades, one was related to the New Jerusalem.
Would you help us understand that aspect of Columbus and his journeys?
Sure.
So Columbus was really a believer in apocalyptic end times and was influenced by the Joachimites preceding him.
So he believed that the end of the world was really imminent.
And there were prophecies that he believed still had to be fulfilled.
One was the taking back of Jerusalem from the infidels, that is the Muslims.
And the other was that the news of the gospel had to be spread to every corner of the earth.
And so he imagined that if he read the prophecies correctly and understood cartography and oceanography in a particular way, he could be able to reach around the world.
I mean, famously had that theory.
And the goal for that was to bring back treasure in order to take back Jerusalem.
And also, he believed whatever people he found in the far reaches of the earth, if he had brought that would knock another prophecy out.
And so he really had this understanding of having an apocalyptic mission to deliver those two things to bring about the kingdom of heaven.
You identify Columbus as somebody who saw himself as a seer and a prophet.
If we consider that, what does that unlock for us about his actions here, his actions in terms of his voyages, and just the whole understanding of what they meant?
Yeah, I mean, because he felt he was on that mission, whatever he did, I think he felt justified, right?
So he had divine fiat to do whatever he wanted when he landed, never mind that so much of the cruelty and violence that he inflicted was You know, completely counter to what one might think would bring about the kingdom of God.
But his imagining of, you know, these are the means by which I will establish the end times, the eschatological chronology.
So that fueled a lot of that.
And I mean, what is fantastic in an awful way is that he did reach land, right?
And so it was a confirmation to him that everything he believed was true.
And so it was very convincing to himself and it created this very This brings us a little bit forward in time into things we've also spoken about on this show,
which is Massachusetts Bay Colony, New England, what many Americans envision as the beginning of the United States as we eventually came to know it, what certain folks would refer to as the beginning of the Christian founding of the United States.
And this brings us to the Mather family, who are seemingly ubiquitous, no matter how many times we go back, we have to talk about the Mathers.
And it also brings us to John Winthrop, who was the person who kind of coined this idea of the United States as a city on a hill.
Again, we've talked about the city on a hill metaphor.
Can you explain how the New Jerusalem metaphor that is in the book of Revelation, the very end of the New Testament, the idea of the new heaven, the new earth, the place where God's chosen people will be, the place where those who deserve salvation in some ways, even though they're saved by grace, that they have found their way into the gates.
How was that mapped onto this idea of the New World as the Mathers or John Winthrop or anyone in the Massachusetts Bay Colony might have understood it?
Yeah, so the New World, I think, presented to those colonists the idea that there was a blank page, which obviously is not true given Indigenous populations.
But for their understanding, it was a place upon which they could build their Dreams of a divine kingdom realized.
And whether that was through, you know, governance or church order and congregationalist church polity, all of those things, right, were in the air of this is a new place, we can establish something new, a new Jerusalem would fit in right into that kind of understanding, discourse, etc.
whether they believed it literally or not.
I think there's some diversity in terms of whether they thought they were establishing really a New Jerusalem or whether it was, you know, a very handy metaphor, but it just was super convenient to be able to use that.
And John Mather, the first generation in Massachusetts, writing to John Davenport, who was coming to New Haven in Connecticut, was describing this as, you know, where God's kingdom could be realized.
And Davenport fully embraced that idea and, you know, wanted to establish almost literally a New Jerusalem.
And then Cotton Mather after that is comparing New England to heaven and talking about the golden streets and calling for revival, calling for repentance in order to realize that sort of vision.
So that metaphor becomes really common usage.
And it's of a piece with John Winthrop and thinking about city on a hill because Matthew 5, where that phrase is used, is talking about Jerusalem, the city on a hill.
And linking that is very easy to thinking of the new Jerusalem coming down as a better prototype, right?
As a better version of what the old Jerusalem was.
It might be worth stopping just for a minute to talk about what actually is in the biblical text in Revelation, because I'm sure people listening have read it.
I'm sure there's a lot of folks who have childhood memories of combing through it and wondering if the end times were coming.
There's a lot of folks listening who grew up wondering if when they went home and their parents weren't there, if they'd been raptured and left behind.
And so would you just refresh our memory when we think about the New Jerusalem in the last chapters of the book of Revelation?
What does it look like in terms of inclusion-exclusion?
What does it look like in terms of who gets in and who gets out?
It's not a place that you might imagine by way of the Sermon on the Mount where all are welcome, or those who are meek and poor, those who are vulnerable, those who are without are first.
There's a much different kind of vision of who's allowed in this New Jerusalem, if I'm not mistaken.
Certainly.
So the entire narrative of Revelation leading up to the New Jerusalem is already divisive.
So there are worshipers of the beast and those who are against the slain lamb and the saints.
And then on the other hand, you have the chosen, the 144,000, those who are dressed in white.
And then you have The Judgment of the Dead, and that's where the starkest division takes place.
And they open the Book of Life and also books that record what everybody has done.
And if your book name is not in the Book of Life, and it's kind of a faded document, it's there from the foundations of the world.
If your name is not in there, you are thrown into the lake of fire.
It's just very direct, along with Satan and the beast, etc.
So And then everybody else goes into the New Jerusalem, but first you have that great division and a great, you know, number of those go into the Lake of Fire.
I think when you hear the city on a hill metaphor, it's imperial, it's colonial, it's problematic on a hundred different ways that we could talk about for the next three hours.
But on the surface, a lot of people, when they hear that, imagine a place that Ronald Reagan used to talk a lot about.
And I want to get to one of his kind of farewell address to America that you read so brilliantly, a place where everyone's welcome.
One of the things that I took away so vividly from your book is that if you're using the New Jerusalem as a metaphor for the United States, Then you have a very clear understanding of some people get to be in and enjoy this wondrous, heavenly paradise.
Others are condemned to the lake of fire, and that's just how it goes.
And at one point, you go through various laws and regulations and policies throughout the country's history, and you say that for this country, it's not just about the book of life, as it is in Revelation, but it's about the book of white life and those who are Allowed into this heavenly city, enjoy all of its fruits and all of its wonders.
Those who are not are just simply cast out.
Could you just unpack that for a second in terms of how the New Jerusalem and the Book of Life is applied to the United States and the Book of White Life?
Yeah, so it seems as if, you know, there is a fated book, a book of destiny for America, for entry and exclusion.
So just like in New Jerusalem, where you have a book of life that has a record of all these names, you're either in or out, right?
It's not a book of...
Cumulative deeds or a process, right?
It's yes or no.
And so that's already setting up an absolute exclusion line.
And for America, we talk a lot about open doors and welcome and those who merit it and work really hard to can achieve this dream.
But there is also a sense of fate and destiny because From the establishment of the United States as a country, the laws were meant only for inclusion for white peoples.
There is an identity from the beginning.
And you could say, like the Book of Life, from the foundation of the world, i.e.
the United States.
And, you know, those things can expand or change where you can add amendments, which we have, right, through our nation's history.
But the default foundational baseline is going to be the white, mostly Protestant, masculine identity.
And that's where, you know, that's not going to change, or at least, you know, hasn't changed in our country's history.
What does change around the borders, you know, can give way.
And it says, you know, your name can be blotted out.
It never says you can be added in, right?
But you can definitely be blotted out.
And the people who are vulnerable to being blotted out are being blotted out all the time.
You know, you could take away this immigration law, you could take away DACA, you can take away, you know, so many ways that that can be possible.
And I think that's a very similar logical function as what's happening at the New Jerusalem.
I think about South Asian folks who lost their citizenship, even though they were United States citizens, they were just revoked.
I think about, of course, Japanese incarceration.
I think about Chinese exclusion.
I think about all the ways that you can be blotted out of the book of American white life.
This brings us to Reagan really quickly, and then we're going to fast forward to Donald Trump and Border Patrol.
But I think Reagan provides a nice bridge between Columbus and colonial New England pre- Pre-colonial New England, really, to the current moment.
Ronald Reagan, other than John F. Kennedy, he loved using the city-on-the-hill metaphor.
Others have used it, but it was really Reagan's metaphor.
He used it dozens of times.
In his farewell address, he talks about, and I'll just read a little bit, the United States as a place teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, If there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get here, which is interesting phrasing.
That's how I saw it and see it still.
This is Reagan essentially saying goodbye to the presidency and goodbye to public life.
But for you, this was not simply an address of, oh, United States, the beautiful, open to the world.
This was Reagan inserting himself as playing a certain role as an apocalyptic seer in the vein of John, the visionary of the Book of Revelation.
Would you help us understand that?
Yeah, so his description in that farewell address of America, the shining city on the hill, has so many parallels to the description of the New Jerusalem that I think I am convinced that that was in his mind or in his speechwriter's mind.
To create that speech.
So he talks about strong foundations.
He talks about if there had to be walls, the walls are open, which is just like the New Jerusalem in which there are gates.
The gates are open because it's never nighttime.
He talks about wealth entering the city, which is also what's happening in the New Jerusalem.
The kings of the earth are bringing their glory into it.
Teeming with people, same thing, full of the nations.
And so many different aspects of That phrasing in the farewell address is also, I would say, borrowing directly from the New Jerusalem vision.
So he's laying out and equating in many ways, as many have done before him, America with the New Jerusalem vision.
And it has the sense of hospitality, right?
Of open gates and open doors, you know, the will and the heart to get there.
But also, I mean, we have the mechanisms for doors.
We have the understanding that maybe people don't qualify implicit in that metaphor always.
The lake of fire is always right behind you when you say, all are welcome.
Well, that brings us forward.
So that's 1989.
And I want to fast forward to the recent decade and, of course, to looking forward to the second Trump term.
You begin one chapter with a history of Chapter 7, with a history of the Border Patrol.
And I just found this such a brilliant way to open this chapter.
Of course, everyone listening is familiar with the Border Patrol, but most probably don't know how it started, where it started, or why it started.
So would you give us just a brief understanding of that?
Yeah, so they were...
When you create laws, as I've said, you have to enforce them, right?
And so they were creating immigration laws in the United States, starting with...
Well, I think Chinese were really with mass-scale, federally enforced laws that had to be realized somehow.
And so these different departments and bureaus were creating...
Ways to enforce these things, especially upon the southern border, because now there was the fear, well, one, that Chinese would come through the southern border, and also, two, of what to do about migrants coming in from Mexico and other places south.
And so that is when, in the 1920s, when the Border Patrol came into being, is that understanding that now we need to fund this in order to enforce that particular border.
And a lot of it was formed from, you know, already vigilante groups that took it upon themselves to understand, you know, this was their line that they had to hold.
And some of that was from Texas Rangers.
Some of them who had been expelled from Texas Rangers and also many from the Ku Klux Klan were joining in to be part of keeping the border secure.
We're talking about 1924, and Congress creates the Border Patrol with the Labor Appropriations Act of 1924.
Friends, if you can't locate yourself in time quickly, think about the 1920s.
Yes, we have- The years after World War I, yes, we're leading up to the Great Depression, but these are the years when the Ku Klux Klan was in its absolute heyday in this country.
These are the years where you have governors and mayors and members of Congress who are part of the Klan, vigilantes who are enforcing a white Christian social order.
To me, it's no accident that we, of course, of course the Border Patrol was created in 1924.
Of course.
And one of the things you point out, that it was intentionally created to be without oversight.
And I'm just wondering why that matters to you in terms of immigration and this idea of the United States as a new Jerusalem.
So the creation of it is that they did not have oversight.
It was left largely to their own devices in this one quote that I pull from Congress.
And this understanding, I mean, I think it was part and parcel with a romantic sense of vigilante justice that has survived an American understanding of Freedom, in white particular, and freedom, and also a sense of religiosity in terms of enforcing the border of divine fiat, again, justifying whatever is possible.
And this creates a cultic feeling around the border patrol that's part and parcel to all of these things.
And so those who are killed in the border patrol as they are working the border are also understood as joining a martyrdom, a sainthood, right?
So like this entire kind of That leads to discussion of the border wall.
So we have the Border Patrol created in 1924, the high times of the KKK, high times of American xenophobia, complete fear of new immigrants from the I think we're good to
go.
You point out in your work here that it was largely a laughingstock, the idea of creating a wall.
Because in functional terms, a wall doesn't really help.
A wall can be scaled.
There's so many ways a wall doesn't function as an effective way to control who is in or out of the country, who's going across the border, and so on.
But you say on page 163 that the border wall is more It's more rhetorical, it's more symbolic, and it really does reinforce the idea of America as a new Jerusalem.
Would you help us understand how this symbolism and this rhetorical significance of the wall are really what matters when white Christian nationalists and anyone else who supports the idea of a wall hears it from Donald Trump's mouth?
Yeah, I mean, like you said, the idea of a wall and building a wall does not actually prevent much, right?
And many of the things that we say that Donald Trump says that they're fighting in terms of drug trafficking or human trafficking is actually happening at I think?
A viable way to guard the border if you wanted to guard the border.
And the same thing goes with the New Jerusalem.
It's an equally ridiculous idea, right?
So you have a city, and if you take the literal measurements, which are given, right, you know, of 1,500 miles by 1,500 miles, that's the size of India, right?
Of having a wall that size and that thick.
It's the point of it, right?
So you have this new heaven coming down.
If God's enemies are all destroyed, like why in the world are we creating these defensive walls upon this plan?
Right.
It's a show of strength.
Right.
And in the end, it's symbolic of the utter dominance of God's kingdom.
I think that's the rhetorical force that it comes down with.
This giant city, it doesn't need these things.
Right.
It's really an architectural way of saying this is the power.
And that is definitely what's happening with Donald Trump talking about the wall, especially in his first candidacy.
And then presidency and saying, you know, and like the New Jerusalem, he's repeating the numbers over and over again.
It's gonna be a thousand miles long.
It's gonna be, you know, it's gonna keep out this many.
It's gonna be 50 feet high, 30 feet high.
It doesn't matter whether it ever happens or not.
What happens is that he says it and it gets people really excited.
And people just love to be a part of that fury.
That's also very similar to what's happening in Revelation.
You have a very descriptive language and repeating of numbers.
It's never happened, but that doesn't keep people from being excited about the descent of heaven, right?
So again, it's highly symbolic and powerful in dividing people in that way.
One of the folks who in the first Trump term got behind this idea of a wall was Robert Jeffress, who is a A prominent pastor, megachurch pastor in Texas.
And he talks about how walls are not unchristian.
So I want to play that clip now so people can hear Robert Jeffress talking about not only why walls are a good Christian thing to build, but also because there's biblical precedent in the book of Nehemiah.
You know, I had the privilege of preaching the sermon before President Trump's inauguration, and I chose the Old Testament story of God telling Nehemiah to build a wall around Jerusalem.
And I said, Mr.
President, God is not against walls.
Walls are not unchristian.
The Bible says even heaven is going to have a wall around it.
Not everyone's going to be allowed in.
So here's Robert Jeffress, full-throated defense of the border wall, and he says, look, Nehemiah built a wall, and I'm just wondering if you might remind us, as you do in this chapter on page 168, of what happens after the wall's built, because that part's always left out.
The amount of times on this podcast I've said, hey, let's talk about Jericho.
What a great story.
And then I'm like, yeah, do you know the end of that?
They went in there and they killed everybody?
Jezebel, Jehu, y'all read that?
Because that's a really violent episode in the Hebrew Bible.
The building of the wall in Nehemiah?
Great, you built a wall.
Then what happened?
So, I mean, the comparison that Jeffress uses to compare Trump to Nehemiah is so...
First of all, it fits so well into the wall building, like you said, but also afterwards, there is this condemnation from Nehemiah of the inclusion of foreigners in the community.
So Nehemiah completes the wall and then his next task is to condemn these men who have married foreign women.
And it says in chapter 13, these people who could not speak the language of Judah, he cleansed them from everything foreign.
So there's the idea of not only a building wall, but the expulsion of what is foreign.
That is also part of the story and very much, I think, a part of why it's become such a great metaphor for the Trump party.
This really came home for me, and I'll close my questions on this chapter here, but it really came home for me on page 175, where you talk about what is actually in the book of Revelation, chapter 22.
And the book of Revelation, chapter 22, verse 14, says, Blessed are those who wash their robes, so they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates.
Yet, immediately afterward, the narrator says, outside are the dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
And I think after reading almost the entirety of your book, it all just hit me like in my body.
My body started to just feel it.
Like, if you bring consistently for centuries the idea of the United States as the New Jerusalem, You can justify claiming that those who don't get to be here, those who don't deserve to be here, those who are outside, cast out, put in camps, whatever may be, are done so because they're the sexually immoral, they're the murderers, they're the idolaters, they're the, as you point out, rapists, drug dealers, whatever Donald Trump and his cohorts call them.
It just hit home for me so hard And I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on this as we kind of close talking about this chapter in terms of so many folks love referencing the Bible and the first part seem appealing.
The conclusions of the stories they draw on are usually so brutal.
I'm sorry, and this is not me being incendiary or anti-biblicist or none of that.
This is brutal.
It's brutal to think about people left outside suffering and to think of us as human beings, whether political leaders or others, getting to decide who is the one who is...
Left to the lake of fire.
It's really, really vicious.
This is the moment my body started to feel all of the weight of what you'd unpacked for 175 pages.
Yeah.
Revelation is so troublesome on many different levels.
I mean, it's troublesome on a misogynist level because of the use of the Whore of Babylon and her destruction.
It's troubling in a sense of using imperial power and copying and mimicking Rome.
But I think ultimately, right, it's leading towards an end that includes division, that includes exclusion.
And I think many people are disturbed by that idea because the New Jerusalem and heaven is a comforting thought.
And in the last chapters, we have every tear shall be wiped from every eye and there will be no more mourning.
Everyone will be comforted.
And there could be liberationist readings of this as well.
But at the same time, because I think the direction of it is towards finality, it's towards a telos of satisfying a sense of justice.
And, you know, and I understand that.
And it's cathartic in the way it talks about battle and conflict.
But as long as that neat ending and division is necessary, I think everything leading up to that, it's going to be problematic.
Because if you look at the rest of the New Testament within the canon, right, and thinking about centuries of Christian interpretation, Why is it that there's an ending to forgiveness?
There's an ending to compassion?
There's a statute of limitations on forgiveness.
It just is interesting that there's a sense of necessity for a finality, right?
And so I think incorporating the metaphors and drawing comfort on You know, an example of a shining city and places of comfort and, you know, a refuge, but also walls, right?
It includes, it folds into the dark underbelly of that need for an ending, need for an absolute that is really problematic.
I think when you draw a firm line, you know, whether on a piece of paper or as a wall, it's a division that is going to haunt no matter what.
So I think that, yeah, I mean, it is a problematic text and I think will remain so.
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Don't forget y'all, two live events coming in November, some straight white American Jesus.
One at the University of Southern California in LA with Americans United for Separation of Church and State and then the next night at the San Diego Convention Center.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
