Heaven Has a Wall
Religion, Borders, and the Global United States
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
An urgent exploration of borders as sacred objects in American culture.
Our national conversation about the border has taken a religious turn. When televangelists declare, “Heaven has a wall,” activists shout back, “Jesus was a refugee.” For Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, the standoff makes explicit a longstanding truth: borders are religious as well as political objects.
In this book, Hurd argues that Americans share a bipartisan border religion, complete with an array of beliefs and practices, including a reverence for national security, a liturgy for immigration, and an eschatological foreign policy. Through an analysis of the many ways the United States creates, enforces, and ignores borders at home and abroad, Hurd offers a bold new perspective on the ties that bind American religion, politics, and public life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hurd (At Home and Abroad), a professor of religious studies and political science at Northwestern University, argues that for Americans, the border has not only a political but also a religious significance—"a capacity to summon a sacred American nation." This "American border religion," as Hurd calls it, "comes with an array of beliefs and practices, including a reverence for national security, a liturgy of immigration and an eschatological foreign policy"; she illuminates these "theologies" across an array of mostly standalone chapters. One focuses on how, like in many religious myths, the American border religion includes the idea of asylum, or the ability of the land to confer salvation upon the deserving, and of a clerical class—consisting of border guards and national security apparatchiks—that delineates the saved and the hell-bound. Hurd's thesis is most intriguing when she focuses on how borders are both a palpable and inchoate idea; the Department of Homeland Security, for instance, carries out border enforcement activities deep within the American state—far from any actual border—as well as all over the globe, with offices in far-off countries. (For Hurd, one notable iteration of this simultaneous extension and erasure of the border is Israel—"both countries are imagined as Holy Lands.") It's an original perspective on how Americans are politically motivated by feelings of sanctity that at times verge on zealotry.
