(Picture supply: Evan Rosa/Yale Heart for Religion and Tradition)
The next excerpt comes from Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Heaven Has a Wall: Faith, Borders, and the World United States (College of Chicago Press, 2025). The e book explores how American nationwide borders, and our conversations about them, operate in non secular methods.
This excerpt comes from the e book’s introduction.
***
US borders provide up a paradox. They’ve a capability to be each current and absent. They’re avowed and deferred. Open and closed. They’re a “substantial but porous object” whose “boundaries are clear but additionally open.” The US is outlined concurrently by ferocious bordering practices and a willingness to defy borders within the identify of one thing higher than itself. This paradox can’t be defined away by materials pursuits. The expertise of the border speaks to one thing extra: it’s a web site of retrenchment and transcendence. It entails erasure and enforcement. It calls for the suspension of the regulation in addition to its vigorous prosecution. On the coronary heart of this paradox is the conviction that borders should be rigorously defended whilst America is well known as borderless and all encompassing. Borders are technocratic fantasies and locations of utmost violence. They’re efforts to flee the bizarre. They exist inside and past the regulation. “In distinction to the emphasis on a historic homeland that might outline European nations,” writes historian Rachel St. John, “Individuals embraced the notion that their nationwide boundaries would proceed to increase to include ever extra land and folks beneath the umbrella of republican authorities.” Thinker Jean Baudrillard describes this expansionist tendency as a “hyperreality”: “America is neither dream nor actuality. It’s a hyperreality. It’s a hyperreality as a result of it’s a utopia which has behaved from the very starting as if it had been already achieved.”
The border paradox resists decision even because it incessantly calls for it. Information from the border drives the information cycle and floods the airwaves. Discussions echo by American courtrooms, school rooms, and congressional listening to rooms. Border regulation and coverage inspire protests and grassroot actions, from personal paramilitary teams just like the Minutemen to authorized reform advocates and people calling for borders to be abolished. Civil, immigrant, and Indigenous rights’ advocates file lawsuits and lift funds. Nationalists arrange border patrols and argue with humanitarian activists within the desert. Advocacy teams are stretched to the restrict as US borders are remodeled into websites of humanitarian and pure catastrophe. Consultants invoke border enforcement in discussions of protection and safety, constructed infrastructure and biometric applied sciences, and humanitarian and local weather crises. Spiritual teams spearhead humanitarian reduction, harkening again to the Sanctuary motion of the Eighties. Educational and coverage discussions of refugees, migration, and faith are flourishing. Students debate the finer factors of border historical past; one outstanding historian describes the wall as a monument to the ultimate closing of the American frontier. Although some contend that US territorial enlargement has seen its day, others see America’s boundless frontier manifesting in new methods: within the US dedication to technological innovation over territorial enlargement and in American efforts to innovate our means out of the local weather disaster.
Regardless of the flurry of consideration surrounding US borders, few have thought of borders as websites not solely of regulation, violence, and management but additionally of redemption, enchantment, boundless enlargement, and salvation. These are non secular in addition to political ideas.
There’s something sacred about borders. They’re non secular in Kathryn Lofton’s sense of “enshrining sure commitments stronger than nearly some other acts of social participation.” As Lofton explains, “faith isn’t solely one thing you volunteer to affix, open-hearted and confessing. It isn’t solely one thing you inherit, enjoined by your mother and father. Faith can be the factor into which you turn out to be ensnared regardless of your self.” Borders are non secular within the sense that they reckon with human limits. They’re websites at which the bounds of the human turn out to be obvious. They’re non secular within the sense of getting a capability to summon a sacred American nation with out essentially summoning “faith.” To enter into the religiosity of borders conceived on this means it’s useful to begin with materials and different exchanges that aren’t normally thought of problematic: tomatoes, vacationers, butterflies, and so forth. The “non secular,” we rapidly discover, just isn’t the one place we discover the sacred. The sacred is expressed in ways in which exceed the logics of the trendy assemble of faith. It has been captured in notions such because the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum (thriller that repels and attracts), the homo sacer (in Roman regulation, he who’s banned however can’t be sacrificed), and all that which is honored by borders, akin to clear/soiled, permitted/taboo, and sacred/profane. It’s in objects too, as Mateo Taussig-Rubbo finds in property recovered from the rubble of 9/11.
The slipperiness of borders shapes a few of the most pressing political developments of our time. The border’s capability to be concurrently fluid and agency, current and absent, lawful and lawless, sacred and secular disrupts social scientific and governmental efforts to explain, delineate, and management border areas. The border paradox manifests within the politics of race, immigration, asylum, overseas coverage, and nationwide safety. It shapes the adjudication of asylum. It authorizes nationwide safety to function concurrently inside and past the attain of the regulation. It buoys US help for the State of Israel in ways in which have but to be totally understood. It permits the off-site detention of “enemy combatants.” It energizes stand-offs and sparks worry amongst US regulation enforcement as they face down countersovereigns who refuse American borders of all types. It traverses presidential administrations and confounds partisan divides, galvanizing unlikely alliances between liberals and conservatives.
That the border is a zone of authorized exception just isn’t a brand new perception. Rachel St. John notes that as early because the Twenties the border had turn out to be a “sophisticated system of relational house” that “might both be fluid or agency.” In her historical past of the INS, the predecessor to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, ICE, and CBP, S. Deborah Kang describes the border as “an impermeable sovereign boundary, a permeable socioeconomic zone, and an unlimited policing jurisdiction.” As a result of the INS was exempt from the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) of 1946, Kang notes, the company was “unconstrained by the procedures stipulated by the APA and judicial overview of its administration practices and inside adjudication,” thus turning into “an ‘outlaw’ in American authorized tradition.” In his autobiographical account, former Border Patrol agent Francisco Cantú describes the US-Mexico border as “an unlimited zone of exception, a spot the place legal guidelines and rights are utilized in a different way than in some other a part of the nation.” The one-hundred-mile aforementioned “Structure-free” border jurisdiction zone contains roughly one-third of america and almost two-thirds of its inhabitants. It contains your complete state of Michigan, which has had the quickest fee of progress of any Border Patrol Sector within the nation. The variety of brokers in Border Patrol’s Detroit Sector grew from 35 brokers in 2000 to 404 brokers in 2019, a 1,054 p.c enhance. The ACLU explains:
“The Fourth Modification of the U.S. Structure protects Individuals from random and arbitrary stops and searches. In line with the federal government, nevertheless, these fundamental constitutional rules don’t apply totally at our borders. For instance, at border crossings (additionally referred to as ‘ports of entry’), federal authorities don’t want a warrant and even suspicion of wrongdoing to justify conducting what courts have referred to as a ‘routine search,’ akin to looking out baggage or a automobile. Even in locations far faraway from the border, deep into the inside of the nation, immigration officers take pleasure in broad—although not limitless—powers. Particularly, federal laws give U.S. Customs and Border Safety (CBP) authority to function inside 100 miles of any U.S. ‘exterior boundary.’”
The exceptions proceed. DHS considers itself exempt from the Fourth Modification, and the federal government has exempted each CBP and DHS from restrictions on racial profiling which can be imposed on different federal departments. One DHS official defined, “We will’t do our job with out taking ethnicity under consideration,” prompting the New York Instances to report that “division officers argued that it was impractical to disregard ethnicity when it got here to frame enforcement.” The group Folks Serving to Folks documented a sample of profiling folks of coloration at Border Patrol inside checkpoints, invoking a protracted historical past of white supremacy within the patrol. Based in 1924 as a part of the Immigration Act, the patrol in these days, as described by historian Greg Grandin, was “a frontline instrument of white supremacist energy” and “a vanguard of race vigilantism.”
US borders are about greater than making legal guidelines, constructing obstacles, and rationally managing flows of products and folks. Borders contain reaching past the collective self, transcending constraints within the seek for an American utopia. Borders are additionally liminal areas and locations. The act of crossing them is imbued with magic and worry. Partitions, strains, doorways, and arches are harmful locations to be human. Ought to one look backward? To whom ought to one give one’s actual identify? Can one return after crossing? The title of this e book, Heaven Has a Wall, alludes to the concept borders are non secular in addition to political objects. Shifting past a traditional concentrate on non secular traditions, practices, and beliefs and their affect on collective life, I flip to frame historical past, nationwide safety, and immigration politics and overseas coverage. Faith is embedded within the matrices of all these phenomena. It can’t be set aside as a definite object. On the similar time, and whilst I query fastened boundaries between faith and politics, sacred and secular, and idea and theology, this e book just isn’t just for students of faith and politics. It’s for anybody serious about borders and within the American nationwide mission. I particularly wish to communicate to readers who see their very own methods of life as much less dogmatically non secular than others and as due to this fact promising extra inclusive types of politics and public life. That is frequent amongst liberal lecturers. Faith, they are saying, is one thing to be stored as an alternative, out of politics and public life. If solely these to the political and non secular proper would outgrow their dogmatic expressions of religiosity and the distorted types of politics they engender, it’s stated, the US would regain its naturally emancipatory and progressive bearings.
I suggest another. US (non secular) politics, together with border politics, are neither personal nor the unique area of political or non secular conservatives. Modernity just isn’t a post-religious achievement. The oft-presumed dichotomy between secular modernity and its theological previous is a false one. In Eric Santner’s phrases, “there may be extra political theology in on a regular basis life than we would have ever thought.” The political is an already-religious house that needn’t be feared or overcome however understood.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is professor of political science and non secular research at Northwestern College. Her books embrace Past Spiritual Freedom: The New World Politics of Faith and Politics of Spiritual Freedom.
***
Focused on extra on this matter? Take a look at episode 59 of the Revealer podcast: “Borders, Immigration, and Faith.”
(Picture supply: Evan Rosa/Yale Heart for Religion and Tradition)
The next excerpt comes from Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Heaven Has a Wall: Faith, Borders, and the World United States (College of Chicago Press, 2025). The e book explores how American nationwide borders, and our conversations about them, operate in non secular methods.
This excerpt comes from the e book’s introduction.
***
US borders provide up a paradox. They’ve a capability to be each current and absent. They’re avowed and deferred. Open and closed. They’re a “substantial but porous object” whose “boundaries are clear but additionally open.” The US is outlined concurrently by ferocious bordering practices and a willingness to defy borders within the identify of one thing higher than itself. This paradox can’t be defined away by materials pursuits. The expertise of the border speaks to one thing extra: it’s a web site of retrenchment and transcendence. It entails erasure and enforcement. It calls for the suspension of the regulation in addition to its vigorous prosecution. On the coronary heart of this paradox is the conviction that borders should be rigorously defended whilst America is well known as borderless and all encompassing. Borders are technocratic fantasies and locations of utmost violence. They’re efforts to flee the bizarre. They exist inside and past the regulation. “In distinction to the emphasis on a historic homeland that might outline European nations,” writes historian Rachel St. John, “Individuals embraced the notion that their nationwide boundaries would proceed to increase to include ever extra land and folks beneath the umbrella of republican authorities.” Thinker Jean Baudrillard describes this expansionist tendency as a “hyperreality”: “America is neither dream nor actuality. It’s a hyperreality. It’s a hyperreality as a result of it’s a utopia which has behaved from the very starting as if it had been already achieved.”
The border paradox resists decision even because it incessantly calls for it. Information from the border drives the information cycle and floods the airwaves. Discussions echo by American courtrooms, school rooms, and congressional listening to rooms. Border regulation and coverage inspire protests and grassroot actions, from personal paramilitary teams just like the Minutemen to authorized reform advocates and people calling for borders to be abolished. Civil, immigrant, and Indigenous rights’ advocates file lawsuits and lift funds. Nationalists arrange border patrols and argue with humanitarian activists within the desert. Advocacy teams are stretched to the restrict as US borders are remodeled into websites of humanitarian and pure catastrophe. Consultants invoke border enforcement in discussions of protection and safety, constructed infrastructure and biometric applied sciences, and humanitarian and local weather crises. Spiritual teams spearhead humanitarian reduction, harkening again to the Sanctuary motion of the Eighties. Educational and coverage discussions of refugees, migration, and faith are flourishing. Students debate the finer factors of border historical past; one outstanding historian describes the wall as a monument to the ultimate closing of the American frontier. Although some contend that US territorial enlargement has seen its day, others see America’s boundless frontier manifesting in new methods: within the US dedication to technological innovation over territorial enlargement and in American efforts to innovate our means out of the local weather disaster.
Regardless of the flurry of consideration surrounding US borders, few have thought of borders as websites not solely of regulation, violence, and management but additionally of redemption, enchantment, boundless enlargement, and salvation. These are non secular in addition to political ideas.
There’s something sacred about borders. They’re non secular in Kathryn Lofton’s sense of “enshrining sure commitments stronger than nearly some other acts of social participation.” As Lofton explains, “faith isn’t solely one thing you volunteer to affix, open-hearted and confessing. It isn’t solely one thing you inherit, enjoined by your mother and father. Faith can be the factor into which you turn out to be ensnared regardless of your self.” Borders are non secular within the sense that they reckon with human limits. They’re websites at which the bounds of the human turn out to be obvious. They’re non secular within the sense of getting a capability to summon a sacred American nation with out essentially summoning “faith.” To enter into the religiosity of borders conceived on this means it’s useful to begin with materials and different exchanges that aren’t normally thought of problematic: tomatoes, vacationers, butterflies, and so forth. The “non secular,” we rapidly discover, just isn’t the one place we discover the sacred. The sacred is expressed in ways in which exceed the logics of the trendy assemble of faith. It has been captured in notions such because the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum (thriller that repels and attracts), the homo sacer (in Roman regulation, he who’s banned however can’t be sacrificed), and all that which is honored by borders, akin to clear/soiled, permitted/taboo, and sacred/profane. It’s in objects too, as Mateo Taussig-Rubbo finds in property recovered from the rubble of 9/11.
The slipperiness of borders shapes a few of the most pressing political developments of our time. The border’s capability to be concurrently fluid and agency, current and absent, lawful and lawless, sacred and secular disrupts social scientific and governmental efforts to explain, delineate, and management border areas. The border paradox manifests within the politics of race, immigration, asylum, overseas coverage, and nationwide safety. It shapes the adjudication of asylum. It authorizes nationwide safety to function concurrently inside and past the attain of the regulation. It buoys US help for the State of Israel in ways in which have but to be totally understood. It permits the off-site detention of “enemy combatants.” It energizes stand-offs and sparks worry amongst US regulation enforcement as they face down countersovereigns who refuse American borders of all types. It traverses presidential administrations and confounds partisan divides, galvanizing unlikely alliances between liberals and conservatives.
That the border is a zone of authorized exception just isn’t a brand new perception. Rachel St. John notes that as early because the Twenties the border had turn out to be a “sophisticated system of relational house” that “might both be fluid or agency.” In her historical past of the INS, the predecessor to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, ICE, and CBP, S. Deborah Kang describes the border as “an impermeable sovereign boundary, a permeable socioeconomic zone, and an unlimited policing jurisdiction.” As a result of the INS was exempt from the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) of 1946, Kang notes, the company was “unconstrained by the procedures stipulated by the APA and judicial overview of its administration practices and inside adjudication,” thus turning into “an ‘outlaw’ in American authorized tradition.” In his autobiographical account, former Border Patrol agent Francisco Cantú describes the US-Mexico border as “an unlimited zone of exception, a spot the place legal guidelines and rights are utilized in a different way than in some other a part of the nation.” The one-hundred-mile aforementioned “Structure-free” border jurisdiction zone contains roughly one-third of america and almost two-thirds of its inhabitants. It contains your complete state of Michigan, which has had the quickest fee of progress of any Border Patrol Sector within the nation. The variety of brokers in Border Patrol’s Detroit Sector grew from 35 brokers in 2000 to 404 brokers in 2019, a 1,054 p.c enhance. The ACLU explains:
“The Fourth Modification of the U.S. Structure protects Individuals from random and arbitrary stops and searches. In line with the federal government, nevertheless, these fundamental constitutional rules don’t apply totally at our borders. For instance, at border crossings (additionally referred to as ‘ports of entry’), federal authorities don’t want a warrant and even suspicion of wrongdoing to justify conducting what courts have referred to as a ‘routine search,’ akin to looking out baggage or a automobile. Even in locations far faraway from the border, deep into the inside of the nation, immigration officers take pleasure in broad—although not limitless—powers. Particularly, federal laws give U.S. Customs and Border Safety (CBP) authority to function inside 100 miles of any U.S. ‘exterior boundary.’”
The exceptions proceed. DHS considers itself exempt from the Fourth Modification, and the federal government has exempted each CBP and DHS from restrictions on racial profiling which can be imposed on different federal departments. One DHS official defined, “We will’t do our job with out taking ethnicity under consideration,” prompting the New York Instances to report that “division officers argued that it was impractical to disregard ethnicity when it got here to frame enforcement.” The group Folks Serving to Folks documented a sample of profiling folks of coloration at Border Patrol inside checkpoints, invoking a protracted historical past of white supremacy within the patrol. Based in 1924 as a part of the Immigration Act, the patrol in these days, as described by historian Greg Grandin, was “a frontline instrument of white supremacist energy” and “a vanguard of race vigilantism.”
US borders are about greater than making legal guidelines, constructing obstacles, and rationally managing flows of products and folks. Borders contain reaching past the collective self, transcending constraints within the seek for an American utopia. Borders are additionally liminal areas and locations. The act of crossing them is imbued with magic and worry. Partitions, strains, doorways, and arches are harmful locations to be human. Ought to one look backward? To whom ought to one give one’s actual identify? Can one return after crossing? The title of this e book, Heaven Has a Wall, alludes to the concept borders are non secular in addition to political objects. Shifting past a traditional concentrate on non secular traditions, practices, and beliefs and their affect on collective life, I flip to frame historical past, nationwide safety, and immigration politics and overseas coverage. Faith is embedded within the matrices of all these phenomena. It can’t be set aside as a definite object. On the similar time, and whilst I query fastened boundaries between faith and politics, sacred and secular, and idea and theology, this e book just isn’t just for students of faith and politics. It’s for anybody serious about borders and within the American nationwide mission. I particularly wish to communicate to readers who see their very own methods of life as much less dogmatically non secular than others and as due to this fact promising extra inclusive types of politics and public life. That is frequent amongst liberal lecturers. Faith, they are saying, is one thing to be stored as an alternative, out of politics and public life. If solely these to the political and non secular proper would outgrow their dogmatic expressions of religiosity and the distorted types of politics they engender, it’s stated, the US would regain its naturally emancipatory and progressive bearings.
I suggest another. US (non secular) politics, together with border politics, are neither personal nor the unique area of political or non secular conservatives. Modernity just isn’t a post-religious achievement. The oft-presumed dichotomy between secular modernity and its theological previous is a false one. In Eric Santner’s phrases, “there may be extra political theology in on a regular basis life than we would have ever thought.” The political is an already-religious house that needn’t be feared or overcome however understood.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is professor of political science and non secular research at Northwestern College. Her books embrace Past Spiritual Freedom: The New World Politics of Faith and Politics of Spiritual Freedom.
***
Focused on extra on this matter? Take a look at episode 59 of the Revealer podcast: “Borders, Immigration, and Faith.”
