Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States

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. (June)