Abstract
For many Christians, the Book of Revelation provides hope and the promise of ultimate refuge and rest. Yet the book undeniably reaches its paradisiacal end through violent destruction, suffering, and the death of those excluded from the heavenly community. This essay considers how the ideation of America as the New Jerusalem, as a walled, secure, and wealthy city, feeds into racist, white nativist discourse and fearmongering, anti-immigrant rhetoric. This is especially clear in American immigration discourses that identify Asians/Asian Americans as foreign, unassimilable, disease-ridden, and idolatrous, like those kept out of the heavenly city in Revelation. To limit the scope and length of this essay, I will focus on the history of Chinese immigration to the United States—but the implications apply to all immigrants unwanted by white nativists.
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Notes
- 1.
Archaeologists estimate that the first human arrivals to the Americas date to 21,000–23,000 years ago. See Matthew R. Bennett, et al., “Evidence of Humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum,” Science 373:6562 (2021): 1528–1531, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586. Evidence of a brief Viking settlement in Newfoundland dates to 1021 CE. See Margot Kuitems, et al., “Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021,” Nature 601 (2022): 388–391, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03972-8.
- 2.
See David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi” in The History of Cartography, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 341: “Thus, while there is a clear biblical justification for centering these maps on Jerusalem and an empirical reason for doing so (it did occur roughly in the middle of the then known world), the idea does not seem to have been taken as literally as was previously thought …The strengthening of the idea of Jerusalem as the spiritual center, a natural outcome of the Crusades, may have been responsible for the noticeable shift in the structure of mappaemundi from 1100 to 1300, toward centering maps on Jerusalem.” See also John Kirtland Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe (New York: American Geographical Society, 1927), 259–260.
- 3.
While other types of maps, such as portolan (navigational) and topographical maps, were certainly in use during Columbus’s time, symbolic T-O maps were also important in that time period for understanding and interpreting the world, with T-O maps accounting for over 50 percent of the extant mappaeumundi from the fifteenth century (around 330 maps). See Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 286–370, especially Fig. 18.8 and 18.9 on 298.
- 4.
Isidoran because it is based on Isidore of Seville’s descriptions of the world in De natura rerum and Etymologiae. See John Williams, “Isidore, Orosius, and the Beatus Map,” Imago Mundi 49 (1997): 7–32; also Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 301–302.
- 5.
Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 342: “the function of mappaemundi was primarily didactic and moralizing and lay not in the communication of geographical facts.”
- 6.
The other points of the compass here are Arthos [sic] for Arctos (north) to the left, Mesembria (south) to the right, and Disis (Greek: δύσις, west, “sunset”) at the bottom. The city name at the lower left-hand side is Anglia (England).
- 7.
Jonathan T. Lanman, “The Religious Symbolism of the T in T-O Maps,” Cartographica 18:4 (1981): 18–22. See also Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 334.
- 8.
See John Leddy Phelan, “The Apocalypse in the Age of Discovery,” 17–28 in The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Abbas Hamdani, “Columbus and the Recovery of Jerusalem,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 99.1 (1979): 39–48; and Carol Delaney, “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48.2 (2006): 260–292.
- 9.
In a letter to Doña Juana de la Torre, Christopher Columbus, Cristóbal Colón, Textos y documentos completos: Relaciones de viajes, cartas y memoriales, ed. and comm. Consuelo Varela (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1984, 2a ed.), 243. Quoted and translated in Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 141.
- 10.
As Zamora, Reading Columbus, 143, eloquently states: … the Indies is not only on the figurative way to Jerusalem, it is also in the vicinity of Paradise. Such a geography makes sense only in the context of a paradigmatic cartographic discourse in which spatiotemporal coordinates are determined ideologically rather than empirically. Columbus describes the voyage’s trajectory from west (Spain) to far east (the presumed Asiatic mainland) as an ascent up the slope of a pear-shaped southern hemisphere toward a Terrestrial Paradise, situated at the very top, on the spot closest to heaven.”
- 11.
Quotation from Phelan, Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 24: “Only after the equation ‘the New World equals the end of the world’ is understood can some new light be thrown on the origins of one of the most celebrated New World myths; namely, that the Indians were the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.” The lost tribes are just one aspect of the many apocalyptic beliefs surrounding the New World and, later, America and the United States, that should be understood in light of this equation.
- 12.
See Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New-York (London: John Hancock, 1670), 12, who described disease that killed indigenous peoples as the process of clearing the land “of those pernicious creatures to make room for better growth.”
- 13.
John Davenport, The Power of the Congregational Churches Asserted and Vindicated (London: [s.n.], 1672 [written ca. 1648]), 57.
- 14.
On Puritan colonists’ intention to merge state and church governance, see Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); on Davenport’s hopes for New Haven and surrounding regions specifically, see Francis J. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 181–219.
- 15.
This is a quotation of John Cotton, recorded by his grandson: Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana or The Ecclesiastical History of New-England from Its First Planting in the Year 1620 unto the Year of our Lord, 1698 (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1702), Book 3.53.
- 16.
Ibid., Book 3.55.
- 17.
See James P. Byrd, “‘The Fierceness and Wrath of the Almighty God’: Revelation in the Revolution” in Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 143–163. Byrd demonstrates that while Revelation was not among the most quoted biblical books during the American Revolution, it still provided rhetorically effective imagery and language to stir up morale, such as the call to martyrdom in the opening seven letters to seven churches (Rev 2–3), the woman’s flight from the dragon to the wilderness (Rev 12), and the militant Christ (Rev 19:11–21): 163: “Through these apocalyptic visions, including the victorious charge of a militant Christ, ministers proclaimed a bellicose Christianity that endowed patriotic sacrifice with sacred martyrdom” (163).
- 18.
On the conflation of America with Zion see Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). For more on Julia Ward Howe’s writing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862) and its use of Revelation, see Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 197–202. The winepress imagery comes not only from Revelation 14:9-10, 18-20, 19:15 but also from Isaiah 63:1-6, Joel 3:13, and Lamentations 1:15.
- 19.
“Dead Chinamen,” Elko Independent, January 5, 1870, 3. Cited in CPPR.org, “FAQs: How Many Died Building the Central Pacific Railroad,” Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum, http://cprr.org/Museum/FAQs.html#died, accessed June 13, 2022.
- 20.
On the history of Chinese workers and the transcontinental railroad, see Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2019); Gordon H. Chang and Shelly Fisher Fishkin, eds., The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019); Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 21.
Other newspaper reports of the cargo of dead Chinese workers include “Bones in Transit,” Sacramento Reporter, June 30, 1870, which notes that “accumulated bones of perhaps 1,200 Chinamen” weighing “20,000 pounds” were in by train, noting that Chinese custom requires burial in China; “Bones of Defunct Chinamen,” Sacramento Union, June 30, 1870, which reports “fifty defunct Chinamen … to be interred in Conboie’s private cemetery, as have been already the bones of about one hundred others similarly deceased.” Whether these reports tell of the same shipment (and the numbers of one or the other are mistaken or exaggerated) or of different cargo trains is unknown. Both are cited in CPPR.org, “FAQs: How Many Died Building the Central Pacific Railroad?” which states that the report of 1200 dead Chinese workers is highly dubious given the two conflicting reports, although the possibility that these were two different trains with different destinations (Conboie’s cemetery in Sacramento vs. China via San Francisco) is not considered. The museum site is run by descendants of Lewis R. Clement, an engineer and surveyor of the Central Pacific Railroad. On the dangers that led to the death of Chinese railroad workers, see Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, especially 225–226.
- 22.
The landowner first unearthed five bodies on his property, which led to the discovery of thirteen total bodies on his land and a neighbor’s property. See Sue Fawn Chung, Fred P. Frampton, and Timothy W. Murphy, “Venerate These Bones: Chinese American Funerary Practices as Seen in Carlin, Elko County, Nevada,” in Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors, Sue Fawn Chung and Priscilla Wegars eds. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005), 107–145, on the discovery of these graves and their analysis. See also Ryan P. Harrod and John J. Crandall, “Rails Built of the Ancestors’ Bones: The Bioarchaeology of the Overseas Chinese Experience,” Historical Archaeology 49.1 (2015): 148–161, on the analysis of these remains and the evidence of hard labor in rough environments.
- 23.
The earliest dated tombstone housed in the crypt of the Center Church on the Green belongs to “Ms. Sarah Trowbridge,” who died in 1687. New Haven was “founded” in 1638. See M. Reynard Georgevitch, “Sarah (Rutherford) Trowbridge, 1641-1687,” Tales from the Crypt: A Cata-Blog of Stones and Stories form the Basement of Center Church, July 20, 2014, https://ctcryptkeeper.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/sarah-rutherford-trowbridge-1641-1687/. The graves of Chinese discovered in Carlin Nevada date from before 1900 through 1924, according to Chung, Frampton, and Murphy, “Venerate these Bones.” On Chinese immigrants heading east after working mines in California, see ibid., 108–111.
- 24.
Birthright citizenship was codified in the Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898.
- 25.
The Naturalization Act of 1870, passed in Congress as H.R. 2201. This extended the ability to be naturalized to those of African descent, but Congress rejected any amendment that would allow those of Chinese descent to be naturalized. Similarly, although birthright naturalization had existed by jus soli in the United States and then codified in both the Civil Rights Act of 1868 and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, the children born of Chinese immigrants in the United States were not regarded as legal citizens as a matter of course. See, for example, the case In re Look Tin Sing (1884) of the California federal circuit court, in which American-born Look Tin Sing’s citizenship had to be established in court before he could be legally readmitted in the country. It was not until United States vs. Wong Kim Ark (1898) that birthright citizenship was established for all born in the United States—although that right has been questioned in recent decades with regard to the children of “illegal” immigrants. See Chap. 4.
- 26.
41st Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Globe 5156, July 4, 1870. Also quoted in Martin B. Gold, Forbidden Citizens: Chinese Exclusion and the U.S. Congress: A Legislative History (Alexandria, VA: TheCapitol.Net, 2012), §1.13, p. 17.
- 27.
See Donald L. Hardesty, “Archaeology and the Chinese Experience in Nevada,” South Dakota History, Ethnic Oasis: The Chinese in the Black Hills, Special Historic Preservation Issue, 33.4 (2003): 363–379; Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, 209–236; D. Michael Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West: 1850–1890 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press), 137–138; Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 70–71.
- 28.
See Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 136–137, and Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 161.
- 29.
Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color, 138: The Chinese population in California increased by 50 percent in the 1870s, although their number did not account for more than 10 percent of the total population.
- 30.
Daily California Chronicle, April 22, 1854. Quoted in Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, 44.
- 31.
Leland Stanford, Statement Made to the President of the United States, and Secretary of the Interior, on the Progress of Work, October 10, 1865 (Sacramento: H. S. Crocker & Co, 1865), 990. Quoted in Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, 86.
- 32.
47th Congress, First Session, Congressional Record vol. 13.2, 2616, April 5, 1882.
- 33.
Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 165.
- 34.
See Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 10–11. The Page Law also effectively tamped down the growth of Chinese communities and populations. See also George Anthony Peffer, “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women under the Page Law,” Journal of American Ethnic History 6.1 (1986): 28–46.
- 35.
While widely known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, historian Beth Lew-Williams uses the term “Chinese Restriction Act” to capture more accurately the phases of legislation against Chinese and Asian immigration: “Historians, with their eyes trained on what Chinese exclusion would become, have overlooked the distinction between the Restriction Period (1882-1888) and Exclusion Period (1888–1943). To understand the radicalism of Chinese exclusion and the contingent history of its rise, we must recognize the period of restriction experimentation, and contestation that preceded it.” Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 8–9.
- 36.
See R. Gregory Nokes, Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2009), 76: “But although the Exclusion Act effectively blocked new laborers, it failed to protect the estimated 132,300 Chinese who remained. If anything, violence and mistreatment became worse.”
- 37.
See Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go, particularly the map “Sites of Anti-Chinese Expulsion, 1885–1886,” page 2, and Appendix A: Sites of Anti-Chinese Expulsions and Attempted Expulsions, 1885–1887, pages 247–251.
- 38.
See U.S. House Report (1885–1886), 49th Congress, 1st Session, no. 2044, 28–32, excerpted in Judy Yung, Gordon Chang, and Him Mark Lai, eds., “Memorial of Chinese Laborers: Rock Springs, Wyoming (1885),” pages 48–54 in idem, Chinese American Voices from the Gold Rush to the Present (Berkeley: University of California, 2006); and Craig Storti, Incident at Bitter Creek: The Story of the Rock Springs Massacre (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1991).
- 39.
Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, 232; Nokes, Massacred for Gold.
- 40.
See Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, 231–232; and Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go, 91–165.
- 41.
Amendments to the Exclusion Act of 1882 were passed in 1884, which forbid Chinese from any place of origin (not just China) from entering, except for teachers, students, diplomats, merchants, and tourists. The Scott Act of 1888 kept Chinese laborers who left the United States from returning, canceling their certificates for re-entry.
- 42.
See Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 42. See more on the creation of the bureaucracy, records, and officials needed for these laws in Chap. 4.
- 43.
The essential themes of Yellow Peril date from long before the existence of the United States and can be identified with the conception of the “Mongol” Other in Europe. The use of Yellow Peril in public discourse, art, and entertainment continues to this day. See John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, eds., Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (London: Verso, 2014).
- 44.
47th Congress, First Session, Congressional Record vol. 13.2, 2616, April 5, 1882.
- 45.
I use the Matthean KJV translation here since it is closest to Bayard’s paraphrasing. See also Luke 16:13.
- 46.
47th Congress, First Session, Congressional Record vol. 13.2, 2616, April 5, 1882, emphasis added.
- 47.
41st Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Globe 5151, July 4, 1870. Also quoted in Gold, Forbidden Citizens, §1.30, 14.
- 48.
41st Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Globe 5151, July 4, 1870. Also quoted in Gold, Forbidden Citizens, §1.30, 18–19.
- 49.
41st Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Globe 5151, July 4, 1870. Also quoted in Gold, Forbidden Citizens, §1.30, 18, emphasis added.
- 50.
On Chinese luxury goods as status symbols in the nineteenth century, see Kyla Wazana Tompkin, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 132; also John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); on the increase of export and trade of tea, silks, porcelain, and other handicrafts from China to America, see Yen-p’ing Hao, The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-Century China: The Rise of Sino-Western Mercantile Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
- 51.
For more on ancient and current interpretation of the misogyny, tragedy, and power of this figure, see Shanell T. Smith, The Woman Babylon and the Marks of Empire: Reading Revelation with a Postcolonial Womanist Hermeneutics of Ambiveilence (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014).
- 52.
H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 33.
- 53.
P. W Dooner, The Last Days of the Republic (San Francisco: Alta California Publishing House, 1880), 96.
- 54.
Dooner, The Last Days of the Republic, 234.
- 55.
Dooner, The Last Days of the Republic, 256.
- 56.
For a history of European and later Chinese Christian interpretation of the lóng with regard to biblical dragons and snakes, see Emily Dunn, “The Big Red Dragon and Indigenizations of Christianity in China,” East Asian History 36 (2008): 73–85.
- 57.
Robert Wolter [“A Survivor”], A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899 (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and Company, 1882).
- 58.
Wolter, A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899, 58.
- 59.
Wolter, A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899, 79.
- 60.
Wolter, A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899, 79.
- 61.
The illustration generated many spin-offs and parodies, and even an illustration purporting to show an Asian perspective. See Peter C. Perdue and Ellen Sebring, “The Boxer Uprising I: The Gathering Storm in North China (1860–1900),” in MIT Visualizing Cultures, https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/boxer_uprising/pdf/bx_essay02.pdf.
- 62.
Peter Paret, “The Tschudi Affair,” Journal of Modern History 53.4 (1981), 590.
- 63.
See Kuo Wei Chen and Yeats, Yellow Peril!, 12–13.
- 64.
They may be identified as (from right to left): Marianne (France), Germania (Germany), Mother Russia (Russia), Austria (Austria-Hungary), Italia (Italy), Great Britain (Britannia), and Hispania (Spain). See also Asmut Brückmann, Die europäische Expansion:Kolonialismus und Imperialismus 1492–1918 (Leipzig: Klett, 2005), 79.
- 65.
The angel Michael also plays the role of battle commander in other Jewish apocalyptic sources, for example, in Daniel 12:1. See Darrell D. Hannah, Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity WUNT 109 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999).
- 66.
“A Celestial Horde,” The Dalles Daily Chronicle, April 30, 1892, vol. 3 (118): front page, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042448/1892-04-30/ed-1/seq-1/#words=act+Act+Chinese+exclusion+Exclusion.
- 67.
Named Isla de Los Angeles by Juan Manuel de Ayala in 1775. See Erwin G. Gudde, 1000 California Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 3–4.
- 68.
Louis Stellmann, “San Francisco to Have the Finest Immigration Station in the World,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 18, 1907, 4.
- 69.
On the Island of Immortals or Mount Penglai see Wai-Ming Ng, Imagining China in Tokugawa Japan: Legends, Classics, and Historical Terms (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019), 190, n. 3.
- 70.
Poem 23 in Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, eds., Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (San Francisco: Hoc Doi, 1986), 60.
- 71.
Poem 36, Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 86.
- 72.
See Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 34.
- 73.
See Nayan Sha, “Making Medical Borders at Angel Island” in Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 179–203. See also Chap. 2.
- 74.
See Robert Barde and Gustavo J. Bobonis, “Detention at Angel Island: First Empirical Evidence,” Social Science History 30 (2006): 103–136. Lee Puey You, who arrived at Angel Island April 13, 1939, was deported back to China November 8, 1940. Lee’s case is not straightforward—she was instructed by her family to claim falsely that she was the daughter of a U.S. citizen. Nevertheless, the conditions, treatment, and immigration policies at work in her case remain reprehensible. See Lee and Yung, Angel Island, 93–95.
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Lin, YJ. (2023). America, the New Jerusalem, and Anti-immigrant Discourse. In: Pae, Kj.C., Lee, B. (eds) Embodying Antiracist Christianity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37264-3_2
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