The Strangers in Our Midst: American Evangelicals and Immigration from the Cold War to the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Studies of the post-1970s rise of the evangelical Right have long highlighted matters of family and gender. With federal abortion rights presently imperiled, that thesis remains salient. At the same time, the recent prominence of a strident, reactionary type of Christian nationalism points to a broader set of issues that also deserves consideration. Ulrike Elisabeth Stockhausen's fine study of American evangelicals' attitudes toward immigration thus fills an important gap. The story is largely one of the triumph of politics over distinctively evangelical approaches to the public square. Stockhausen explores the response of evangelical organizations (along with grassroots figures) to high-profile cases, beginning with Cuban refugees in the 1960s and stretching through the Vietnamese “boat people” of the 1970s, the Central American Sanctuary movement of the 1980s, and the more recent rise of Trumpian nativism. The pivot, fully apparent by the 1990s, was away from a “theology of hospitality” (p. 3). In biblical terms, the shift was from Hebrews 13, which likens strangers to angels, to Romans 13, which urges submission to governing authorities. The latter passage became a “widely used ‘proof text' for emphasizing legal status over hospitality” (p. 159). An evangelical Left persisted, with varying degrees of media attention, offering an important counterpoint to hard-line attitudes about illegal immigration.