Borderland Religion

Ambiguous practices of difference, hope and beyond

Daisy L. Machado, Bryan S. Turner, Trygve Wyller, Trygve Eiliv Wyller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138482722
• eBook ISBN: 9781351056922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Borderland Religion narrates, presents and interprets the fascinating and significant practices when borders, migrants and religion intersect. This collection of original essays combines theology, philosophy and sociology to examine diverse religious issues surrounding external national borders and internal domestic borders as these are challenged by the unstoppable flow of documented and undocumented migrants. While many studies of migration have examined how religion plays a major role in the assimilation and integration of waves of migration, this volume looks at a number of empirical studies of how emergent religious practices arise around border crossings.

The volume begins with a detailed analysis of the borderland religion context and research. The aim is to bring an eschatological interpretation of the borderland religion, its impact and significance for migrants. Themes include a critical analysis of how religion has formatted Europe; empirical studies from the US/Mexican border and Southern Africa; an overview of the European refugee crisis in 2015; editors' account of borderland religion from the perspective of citizenship studies.

Contributions of scholars from a broad range of disciplines ensure a careful analysis of this highly topical situation. The volume's interdisciplinary profile will appeal to scholars and students in religious studies, migration studies, theology and citizenship studies.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Traces of a Theo–Borderland

Daisy L. Machado, Bryan S. Turner and Trygve Wyller

Borders and boundaries

‘And then, a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian’ Pope Francis said after his visit to Mexico in February 2016. With this sentence the Pope actualized the very old, very important and surprisingly under researched relation between borders, bridges and Christianity.

This collection of original essays combines theology, religious studies, philosophy and sociology. The aim is to examine diverse religious issues surrounding external national borders and internal domestic borders as these are challenged by the unstoppable flow of documented and undocumented migrants. While many studies of migration have examined how religion plays a major role in the assimilation and integration of waves of migration, this study looks at a number of empirical studies of how emergent religious practices arise around border crossings. We treat borders as inevitably contested and ambiguous sites of dispute, contestation and conflict. Yet as some of the case studies show there is also an added contradiction, the contradiction between the religious universalism of Pauline Christianity and the exclusionary thrust of national sovereignty.

This book aims to follow the argument to more borders, more controversies and to more contextualized spaces. Why is it that building bridges is said to be more Christian than building walls? If the borderland is a space where values, bodies and politics are both contested and reformatted: can we learn some religious basics by studying current borderland religions?

We might argue common-sensically that all social groups have an inside and an outside that are marked by multiple boundaries that may be cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious or simply all of these. Social groups probably survive insofar as they can sustain these borders. Maintaining exclusive boundaries may require, for example, strict control on marrying outside the group. In many religious groups, patrolling these boundaries may involve a special dress code (as in the case of ultra-orthodox Jews) or can require a designated territory where group norms may be better protected (such as the Amish or Mormons). Thus closure and openness can vary considerably between groups but this is not to detract from the basic idea of group boundaries.

In addition, with the growth of the nation state we can add a further more problematic division, namely the idea of national borders that are patrolled by state agencies and where entry and exit are regulated by passports, work permits, ‘Green cards’ and visas. So we can combine these two rather simple observations: human beings typically live in groups whose boundaries culturally exclude others and also live in nation states where citizenship is an exclusionary form of membership. Membership of groups and nation states is also not simply cultural in that belonging normally brings advantages that satisfy the needs of members. Group membership may be important for our sense of identity, whereas citizenship brings a range of benefits not least of which is security. Crossing boundaries and borders is therefore understandably fraught with difficulties and dangers.

Many recent contributions to the theory of globalization have challenged the common-sense notions that undermine this opening paragraph. It has been argued that the sovereignty and autonomy of the nation state is being slowly undermined by the globalization of corporations, by outsourcing, by international labour migration, by the spread of human rights legislation, the growth of legal pluralism and by international arrangements for trade and travel. It is further argued that against nationalism there is a new spirit of cosmopolitanism and internationalism, especially among the middle class. In economic terms, there is the view that free trade, the free movement of people and open borders have raised the general standard of wellbeing across the globe.

There is of course much to support this argument, except that globalization has also brought with it the global trafficking of people, and global crime. Undoubtedly 9/11 and the subsequent ‘war on terrorism’ changed the optimistic view of globalization and the need for national security has placed renewed emphasis on protecting national borders. There is also a counter economic argument that middle class incomes are stagnating and there is growing income inequality. The leakage of information about overseas tax havens (the Panama Papers 2016) only served to confirm the fact that the rich have various strategies to avoid taxation. In response there has been a general revival of populism, hostility to the global elites, right-wing nationalism and in some cases the re-emergence of fascism with its strong racist opposition to outsiders, ethnic minorities and refugees.

The presidential elections in the US in 2016 demonstrated the strong attraction of populism and nativism and in particular the need to defend borders against unwanted ‘outsiders’ such as Muslims and Mexicans. These developments only serve to reinforce the idea that borders and boundaries are unsurprisingly sites of contestation, ambiguity and periodically violence. Thus the very well-known counter-argument to growing cosmopolitanism was marked by the publication of Samuel Huntington’s Foreign Affairs article in 1993 on ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ with clear evidence that in the last two decades of globalization, borders have become more problematic and dangerous rather than less.

An emerging Pauline Christianity and the remaining dilemma from Westphalia

How does religion fit into this picture? Because in this collection we are mainly concerned with the West, we can concentrate our discussion at this stage on Christianity. There has in recent years been an important revision of our understanding of St. Paul. Two publications in particular – Jacob Taube’s (2004) The Political Theology of Paul and Alain Badiou (2003) Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism – have drawn attention to how Paul attempted to overcome the division of the world into the circumcised and the un-circumcised by arguing that in the Kingdom of God we are circumcised in our hearts. Paul’s political letters sought to overcome boundaries in the assertion that there is neither Greek nor Jew. There is nothing in Pauline Christianity that could easily regard either borders or boundaries as religiously sanctioned.

These new (philosophical) Pauline studies are parallel to recent theological publications (Kahl 2010, Westhelle 2010, Jones 2009) that also reintroduce the radical version of the Pauline-Lutheran/Calvinist tradition in the same way: The core message coming out of Pauline Christianity is that of not accepting social or cultural borders. In this radical religious message there shall be no aliens and therefore no borders, because they are all one in the love of Christ. This universalism underlines the significance and importance of recognizing all marginalized as part of the universal; this is the radicalism of the Pauline universalism.

This also gives the theological context to the Pope’s position on borders and brings the Christian message surprisingly back on to the international stage, at the same time opening possibilities for a decisive and important sharing of positions between Christians, other confessions, and many other non-religious movements. In the borderland some basic values shared by many appear to develop. We therefore think it is important to examine these borders and to conduct research there to look for traces of this unforeseen religious world in the projects and in the practices of the borderland, especially practices that are religiously based.

The paradox with religion, and in our context with Christianity, is that religion is also part of the problem. In Europe, religion was also strongly involved in creating the borders of the present nation states. So even if the Pauline vision of no-borders were to be accepted by Christians, nation states continue to enforce their borders in the interests of sovereignty and citizenship.

After the wars of religion and the Westphalian Treaty of 1648, an international order was created based on sovereign nation states, some belonging to the Protestant side and some to the Catholic. The nation and city-states belonging to the Catholic sphere recognized the Vatican and the Pope as their religious sovereign. The nations and city-nations belonging to the Protestant side disconnected from Roman Catholic sovereignty. But they often chose a political solution where the monarch also became head of the national Protestant church, thus creating confessional churches.

With this historical background, the Protestant Churches became more obviously national and ironically one might say that translation of the Bible into the vernacular also served to underpin these national divisions. Nevertheless, the Christian Churches have often felt uncomfortable with this contradiction of hospitality (love thy neighbour as thyself) and the fact that in many European societies the monarch was the head of the (Protestant) Church, or on the Catholic side, that the Pope remained a strong political power in both the European and the international agenda.

This said, one should also bring in one more perspective: While the Christian Church has been subject to much criticism not only for its nationalism but also as an agency of colonialism, there is an alternative view or a correction to this account. Recent literature has argued that human rights also developed from inside Christian theology. Natural law and religious motivation behind anti-slavery ideas were important developments and Peter Stamatov (2013) The Origins of Global Humanitarianism has shown how Jesuit missions in Latin America often defended native communities against both Church and state, and that the anti-slavery movement grew out of trans-Atlantic Quaker networks. The previous Berlin bishop Dr Wolfgang Huber and his colleague published Menschenrechte: Perspektiven einer menschlicher Welt (1977) on the positive relation between human rights and Protestant theology. Recently Samuel Moyn (2015) in Christian Human Rights has claimed that the Declaration partly grew out of Catholic philosophy in the 1930s whose source, according to Moyn, was Pope Pius XII in 1930 promoting the idea of human dignity and Jacque Maritain developing the idea of the person. During the Cold War period human rights were promoted by Christian Democratic parties in Europe. In short, the modern history of human rights further illustrates the ambiguity of national borders and highlights the clash between the social rights enshrined in national citizenship and the universal rights embedded in the Declaration and subsequent legislation.

In this volume we are concerned with understanding how religion sits in relation to the defence of national borders against illegal migration, refugees, and asylum seekers and at the same time how religious groups explicitly hold on to, or implicitly contribute to, the legacy of Pauline Christianity in which there is neither Greek nor Jew. Secondly we are interested in how new forms of religious belief and practice emerge in the ambiguous places along borders. Thirdly we examine how boundaries between groups are either challenged or reinforced by religious identities.

Challenging the classics

In this way we want to bring in a new perspective that is absent in most discussions of the contested issue of migration. We think combining the theme of ambiguous borderlands and religion is a fruitful way to (re) discover why the migration topic affects us so much. The contradiction between Pauline Christianity and closed borders has been given a public presence by the intervention of Pope Francis, and has since been both addressed by world leaders such as Merkel and Obama, and later challenged by President Trump. These interventions call for more systematic reflection on this political and ethical dilemma – the universal claims of the human rights tradition, the theology of hospitality, and the legitimate claims of sovereignty, security, and national citizenship.

Migration is, beyond any doubt, today one of the most burning political issues in both national and international debates. We meet this issue in many different ways – in news items, at most national borders and cultural boundaries, wherever there is undocumented migration, in the arrival of asylum seekers, and in thousands of local contexts. Over a million asylum seekers in 2015 exposed the impossibility of guarding and securing European borders by normal policing and security measures.

Mobility of objects, ideas, and people has become a new field in sociology as in the work of John Urry on global modernity and in this volume we are specifically interested in the social, religious, and political crises that are connected to human mobility. The crisis of mobile populations – refugees, illegal migrants, economic migrants, asylum seekers, and displaced populations – is evident on all continents today. We cannot avoid their visibility. The moral, political, and theological challenges connected to this visibility are also more than evident (Mezzadra and Brett 2013, Andersson 2014, Ponzanesi 2016). Our book Borderland Religion will focus on these issues from perspectives not so often articulated in the public and academic debate.

In this collection of original essays, we focus on the interface of the religious and the ethical/political and we treat borders as multidimensional but ambiguous sites that have symbolic, religious, moral, and political dimensions. Of course research on migration in the past has often been concerned with religion and typically, such research concentrates on how religion helps the civic engagement of new migrants (Snyder 2012, Groody 2011). In the US, given the separation of church and state, religious institutions play an important role in the provision of services for new migrants (Kniss and Numrich 2007). We think that in the US context the issue of religion and migration relates as much to the open/closed dilemma presented above as to current everyday politics. Or, to put it the other way around – one of the reasons why politics become so tense could be because of the implicit position of this dilemma and its important relation to Christian religion. Many of the chapters in this book are based on the presupposition that practices, politics, and life worlds on the borders and in the crossing of the borders are, at one and the same time, impacting on and challenging religion, but also that religious trajectories impact on the practices and the politics.

Such contested zones raise new challenges for conventional religion and present new opportunities of engagement. To indicate the nature of these ambiguous zones and their emergent religious forms we use the phrase ‘Borderland religion’. The borderlands are areas where the traditional contradictions between the secular and the sacred, religion and politics, and ethical and emic are contested and reformatted. In the practical empirical world there are seldom binaries. What exist are practices that embody both the Pauline Universal and the border at one and the same time, which is why we think one needs to research the borderland because there might be new and important traces and trajectories to be discovered.

Traditionally, members of the host society (the natives) look at these new settlers with great suspicion, not least in the area of religion. Often the religion of the migrant community is a minority religion and distinct from the religion of the host community. In the European case, migrants from the Middle East and North Africa have been Muslims. In the past for example Muslims had settled easily into Germany (Ozyurek 2015). Perhaps surprisingly both Jews and Muslims had settled successfully into French society (Mandel 2014). The US has been a country of settlement through migration where Muslim communities have been relatively successful as migrants. After 9/11 and the War on Terror the presence of Muslims has been a cause of considerable concern and public debate and there is a common perception that Islamophobia has become widespread (Lean 2012). However, Muslims have found a space in US culture albeit an often uneasy one. Interestingly enough it is the presence of some 11 million undocumented Latina/o migrants that has produced a political backlash with demands for repatriation and greater border security. This situations became a major talking point for Trump during his campaign.

Many people think issues like these belong to the trajectory where fear of terrorism, loss of democracy, and the future of traditional values are challenged. Because the US in its early history and in its self-image was a nation of Protestants seeking refuge from religious conflicts in Europe, there has been a tradition of hostility towards Catholicism. There is, of course, evidence that the Protestant bias against Rome has declined (Putnam and Campbell 2010) and at least since the publication of Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Herberg 1955) Catholicism became an acceptable American identity and has even been identified as a ‘denomination’. Nevertheless, there is an ongoing concern that any large flow of Catholics from Latin America would change the religious composition of the US, a fear that combined with racism and has plagued US immigration policy since the early 1900s.

But what if migration and the passing of borders also could be – and should be – addressed from perspectives that are less hostile, less anxious, and less media-driven? Sara Ahmed (2000) is among those who have developed new migration configurations. Ahmed proposes to not only interpret migrants as victims and opposing Levinas she proposes to recognize the new encounters that migrants experience and develop. People are moving with their ‘home’ religion into fundamentally new and alien contexts and they change the social and cultural context simply by virtue of being there. For Ahmed this changes the symbolism of migration f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part 1: Introduction
• PART II: Borderland challenges
• PART III: Borderland Religion Practices
• Index