The American religious experience has been shaped as much from behind as from before. What do I mean? I mean that we are a product of a powerful force born of people leaving some other place to come here.

While they all left something looking for something else, their reasons for leaving and the circumstances they left were as diverse as their languages, religious backgrounds, and ethnic origins.

According to Sydney Ahlstrohm, who was the pre-eminent American church historian of a generation ago, this was spurred by several factors. Some of this mass exodus was forced by untenable conditions elsewhere–like the Joads of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, generations of soon-to-be Americans departed from political events in Europe.

So, too, were their dreams and hopes different from one another. If the pilgrims came in search of a Puritan state with one established religion in Massachusetts, Baptists came to escape their Anglican persecutors in Virginia and Puritans in Massachussetts. Catholics came to flee Anglicans and some Europeans came seeking a place free of Catholicism.

Many, perhaps most, came with other motivations besides religious ones, of course. They left political oppression in Eastern Europe, famine in Ireland, and economic despair in Asia. One thing united them about this quest, however. The tales they heard about an endless land of economic opportunity and plentiful land drew them to risk what little they had to come. The railroads opened up the American continent to rapid settlement in the nineteenth century. The frontier kept expanding and carrying vast numbers of people to its edges.The lure of cheap or free land and the desperate bid of employers for laborers made it a risk worth taking.

The scope of this vast transplantation staggers the imagination and puts into perspective some of the sentiments of our present time against immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants. From 1865 until 1900, 13.5 million people migrated to the United states. Another 9 million persons came in the first decade of the 20th century–22 million people in only 45 years. From 1820 until 1969, the United States of America welcomed 45 million strangers to its shores.

This wave of immigration impacted the country in many ways, not the least of which was a shift from a rural society to an urban one. These newcomers crowded into the cities, forming a gigantic pool of available, willing and needy labor upon which industry could draw. It also meant the United States would face, as few other societies have in such a short time, unprecedented diversity. This diversity was and continues to be one of our greatest challenges. When people are not united by national origin, language, culture, religion, habits, customs, or history, what shall unite them? It has meant that the United States has suffered a kind of perpetual identity crisis.

Who is a good American? Does one have to be a Christian to live here? A Protestant? European? Naturally, not all who got here first (not counting the native Americans, of course!) were hospitable to others who crowded in among them. Then, too, there were religious tensions–between Christians and Jews, Christians and non-Western religionists, Catholics and Protestants and between rival Protestants.

The freedom that American society provided resulted in the proliferation of religious sects, both Christian and non-Christian. American religious life mirrored its economic and political life, in which rival and competitive versions of ultimate truth lived side-by-side, tense, often hostile and disagreeable, but nevertheless without the imbalance of state power of one over the others.

Denominationalism is, more than any other place, a fact of American life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when he visited the United States in the 1930s, commented that “it has been granted to the Americans less than any other nation on earth to realize the visible unity of

the Church of God.: (Sydney Ahlstrohm, A Religious History of the American People, p. 5).

These uncomfortable historical factors are at the root of many of our present struggles–the so-called “culture wars,” in which many Christians worry collectively that our “family values” are being lost. Buried not too far from the surface of this concern is something very like what happened in the nineteenth century. It was a time of conflict and reaction–Ahlstrom reports that from 1870 until 1905, there was not a single church merger in the country, only fragmentation!

At the turn of the century, many said that the tides of immigrants coming into the country were threatening the American dream. This resulted in what has come to be called “nativism.” Nativism was a recurring form of nationalism in which minorities were opposed on the ground of their “un-American” connections.

This attitude was visited most powerfully upon Catholics in the nineteenth century and continued to be present even in the 1960 presidential election. I still remember hearing my relatives worry about whether John Kennedy would turn over the control of the United States de facto to the Pope if we had the audacity to elect our first Catholic president.

Nativism was most powerful during times of economic and social unrest. Between 1830 and 1860, anti-Catholic attitudes were aroused as vast numbers of Catholics crowded into northeastern cities. The famous preacher Lyman Beecher, for whom the most prestigious preaching lectures in the United States are named today at Yale, launched much of this in a series of three sermons in 1835. He likened the newcomers to an invasion of locusts in Egypt. A mob shortly after burned a convent in Massachusetts. Similar riots in Philadelphia and Louisville resulted in several deaths.       

Anti-Catholic literature of this era told tales of priests and nuns engaged in horrible sexual depravities, even of the murders of babies born of these unions. This wave of resentment was soon overshadowed and forgotten by the passions of the Civil War, but in the final years of the century, these attitudes flamed up again. Hard times were blamed on Irish labor leaders.

An organization called the American Protective Association claimed to have uncovered a secret papal plot for the Catholics to take over the United States government. Members of the organization had to pledge never to vote for, hire or join a strike alongside a Catholic.

The competitive nature of American society may account for this. During the nineteenth century, Protestant Christians enjoyed cultural dominance due to the large numbers of converts from the Second Great Awakening revivals.

The first problem that our diversity causes is internal to us all. Most of us hold certain convictions and beliefs to be absolute and ultimate. That is, these truths are, from our perspective, essential to any sense of identity and if we are Christian, then our Christian identity. How do we hold these beliefs and at the same time find a way to make room with differences that others might sincerely hold?

The twin dilemmas of this problem are intolerance and relativism. That is, on the one hand, we may find ourselves misunderstanding others. On the other, we may so wish all to co-exist that we surrender any notion of truth and sink into relativism. Neither is necessary. What is necessary for all genuine historical understanding is to acquiesce to the standards of a good historian.

The same may be said of scientific assertions and even theological truth. A basic stance of epistemic (how we know what is true) humility is necessary. Quasi-historical presentations have been depicted accurately by John Fea in his book, Was America Founded As a Christian Nation as “a form of propaganda, or, as the historian Bernard Bailyn described it, ‘indoctrination by historical example.’” The current Christian Nationalists are guilty on this count, as though the appeal to the founders settles the case of what we ought to do in the present.

Perhaps we might learn a different lesson from our past—that our history is one struggle after another to translate a set of ideas and ideals into a continually changing present. America the Idea was a new possibility, and expansion, slavery, white male superiority, immigration, and all the moral debates yet to be worked through. The waves of immigration and the story of our responses can help us understand the difficult responsibility to deal with the questions of the present moment.

The most ardent and militant voice of anti-immigrant rage at this moment is certainly political advisor Stephen Miller. Miller’s own history is an odd background for his perplexing nativism, given that his ancestors fled the pogroms of Europe for the United States. His own family’s divisions over his consuming animosity toward immigrants is well documented (see, for example, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda by Jean Guerrero).

Anti-immigrant sentiment is finally built upon three primal human weaknesses—anxiety, fear, and anger. They are all appropriate responses to threats in human survival, but when employed by personal blindnesses and partisan ideology, they eliminate any prospect of rational problem solving. They work because human masses are vulnerable to their momentary appeal. But they are nothing more than the appeal to the most primitive and undeveloped childish fears of human beings, a psychological mass-projection that requires dehumanization of the other to succeed.

The failure of the American government (read “leaders”) to adequately address labor needs, border security, and a sane process for those seeking to emigrate leaves us in the hands of those who would manipulate us into irrationality for their own purposes.

So we find ourselves repeating a familiar conversation that has reappeared at many junctures of the American story. We change positions, of course, as strangers and orphans in one time give birth to comfortable and privileged settlers later who oddly see themselves as somehow having been entitled for all eternity to occupy the present time and place. History itself is distorted to validate this to eliminate in advance the intelligent requirement of asking questions of why and how it is this way or whether it should stay that way. Or, in the case of fearful people of faith, if it is right in the eyes of God to treat refugees and the vulnerable with hatred and cruelty. In the latter case, we fail even to believe in our own scriptures and story as we claim to defend them.