Immigrant Apocalypse with Yii-Jan Lin

Yii Jan Lin Thinking about us hurtling towards climate disaster, or the end of the economic world as we know it, the rise of populism, is there a sense of, well, it's foretold. A sense of teleology in which all these catastrophic, terrible things are just part of the plan. That really disturbs me to think that that kind of thinking can be entrenched and think, well, a new world is coming. Well, great, but what if it doesn't, and this is what we're stuck with? Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan. And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Yii Jan Lin Oh, things are great, man. I'm thinking about the tour that's coming up. The tour. Data Over Dogma. We're hitting the road pretty soon. Yes.

Dan Beecher So, if you're in any of the cities that I'm about to name, go into the show notes and click on the link to either the first leg or the second leg, and get your tickets now, because we really want to meet you. We're going to be in Chicago, then Seattle, then Portland, then Los Angeles, and then we're going to wait a couple weeks, and then we're back out on the road in Dallas and Atlanta and Philadelphia, and then Washington, DC. And, we'd really love to see you guys. So please, if you're even considering it, buy a ticket. That'd be great. Yeah.

Dan McClellan It would help us out a lot. And, today we have a wonderful episode for you, as far as we know. Yeah. We don't plan out too much. The scripts stay pretty light, pretty loose. But we have Dr. Yii-Jan Lin is joining us today. Welcome to the show, Dr. Lin. Thank you so much for being here.

Yii Jan Lin Thanks for having me. Really looking forward to this, and careful viewers of my own work on social media will recognize her name because I've talked about her, as well as a Dr.

Dan McClellan Epp, in relation to the first woman apostle, Junia, and hopefully we'll have a few minutes to talk about that a little later in the show. But Dr.

Yii Jan Lin Lin has a new book out right now called "Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration."

Dan McClellan And Dr. Lin is associate professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School. And, hopefully the weather's been warming up for you there in New Haven recently. Yeah. A little bit.

Yii Jan Lin It was a nice, crisp 35 today. Oh my gosh.

Dan Beecher Oh, man. So we're out- So no, the answer is no.

Yii Jan Lin Today was weird. Yes. Today was weird.

Dan McClellan We're out in Utah, and it was in the 60s today. Oh.

Yii Jan Lin I have three girls, and they're very much enjoying the fact that there is not an ice cold wind cutting through everything. Yeah. So, could you tell us, well, first of all, a little bit about your background, before we dive into the book? Yeah. So I teach New Testament at Yale Divinity School, as you've mentioned. I actually got my doctorate here, before I returned after teaching out west at the Graduate Theological Union. I was at the Pacific School- Oh, yeah ... of Religion for a few years before I moved back out to New Haven and began teaching in 2016. So this is my ninth year here- Mm-hmm ... teaching at the Divinity School. So yeah, I began in English literature. That was where I began my studies in graduate school, in University of Chicago, and I felt drawn to textual analysis- Mm-hmm ... but wanted to dive deeper into thinking about biblical texts, texts that are scripturalized, understood as sacred, and- Right ... think about how that's working out in the world. So, that's how I ended up in this realm of academics.

Dan McClellan And that also obviously has to do with the way you're kind of weaving together discussion of the Bible with discussion of contemporary geopolitics, but also historical politics.

Yii Jan Lin Yeah, absolutely.

Dan McClellan And this was one of the first things I noticed.

Yii Jan Lin You start off, not really start off, but close to the beginning of the book, you have a story about the New Haven Green. Yeah.

Dan Beecher I was going to say, what's funny is that you were mentioning being in New Haven, and my brain was like, oh, why did I not put together that that's her home turf right there?

Yii Jan Lin That's probably how she found out about this legend. Would you mind telling the audience the relevance of New Haven Green to the story you're telling about the leveraging of Revelation as kind of a lens for viewing contemporary immigration policy? Yeah. So, the premise of the book is really that America, since its you know, discovery by Europeans, and its settling by colonists has been conceptualized as a type of paradise utopia and borrowing from Revelation, the New Jerusalem. And part of that story I find in the soil of New Haven itself, of this kind of apocalyptic thinking of the land that is now the United States. So there was this legend that the New Haven Green, which is the center of town, and you can find city greens all up and down New England, but the New Haven Green is unusually large. And it is weird when you pan out over the green, you can see these pathways that look very Masonic. I don't know where we can go with that, but you can probably come up with some conspiracy theory, but- So a compass and a square kind of stuff? Yeah. You can see the crisscrossing looks like the Masonic symbols. Oh, fun.

Dan Beecher But the legend goes- Definitely Illuminati stuff, for sure.

Yii Jan Lin Exactly, and there are plenty of secret societies here, too. Skull and Bones and- Yep ... now there's Scroll and Key. But the Green is so big, it is said, because supposedly John Davenport, who is one of the co-founders of New Haven, wanted to create a place where 144,000, that's in Revelation, the chosen could gather or be buried, depending on who you ask. So it was this kind of apocalyptic urban planning, as I like to call it, where he wanted the Green to be that big in order to fit all those bodies on there. I've not been able to find any historical evidence for that, but it's very understandable because the city itself is modeled on the measurements of the temple from Ezekiel. It's a nine-square grid.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Yii Jan Lin So it's very much this gridded, I think first of its kind in the US- Yeah ... plan for a city, and it surrounds the center of town in which there is a house of worship, right? So it's very much like the Israelite encampment or the Ezekiel temple in the understanding of 12 outward-facing sides and then the center of worship in the middle. And so there's this sense of apocalyptic structure, even in the literal structure of the city, which is fascinating.

Dan Beecher Has anyone tried to throw a music festival there? Because I'm just thinking 144,000 people all come into like a- Yeah, I don't know.

Yii Jan Lin I mean, maybe ...

Dan Beecher Woodstock-type thing feels great. I'm on board.

Yii Jan Lin There are, they say, thousands of bodies buried in the Green because you can still visit the crypt of the Center Church on the Green in New Haven, which the church was built over the cemetery, and they kept the headstones up. Those are the only headstones that are still standing. All the others were removed sometime in the 1800s to Grove Street Cemetery. They say that Yale College students were the helpers that carried these stone headstones to Grove Street Cemetery, but they kept the graves under Center Church. So you can still go down into the crypt, and look at the standing stones there. Interesting. The earliest that we have is probably late 1600s. Wow. Yeah. Wow. That's pretty interesting.

Dan McClellan It reminds me of I was at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish studies for one of my master's degrees, and we had St. Bartholomew's Church right next door, and they had graves outside, but also a crypt and a bunch of graves inside, and the Spencer family, Princess Di's family, is all in there as well. But it's kind of an experience to go into a church and be like, "Oh, there are a bunch of people buried- Yeah ... under here." That was peculiar for me. I was not used to that kind of thing. But when I was reading through the book, it kind of reminded me of Salt Lake City. I don't know if you're aware, but Salt Lake City, to some degree, is planned on a block grid pattern, and Joseph Smith had a lot of apocalyptic ideas- Yes ... about some of the... And he didn't design Salt Lake City. That's much later. But there are ideas about different parts of the US, like Adam-ondi-Ahman, which was supposed to be identified with the Garden of Eden, and there's a legend within Mormonism that everybody's going to gather there for the apocalypse, the Second Coming, and all that. So it seems like it was kind of in the air- Yes ... when this was going on. And you share some maps of Jerusalem from medieval and later, where Jerusalem is the center of the universe. It's the axis mundi, and everything else is around that. And I found one of the comments that you made when you talked about colonists coming here and settling and treating the Indigenous folks as the other, as the foreigner, and I wonder if you might talk about how this conceptualization of America as a new Jerusalem kind of has them bringing the axis mundi with them and treating themselves as if where they are, that's the center of the universe, and everybody who is not part of their group is the other, is the sojourner, is the alien. Because that has a big role in this story. Could you talk a little bit about that? Sure.

Yii Jan Lin I think a lot of this turns on the theology of chosenness. So there was a sense of those who were at least establishing Congregationalism, churches in Massachusetts, New Haven, New England especially, a sense of theological chosenness, that they were going to create the church order that is supposed to be, that they were also part of an age or dispensation in which they were going to realize a perfected or ever-perfecting congregation and community life and worship, and that this new world that they have discovered and now have the opportunity to settle and colonize is divinely given, right? So there's this sense of this mantle of establishing God's kingdom on Earth in a new way that is different from the England they're leaving, is different absolutely from Catholicism, which they see as evil and a manifestation of evil.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Yii Jan Lin And so this new world is justifiably theirs, and because they have a sense of chosenness, and I think a lot of that is driving that sense of justification, right? So when they come to this new world, this new land, to do that because There is a sense of destiny. There is a sense of divine fiat. Whatever happens to the Indigenous people or the lands that they claim, they're seeing themselves as Israelites entering into the promised land, right? So whatever is justifiable then is justifiable now in that sense. And so they also use language from Hebrew Bible of talking about the spying out the land, as with Caleb and Joshua, they speak about the plantation. We're not talking about Southern plantations, but a plantation of God. And so there's the plantation of New Haven in which there's a planting of the ground. And that also works with clearing the growth, right? So the wild growth, those wild things include Indigenous peoples, right? So that's part and parcel of creating a theology or tapping into a type of chosenness theologically that justifies what their actions are. Yeah. Your book centers on America being seen as the new Jerusalem, the city on the hill, all of these metaphors that come out of the Bible and specifically out of Revelation, the Book of Revelation. Talk a little bit about how that apocalyptic book comes to be applied to this new world. So I think the history of America as it appears to the Europeans is very much already in itself an apocalyptic moment in a popular sense of the word, right? Because it is so out of this world. And also in the Greek sense of the word, it's a revelation in that there is a whole land that was unknown to the European imagination. So even in that phenomenon, it is just a startling, astonishing moment in European history for that to have happened, and also for the imagination of Christopher Columbus to actually succeed in his mission to find land. The fact that he did it is really strange, right? So kind of an amazing moment in human history. When he set out, he thought he was accomplishing something that was apocalyptic and bringing about the end because he was going to find paradise, and he was going to reclaim Jerusalem using the riches that he found to fulfill all these prophecies and behold, America, that land appears on the horizon. And that just, I think, stirred the imagination of European explorers. And we can find this kind of thinking in other explorers coming from Spain. There's also an understanding of apostolic mission coming to the New World. And so all of that builds up this aura, I would say, of this new land. And that, of course, gets picked up in other streams, depending on whether you're speaking of Catholicism, whether you're speaking of Puritans, whether you're speaking of folks who are thinking not necessarily in theological or dispensational terms, but thinking of this as a new opportunity. So even in economic terms, it can be a place with streets of gold, right?

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Yii Jan Lin And so it begins to use these metaphors that become pretty iconic in thinking about heaven and thinking about paradise. All those things kind of get mushed together in the aura that surrounds America. And then, of course, if you're going to create a nation out of that, of course, you want to pick up on that, right? If you're going to talk about yourself in a very flattering, glowing light, that's going to be very politically expedient to use.

Dan Beecher It's all very grandiose, isn't it? Yes.

Yii Jan Lin I was surprised by the Columbus stuff because it made sense to me that the Puritans who came over would clam onto these big ideas about how they're the righteous people, and they're God's people, and the apocalypse is for them, really. But I didn't realize that this was so much on the mind of Columbus when he came here. You point out that he was coming to bring about the eschaton.

Dan Beecher That's what he was shooting for. Yeah. Well, and there are...

Dan McClellan Oh, I'm sorry.

Dan Beecher I don't know if you go ahead. Go ahead.

Dan McClellan No, I didn't even give you a chance to answer the question.

Yii Jan Lin Well, I was going to say the one person that, and I want to write on this, and I'm planning an article on this, at some point, it's going to come out, of the comparison between Columbus and Paul, because here there's an imagination of the eschaton is coming, right? And I am going to be the one to take it to, whether it's the ends of the Earth in Columbus's mind, right? Because you have to evangelize so that every tongue and nation is able to hear the gospel, or if you're going to head to Spain, and you're going to bring in the full number of the Gentiles so that we're going to trigger the end of the world. There's a kind of egomaniac kind of working happening here- Yeah ... and the sense of mission as if I am the one, right, to do this, and definitely an eschatological timeline upon which they're working. So I think there's a lot of interesting parallels. Columbus doesn't cite Paul a lot in his book of prophecies. But he does hit a few points, so it might be interesting to take a closer look at that.

Dan McClellan And I know that kind of thinking continues down to this day. My previous work, I was a scripture translation supervisor for the LDS church.

Yii Jan Lin I've been to some Bible translation conferences, and I discovered that the greens are actually funding the majority of the Bible translation projects- Yes ... that are going on out there.

Dan McClellan And I spoke with some people who told me that the greens seem to think that once they get a translation into every language on Earth, that checks- Yeah ... that box on the spreadsheet- ... on the worksheet and brings us one step closer to catalyzing the second coming. Yeah. So that kind of thinking is Yeah. Sounds like it's pretty old. But I wanted to talk about... So we've got Europeans, they come here, they plant their flag in the ground, this is the new Jerusalem. And I found the phrase a little disturbing, but also apropos and fascinating, excuse me, apocalyptic epidemiology. You talk a little bit about disease and uncleanness, the statement in Revelation, "Nothing unclean will enter it." And this kind of pivots us towards talking a little bit about how this affects the way Americans think about immigration. Could you talk a little bit about what apocalyptic epidemiology is and how this plays into the narrative you're unfolding for us? Yeah.

Yii Jan Lin So that is thinking of epidemiology, the viewing of disease and how it's playing a particular role or how it works, right? So the logics of disease, but basing that in an apocalyptic worldview, right? So, I would say when the settlers and the colonial folks are coming over to colonize the eastern coast of America, what the Puritans see when they're coming is that there are indigenous people, Native Americans, dying left and right from diseases. They don't know that they are the ones necessarily that are bringing smallpox that are completely new to these Native peoples. But they do see the dying off due to disease of all these people, and it basically, besides that, and of course, war with indigenous peoples, it kills off such a huge percentage of the Native populations. And in the minds of those who are coming, for the Europeans who are coming, it's really God's will, right? That's an explanation of why this is happening, because it's the clearing away of old growth or to make room for better growth, to make room for God's plantation, right? So that's one way of thinking theologically in a very disturbing way, to think of how the spread of disease is working. It's the sword of the Lord, as one of the Mather's, I think, phrases it, to say that whether by war or by disease, this is happening to benefit us as the chosen people who are coming. Once they are established in the land and they have a nativist perspective, which is now we belong, we are the one who own and have this as our home, then everybody else coming in, never mind that they came in themselves, now are the foreigners, right? Right. And so then they become a threat, especially also in terms of disease. And so they themselves are faced with diseases that show up on the shores that they now claim as their own, and they pivot, right? So instead of themselves having brought the disease, they now see others bringing disease and how to explain that. So we have yellow fever outbreaks in Philadelphia. You have measles, you have other diseases coming in, and as they see people arriving on the shores and they now see themselves as belonging, they're going to blame the outsiders, right? And the outsiders then can easily be understood as bringing plague in a way that is part of the invasion of God's enemies coming into this chosen land. Or another way of thinking about this, which isn't mutually exclusive to thinking about invading of plagues, is God disciplining them. Mm. So it was interesting to read sermons in which preachers are exhorting their congregations to repent, and they would have repent days and fasting days and days of prayer because they see this as God's discipline, because they're especially chosen, right? So God disciplines those whom he loves. That's from the Bible, right? So think about how they're going to understand that. Of course, you can also understand this as the bowls of God's wrath being poured out on the earth, at least in a specific eschatological timeline that some of them are following. So thinking about this as the end days when they see massive amounts of people dying of yellow fever, is this the end? And that comes up perennially, right? So we had that with COVID. You could just Google end of days COVID, and you would find- Yeah ... is this a fulfillment of prophecy? And it's easy to latch that onto immigrant peoples that you don't want on your shores to say that this is not God's chosen. Well, and you also make a point of not just the people bringing plagues here, but then there's this idea that the people are a plague. Yes. That the foreigner is a plague themselves, which I can't imagine living in a country where that idea is prominent or present at all. Right.

Dan Beecher But back long ago, that must've been... Talk a little bit about that, the idea of the foreigner as the plague or the... Yeah. Yeah.

Yii Jan Lin So it's interesting to see that not only are they bearing a disease or possibly especially infectious, but it becomes so a part of the characterization of unwanted peoples that it becomes their identity themselves, right? So you'll see depictions in some political cartoons I included in the book where you have Chinese coming over from China and escaping famine in the end of the 19th century, and they're portrayed as grasshoppers. And it seems right out of the Book of Revelation when they're like a horde of locusts. They have human faces, but they're these animal insect creatures that are eating everything up. So they're a plague of locusts, basically. Or you see Eastern Europeans leaving the shores of Europe to swim towards America as a herd of rats. So also understood in terms of plague, and especially in terms of the Black Plague, leaving European shores for the US. And so that's all used in anti-immigration discourse, cartoons, literature, what have you, in which people are plagues and identified as such.

Dan McClellan Yeah And even with COVID, I think we see a recapitulation to this idea that you talk about in the book with the Chinese Exclusion Acts and everything. COVID is a Chinese disease that has- Yeah ... created in China, brought to American shores.

Yii Jan Lin And these acts, the Chinese Exclusion Act, some other immigration policy that has passed end of 19th century, beginning of 20th century, that's kind of the beginning of the entire idea of illegal immigration in the United States.

Dan McClellan Could you talk a little bit about what contributes to what has now become this very Machiavellian approach to immigration that we see today, but that started off with just saying, "Wait, we don't want you guys. We'll take you, but only if you're building our railroads." And even Catholics, the Christians aren't safe. Yeah. Nativism targeted Catholicism. It was a decidedly Protestant flag that was stuck in the ground as well.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. Could you talk a little bit about how this gives rise to our immigration policies? Yeah.

Yii Jan Lin So, you mentioned the Catholics, so I think of the Irish especially leading up to the time of the Civil War, right, in which there was the Great Famine, the Troubles, and Irish immigrants are arriving on US shores, and there is political fear that these Irish who are Catholic, who are not like "us," right, which is understood default Protestant, white, male citizen, they are going to infiltrate and vote in these particular ways that's going to hand over power to the Catholic Church, right?

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Yii Jan Lin Which is not going to respect this separation of church and state. They're going to infiltrate the militia. So, a lot of hysteria, especially with the party, the Know Nothing party, who are working along these lines. The Civil War comes and that becomes a side issue, right? And the Irish at the time also, even though they are excluded, they are legally able to enter, they're legally able to naturalize, and also to marry other white people, right? So they're, I would call, legally white, right, at that point.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Yii Jan Lin What's happening at the second half of the 19th century is you have immigrants from Eastern shores, from Eastern lands, from Asia arriving, and so what do we do with them? And they come because they're needed, and they're also escaping certain things from their own country, famine, finding better opportunity, and there's the building of the transcontinental railroad, and so there's a great need for labor.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Yii Jan Lin Just think about how vast the United States is and how little the population was at the time, and so this is your cheap labor to be used, to be exploited in these particular ways. But then, of course, fear grows, and you'll recognize the talking points, right? They're taking our jobs. They're not like us. And the talking points are very much along the lines of Revelations exclusion, right? They're idolaters, they're sexually corrupting, and they're also disease bearing. And so they start creating legislation, and the first legislation that is federal, that is enforced against a particular people group, the first one is the Page Act in 1875, that discriminates against Chinese women to say that they're coming as prostitutes. Jezebels. So that was the first law. Yeah. Yeah. 1875? 1875. Sorry, did I say 1975? Yeah. Yeah, 1875. Wrong century. Right. And then the legislation just builds after that. So we have- Yeah ... the Chinese Exclusion Act and then others following that layer upon that, and eventually you get to the Asiatic Barred Zone altogether. So, once you create that legislation, you open the gates to creating other restrictions as well, and then you realize you can target X, Y, Z people. You can have literacy tests. You can require photographic evidence. With the Geary Act, you can require documentation. And none of those things were necessary before, right?

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Yii Jan Lin So, with this accretion of requirements and qualifications, you then get to 100 years later, right, we have where we are now. We just reached the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Immigration Act. So, we see these things are all constructed over time- Mm-hmm ... and bureaus are built around them because you have to enforce them, right? Yeah. So it creates this massive body of bureaucracy and qualifications needed. Well, and talking about bureaucracy, one of the parallels that you make in the book is between these bureaucratic ideas and the sort of bureaucracy in the Apocalypse of John, talking about the Book of Life and the Book of Deeds.

Dan Beecher Can you talk a little bit about those and how that fits into the picture? Yeah.

Yii Jan Lin That's actually my favorite part of the book, even though I feel like it gets a little into the weeds. So in Revelation, when you reach the judgment of the dead, you have this bureaucratic moment when books are opened.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Yii Jan Lin And you have Books of Deeds. It doesn't actually title them as such, but just books in which your deeds are written. And then there's the Lamb's Book of Life that's mentioned several times in Revelation. And your name is either in the Book of Life or not, and that is basically whether you're in or not in the New Jerusalem. But then there's also these Books of Deeds that show what you've done. So it seems like there's some sort of merit given, but if it's a yes or no book for the Book of Life, it doesn't really seem logical that you would have both kinds of records. So there's this illogic that's going on in these heavenly records, and it's also a trope that's used in other Jewish apocalyptic writings. So you have ... different other ancient writings that show a huge book of deeds, the size of a massive book that's being carried by two angels, or where people's deeds are being written in simultaneously as they're being done. And also books of life elsewhere that serve as these citizenship lists.

Dan Beecher So- Mm-hmm ...

Yii Jan Lin there's these two things that are operating. What's interesting about Revelation is that it is a depiction of how God's kingdom ultimately will be administered, right? So here we have angelic administration and bureaucracy, if we want to put it in those terms. And when there was an understanding of, the kingdom of God is the Roman Empire, for example, is going to be the kingdom in Europe. How are we going to understand citizenship or rule? There was a lot of theologizing and talk of how these things are administered. And so genealogically, you can think of Revelation as a type of inspiration, blueprint, structure for thinking about civil administration and how citizenship works, right? And that has been part of theological imagination all these centuries. You get to the United States, how are you going to determine whether people are in or out? And you find also similar paradoxical logics at work, right? In which you can try to merit citizenship by all the things you do, the forms you fill- Mm-hmm ... your bank account status, whether you've committed any crimes or not, whether you're on these lists or not. But ultimately I would say that can be revoked at any time, right? We've seen this happen again and again, especially in recent history where you have an executive order, or you have- Right ... citizenship meaning nothing at all if you're not within a particular book of life. In the book I call it the book of white life because- Mm-hmm ... the default identity that's been unquestioned since the beginning of the United States is the white male Protestant. And if you don't- Yeah ... fall within those parameters, you can be questioned of whether you belong or not. So, it seems like there was something that was established at the foundation of the United States, just like there is at the establishment of the world in Revelation for the book of life, that you can't change what's there almost, or you can be struck out of it at any point, just like it says- Yeah ... in Revelation. Now, I think it's interesting that that whiteness kind of becomes home base for a lot of this because when we look at the Irish, you've mentioned they're kind of legally white, but socially were considered a part of a different race.

Dan McClellan The same is true of Italians in the early 20th century. There's even, Mormons were considered non-white to some degree- ...

Yii Jan Lin in the 19th century.

Dan Beecher And when we talk- Which is funny because now Mormons are considered the most white.

Dan McClellan Oh yeah, the whitest. The whitest whites. And even down to today, a lot of the immigration policies that are being enforced are being enforced primarily based on proximity to whiteness.

Yii Jan Lin We have Hispanic folks who are being abducted from the street for no other reason than that they are Hispanic or they're speaking Spanish or something like that. And, they may not be given due process, may not be given an opportunity to prove that they're US citizens or that they have legal status in the country, which shows that this narrative seems to continue to be the foundation on which a lot of America builds its self-identity. And we have people who berate indigenous Americans for, "Get out of my country. Do you speak this language?"

Dan McClellan It's like, "We've been here for thousands of years longer than y'all." Just based on the color of skin, which is just abominable.

Yii Jan Lin And you talk toward the end of the book about the wall, and Jerusalem is a walled city, and the new Jerusalem is going to have this wall around it, something that I've heard many times in the last couple of years.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. Even heaven's going to have a wall- Yeah ... around it. Can you talk a little bit about how you get to the idea of building walls and- Oh my goodness. Yeah.

Yii Jan Lin So I have an interesting anecdote about that. But, that even heaven has a wall around it, that was the Reverend Jeffers who gave the- Mm-hmm ... inaugural sermon for the first inauguration of Trump, in which he compares Trump to Nehemiah as a wall builder, right? And part of the first campaign for presidency for Trump was build the wall. That was the resounding chorus all the time. Yeah. And he even said, "When people are a little bit bored, I will just say, 'We'll build a wall,' and everyone gets really hyped about that." And it's this physical manifestation of the new Jerusalem. It's like the most literal you can get, right? To say even heaven has a wall around it. You can buy bumper- Mm-hmm ... stickers that say, "Heaven has a wall around it. Hell has open borders and extreme vetting," which- Yeah. Heaven has extreme vetting, which yes, if you include the lake of fire, it is extreme vetting. But, the interview in which Reverend Jeffers said that, I realized later as I watched the clip, it was with "Fox and Friends," one of his interviewers was Pete Hegseth. And only now- Uh-huh. ... and I'm like, "Oh my God." I did not see how this would play out into the current administration. But there is, with the wall, very similar political rhetoric that's being used. So I would say you can read Revelation 21, 22 in a very political way, in which you have a monumental wall that's gigantic. I found someone's blog that created a paper square that he put on a globe, and it's like the size of India, basically. And it extends- Oh, wow ... into space. That's how big, cubically, the new Jerusalem would be. Right. So it's absurd. But the absurdity of those numbers, just like the absurdity of Trump's numbers when he talks about the wall, it doesn't have any real meaning in terms of practicality, but it's just political rhetoric to be very affecting and emotive. So it creates this- Yeah ... understanding of might, power, repeated numbers. It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be big. Just like we have the repeated of all these jewels, all this gold. It's going to have pearls for gates. Just pretty absurd. Part of a- Type of genre of political talk and political architecture, literally, of what they want to symbolize and get their audience to feel a certain way about. So it's interesting to see that play out and have that literally realized in the political discourse. Well, and I think you bring up the fact that this is effective speech, which is one of the hallmarks of apocalyptic literature.

Dan McClellan It's not supposed to be a coherent narrative.

Yii Jan Lin It's evoking emotion and responses and things like that.

Dan McClellan And you mentioned the illogic of the different books that are involved, and I think that parallels very well the political rhetoric that we see today, where it's primarily about vibes. Yeah. We're going to force them to... The tariffs are going to force them to compromise. And then, oh, that's the art of the deal. And we get this cycle of, okay, I did the stupid thing. Now I tell everybody I'm going to fix the stupid thing. I remove my stupid thing. Then I do the stupid thing over again.

Yii Jan Lin And the illogic of it all is making a lot of us want to claw our eyes out because of just how ridiculous it is that folks are eating this up as much as they are.

Dan McClellan But it kind of sounds like this, we have a long history in our nation of appealing to that illogic, evocative, effective speech as kind of more at the foundation of our identity than any kind of actual coherence. Yeah.

Yii Jan Lin I think that's a great read of Revelation. Many people have said, "It doesn't make any sense. It's very repetitive. I don't know where I... What's the plot?" There is no plot, really. Yeah. You could try to make a plot out of it, but we have cycles that are repeated over and over again. Why do we have trumpets and then we have bowls of God's wrath? You can try to numerology it away. Yeah. But that's very much, you make a great point in terms of thinking about what's happening with this presidency and the way speeches go, and you're not quite able to trace, but much of it is just affective, right? Yeah. The base is really happy, right? And if you feel like you're on the good side, then it doesn't really matter if it doesn't make any sense, right? God is here. He's mighty, right? There's this sense of like, well, we win. Yeah. Which is what it's always about. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Winning, as for Trump, because he's used to, as a phenomenally wealthy, white, cis, hetero male, he's used to just swinging his weight around and letting that tell the tale. Unfortunately, now that he's doing it with the country and with the world, really, there are an awful lot of bodies in the wake. But it seems to me that maybe the folks who are like, "I don't understand Revelation," is, well, pay attention to the kind of rhetoric on Fox News that makes you feel the tingle, because it's functioning in a lot of the same way. Yeah. And you have an exhortation toward the end of the book about decoupling Revelation from our self-understanding as a nation, from the foundation of our identity. Can you talk a little bit about what brings you to this exhortation at the end of the book?

Yii Jan Lin Yeah, I think going back again to this understanding of election or chosenness, there is definitely that intertwined with American exceptionalism, which is inextricable, I think, from an American Christian identity and thinking of the nation as God's chosen in a particular way, whether as a shining city on the hill, or which is hopefully a righteous aspiration, as versus America first, which is still America-centric, America-focused. We are the chosen, right?

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Yii Jan Lin And there's also, of course, that sense in Revelation of the chosen are within this city, right? And everybody else is struck down or kept out. They cannot come in. And even beyond immigration, of thinking about the way that America feels or the way this administration feels, and historically through the centuries, that it is empowered in a particular exceptional way. And it is the focal point, it's the end point, all of these things. And just thinking how destructive that kind of thinking can be, and we're seeing that play out, I think, today, in which everything needs to revolve around this nation. We are able to keep out whoever we want because we are America first, et cetera. And so I'm thinking that kind of self-identification with chosenness, with the new Jerusalem needs to be that surety, right? That certainty that we are on God's path, we are on this side. It causes massive violence and causes devastating exclusion and also violation of others in the end. And that's where I see that call to decouple from that. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I can say I've been in most of the states of this country, and not a single street is lined with gold.

Dan McClellan I'm just going to say that.

Dan Beecher It doesn't exist.

Dan McClellan When I think about the Book of Revelation as the interpretive lens through which we consider our own identity and our history, the thing that baffles me the most is that Revelation is, and most apocalyptic literature is written by the marginalized and the oppressed, and I think of it as kind of revenge fantasy. That God's going to pull away the fabric of reality and show that they've been on our side the whole time and are going to wipe out the enemies and all this.

Yii Jan Lin And there are folks in the fourth and fifth century CE who are like, "Oh, maybe everything got fulfilled because we're in charge now. We're the empire." And the United States has kind of still occupied that role as the empire, as the larger power.

Dan McClellan And so folks today who want to find themselves in the Book of Revelation have to Find a way to make themselves victims of some larger force, the forces of evil that are oppressing them. And unfortunately, when you are the oppressor, the only choice you have really is to make the victims of your oppression the enemy.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. You kind of switch places, and now it's these demonic trans folks who are oppressing us, even though they're some of the tiniest minorities and the most marginalized, the most vulnerable groups of people in our nation today, and we're trying to turn them into the beast.

Dan McClellan It just strikes me as such a turn, and so thoughtless as well to try to say, "Well, Revelation is about us. We're the good guys," and then we take everybody that we've excluded, everybody that we've othered, and then try to make them the aggressor. Whenever I get asked what book from the Bible I would leave out of the canon if I were in charge, and usually before they finish the question, I let them know it's the Book of Revelation because I think it is the source of an awful lot of trauma, an awful lot of suffering, and an awful lot of idiotic conspiracy theories today. Whether it's about UPC symbols or- ... Amazon One or the Euphrates River drying up or whatever, there's just an awful lot of nonsense that springs from misreadings of Revelation.

Yii Jan Lin That makes a lot of sense. I mean, it is. It inspires, I don't know if inspires is the right word, it creates, as you said, so many conspiracy theories and attempts to decode, to understand our history in these very eschatological ways that is just not helpful to say the least, and catastrophic. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. One of the questions I always have is when are we going to learn our lesson?

Dan Beecher When you talk at the beginning of the book about the New Haven Green, you open it with the image of two guys sitting there waiting for Harold Camping's- ... apocalypse to come to its fruition, and like everybody who was waiting for that, they waited, and then eventually you got to just go home because it didn't happen. I think the question, to my mind, always becomes how many times do we have to go through these same cycles of seeing this as the end times, which keeps happening over and over and over again, and people keep predicting, prophesying the end is going to be next. "Oh, it's coming. It's just around the corner," before we just say, "Okay, let's let go of that and deal with what we have." Yeah.

Yii Jan Lin And I often wonder, too, if there's just an acceptance of catastrophe also or hurdling. I think of us, not to be a terrible damper and pessimistic, but thinking about us hurdling towards climate disaster- Mm ... or the end of the economic world as we know it, the rise of populism. Is there a sense of like, well, it's foretold. A sense of- Mm ... teleology in which all these catastrophic, terrible things are just part of the plan. Yeah. And I think that really disturbs me to think that that kind of thinking can be entrenched and think, well, a new world is coming. Well, great, but what if it doesn't, and this is- Yeah ... what we're stuck with, yeah. Well, yeah.

Dan Beecher Like Columbus, I've heard plenty of people say, "I want the climate disaster." Yeah.

Yii Jan Lin "I want the thing because it's going to hurry along- Yes ... the eschaton." Yeah. So yeah.

Dan Beecher It can be very disturbing.

Dan McClellan There are, I don't know how many videos I see on social media from folks who are saying, "Isn't it exciting? It's coming. It's around the corner. I don't think you know how close we are." Yeah. And they're excited about it, and looking at disaster and death and even genocide- Yeah ... as something to be excited about. Yeah. It's phenomenally problematic.

Yii Jan Lin Well, Dan, I wanted to make sure that, you teased earlier at- Yeah ... the beginning of the show that we were going to jump ship on- Oh, gosh ...

Dan Beecher the apocalypse for a bit and talk a little bit about Junia, so I think we better do that. I think we might run out of time if we're not careful.

Dan McClellan So one of the things I love bringing up, particularly because a lot of what I do on social media is engage with folks who are spreading misinformation and trying to perpetuate harmful frameworks from the Bible, and one of these is that women aren't allowed to have any ecclesiastical authority. And so Romans 16:7 is such a wonderful passage, and Jael Dunn-Epp, I think, is the author of pretty much considered the standard, at least monograph on the topic of Junia, the first woman apostle. But a lot of apologetic responses to this try to make one of two cases that I've seen. One is that against the identity of Junia as a woman apostle because the text has Paul send greetings to Andronicus and to Junia and says they're well-known among the apostles and were in Christ before me. And the two apologetic responses are, one, that maybe this is a man's name, which is kind of a ridiculous argument because there's only one known example of this being a man's name, and it's from a century later, bunch of examples of this being a woman's name. And then the other is that the text is saying not that they are well-known among the apostles, but they are well-known to the apostles. The apostles know who they are, and that's why they're cool and they get this mention. And you wrote a wonderful article in the Journal of Biblical Literature that I think the subtitle was "The Apostle Before Paul." Okay. Yes. Something like that. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about what you were doing with that article? Yeah.