Home missions

• This is a fascinating piece from Elizabeth E. Evans at RNS, “A mission field at home: How Christian America welcomed its first Chinese immigrants.”

The starting point here is Michael Luo’s book Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Evans doesn’t so much review the book as recommend it and invite others to converse with the history Luo recounts. As she writes:

Christian clergy cast their own shadow over Luo’s narrative. Faith leaders — almost all of them white Protestants — were instrumental in shaping, not only the experience of the immigrant, but also the communities that sometimes welcomed, sometimes attacked them.

She talks to a half dozens historians and theologians about this ambiguous history, all in the shadow of 2025 America with its ICE raids and Kavanaugh Stops and throngs of white evangelical Christians cheering for “Mass Deportation Now!”

The language in Evans’ title — “A mission field at home” — comes from the “home mission societies” of multiple Protestant denominations that were founded or expanded in the 19th and early 20th centuries to welcome immigrants to America. Those mission societies helped immigrants to find housing and jobs and to learn English. That work was a lifeline for many immigrants even as it was also focused on “Christianizing” and “Americanizing” those immigrants, often in ways that didn’t distinguish those as two separate things. It was ardently conversionist, but the assistance it provided was not conditioned on conversion.

So that history of “home missions” can be almost as problematic as the history of “foreign missions” — the mass movement begun in the 19th century that sent thousands of American missionaries sailing overseas to spread the gospel around the world. But for all of its many flaws — colonialism, white missionary plantations, Nelson Bell-style segregationist ecclesiology, and every Poisonwood Bible stereotype imaginable — that massive missionary movement was also fueled by an inclusive, borderless vision of shared humanity that is now despised and rejected by white American evangelicals.

For 21st-century white evangelicals, Hudson Taylor and Lottie Moon are too “woke.”

Evans and Luo have me thinking more about Taylor and Moon and the missionary movement histories that have yet to be written. How is it that many of the same white American Christians who supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 were — at the same time — generously and sacrificially raising money to support missionaries in China? (This isn’t precisely a contradiction, of course, because “foreign missions” can be viewed as a way to keep “them” over there and thus not coming here, but the seemingly simultaneous outpouring of hatred and love still needs unpacking.)

• Meanwhile, also from RNS, “After clergy arrests, religious pushback to ICE expands in Chicago,” by Jack Jenkins:

“More than 210 mostly Chicago-area clergy, representing a range of liberal and conservative traditions, have signed a letter criticizing ICE titled ‘Jesus is Being Tear Gassed at Broadview.'”

Signers of the letter represent an unusually diverse array of Christian groups, hailing from Presbyterian, Catholic, Black Protestant, United Church of Christ, Methodist, Lutheran, Mennonite, Episcopalian, Anglican, Unitarian Universalist, Disciples of Christ and Baptist traditions, as well as evangelical denominations and nondenominational evangelical churches.

Signers are primarily pastors but also include members of local religious institutions such as the Rev. Enzo Del Brocco, head of the Catholic Theological Union; the Rev. Dennis R. Edwards, dean of North Park Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church; Christian Scharen, a theology professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, which is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; and Mike Hogue, a theology professor at Meadville Lombard Theological School, a Unitarian Universalist school. …

The Rt. Rev. Paula E. Clark, the bishop who oversees the Episcopal Diocese Of Chicago, also signed the letter on Tuesday. And while Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, has not signed on, he released a new statement Tuesday afternoon declaring solidarity with migrants.

“Families are being torn apart. Children are left in fear, and communities are shaken by immigration raids and detentions. These actions wound the soul of our city,” Cupich’s statement reads. “Let me be clear. The Church stands with migrants.”

… Religious diversity presence has expanded outside the Broadview facility in recent weeks. Mainline Protestant clergy have been a mainstay, as have Unitarian Universalist ministers, Jewish activists and Catholic leaders. But they have been joined by members of more theologically conservative traditions: Earlier this month, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints organized a protest outside the Broadview facility, and a contingent from Wheaton College — a prominent evangelical Christian school — convened a vigil as well.

This is good.