Presenters in this session will examine religious thought and practice in situations where borders are violently guarded, the rights of migrants (and others) often brushed aside, and democratic norms come under attack. The papers explore diverse forms of religiously-inflected activism that arise under situations of significant human rights violations. The first paper uses a Christian ethical lens to examine rights across borders when strict ideologies of sovereignty diverge from facts on the ground. The second considers how gender-based rights violations in immigration detention arise out of the context of detention itself. The third elucidates the role of religion in undocumented Filipino Americans’ activism to resist violence in the immigration enforcement system. And the fourth considers how religious actors and scholars have acted across borders to resist manipulation of historical memory, advocating for both democratic norms and the rights of migrants and the most vulnerable.
As many as 370,000 Filipinos live in the United States without legal status. Under the Trump presidency, their daily lives were plagued by fears of state violence in the forms of incarceration and deportation. Despite his promises, President Biden has not succeeded in changing U.S. immigration policies. Seizing on a crisis at the Southern border, nativists have continued to depict undocumented immigrants as “illegals” who are a danger to American society, even though empirical studies have consistently shown otherwise. In this paper, I examine the lived realities of undocumented Filipino Americans in order to challenge assumptions about their Christian faith and ethics. By situating their decisions historically and sociologically, I show that they are not only victims of largely-hidden legal violence, but that their communities offer important contributions to the work of nonviolent resistance.
Based on religious scholarship of “micropractice,” I demonstrate how immigration detention work produces violence. Through examination of incidents of gender-based violence in immigration detention contexts across history–from ships moored off the California coast to modern private prisons–I show how workplace micropractices culminate into incidents of gender-based violence. Through methods of control, surveillance, and humiliation, those involved within the immigration system learn how to treat immigrants that they encounter; if you spend every workday demeaning immigrants, what is one more personal act of degradation? I propose that in order to end gender-based violence within the immigration system, and the violence of the immigration detention system itself, we must look not just at the religious ideologies that support xenophobia, but also the ritual practices that sustain it.
This paper investigates religion’s ongoing contribution to the transmission of the memories of the May 18 Uprising, a historic South Korean pro-democracy uprising against the authoritarian Korean government, and the generation of new multi-racial activist networks in the U.S. Based on qualitative research and drawing from feminist and womanist theo-ethical frameworks on memory, I examine the role of religion in three sites of social memory: haunted bodies, political art, and religious networks. In these three sites, the Christian religion and the Korean spiritual traditions preserve the memory of the movement and regenerate its radical spirit. I argue that such a confluence of religious traditions provides fertile ground for mobilizing resources for cultivating transnational democratic (political and cultural) belonging. More broadly, my presentation invites conversation on how religion uniquely contributes to keeping memories of progressive social movements “alive” for a liberative and decolonial democracy.
The particular intersection of the novel and the unchanged in today’s relations between borders, sovereignty, and migration—which can be called “toxic Westphalianism”—represents both a moral challenge and an opportunity to rethink rights with respect to violations of migrant rights in border spaces. In light of the history of Westphalian sovereignty, in which nonhuman considerations were excluded, theological elements were sublimated, and non-European territories were colonized, the examination of borders as systems of exclusion renders visible elements that can be brought together in challenging but promising ways. The situation demands Christian ethical attention, both as a moral concern and because of Christianity’s ambivalent historical relationship with sovereignty. Such attention facilitates rethinking rights in terms of encounters that ramify across wider social relationships. This account of rights does not occlude the universalism that typically accompanies assertions of rights so much as deploy it within specific acts of contestation or resistance.