(Moore Lecture 2) American Border Religion

Name: (Moore Lecture 2) American Border Religion
Start: 2025-03-19T17:30:00+13:00
Location: Burns 2 Lecture Theatre, Arts Building

Schedule

Wed, 19 Mar, 2025 at 05:30 pm

UTC+13:00

Location

Burns 2 Lecture Theatre, Arts Building | Dunedin, OT

Public Lecture - All Welcome
In the first of two lectures drawing on Hurd’s new book, Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, this talk introduces the idea of “American border religion.” While politicians write laws, build barriers, and manage flows of people and goods, another aspect of American borders goes unseen. Borders are more than just lines or transit points, or places of constraint and violence. They are also sites of efforts to escape the ordinary, to cross over, to find spaces outside of law, spaces of emancipation, even chosenness. Borders are religious as well as political. Expanding our understanding of American borders, and the American national project, this lecture explores the paradox of why Americans defend the border so ferociously even as they celebrate the idea of America as borderless, transcendent, and universal. Americans share a bipartisan “border religion” complete with an array of beliefs and practices. This border religion includes reverence for national security, a liturgy of immigration, and an eschatological foreign policy.