Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States

by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Overview

An urgent exploration of borders as sacred objects in American culture.
 
Our national conversation about the border has taken a religious turn. When televangelists declare, “Heaven has a wall,” activists shout back, “Jesus was a refugee.” For Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, the standoff makes explicit a longstanding truth: borders are religious as well as political objects.

In this book, Hurd argues that Americans share a bipartisan border religion, complete with an array of beliefs and practices, including a reverence for national security, a liturgy for immigration, and an eschatological foreign policy. Through an analysis of the many ways the United States creates, enforces, and ignores borders at home and abroad, Hurd offers a bold new perspective on the ties that bind American religion, politics, and public life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226841182
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/05/2025
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is professor of political science and religious studies at Northwestern University. Her books include Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion and Politics of Religious Freedom, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Where People Come to Press Close to the Other Side
Chapter 1. Creating: The Liturgy of Asylum
Interlude I. Border/less
Chapter 2. Enforcing: National Security
Interlude II. Unbordered: Land without Law
Chapter 3. Suspending: AmericaIsrael
Interlude III. Crossing
Chapter 4. Refusing: Holy Death in the Borderlands
Interlude IV. Walking: Pilgrimage to Magdalena
Conclusion: The Ideal Border

Acknowledgments
Sources
Index

Editorial Reviews

In invitingly accessible prose, Hurd brings together the resources of political science and religious studies in a short and poignantly personal introduction to the horrors of US border politics. Heaven Has a Wall will be a valuable pedagogical resource for undergraduate instructors.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

"Her new book, Heaven Has a Wall: Religion Borders and the Global United States was the topic of our discussion, and as the title suggests, it's about the American border and the discourses and the policies and the assumptions that surround it. But for Professor Shackman, the American border and borders more generally aren't just administrative features of the state, they're not just lines in the sand, they're not just things we experience, say, at the airport; for her they regulate our core notions of self and other, belonging and exclusion, and at least in the American context, they're almost treated like sacred objects and so rather provocatively, she argues that our national conversation about the border is increasingly replete with religious implications. It's a very timely work but also one that I think is going to far outlast the current moment in its significance."

Protean View

Heaven may have a wall, but this book has no guardrails. Crashing borders of nation-states, legal frameworks, and disciplinary categories, Heaven Has a Wall is grounded by telling examples and provocative interludes. It will certainly find a place on my next religion and law syllabus.

Greg Johnson

Hurd deftly shows how contemporary U.S. border politics are permeated with religious meaning.

Library Journal

Capaciously intellectual and intimately personal, this remarkable book examines the religiosity of asylum applications and border checkpoints, the imposition of borders across sovereign Indigenous land, and worship of Santa Muerte as devotion to a sovereignty that negates borders. Hurd’s work will change how people think about the border—and help readers see ways that religion, law, and politics are entangled, often synonymous, categories.

Spencer Dew

An original perspective on how Americans are politically motivated by feelings of sanctity that at times verge on zealotry.

Publishers Weekly