Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies: American Liberal Protestants, U.S. Immigration Policymaking, and the Un/Making of the Asian Exclusion Era, 1875-1924

Abstract

Histories of American immigration restriction have located its causes in labor conflict, racial formation, legal doctrine, and imperial geopolitics. This dissertation argues that those forces became politically durable only because they were mediated through a religious infrastructure that has remained largely invisible in the historiography. Between the Page Act of 1875 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, liberal Protestantism—the most culturally dominant religious formation of the period—supplied the moral architecture that made exclusion thinkable, defensible, and emotionally bearable as an act of national stewardship rather than coercion. Religion's role was not ornamental but constitutive: it furnished the categories, institutions, and feelings through which the modern American immigration state took shape. Drawing on missionary records, denominational and rescue-home archives, restrictionist organizational papers, congressional testimony, judicial opinions, and Asian and Asian American writings, the dissertation reconstructs how moral authority generated in transpacific mission fields and bicoastal Protestant networks—from China and California to Boston and Washington—was translated into federal law. I trace this religious architecture of exclusion across three interlocking domains. Organizationally, churches, missionary agencies, and reform societies built the rescue homes, certification systems, and surveillance networks that the federal state would later inherit and formalize. Epistemically, sermons, missionary reports, and philanthropic surveys produced a body of "moral knowledge" about Asian character, sexuality, and assimilability that hardened, through secularization, into the evidentiary grammar of admission and exclusion. Affectively, religious vocabularies of purity, salvation, and stewardship recast restriction as protection—of women, of civilization, of the nation's soul—allowing coercive measures to be felt as compassion. Yet this architecture was never uncontested. Asian and Asian American Protestants challenged it from within, mobilizing the same scriptural and theological resources to articulate counter-narratives of universal belonging that exposed the contradictions of a faith authorizing exclusion at home even as it preached universal love abroad. Centering religion resolves what I call the progressive-exclusionary paradox: that the most reform-minded, internationally engaged Protestants, not crude nativists, furnished exclusion with its most durable intellectual and moral legitimacy. Liberal Protestantism did not stand apart from the politics of Asian exclusion; it helped to make it. By tracing how missionary epistemologies, reform institutions, and theological vocabularies were absorbed into the legal and bureaucratic architecture of restriction, the dissertation reframes both U.S. immigration history and the history of American liberal Protestantism, while bringing the long-segregated fields of Asian American history and American religious history into sustained conversation. Exclusion endured, I argue, not because it proved efficient but because it felt moral. Recovering that religious genealogy clarifies why the American border remains, to this day, a site of moral feeling as much as legal reasoning—and why immigration in the United States continues to be waged as a struggle over race, religion, and belonging.