"Borders and Borderlessness: The Religious Politics of American Power"

For American borders there is more going on than meets the eye. Drawing on Professor Hurd’s book Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, this lecture explores the paradoxes of creation, enforcement, suspension, and refusal of American borders understood as simultaneously religious and political objects. Americans, argues Hurd, 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.

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Elizabeth Shakeman Hurd, author of the recent volume Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is a leading voice in the study of the politics of religion in the US at home and abroad, secularism and religious freedom, American borders, the US in the Middle East, and the intersections of political theory and political theology. 

Pamela Klassen is the chair and graduate chair of the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. 

Benjamin L. Berger is Professor & York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law at York University.