Evangelicals and Immigration–1940s Style
by Miles Mullin, II
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
These words, ascribed on a bronze plaque affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, were penned by American poet Emma Lazarus. Originally written to help raise money to fund pedestal construction, “The New Colossus” portrays the statue as the “Mother of Exiles” whose “beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome,” encapsulating a vision of America as a land of opportunity for immigrants. Lazarus understood the promise that America held for those wishing to emigrate. A part of the migration of Sephardic Jews to America, her own family succeeded in the United States, rising into the upper class.
Like the “Mother of Exiles,” in the mid-twentieth century neo-evangelicals welcomed immigrants traveling from some “teeming shore” across the Atlantic. Like Emma Lazarus, they recognized the promise that America held for those wishing to emigrate from Europe. Embracing the “activism” characteristic of evangelicalism, after World War II, they helped settle such persons in the United States.
Recent books like historian Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason (2013) and theologian Greg Thornbury’s Recovering Classic Evangelicalism (2013) emphasize the intellectual aspects of the mid-twentieth-century evangelical renaissance. However, just as intellectuals and elites fueled a more socially and culturally engaged American evangelicalism, so did the evangelical practitioners and laypeople associated with the movement.
While neo-evangelical intellectuals worked to engage the scholarly currents prevalent in Western culture, pastors, missionaries, ecclesiastical leaders, and laypeople were confronted by a world thrown into turmoil by World War II and its aftershocks. As the world grew smaller due to technological developments and media advances, these laypeople and ecclesiastical leaders regularly encountered suffering on the “other side of the world” right in their homes and churches. Seeing those in need, the words of a Jesus concerning the “least of these” in Matthew 25 spurred them to address the spiritual and physical needs of the world just as their heady coreligionists attempted to address the scholars in Cambridge, New Haven, Chicago, and Berkeley. To wit, they founded several evangelical global relief agencies, an evangelical child welfare agency, and several other ministries focused on meeting the needs of the less fortunate “for whom Jesus died.” As might be expected, when opportunity came, they assisted those who wanted to immigrate to the United States in order to escape deplorable conditions and persecution in their home countries.
World War II displaced millions of Europeans. After the war, most of these displaced persons (DPs) returned to their home countries. Others, who anticipated maltreatment in their countries of origin, refused to do so. Many of these had opposed the Nazis, were Jewish, or were escaping from the communist governments taking control in Eastern Europe. Each DP that refused to return to his/her home country violated numerous legal strictures. Even so—and regardless of the fact that he could not verify their stories—General Dwight Eisenhower declined to forcibly repatriate them. As a result, three years after VE Day, the United States passed the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, temporarily enlarging immigration quotas in order to welcome such people. The Act made provision for just over 200,000 of these people to immigrate to the United States.
Barely four years old at the time, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) unhesitatingly agreed to the State Department’s request that it sponsor 3,000 such displaced persons (DPs). Leaders hustled into action, raising monies and educating their constituency regarding the whys and hows of sponsorship. Even the aged grandfather of neo-evangelicalism, J. Elwin Wright, got in on the action, pressing for support in “Shall DP’s Have a Chance to Live Again?” published in the February 15, 1949 edition of United Evangelical Action, the NAE’s official organ. By autumn 1949, NAE-affiliated evangelicals had sponsored nearly 500 DP’s. In that era, evangelical leaders welcomed those who could not return to their home countries for fear of some sort of persecution or retribution.
Although consistency wavered, evangelicals intermittently demonstrated that same attitude throughout the rest of the twentieth-century when similar humanitarian crises arose. Especially supportive of those emigrating from Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, many evangelicals also embraced the “boat people” of Vietnam, helping them settle in the United States. In part due to the compassion they were shown in the name of Jesus, many of the “boat people” became Christians.
Granted, there were some disappointing features of the 1948 DP Act, such as attempts to exclude Catholics and Jews in favor of admitting DPs that helped maintain the WASP-y character of the United States, but the evangelical response to the State Department’s overtures was not one of them. Rather, the actions of the leaders and constituency of the NAE in the late 1940s demonstrate something about the ethos of mid-century American evangelicalism: it possessed an attitude of expansive welcome towards those who were displaced. In our current context, let us at least demonstrate the same attitude as our compassionate evangelical forebears. From the comments and actions I have seen, many of us are falling well short of that rather mundane goal.
Miles S. Mullin II (PhD, Vanderbilt) is Associate Professor of Church History at the Houston Campus of Southwestern Seminary. An earlier version of this article appeared on The Anxious Bench (Patheos Evangelical Channel) on July 30, 2014.
REFERENCES:
Bebbington, David. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin
Especially supportive of those emigrating from Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War many evangelicals also embraced the “boat people” of Vietnam helping them settle in the United States. In part due to the compassion they were shown in the name of Jesus many of the “boat people” became Christians.
sans-serif; font-size:10pt”>Hyman 1989.
sans-serif; font-size:10pt”>Carl F. H. Henry Papers. Rolfing Memorial Library. Trinity International University (Deerfield Illinois).
sans-serif; font-size:10pt”>Displaced Persons Act of 1948 62 Stat. 1009. Available @ http://library.uwb.edu/guides/usimmi-gration/62%20stat%201009.pdf.
sans-serif; font-size:10pt”>“Emma Lazarus.” National Park Service. http://www.nps.gov/stli/ historyculture/emma-lazarus.htm. Last accessed August 16 2014.
sans-serif; font-size:10pt”>“Emma Lazarus.” Oxford Book of American Poetry. Edited by David Lehman and John Rehm. New York: Oxford University Press 2006.
sans-serif; font-size:10pt”>NAE Archives. Wheaton College Archives. Wheaton College (Wheaton Illinois).
sans-serif; font-size:10pt”>Thornbury Gregory Alan. Recovering Classic Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F. H. Henry. Wheaton IL: Crossway 2013.
sans-serif; font-size:10pt”>Worthen Molly. Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press 2014.
