Dear Revealer readers,

I am writing this letter the day after the current president of the United States announced in Pittsburgh that he will have a border wall built in Colorado. His crowd cheered. But much of the media mocked the president for thinking Colorado shares a border with Mexico. The next day the president tweeted that he had been joking. Watch the video and decide for yourself, or if you think his intent matters. The crowd, after all, applauded. So, what, then, should we make of the crowd’s response? Perhaps they believe the Southwest is filled with hordes of people who shouldn’t be citizens, so many that a border wall should snare through the region to protect everyone else? Maybe they don’t care about actual borders, but about making the “land of the free” exclusively in their own image and in their own tongue? Or, maybe they know borders can change and they want to remain in the president’s favor?

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

This issue of the Revealer looks at borders and boundaries, at insiders and outsiders, at race and ethnicity. The articles begin from the premise that race and ethnicity are central to understanding religion in the border-shifting Americas. In “Moses Speaks Spanglish,” Daniel Camacho, a child of Spanish-speaking immigrants who was forced into English as a Second Language classes even though he was born in the United States, imagines Moses as a bilingual, proto-Latinx figure. In “La Llorona Visits the American Academy of Religion: A Tribute to Luís D. León,” Daisy Vargas pays homage to a pioneering queer scholar of Latinx religions. In “Thea Bowman: A Black Nun for Sainthood,” Ashley Okwuosa profiles a black Roman Catholic nun who challenged the Church’s racial injustices. And, in an excerpt from his book Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala, Kevin Lewis O’Neill describes his time following Guatemalan pastors who kidnap addicts, often at the request of their families, and take them to rehabilitation centers to eradicate their addictions by saving their souls.

As this issue highlights, religions, like countries, have borders. People in power also use religion to establish boundaries, to exclude, and to maintain an “us” that is free of “them.” But so, too, do people use religion to tear down walls and to open up paths to greater freedoms. There is not, as these articles attest, a single, simple picture of how religion functions in our world, in our nations, or at our borders.

Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.