The president’s recent immigration orders have been denounced by most of my friends and associates in Seattle and Americans nationwide. But they are applauded by certain of the folks back home, seen as evidence the new president is keeping his campaign promises. Some of the more holier-than-thou of my Christian friends on social media applaud the loudest. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” does not apply to Muslims or immigrants, it seems.
I’m surprised but not surprised to see these attitudes embraced by folks who claim to walk with Jesus. This ugliness is familiar to me, both from interactions with overzealous Christians and with some of the loved ones at home.
I wasn’t raised in a religious atmosphere, but the distrust and suspicion of the “out of towner” was endemic in our household. How much of it was my mom’s response to the events of her life and how much a product of the times that formed her is up for debate, but she took a dim view of strangers. In general, her kids grew to be more open and welcoming in the presence of new ideas, new people and experiences. But we are her children, so a certain sense of caution or fearfulness is in all of us. How we express it varies to a person.
The ugly truth beneath the surface is that bigotry is entwined in the threads of our history. Our mother was born at the height of a populist movement that swept America in the early 1920s and was given up for adoption as an infant because of wrong-headed ideas about religion. She never knew her birth parents. She felt that loss and rejection every single day of her life, all 93 years of it.
The maternal line of our family genealogy is blank. We have names of her parents, but no traces of their lives after giving away their baby girl. “They didn’t want me,” my mother said when asked why she never looked for them when she had grown, but I can’t believe this to be true. The name on her birth certificate is her mother’s exact name. “She gave you all she could give you,” I told her. “Of course she wanted to keep you.”
The attitudes of the time help to explain why my mother ended up in the orphanage instead of claiming her birthright. In late 1922, when my mother was born, white Anglo-Protestants in Michigan and across the nation were in the grip of a phase of virulent antipathy toward Catholics and immigrants, an era British author Craig Fox investigated in Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan (Michigan State University Press). I read about this phenomenon with particular interest, realizing as I did that my own family was surely directly affected by the widespread attitudes of that time.
According to Fox, Klan membership in Michigan when my mom was born numbered in the hundreds of thousands. There is no evidence at all that my mother’s people were Klan-sympathizers, but those numbers, and the status of the organization in mainstream society at that time, reveal the widespread acceptance of the group and its agenda during my mother’s early life. Members included prominent pillars of the community who often didn’t bother to cover their faces in marches and parades because of wide acceptance of bigoted views toward Catholics, Jewish people, and immigrants. The KKK was seen by many at that time as just another mainstream civic organization.
My mom’s birth mother was a 17-year-old Protestant schoolgirl living with an aunt and uncle after both of her parents died in an automobile accident. She fell in love with a Catholic farm boy from a nearby town. When she found herself pregnant, she wanted to keep her baby and marry the boy, but the aunt and uncle forbade it. They forced her to give the baby up for adoption, stipulating the infant must go to a Protestant family. That is how my mother ended up with her adoptive parents (who divorced when she was small) and a handful of adopted siblings. Born a few years later, things might have been different for my mom. The Klan’s wave of popularity was short-lived and by just a few years later its membership ranks had dwindled. New biases and suspicions formed in place of old and those who remembered this shameful period of history preferred to keep the details–and the artifacts–to themselves.
The woman who adopted my mother worked herself to exhaustion cleaning houses to make ends meet and to support her six adopted children. When she was home she mainly wanted to sleep. Most of my mother’s childhood stories spoke of neglect and loneliness, though I believe her adopted mother did love her and did all she could to provide for her. But long hours left on her own and memories of careless remarks—“We only took you because nobody else wanted you”—left my mother deeply bitter about the raw deal she had been dealt. Toward the end of her life, after dementia had claimed her recognition of me as her daughter, she spoke to me as she might to a friend or confidant, and revealed she had not been granted the life she was meant to live. “I was college material,” she told me. “I was supposed to be college material.” Instead she left school after the tenth grade with all of her considerable intellectual and artistic potential unexplored and only found her purpose in life when she met my dad, at age 16, at which point, she said, her life began.
The personal, individual impacts of attitudes and prejudices have been hurting people and families throughout human history. “In American history there has always been a strain of people either scapegoating the other or trying to shut down immigration from places that are seen as un-American or undesirable, even if the reality is far from that,” writes political scientist Karthick Ramakrishnan of the University of California, Davis, in Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy (2016, Russell Sage Foundation).
I see that happening now, with the recent immigration orders. The folks back home don’t see what I see, living in my multi-cultural neighborhood. I see families, bound together by the ties of love and genetics. The families that pour out of the two mosques I pass on my way to and from work each day love their children as much as I do mine. This is their neighborhood as much as it is mine. They have roots here, connections. Their ways may seem strange to me, as do many of the ways of all religions. I can’t help but notice how often the extreme love of God breeds death. But so must mine to them.
One of the more outspoken Christians on my social media list professes her love of Christ, and I have no doubt of her devotion. But she has a judgmental tone when pointing out the errors of others. This same person disowned her own sister for being gay and prevented her children from knowing their aunt. She waited until her sister died, much too young, to try to set things right. Is it any wonder the rest of the family barred her from the funeral?
Above: Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844-1925), Jeune Mère (Young Mother), [Public domain]
Source Readings
A history of anti-immigrant bias, starting with Benjamin Franklin’s hatred of the Germans; Quartz
1920s Michigan: Klan Country?; Lansing City Pulse, March 24, 2011
Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy (2016, Russell Sage Foundation)
Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan (2011, Michigan State University Press)