Faith Works 7-7-18

Faith Works 7-7-18

Jeff Gill

 

A county of immigrants

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So much has been said, and at a fevered pitch, about immigration and faith communities, that I worry about having anything useful or new to say.

 

Both as a pastor and as a citizen, I've been dismayed for years over many aspects of our national incoherence around immigration and a fair degree of social confusion about immigrants. As a historian, though, it's all too familiar.

 

My Native American friends get to smile, or snarl as the spirit moves them, about any European-origin Americans complaining about immigration and immigrants. "Tell us about it," they say. As we say often, but perhaps too quickly, we are all a nation of immigrants. It's just a question of when, and from where, and the cultural moment's choice of biases and discrimination that puts a frame on the snapshot. The first Gill in my father's line seems to have come from northern England with the British Army, deserting at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 and becoming a US citizen before the end of the year, switching sides to fight for this country, then on getting bounty lands in central Pennsylvania, marrying a recent immigrant from Scotland.

 

In our early history in Licking County, we have the Welsh settlers whose hills still sit at the heart of the county. A strange language, alien customs, they were immigrants twice over. Jones and Philipps and Rees sound native now, but then…

 

After statehood but before the Civil War, Irish and German immigrants knew hostility and exclusion we associate today only with "people of color," but whiteness was still a loosely defined category in the 1840s and 1850s. A French migrant, Father Jean-Baptiste Lamy, came to establish the first Catholic parishes in the area before going on to New Mexico and an archbishop's hat. Father Lamy's people were German and Irish, often anxious about the reception they got on market day or from their neighbors, glad to have a community at St. Francis de Sales within which to feel some peace and acceptance.

 

Reinhardt Scheidler & Patrick McNamar left the Newark Machine Works and became the driving forces of the rapid growth of Newark's steam tractor engine industry; Scheidler, whose later independent business is the heart of "The Works" museum today, was born in Prussia, while McNamar was born in Ireland.

 

Wehrles and Moraths and Heiseys were German born families that became pillars of the community after the crucible of the Civil War. That was the melting pot of their day, and for Austrian and Italian immigrants who came to work in the glass factories and foundries that blossomed in and around Newark afterwards, it was service in the military during the Spanish-American War and World War I that marked their greater acceptance into the community fabric. If you read microfilmed copies of the Advocate in the late 1800s and early 1900s, you'll find racist bile spilled more about central and eastern Europeans than you will about African Americans, though there is sadly more than enough of the latter, as well.

 

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan took over our community, and it will take more than a column to address that still unscrubbed stain on our history, but to read in the archived copies of "The Fiery Cross" (easily findable online) is to be confronted with a shocking degree of inflamed nativism which presumes that any Catholic, and certainly most Italians and Irish persons, cannot truly be considered American. Sadly, the Protestant churches of the day were not only silent in the face of this scandal, they were often complicit. The Klan's vile rhetoric collapsed in the face of its own corruption (secrecy of membership also leads to misuse of funds), and the weight of the Great Depression forced many to acknowledge a level of common cause which healed some, if not most wounds.

 

And then again a world war brought all races and ethnicities together, the response to Pearl Harbor and the draft both throwing into close proximity the children of other shores as men and women in service, who often brought home a new tolerance and acceptance which we greatly benefited from.

 

The aftermath of World War II also brought us refugees, "displaced persons" from Europe like Jan Michalek, twice imprisoned first by the Nazis and later by Communists, who brought to Licking County his Czechoslovak experience with fish hatcheries to rejuvenate what became the Trout Club, an enduring monument to his work and skills.

 

The fundamental Christian question is one asked of Jesus, "who is my neighbor?" In my faith tradition, we are called to wrestle long and hard with what his answer means, but it was a story, and it was about a man who was himself an alien in the land where the challenge was presented. The Samaritan was an immigrant before he was good, and his actions were Jesus' answer to the question as presented.

 

How do we answer that question in our Ohio home?

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's only been here since 1989, so is he really from here? Tell him about how our fences and gates and doorways make for good neighbors at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.