The nation is often accepted in political and theological discourse as a stable and natural category of belonging. In this dissertation, I argue that the nation as a form of political community must be continually created and recreated by making natives through excluding foreigners. I trace this process through four moments of exclusion that occur over the nineteenth-century history of the United States: removal of Native Americans, denial of Black citizenship, dispossession of Mexican landowners, and exclusion of Chinese immigrants. I do so by focusing on the legal discourses in Supreme Court opinions central to these moments of exclusion. What emerges from this history is a series of variations on the theme of the native and the foreigner: the settler and the migrant, the citizen and the subject, the kin and the enemy, and the chosen and the heathen. Each of these variations illuminates the category of the native and the foreigner as well as the nature of the binary system in which they are mutually created. By tracing these recurring moments of exclusion, I argue that the nation cannot be understood as a fixed or stable category. Instead, the nation operates as a political theological claim to timelessness and coherence that seeks to rise above or transcend the complicated reality of democratic politics.

This critique of the nation opens the possibility of a new political theology, which I describe as the people after the nation. The people after the nation is a political theology of ingathering, in which the people—that essential element of democratic politics—does not seek out a fixed and bounded identity but embraces the unavoidable reality that the identity of the people is constantly changing. A political theology of ingathering rejects a politics of recurring exclusion and, instead, seeks to practice a politics of gathering the people in without privileging anyone as already belonging. Politics is the ongoing practice of making belonging possible for all.