One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History

by Peter Manseau,
The San Francisco Chronicle, February 19, 2015

Following the arrival of hundreds of Sikhs in Bellingham, Wash., in 1906, a minister opined (in a sermon reprinted around the region) that “at the present rate at which they are coming, we can no more Christianize them than we can put out hell by throwing snowballs into it.” America’s offer of asylum and refuge to the “tempest-tossed and persecuted of the earth,” he added, “does not imply that we should invite those people here in such hordes that we shall be swamped, inundated, despiritualized, and un-Americanized.”