The Evangelical Covenant Church was formed in 1885 at the height of the Swedish mass migration, which saw 1.3 million Swedes cross the Atlantic between 1840 and 1930, with a full half million arriving in the period between 1879 and 1893. In total, Sweden lost 20 percent of its total population to emigration, a proportional loss only surpassed by Ireland and Norway.
This migration took place within the broader tidal wave of European migration. As tends to be the case in US history, this wave of immigration elicited a corresponding wave of anti-immigrant nativism—especially as the 1880s brought increased numbers of immigrants from eastern and southern European countries—suspiciously less Protestant and less “white” than earlier immigrants from northern Europe. As an immigrant church in this context, the Covenant came under the fire of charges that its retention of the Swedish language and ethnic communal cohesion only served to delay assimilation and so was fundamentally un-American.
Amid these charges, early Covenant leaders defended the gifts they brought to the nation as an immigrant community. David Nyvall, founding president of North Park (and, for a time, secretary of the Covenant), was especially vocal on the importance of his community’s honoring, preserving, and transmitting their culture. “We shall not be assimilated because we shall not be Americanized. By making the best of what we now are, we can best educate the nation in America….If we are good Swedes (in an apolitical sense), we are good Americans.”
Nyvall insisted upon his community’s agency in determining the pace and manner by which they would adopt the culture and language of their new country. “Some people seem to think that the best way to be Americanized is to lose track of ourselves in the wilderness of a strange country the quickest possible. I think the contrary. I think that we ought to know a great deal more about this country before it is safe to break up company with one another.”
Rejecting uncritical assimilation, he impressed upon the Covenant the importance of the second generation maintaining Swedish rather than rushing to Americanize, lest they squander the wisdom of generations, like the prodigal son, and end up orphaned Americans—and their parents childless Swedes. “Americanization is not becoming less and less Swedish. It is not disposing of an iota of our language or even one good and noble custom. It is not forgetting the good that I know nor the language I speak. Rather, the opposite: Making use of the best of me in a new place by mastering a new language, the language of this country.”
This insistence led to the maintenance of a hybrid identity for early Covenanters, retaining their cultural forms of worship and fellowship even as they adopted the common language and common causes of their new home. It is undeniable that many have experienced a residual “Swedishness” as alienating as the denomination grew—intentionally—beyond this ethnic boundary. Nevertheless, historically its preservation of an ethnic identity was not the exclusionary tactic of the powerful but the intentional rejection of pressures toward assimilation within a rising tide of nativism. Moreover, this valuation of the culturally particular served as a conscious tool for the honoring and preservation of new cultures that joined the denomination in the decades that followed.
Following the elimination of the national origins quotas of 1920s legislation in the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, the ethnic diversity of the US exploded. As new languages began to fill Covenant congregations from the mid-twentieth century—Estonian, Assyrian, Spanish, Korean, and Vietnamese—the denomination celebrated the expansion of the Covenant through new immigrant communities, drawing explicit parallels to its own immigrant history.
Consider, for example, a 1981 Covenant Companion article by Sally Wiberg, a member of the Special Commission on Urban and Ethnic Ministries, the predecessor of today’s Mosaic Commission. In her article “Coming Home!” Wiberg asked Companion readers, “Do you know that our larger Covenant family includes growing numbers of people of different races, different complexions, even different languages?” She framed this growth as a return to Covenant roots, in continuity with the denomination’s core identity. “This isn’t a departure from our tradition—it is, in fact, a return to that tradition, in many ways. After all, the Covenant is an ethnic ministry. Remember those old Swedes? In reaching out to city people, to people of various ethnic groups, we’re really coming home as a denomination.” In a 1983 article, Wiberg drew similar connections. Focusing on language specifically she wrote:
“And the Covenant is especially well suited for ministry across ethnic and economic gaps. We began, after all, as an ethnic ministry. How many of our parents and grandparents were born outside the United States? How many of us or our parents spoke another language before we spoke English? Even our official record as a denomination—our yearbook—was printed in Swedish for forty-five years. We know what it is to be ‘strangers in a strange land.’ Should it somehow seem different to us now to see similar experiences with others, just because their language is Spanish or Korean or Vietnamese?”
The intentional community building and growth that took place within the denomination in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s did lead to the mosaic we celebrate as the Covenant today—not in spite of our immigrant beginnings but in continuity with them.
It is imperative that we remember our immigrant history as we face a new wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy. Campaign language vilifying immigrants as invading criminals, “poisoning the blood of our country” is now bearing fruit in widescale arrests, making good on the administration’s promise to execute the “largest deportation operation” in the history of the country.
While Christians may, and of course do, disagree in good faith on the specifics of immigration policy, there is no room for the dehumanization of the immigrant for any Christian who affirms Scripture as “the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct.” Scripture is replete with unequivocal commands to care for the stranger across narrative, law, prophets, gospels, and epistles (e.g., Exodus 23:9; Leviticus 19:33-34; Deuteronomy 27:19; Ezekiel 47:22; Jeremiah 7:5-7; Zechariah 7:9-10; Matthew 25:35; Hebrews 13:12).
It is especially incumbent on an immigrant denomination, as the Covenant is—both in our origins and our current demographics—not to legitimize dehumanizing rhetoric by silence but rather to affirm loudly and consistently the dignity of immigrants. Integrity requires us as a Covenant to remember our immigrant history, celebrate our current mosaic identity, and honor the gifts of immigrants in our nation and church.
Amid dehumanizing rhetoric and threats of deportation, let us reaffirm the discerned position of our 2014 Immigration Resolution, which rooted the following practical commitments in the witness of Scripture and “the Covenant’s great immigrant tradition”:
“The Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Covenant Church seeks to faithfully welcome both documented and undocumented immigrants with the love and peace of Christ as well as stand in solidarity as a people who bear good news in thought, word, and deed. The doors of our churches must remain open to all who would receive God’s saving Word. We humbly repent of any action that has not followed this Christian ethic and ask for forgiveness. As an assembly of churches in various contexts—rural, urban, and suburban—we will seek to respond in faithful ways that are most appropriate. As local churches, we will extend compassion, mercy, and justice to immigrants in need, as we have throughout our history. Furthermore, we will seek to find creative ways to work with immigrant worker centers, citizenship training groups, and other church and parachurch organizations in our own communities. We affirm all who live in peace and for the common good.”
This article originally published with the Covenant Companion on February 3, 2025
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