Migration and Society: Advances in Research 4 (2021): 110–123 © Te Authors doi:10.3167/arms.2021.040111 Freedom, Salvation, Redemption Theologies of Political Asylum Elizabeth Shakman Hurd  ABSTRACT: Te politics of religious asylum is ripe for reassessment. Even as a robust literature on secularism and religion has shown otherwise over the past two decades, much of the discussion in this feld presumes that religion stands cleanly apart from law and politics. Tis article makes the case for a diferent approach to religion in the context of asylum-seeking and claiming. In the United States, it suggests, the politics of asylum is integral to the maintenance of American exceptionalism. Participants in the asylum-seeking process create a gap between Americans and others, afrming the promise of freedom, salvation, and redemption through conversion not to a particular religion or faith but to the American project itself. Tis hails a particular kind of subject of freedom and unencumbered choice. It is both a theological and a political process.  KEYWORDS: American exceptionalism, law and religion, political theology, religion and politics, religious asylum, religious freedom In light of the cultural and sociological complexities which inhere in defning a practice as a religion, or determining whether persecutors consider it as such, a factfnder is encouraged to seek out the assistance of professionals with relevant expertise on the issue. —Karen Musalo, “Claims for Protection Based on Religion or Belief” To be saved is to be made “religious” in the proper way within a properly ordered secular space; those who cannot or who refuse to enter this “order of things” must be annihilated for the sake of the Kingdom. —J. Kameron Carter, “An Unlikely Convergence” Asylum and the Limits of Law Religion is among several protected categories in US and international refugee law. 1 Asylum courts and bureaucracies regularly adjudicate questions involving religious identity, conversion, and persecution (Oraby 2015). Experts like Karen Musalo, whose cautionary advice to religious asylum factfnders is cited above, prioritize international legal instruments and professionals with relevant expertise (Good 2007).Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, however, has described such attempts to defne religion for legal purposes as inherently discriminatory (2018). Moreover, as Sullivan has emphasized, it is not only religion but also law that is ripe for interrogation: “We have mostly accepted the exceptionalism of US law. What we need to do now is see that law is