When you concentrate on Christianity within the Eighties, you seemingly image televangelists and the right-wing Ethical Majority. However throughout the nation, lots of of congregations fashioned a really totally different motion: sheltering undocumented individuals in direct defiance of the federal authorities.
Historians Sergio González and Lloyd Barba, of Marquette College and Amherst Faculty, respectively, discover that motion’s historical past within the podcast Sanctuary: On the Border Between Church and State. “What we discover within the sanctuary motion is likely one of the most dramatic and profitable challenges to state energy maybe within the historical past of the USA,” González says within the first episode.
Because the U.S. authorities refused to guard Central American asylum seekers within the Eighties, homes of worship took up the duty. The work of sheltering undocumented immigrants, whereas knowledgeable by real non secular beliefs, violated federal regulation. Some sanctuary activists paid the value: Operation Sojourner, below which authorities brokers embedded themselves in church conferences, led to the prosecution of nuns, clergymen, and different volunteers. The motion did not die; it advanced to fulfill totally different challenges over the subsequent a number of many years.
In an more and more secular nation, the podcast asks, what’s the function of sanctuary? The proliferation of “sanctuary cities” and “sanctuary states”—and the event of nonimmigration functions, reminiscent of “Second Modification sanctuaries”—proves that sanctuary, and the problem to state energy it represents, stays an vital follow, particularly because the second Trump administration brings a renewed risk to undocumented immigrants.
