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The Ethics of Sanctuary
| Article
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10896 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
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7 / 1986 |
5,802 Words |
| Author
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Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American
Culture and author of The Politics of Human Nature. |
The sanctuary movement is being hailed in many quarters as the great moral issue of the 1980s. The movement, whose members provide protection to illegal immigrants from Central America, is protesting the refusal of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to recognize Salvadoran and Guatemalan emigrants as political refugees. Taking matters into their own hands, more than 150 churches have offered sanctuary and have provided active assistance to Central Americans who wish to enter the United States without benefit of papers. If we can believe what we read in the papers, the movement is, even for nonbelievers, an opportunity to prove the strength of their humanitarian convinctions; for Christians and Jews, it is a test of faith.
For those who make a career out of moral outrage, the sanctuary issue could not have come at a better time: it is a godsend. The radical Catholic bishops of the archdiocese of Milwaukee sent a letter of "personal endorsement" to the local sanctuary coordinating committee, and Jesse Jackson has pledged the support of Operation PUSH. It is the grey-haired veterans of the sixties' street-fighting that are the most delighted. William Sloane Coffin has recovered much of his old exuberance as he tells his Riverside Church congregation "it is not enough to resist with confession, we must confess with resistance." The language of obligation comes easily to Coffin, who speaks with such assurance of the Lord's will, we have to assume that he has been taken into His confidence. He appears eager for the graceful martyrdom of a weekend in jail: You can arrest the church leaders, he editorialized in the March 18, 1985, issue of Christianity and Crisis, but persecution "will only strengthen the sanctuary movement, whose Head is just beyond the reach of the INS." The Nation, despite its announced hostility to all manifestation of religion, recognizes the propaganda value of the clerical protest, and stated in its January 26, 1985, issue: "The religious framework of the sanctuary movement gives it considerable cachet at time when morality has been detached from politics and when a suffocating cynicism attends all efforts to organize support for radical causes."
While Coffin and the rest are sometime incautious enough to speak of their own domestic political agenda--"We can no longer separate foreign policies from domestic policies"--the movement's strength is based not on its political commitment but on its straightforward moral appeal.
Christians have an obligation to help the poor and unfortunate. Doesn't that obligation take precedence over the decrees and regulations of a national government? Supporters
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