Communism in the Pews: The Conservative Religious Backlash against the 1980s Sanctuary Movement

This paper examines the conservative political and religious responses to the 1980s Sanctuary Movement. In a period that historians have often noted as an era of ascendancy of right and far right religiosity – most prominently in the Moral Majority that helped propel Republican politicians like Ronald Reagan to power – a small but vocal cohort of progressive religious organizations also sought to use their social and political capital to influence U.S. immigration and foreign policy. During the 1980s, activists and clergy representing different faith traditions joined together to form the sanctuary movement, heeding a moral call to welcome the stranger by opening their doors as places of refuge for Central Americans. These coalitions functioned as both humanitarian organizations and political movements, often operating in defiance of federal immigration authorities. From the movement’s inception, sanctuary activists faced opposition from a variety of actors. While this fight over refugee justice played out in churches and synagogues across the country, sanctuary’s most coordinated and vocal adversaries weren’t necessarily the well-known members of groups like Moral Majority, the Christian Voice, or the Religious Roundtable. It was instead religious neoconservatives, including the political operatives and intellectuals who fueled the political right’s march into the White House, that pivoted their think tanks, newsletters, and considerable public outreach against sanctuary. By examining how these opponents to the movement sought to tie one of their primary foreign policy concerns – staunching the spread of communism in the Americas – with more pointed efforts to keep churches clean of leftist infiltrators, this paper will explore how faith spaces became contentious sites to debate the intersections between faith, politics, and immigrant and refugee justice.