A Historic and Hallowed Principle in Religious Life: The Useable Histories of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement

In the 1980s, congregations declared sanctuary at their houses of worship as a way to publicly mark their entrance into the decade’s refugee crisis regarding the status of Salvadorans and Guatemalans entering the U.S. Congregations declared sanctuary following in discernment process and in response to the testimonies of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees and reports form religious delegations sent to refugee camps in Central America. The sanctuary declarations or resolutions provide us a window into the shared convictions held by congregations across the country and also allow us to understand how congregations understood themselves in a genealogy of sanctuary traditions across the world and millennia deep. At their core, the various attempts to leverage useable histories pointed to a shared sense that sanctuary, in the words of Rabbi Balfour Brickner of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, constituted a “historic and hallowed principle in religious life.” Congregations across the U.S. articulated such historic and hallowed qualities by citing previous iterations of sanctuary. The brief, albeit textually rich, declaration documents and speeches examined in this talk offer readers insight into a congregation’s decision to take up such a contested public position and the uses of the past as a way to legitimate a congregation's sacred invocation. This talk teases out why these resolutions worked and what histories and usable pasts they invoked. Most of the declarations vaguely alluded to precedents in biblical times, the early Christian era, the Medieval Church, English sanctuary traditions, and the Holocaust. Together, these various histories offered a formidable long history and thus a defense of sanctuary activists’ defiance of the Reagan administration. Sanctuary leaders did not see themselves as upstarts seeking to do something new. For, by declaring sanctuary and invoking the many useable pasts, activists imagined themselves tapping into and continuing this millennia-old tradition.