Ecclesial sanctuary was used as a protection from punishment throughout Christendom for more than a thousand years before entering a period of prohibition and decline beginning in the sixteenth century. The expanding jurisdiction of early-modern states, as well as the Reformation and the Enlightenment, made an institution dependent on the prerogatives of clerical power increasingly unsustainable. Statesmen, historians, and the Catholic Church’s canon lawyers had largely come to condemn sanctuary as a “hoary privilege” that might once have been needed to mitigate cruel punishments amid a “barbarous state of society” but had turned into “[an invitation] to crime” and a “public nuisance.”
The Vatican’s Codex Juris Canonici (Code of Canon Law), which was promulgated in 1917 and superseded eight hundred years of accumulated church legislation, still defended the extinct practice: “A church enjoys the right of asylum, and those who flee there may not be extracted, other than in the case of necessity, without the permission of the [bishop], or else the rector of the church.” When the Codex was updated in 1983, even this limp vestige—lacking threats of excommunication, ceding “necessity” to the discretion of secular authority—vanished, just as sanctuary was experiencing a sort of rebirth. Refugees fleeing civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador had come to the attention of religious-minded US activists who began to provide them help in crossing over from Mexico, navigating the immigration bureaucracy, and, sometimes, finding temporary residence in church buildings.
In March 1982 these activists, primarily progressive Catholics and Protestants, publicly established the Sanctuary Movement, which became a nonhierarchical network of hundreds of congregations across the country. As the Central American asylum crisis waned, the movement quietly dissipated, then reformed a decade ago and underwent dramatic growth in response to the surges in deportations under Presidents Obama and Trump. The Sanctuary Movement had inspired similar activism among churches in Western and Northern Europe in the 1980s that were responding to a wave of asylum-seekers from the developing world; this activism has likewise been revived in recent years by the Mediterranean refugee crisis.
The prologue to the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s was a limited effort among Vietnam War–era churches to provide refuge to draft evaders and AWOL servicemembers, whom military police did not hesitate to drag out. This was expected; such sanctuary was understood purely as moral confrontation, proclaiming a righteous and sheltering higher law. Although there is undoubtedly a romance in the idea of drawing a bright line between what is God’s and what is Caesar’s, church sanctuary practices should not be seen, according to the sociologist Randy Lippert, as part of “a majestic and eternal conflict between two monolithic entities—church…and state.” What allows sanctuary to function today is a tangled and contingent array of legal, political, cultural, and administrative factors. This is, as recent scholarship reveals, as it ever was.