Sanctuary, Immigration, and the Borders Between Church and State
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Today I speak with two historians, Sergio Gonzales and Lloyd Barba, who just finished a fantastic series called Sanctuary: On the Border Between Church and State. I had the opportunity to act as the executive producer for the series and will be out soon for Axis Mundi Media, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement.
The story they tell is of a radical civil rights movement that confronted restrictive governmental policies on immigration from the 1980s all the way to the current moment. It's one that will change how you think about immigration, about faith, and the ways that some Americans, at least, have committed to welcoming the stranger and practicing a radical hospitality.
Sanctuary: On the Border Between Church and State- Subscribe here!
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Given the last week, I'm not sure that immigration could be more on my mind.
We've seen a conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants blow up.
It made the debate stage last week when Donald Trump said that immigrants were eating dogs.
J.D.
Vance continues to double down on this conspiracy theory.
He went on the Sunday talk shows and refused to acknowledge that there's no evidence.
He even said that he has to create stories like this in order to bring attention to the immigration problem in his mind.
One of the things that's been true since Trump emerged on the political stage is that we've associated people of faith with hardcore, right-wing, restrictive immigration policies.
But that's not the whole story.
There's in fact a much larger picture of faith, immigration, and borders in the United States.
Today I speak with two historians, Sergio Gonzalez and Lloyd Barba, who just finished a fantastic series called Sanctuary on the border between church and state.
I had the opportunity to act as the executive producer for the series and will be out soon for Max's Moody Media in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement.
The story they tell is of a radical civil rights movement that confronted restrictive governmental policies on immigration from the 1980s all the way to the current moment.
It's one that will change how you think.
about immigration, about faith, and the ways that some Americans at least have committed to welcoming the stranger and practicing a radical hospitality.
If you stick around, there'll be a preview of the series and if you're a premium subscriber, you'll get early access and you'll be able to listen to the first episode today.
We're going to build the wall.
We have no choice.
We have no choice.
Over the last decade, we've become accustomed to some of the most religious people in the country needing a chance to build a wall.
It's easy to think that to be religious in America means to think of immigrants as a threat, rather than as a blessing to this nation.
And they're allowing millions of illegals to cross the border, probably just because they're hoping they're going to vote Democrat.
In short, many now associate faith with xenophobia and prejudice.
God telling Nehemiah to build a wall around Jerusalem.
And I said, Mr. President, God is not against walls.
Walls are not unchristian.
But what if I told you that one of the biggest movements to protect migrants, to help them find a place within this country, was led by people of faith?
That's our theology, that God is our refuge and our safety, and that's where we hope to live our lives.
But also because of that, the followers of God and Jesus Christ are meant to offer that sort of sanctuary to others, to their neighbors, to fellow human beings.
What if there was a movement that has been cultivated within religious spaces dedicated to a radical hospitality to live out faith by welcoming the stranger?
And so we extended the hospitality of the church.
The congregation voted by secret ballot to declare the church a public sanctuary for these refugees.
To offer safe harbor to those who have journeyed thousands of miles and braved unspeakable violence, crossing into the United States and doing so under threat of detention and deportation.
My name is Dr. Lloyd Barba.
And I'm Dr. Sergio Gonzalez.
And we're historians of Latino migration and religion.
And we are here to share the story of this movement, one in which churches and synagogues transform the way in which Americans understand the relationship between faith and politics.
We'd like to tell you about a phenomenon that helped jumpstart one of the most important immigrant and refugee justice movements in the history of the United States, doing so from houses of worship all across the nation.
In short, we'd like to tell you a different story about faith, politics, and the borders that separate us, and the spaces that unify us.
Join us for Sanctuary on the border between church and state.
Welcome to, as I just said, our wonderful sit-down with the creators of Sanctuary on the border between church and state.
That is Dr. Sergio Gonzalez and Dr. Lloyd Barba.
So, let me say, Lloyd, Sergio, thanks for joining me.
Happy to be here, Brad.
Thank you.
Thank you, Brad.
Y'all have put in so much work to this series.
I've gotten to know you, gotten to know your style, gotten to know your expertise.
It's awesome.
It's one of those moments where I've spent so much time with the material, I can't wait for everyone else to get it.
And so I want to talk about that today.
The series is all about sanctuary.
And I think as we note in the trailer, and two of you are really great about explaining, we're used to hearing about immigration and religion one way.
And I'm just wondering if you wouldn't mind, you know, Sergio explaining, you know, if you're, you're in Wisconsin, if you're in the Midwest, if you're in the South, if you're anywhere, how are we now trained to think about like Christianity and immigration in the United States?
I think, like in many ways, the connections we see between Christianity and politics automatically takes us down one route, which is to think of it as a corrupting force within the way in which we practice politics in our communities or as a nation.
And so, unfortunately, there's been this dominating force, especially within the way in which we talk about immigration and faith over the last I mean, we could really say over the last 10 years, over the last multiple decades, that people have come to kind of understand faith and politics in immigration as just really being a question of restriction, of othering, and of pushing people to the edges of our communities.
And, you know, the story that Lloyd and I try to tell is an alternative one.
It's one that presents a different, not only past, but potentially a different future as well for the way in which we practice our faith, the way in which we practice our politics.
And, you know, the story that we tell is one that we also understand is one deeply based within biblical and scriptural teaching.
And that's, I think, the power of sanctuary.
No, it is powerful.
And one of the things I always appreciate about the way you two talk about this is it's a matter of what happened in the past.
It's also a matter of what's at stake now.
And so, I guess, Lloyd, just to jump in on that, what do you see, you know, at stake?
What is helpful about telling the story of sanctuary today in light of our current political situation?
On the one hand, if I were just to tell you straight up, I am Christian and I care about politics, your mind is going to jump to a particular kind of image, and that has largely been shaped by the rise of the religious.
A topic, of course, Brad, that you know really, really well.
And to be very clear, the scholarship emerging on this topic is really important.
I think it's good to understand the genesis of this, the ways in which Christian nationalism is deployed today.
But I think Saito phrased it quite well.
We're offering a different history and also a different future.
So if you're thinking religion politics in the 80s and you think again Jerry Falwell you know the religious right.
We got to think about sanctuary and I think you know in some of the scholarships Saito has been researching it's pretty clear that there is a conservative even reactionary force to stamp out the importance of sanctuary.
But the story we want to tell about the 1980s is this progressive In large part liberation theology based movement that seeks to humanize immigrants in this case, you know Central American refugees and I think it's it's important to dug in its past its present but it's also right now and we'll probably get into this later in the show, but we know immigration is in the air right now in the discourse on politics and Yeah, we do think a sanctuary offers a different way forward
So let's get into what Sanctuary is and the movement.
The series really takes us from Reagan's 80s and before to the current moment, right up to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions of 2024.
One of the things I just, I really do appreciate, even though the histories are full of struggle and violence and difficulty, is that you're bringing to fore a progressive religious movement of the 80s, which Most people would never think happened in the United States during Reagan's heyday.
They would have never thought that.
And you're absolutely right, Lloyd, that so many books, including mine, about Jerry Falwell and about the 80s and the religious right, but very few about this sanctuary movement.
So, Lloyd, would you set the stage for us?
Where does it begin and why is it needed?
I mean part of it is I think we too hastily jump onto this bandwagon of the decline of Progressive religion right kind of has its heyday to some extent mid 20th century and then when the religious right you know comes about as if like there's nothing in the side of progressive religion and Well, we have to think that, especially in the post-1965 world, this is a U.S.
in a new context of immigration.
Immigration opens up to other parts of the world through family reconciliation.
The restrictive quotas that started really around 1924, what historian Natalia Molina calls this immigration regime from 24 to 65, you know, that's relented to some extent at this point.
And we're seeing, yeah, in this case, the U.S.
taking in refugees.
So, an important starting point is not just the Refugee Act of 1980, in which the U.S.
adopts some of the definitions of what constitutes a refugee, and really kind of gets up to speed with much of the world and who to take in as refugees, but it's also a broad cast of actors in the borderlands, especially in Tucson.
So, we want to jump to Sanctuary and jump kind of the moment to March 24th, 1982, this all-important moment.
But on the ground, we see it's, you know, various immigrant aid councils, like the Monzo Area Council.
It's also the Tucson Ecumenical Council.
These are folks asking the same questions.
I think they both offer different solutions individually, but together they roll out privately first, sanctuary, then publicly.
So I'd say start with that.
So we have the 1980s, 1982, we're in Tucson, and we have various groups working to build infrastructure to welcome people they consider refugees to the country.
And they, as Christians, are saying, this is part of our living out the gospel.
We have a radical hospitality.
We welcome the other.
Jesus said, if you welcome the least of me, you welcome me.
So that's what we're going to do.
But Sergio, who were the refugees and why did they need welcoming?
Why were they leaving their homes in order to come to Tucson and other parts of the United States?
Yeah, there are a series of really traumatic revolutions and civil wars that are really wracking Central America.
I think you're about Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.
And there's civil wars that force this extreme displacement, right?
Anywhere from, you know, one and a half to two million people are forced to leave their homes in the second half of the 20th century.
About 250,000 people die in these revolutions that are really kind of just happening in urban and rural spaces all across this area.
But the key thing to know is that although these are very domestic affairs within these countries, they're very much influenced by the Cold War and by the fact that the United States is doing its best to stem what they fear will be the rise of communism in this region.
And so it's impossible to talk about these wars in this region without talking about U.S.
intervention.
And so the fact that there are 2 million people moving northward to Mexico, to the United States and Canada, they have to go somewhere.
And they arrive at the US-Mexico border, hoping to avail themselves of the 1980 Refugee Act that Lloyd just mentioned.
And what they find is that the United States functionally decides they're not refugees, and they do so outside of the bounds of what the law is here in the US and international law.
are supposed to make available to them.
And so you have these people of faith on the U.S.-Mexico border who see this.
They are well-trained in the law, and so they understand what these people should have access to.
And they pair that with the fact that scriptural teaching says, right at the heart, we are to welcome the stranger.
And what is our obligation when the state refuses to live up to that obligation?
What are we going to do about it?
So I want to come back to what was happening in those countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, but I want to stay on the Refugee Act just so people understand.
A lot of times we hear from those on the American right that, oh, I'm all for immigration as long as it's legal.
And then, you know, you dig into that and it kind of seems like, well, I'm not sure if you are or not, but nonetheless, let's think about this Refugee Act, 1980.
You know, Lloyd, can you just give us the basics of that?
Who is welcomed as a refugee?
This is all in the wake of the Cold War and, of course, of the Holocaust only a few decades prior.
What did that law purport to do?
So, a few things.
So, you mentioned, you noted rightly, I mean, this comes right after World War II, right?
So, in the wake of the continued diaspora of Jews, the question sort of begs of, well, how are we going to define a refugee?
Because it's, you actually find this in the sanctuary literature, that there's sort of remorse in the sense of, oh gosh, when the U.S.
could have taken in refugees, we didn't.
And so there's a couple of different UN protocols and conventions, an important one in 51, another one in 67.
And again, it's basically someone who has a well-founded fear of persecution.
And again, that's really, really what's at the heart of it.
And what you find, however, is that Jimmy Carter signed the law, the 1980 Refugee Act.
It's only a couple of months later that Reagan takes office and immediately it is a politicized definition of who could take refugees so we find at much higher numbers I mean percentages up into the 60 to 70 percent of people from communists or countries that might be affected by communist kind of again, it's all red scale language, right?
Folks from those countries are admitted at much higher rates.
In the case of refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala, it's under 3%.
So yeah, that's...
You see a political application.
So if I'm coming from the Soviet Union or if I'm coming from Cuba and I say, "I fear persecution.
I would like to be a refugee in the United States in 1981." There's a really high chance I'll be allowed to come in the country.
It's almost to the point that Salvadorans and Guatemalans are getting denied at such high rates that I don't even think we have an accurate number of those who are denied because it's already the sort of basically the template.
You apply and you get denied.
So why even apply?
So I think if we had everyone who wanted to apply actually apply.
Somehow we have much lower numbers than two or three percent.
So the numbers are two or three percent of Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, and so on, gaining access.
Sergio, what's the justification?
You know, both those from Guatemala and those from Cuba, those from the Soviet Union, are Fearing persecution at home, they're showing up at the borders.
A large percentage of the Cubans or the folks from Soviet areas are being allowed in.
Those from Guatemala, as Lloyd just said, it's a dismal percentage.
How does the government justify that?
Yeah, I think one of the reasons the sanctuary movement grows so quickly is that it's so obvious how poorly the government is executing these laws, right?
And so, I mean, these people arrive and you have to make the case when you meet with an asylum officer at the border or wherever it is that you try to claim asylum, you have to make the case for well, a case of, you know, fearing persecution.
And so these people would arrive and tell these really horrific stories of the violence that they were fleeing, the civil war that they were fleeing.
Many of them were perhaps involved in revolutionary struggles.
Many were not.
But they were fearing persecution, and they were semirally being denied.
And instead, what the Reagan administration would call these people would be, quote unquote, economic migrants.
So basically, The argument was these people are like all of the other undocumented immigrants that are arriving from Mexico at the U.S.-Mexico border.
All they're looking for are jobs and opportunities.
And you know, when the Reagan administration was being nice, they would say, we completely understand.
We wish this land of opportunity could be available to everyone.
But you know, we're in the middle of a recession.
There's no way we can do this.
You know, the United States is full.
We just can't be this place of refuge for all the people who need jobs and employment.
The reality, of course, is these people were actually looking for safe harbor from refuge from the violence that they were facing in their countries.
And Americans at the U.S.-Mexico border who encountered these people saw that.
And eventually, as these stories got out, Americans all across the nation came to realize that as well.
We've been hearing a lot in the wake of conspiracy theories being spread and the presidential debate in September that Haitian immigrants in Ohio and these conspiracies about eating pets and being in the United States legally illegal and so on.
And, you know, I bring that up because the United States has a long history of intervening in Haiti, of occupation, of placing leaders there and so on.
And it's the same with what was happening in Guatemala and El Salvador, Nicaragua.
So I just want to highlight for folks that if I'm leaving a quote unquote communist country like Cuba, I'm allowed refuge, but in order to prevent there being communism in Central America, the United States has to intervene and send a lot of arms and stuff.
But the people coming from that potentially Soviet place are not Soviet, but that potentially communist place are summarily denied.
I mean, do I have that right, Sergio?
Yeah, I mean, the logic just starts to spin in circles when you think about it, right?
I mean, there's this classic saying we have in Latinx studies, right?
Before I was here, you were there, right?
This idea that there's a reason why people are forced to leave their country in the first place.
And, you know, in the 1980s, it was a very stark reason of American dollars going in to support military regimes and dictatorships that were suppressing people, that were funding death squads, that were making life completely unlivable.
Today, these questions are a little bit more dispersed, right?
I mean, the United States is no longer doing it that objectively clearly in these places, but American intervention through economic decisions, through the way in which we support certain businesses in Latin America, and then, of course, the historical ramifications of decades and decades of U.S.
placement in these locations.
has forced people to functionally have to make decisions, right?
Am I going to go on to stay in this place where it's either dangerous or there's nowhere I can provide for my family, or am I going to try to find a better opportunity for us?
I would just add briefly, so one way to, you know, to think about the kind of the logic operating for the Reagan administration, the Reagan administration, if they were to offer refugee status to people fleeing countries in which those countries, the Reagan administration is backing the dictators, I mean, you really, their hands are tied, right?
They're kind of hamstrung on that one.
They can't say, oh, we're going to offer refuge to you.
But also, sorry, we're the ones propping up these dictators in these countries.
So that was one of the reasons why they relied on the argument, oh, these are economic migrants.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm going to just move on because I don't want to get worked up.
Lloyd, let's talk about those who are offering Sanctuary, who are becoming the agents of networks that are considered and dubbed the New Underground Railroad.
Who are some of the first, if there's one or two people, and what was their explanation of basically Breaking the law and putting themselves at risk of jail time or anything else because they were housing undocumented folks from the countries we're discussing in their churches.
That's what sanctuary was.
It was welcoming folks into a church, into a sanctuary and saying you have safe harbor here and the government will not come in.
The government will not raid the church.
The government will not send a SWAT team to tear up the sanctuary or the narthex or the chapel or the parish.
destroy everything in order to get whoever they think is in there and and deport them so who are some of the folks that were doing that what what did they say caused them to act historically You know in some of the literature on sanctuary we have at least two key players much more again really a broadcast but we have John Fife who's a pastor of South Side Presbyterian Church in Tucson so
So it's at John Fyfe's church on March 24th, 1982, the two-year anniversary of the assassination, or to put in religious language, the martyrdom of Oscar Romero while he offered mass in the hospital in El Salvador.
He was gunned down by military forces.
On that day, so to your anniversary, the church publicly does what it's been doing in private.
It declares sanctuary.
And I wish I had the image in front of me, Brad, to show you.
One of the banners says, La Migra no Profane al Santuario.
La Migra being shorthand for immigration authorities.
Immigration authorities shall not profane the sanctuary.
So kind of demarcating sacred space.
So, there's Southside Presbyterian and John Fife says that he was really prodded to do this by Jim Corbett, who is this really super interesting... I mean, there's so many slashes to his description.
Goatherder slash Harvard-trained philosopher slash librarian slash professor slash...
Border?
Yeah, Quaker.
Quaker, right?
Also Quaker.
Yep.
Really fascinating figure.
Wrote prolifically during these years.
So we have Corbett, a Fife, and also churches who declare sanctuary on the same day in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It just picks up very quickly thereafter.
I can have Sedgwick fill in a bit more.
I'll pass the buck.
Well, one of the things too, Sergio, is that it's not even limited to places people might expect.
You know, the Tucson, San Francisco, the Southwest.
You're a Midwesterner through and through.
You're a Wisconsinite.
I know you probably don't like to talk about Chicago, but I will say, you know, Chicago becomes a hub of the sanctuary movement.
How does that happen?
That is not the place I think most folks listening would expect there to be these large networks of churches.
welcoming migrants from Central America.
Yeah, Sanctuary is born in the borderlands, but the national movement is really born in Chicago, right?
And the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America, which was this solidarity organization, a really leftist group that had eventually, you know, at the beginning was just arguing against U.S.
intervention in the region.
They take up Sanctuary as their main cause and they really become the clearinghouse, the hub for the movement.
They take it upon themselves to set up the structure by which they can move people from the U.S.-Mexico border all across the United States, but they also developed this really robust system by which parishes and congregations and temples can begin to go through what they refer to as a discernment process, right?
You have to begin to have this educational process by which congregants can ask themselves, what is going on in Central America?
What is our responsibility as Christians and as Jews to do something about this?
And so they literally create how-to manuals.
They have books that they publish, and they spread this all across the nation.
So Chicago does this, you know, just a few months after the origins of Sanctuary in March of 1982 in Tucson.
And by the end of the year, Tucson has spread all across the country, including here in Milwaukee.
And you have all types of congregations that are involved in this work, right?
Every single mainline Protestant domination, Catholics, Jews, are doing this work because they feel like their scriptural teaching obliges them to do it.
All right, so we've got seven episodes on this, and you all tell the story masterfully of what happens in the 80s.
There are court cases, there are raids, there are high drama moments.
So we're not going to give it away.
And I'm going to encourage folks that you need to go listen to episode one, and then in the subsequent weeks, episodes two, three, four, five.
I want to fast forward to the post 9-11 context, because the 1980s and the 1990s are one story.
There's a renewed need for sanctuary after 9-11.
What are the circumstances that lead to that renewed need for churches and other religious groups to be thinking about this, Lloyd?
Oh, goodness.
We have a pretty clear end date for sanctuary work in the early 90s, one of them being the American Baptist Church settlement, in which the cases of Salvador and Guatemal will be re-evaluated.
That doesn't mean that sort of this This apparatus that historian Adam Goodman refers to as a deportation machine is slowed down any right?
I mean this is The early 1990s you have things like prop 187 in California that passes, you know by a majority of voters And what you see throughout the 90s is also the expansion of the border border enforcement Then you have, as you mentioned, this important moment of 9-11, and you see the US-Mexico border, the building of it, the securing of it, all sort of technologies, wartime technologies that are brought to secure it.
And we have a case, really the sort of the watershed moment for the New Sanctuary Movement in 2006 in Chicago.
Elvira Arellano takes sanctuary at Alberto United Methodist Church.
She, Brad, is caught up in this immigration raid at the Chicago O'Hare Airport.
It's called Operation Chicagoland Blue Skies, and the idea was that what was once INS, but now under the Department of Homeland Security as ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was supposed to go into these airports and root out any sleeper terrorists, as they called them.
They didn't net any, but what they got were a lot of honest, hard-working immigrants, many of whom felt like they were already Americans.
Elvira Arellano being this case, where she was given staves of deportation, and by 2006, it's not renewed, and she takes sanctuary, claiming, I am an American, my son born here is an American, and why tear families apart?
So it's a very different sort of context.
And leading up to it, again, the expansion of immigration, the border, and especially the enforcement of those.
So it's, you know, again, we're not going to spoil the story because there's there's a lot here, but the post 9-11 Islamophobia and fear and the Patriot Act and just all of the Bush era measures to, quote unquote, root out sleeper cells wherever they may be.
Ends up catching in its nets undocumented immigrants from Central America, from Mexico, from other places, rather than these sleeper cells they purported to want to find.
Again, I'm going to fast forward because I don't want to ruin the story.
You all have put so much effort into telling it, I'm not going to give away all the spoilers, but it goes without saying, Sergio, that the Trump candidacy and the Trump years Put a renewed spotlight on immigration, even in ways that the Obama deportations and Obama as the deporter-in-chief didn't do.
Can you just tell us how Trump as a candidate and his election catalyzed a renewed understanding of sanctuary and a reinvigoration of that whole tradition?
Yeah, I think in 2024, we might unfortunately take things for granted in the way in which things are in terms of immigration politics.
But it's no stretch to say that, you know, Trump enters the political stage in 2015 and 2016, and he completely blows up the way in which we think about demonizing immigrants, right?
I mean, it sets a completely different tone.
And houses of worship leading up to the 2016 election, I think, are watching this very warily.
And when he's elected in the winter of 2016, and as he's preparing to enter the White House in early 2017, Houses of Worship recognize they have an obligation to do something about it.
I mean, I'll just say personally, I talk about this a little bit in one of our episodes, but I was living in Madison at the time as a graduate student, and I remember attending one of these meetings in December of 2016, and people were worried, and it was the uncertainty that was the hardest thing, right?
And the call came out from Houses of Worship, what do immigrant communities need?
What do our immigrant sisters and brothers need from us?
And it was a very clear response, right?
We need a renewal of the sanctuary movement.
We need churches to step forward and use the political, social, and economic capital that they have in service of welcoming, not the stranger, as Lloyd said, but welcoming our neighbors.
Because the reality was that the people who are most afraid were often the people who had lived in their communities for decades, right?
For all intents and purposes, they consider themselves part of their communities.
They may have not considered themselves Americans, but they were maybe Milwaukeeans or Madisonians, right?
I mean, they were part of the fabric of the place they called home.
And the threat offered by an incoming Trump presidency really supercharged this call for sanctuary.
You know, and as hopefully listeners will find out when they listen to the podcast, what we talk about is really a sanctuary movement that expands not just within church spaces and temples, but into the city streets, into all locations that we might call civic life across the United States throughout 2017.
I'm wondering as we close here today and we just leave people with the chance to listen to the whole series.
As scholars, you've both been writing about this for a long time.
It's, as you note in your scholarship, not something that has been examined a lot.
You know, once again, we could point to the 1980s and the thousands of books written about the religious right, the moral majority, mine included.
You are some of the scholars who are examining this.
As academics, as humans, as activists, what do you want people to take away from listening to the series and from getting a chance to understand this story?
I'll briefly add sanctuary activists are not some upstarts that just want to enrage the federal government and, you know, act up and kind of turn the Bible into a crutch for their civil disobedience.
Sanctuary is thoroughly a biblical tradition.
It's also anchored in one, I think, very well-argued millennia of religious practice across various societies.
But even within the Christian tradition, you find centuries of this, right?
And so, one thing I would really care to people, for care to people, I would care that people know about sanctuary is, you know, it's not really too often the case that, you know, progressive Christians can win, quote-unquote, the Bible war.
So goes the saying, you know, liberal Christians won nature and the evangelicals won the Bible.
But it's really hard to gainsay the many passages of the Bible.
In fact, one of the theologians of writing on Sanctuary in the 80s says, the Bible is a story of refuge and exile.
And it's for that reason it's chock full of verses about welcoming a stranger.
Jesus has that in Matthew 25 as well, right?
Inasmuch as you didn't do it to the least of these, my brethren, you didn't do it to me.
So, yeah, it's deeply biblical and it's deeply historical.
And in all the historical cases, there's always innovation brought about to it.
And to conclude my remarks on this, it reminds me of what Jim Corbett said about sanctuary.
This is a church discovery in itself.
And also, there are rabbis who would say that, you know, this is the idea of tikkun olam.
This is a repairing of the world, as thought of in Judaism.
And societies challenge religious bodies and religious folk to adjust in new ways of discovering a church or renewing the world.
Yeah, and I think what I would add to that is, you know, I think faith when lived out in public space and done well is an invitation.
And when I think about sanctuary in the 1980s and its present day, it's an invitation to engage in the conversion experience, right?
Because if your understanding of Christian faith today is very bracketed by the parameters that we opened with, right, thinking about the way in which the church can be a restricting space, sanctuary offers an alternative.
I think about Sister Darlene Nagorski, who is an important player in this story and someone that we talk a lot about in our podcast, but also somebody I had the pleasure of meeting.
She was a Milwaukeean.
I interviewed her for my research, and she often talked about the way in which she came to know her faith a lot stronger because of the work that she did, right?
She understood that the obligation to welcome the stranger, to serve the marginalized, to walk with those who have been pushed to the edges of our society, is at the heart of what it means to be a person of faith, to be a Christian.
The other thing that I would note here is that Sanctuary in its 80s iteration and today knows no political party.
And I think the important thing to note here is that both Democrats and Republicans in 2024 are suffering from this desire to only look at undocumented members of our communities, to look at asylum seekers and refugees as people to be feared, as people to be kept at the border, as people to never welcome.
And it's an impulse that has crept into both political parties.
And, you know, in the 80s and in today's iteration of sanctuary, this is not a political movement in that way, right?
This is about politics lived out through faith and trying to live out that injunction to not only welcome the stranger, but also, as the book of Ephesians calls us to do, to see people as strangers no longer, right?
These are our neighbors.
These are people that we have the space, not just physically, but in our hearts to welcome as well.
Yeah.
Wonderfully said.
I'm going to leave it there because I want everyone listening to check out the show notes, go to the show page, hit subscribe.
Episode one is going to be available to you very soon.
And this really is a masterclass and two historians telling a story that most people don't know is an integral part of modern American history.
It's an integral part of modern American religious history.
I don't say this flippantly, and I'm not saying it to be either snarky or triumphant, but This is also a story where there are a lot of white Americans putting themselves on the line for newcomers to the country.
And that's not something we're used to, I think.
I mean, I know that when I was listening, I was thinking, there's a lot of white Christians here from Chicago or Arizona, you know, whether it's Corbett and Fife or anyone else, who are risking going to jail.
I think we're pretty accustomed.
This show's called Straight White American Jesus.
We spent 700 episodes analyzing white Christianity in America and the ways it has not always, but in many cases, fueled racism and xenophobia and misogyny.
So this is a story where there's a lot of There's a lot of white folks from the Midwest, you don't expect, getting really deep and really risky with their lives.
And I think that's something that is an interesting facet of this too.
It's not a normal or common facet, I think.
So all that to say.
Go subscribe right now.
Just hit the, hit the subscribe button.
Where can people, you all are going to be doing events and we're going to be setting those up and we're going to get you in front of as many folks as we can.
But where can people find you in the meantime?
You can find me on X at El Profe Barba.
I'm also on Instagram, the same name, and I'm trying to use threads nowadays.
So you can find me there too.
Oh no, that's probably gone threadbare at this point.
That's good, Lloyd.
Now, you can find me on Next as well, smgonzalezwi.
And, you know, both Lloyd and I are doing our best to bridge our academic work to a public audience as well.
And so pretty soon Lloyd and I will be rolling out with an edited volume on histories of the sanctuary movement, because Brad, to your point, I think there is so much more that so many people need to know about this movement, not just academics, but as many people who we call our neighbors as possible.
Just fantastic.
Can't wait to share this with you all.
It's going to blow your minds and it just changed how you think about things.
As always, find us this week with It's in the Code with the weekly roundup.
And starting here very soon is Leah Payne with Spirit and Power talking about charismatic and Pentecostal Christians and what's happening with them politically and culturally as we lead up to the November elections.
