The trial of 12 sanctuary workers in Tucson has heated up an issue which is being hailed in many quarters as the great moral issue of the 1980’s. The movement, whose members provide protection to illegal immigrants from Central America, is protesting the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s refusal 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 U.S. without benefit of papers. If we can believe what we read in the papers, the movement is, even for nonbelievers, an opportunity to prove strength of their humanitarian convictions; for Christians and Jews, it is a test of faith.

For those who make a career out of moral outrage, the issue could not have come at a better time: it is a God-send. 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 gray haired veterans of the 60’s street-fighting that are the most delighted. William Sloane Coffin has recovered much of his old exuberance as he tells his Riverside Church congregation that, “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 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 proclaims, but persecution “will only strengthen the sanctuary movement, whose Head is just beyond the reach of the INS.”

While Coffin and the rest are sometimes 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 commitments, 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?

Before we can answer the question, we must remember that there is no right of sanctuary in the modem world. Even if there were, it could not be used to protect illegal aliens. Experts on international law sometimes try to make a case for a right of political asylum, but even if such a notion were accepted, the obligation would be imposed on governments. It is absurd to pretend that private citizens—even in groups—have the right to grant asylum.

Proponents of “sanctuary”—despite the dishonesty of the term—are aware of the problem. To justify their conduct, they fall back on religion. Jim Corbett, one of the founders of the sanctuary movement, insists that he and his friends are “following the traditional Judeo-Christian in junction to minister to those in need.” This injunction seems to involve more than the obligations of conscience; Corbett sees his actions as “the work of the faith community.” As he told the Christian Science Monitor (7 February 1985), “You can’t do it as an individual.” The bishops of three Lutheran synods (not Missouri or Wisconsin) have declared that the sanctuary churches are fulfilling obligations derived from scripture. These are, therefore, the corporate acts of congregations rather than merely individual decisions. When an individual breaks the law, he is either a criminal or a civil disobedient or both. When a church body is involved—a congregation or a national organization—it is presumably a more serious business. But in American constitutional law, churches have rather few rights.

The First Amendment expressly forbids the establishment of religion, by which is meant either a strictly national church, like the Church of England, or an international church with legally recognized rights and privileges, like the Catholic Church in France under the ancien regime. No church in the U.S. enjoys special constitutional privileges, apart from the right of individuals to establish an organization or worship as they please—so long as their activities do not conflict with laws. (Druids are, for example, not allowed to practice human sacrifice.) Where it has seemed appropriate, we have seen fit to confer special privileges on religious groups. Clerics, for example, are exempt from military service, although that was not always the case. In the War Between the States, the Episcopal Church, petitioned Congress to exempt their priests from the draft. Their petition was denied.

For most of the participants in the sanctuary movement, the defiance of U.S. law is an act of civil disobedience. In the eyes of Eric Jorstad, an American Lutheran Church pastor, it is “an act of resistance against what its supporters believe to be the unjust foreign policy of the United States towards Central America.” Civil disobedience is a murky term, which can be made to cover everything from a conscientious refusal to salute the flag or take an oath, all the way to acts of organized terrorism.

Religion enters the picture when churches forbid or discourage some practice which the state requires. Good Quakers, for example, were not supposed to swear an oath or bear arms. Throughout most of this century, there existed a rough-and-ready consensus on religious exceptions from civil obligations, but by the 1960’s that consensus was gone, and the Selective Service was flooded with appeals from conscientious objectors whose church affiliation was either bizarre or nonexistent. It became fairly obvious that religion could not be the test. Perhaps it never should have been, except in a very restricted sense. Reinhold Niebuhr, once a leading pacifist, was right to censure the inconsistency of religious pacifists who enjoyed all the fruits of civil order but insisted on their right to let others bear the burden. Groups that left the world—Shakers or Trappist monks—were one thing, but worldly and prosperous Quakers were quite another. 

Those who actively assist illegal immigration are engaged in more than a conscientious refusal to comply with INS regulations. They are actively involved in what they see as a campaign of civil disobedience against our treatment of Central American refugees. The civil rights and antiwar protests of the 1960’s are an obvious historical parallel. Civil disobedients, in the strict sense, do not simply disagree with government policies; nor do they, on the other hand, seek to subvert the system. While agreeing with the essential fairness of the system of justice under which they live, they object to specific lapses in the application of justice. They appeal not just to their own conscience but to the con science of the nation. 

Most civil rights workers acknowledged the rightness of the American principle of equal rights. What they protested was the fact that Blacks did not seem to enjoy the same legal protection as the rest of society. Many members of sanctuary congregations believe they are doing the same sort of thing. American immigration policies do, in fact, recognize the special status of political refugees. All they want, they claim, is to arouse public consciousness to the point that the government will show the same compassion to the Salvadorans as it does to the Nicaraguans. As William Sloane Coffin puts it, “We must continue the sanctuary movement in its present form until Congress makes it unnecessary to do so.” 

Although civil disobedients like to lump their activities together with the more traditional forms of conscientious objectors, their cases are different. Since they object to the application of laws and regulations, they must, as Ronald Dworkin insists, “exhaust the normal political process . . . until these normal political means hold out no hope of success.” It is not at all clear that the friends of the Salvadorans have exhausted the ordinary and routine steps of the legal and political process. They have not even succeeded in putting debate on open immigration for Central Americans high on the political agenda. It was not a major issue of the 1984 campaign, nor is it likely to be a hot item in the ’86 congressional races. But instead of lobbying and petitioning, they seem ready to break the law at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, the left has been battered in recent elections. The American people, given a chance to vote on their agenda, have rejected it decisively in 1980 and 1984. Like the spoiled children of the 60’s they once were, they refuse to abide by decisions arrived at by democratic process. Many of them, if given half a chance, would eliminate that process and substitute for “government of the people” a government in the name of the people—the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is not simply this or that policy they disagree with, but the American form of constitutional government. 

Most of the clerics express their rebellion in the familiar terms of liberation theology, an enterprise in which the emphasis is definitely on liberation and not theology. Stripped of its passionate appeal to the gospels, liberation theology calls for a violent overthrow of existing social institutions as the prelude to a reign of social justice, a formulation with which few Marxists would argue. Sister Darlene Nicgorski, one of the Tucson 12, has all the right credentials: she campaigns against “the dinosaur” Reagan, visits Nicaragua, and rants against U.S. “incursions” into Central America. William Sloane Coffin is, if anything, more open. In his speech at the “Inter-American Symposium on Sanctuary” in Tucson last January, Mr. Coffin proclaimed that “a successful revolution in Central America would not only bring economic and social change there but would also cast a few hopeful rays in our direction.” If Coffin means to imply that the “refugees” will bring the revolution home to the U.S. (a suggestion made by more than a few members of the movement), then his activities amount to more than a defiance of U.S. immigration policy, more than a protest against our foreign policy: if taken seriously, this active assistance to illegal immigration would have to be seen as part of a general program of subversion against the legal government of the United States.

By any ethical or legal standards, the sanctuary movement is on very shaky ground1 but it is not surprising if most people are confused by questions of civil disobedience. Even after dismissing all the possible justifications for the movement, a nagging suspicion remains. Christian charity, even if it is understood only in the attenuated Sunday school sense, obliges us to help the poor and unfortunate. How can we refuse to assist the Salvadoran refugees on political or prudential grounds alone?

It is a difficult question. Genuine charity is so rare a gift that we should avoid any attempt to limit it. On the other hand, most men and women have what James Fishkin calls primary moral obligations to family, friends, and community. These responsibilities take precedence over our merely universal obligation. Man is, as we must never forget, a social animal, whose sociability is rooted in his experience of family life.

Older ethical systems took account of man’s social nature. Charity, so the proverb used to run, begins at home. Aristotle wondered if a man could be accounted happy if his friends and family suffered affliction. The Aristotelian view of an ethics based on family and community is not simply a fine old idea to read about in books: it is descriptive of the way people actually live.

The older approach to the ethical dilemma presented by Central American poverty would begin by recognizing more than our “primary obligations” to our own families. Most people, in fact, see their ethical obligations as a series of rings radiating outward from the center, family and close friends, to the local community and the church, and to the nation. By the time it reaches “all mankind,” it is a weakly felt obligation, like the magnetic force of the north pole, which is powerful enough to attract a compass needle almost anywhere on earth but too weak to move a carpet tack a quarter inch.

This does not mean that a resident of Dunn, North Carolina, owes no obligation to the people of Oregon or Afghanistan, but that there is an appropriate level for the exercise of moral commitments. Individuals ordinarily exercise them on a personal and familial level, families on the level of community, communities at the national level, and nations in the international sphere. Worrying about all the problems of the Third World is not only too much for the mortal flesh of one person to bear, it is an inappropriate and dangerous burden to assume. These are essentially questions of foreign policy, not private morality. They are national priorities to be established by consensus. The intrusion of individuals and churches into affairs of state is all the more dangerous, because it invites the continued encroachment of the state upon the rights of churches, families, and individuals. 

There is a very real danger in this confusion of spheres of responsibility. Private citizens want to make decisions on the deployment of weapons or foreign policy commitments, and government bureaucrats are eager to champion the rights of children against their parents. If Catholic and Lutheran bishops (to say nothing of our great unlicensed diplomat, Jesse Jackson) want to play at being Secretary of State and arrogate the executive powers of the U.S. unto themselves, they can expect to find treasury department officials taking a keen interest in their tax-exempt activities. Government intrusion into church activities would be undesirable, but not entirely unjustified. It is increasingly evident that many church leaders and religious organizations see their role as primarily political. Their inability to keep religion and politics separate is compounded by an understanding of social ethics so incoherent and confused that in most circles it could pass for ignorance. What all this ferment over sanctuary brings home to us once again is the moral bankruptcy of so much of the religious leadership in America.