Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-10, Section: A, page: 3789.

Director: John Szwed.

This dissertation analyzes a religio-political coalition known as the U.S. Sanctuary Movement. The movement was officially inaugurated during the March 1982 public declaration of Sanctuary by Southside United Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, and comprised a network of churches and synagogues which offered "safe haven" or "sanctuary" to Central American fugitives denied political asylum by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Between March 1981 and May 1986 Sanctuary became a highly volatile locus of U.S. church-state confrontation, eventually resulting in the conviction of eight Sanctuary workers.

This ethnography argues that the U.S. Sanctuary Movement is part of a larger "discourse" about U.S. church-state relations and the "articulating presence" of religion and faith in American society. It explores how a particular group of people used religious beliefs and practices to interpret and respond to state authority, and how, in so doing, they reconstituted their cultural world--from their place in the family and church to their identity within the nation and global community.

Chapter One discusses some of the theoretical issues that the movement raises for the study of "religious" phenomena, contending that Sanctuary raises important social scientific questions about the relationship of religion to power and social change, and underscoring religion both as a dynamic social force and as a powerful medium of experience.

Chapters Two and Three provide an historical account of the Sanctuary Movement between 1980 and 1987. These chapters familiarize the reader with the principal actors and events of the movement, as well as the culture of church-state conflict framing Sanctuary.

Chapters Four and Five analyze Sanctuary as an historical tradition, and discusses the different church-state cultures underlying ancient Hebrew, medieval Christian and U.S. sanctuary practices. They also look at how each culture uniquely shaped the nature of the sanctuary "space" at different times in history.

The remaining chapters take the reader into "ethnographic" terrain by returning to the sanctuary "spaces" of the contemporary movement. Chapter Six focuses an Tucson's Sanctuary Movement as a cultural phenomenon that "articulates" individuals into a novel social group, specifically by recasting the way in which they perceive and experience themselves as a "church." Chapter Seven explores the unique experiences of Central Americans in Sanctuary and highlights how differences of language, class, culture, religion, and political views profoundly shape the ways in which Sanctuary has "articulated" Central Americans into the movement. Chapter Eight examines Tucson's underground and discusses how "border work" is an expression of both the broader Sanctuary church and a "faithful community."

Lastly, Chapter Nine examines Sanctuary's relationship to, and impact on, the reconfiguration of U.S. church-state relations in the 1980s. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)