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The Ideology of Sanctuary
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10886 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
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7 / 1986 |
3,620 Words |
| Author
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Samuel Francis
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Despite a tendency to appeal to Christian charity, common decency, and other moral and humanitarian motives in assisting illegal immigrants as "refugees," the sanctuary movement operates within an elaborate ideological framework that connects it to political activism aimed at a radical transformation of American institutions and policies. Sanctuary ideology indeed makes plain that the movement is not primarily interested in humanitarian goals but in political ones, and not merely in conventional political goals but in the goals of aiding revolutionary movements in Central America and in encouraging changes in the United States that resemble those envisioned by these movements in Nicaragua or El Salvador.
Probably the major component of sanctuary ideology consists of the "theology of liberation" that has informed many of the revolutionary and Marxist movements in Central and South America in recent years. "Liberation theology" is a political and religious movement that interprets Christian doctrine as justifying or mandating radical or even revolutionary social and political change by the use of violence as well as other means. Originating mainly among Roman Catholic clergy and theologians in Latin America in the late 1960s and spreading more recently among Protestant clergy and theologians in North America and Europe, liberation theology involves much more than traditional Christian obligations to obey God's laws or Christian liberals' injunctions to apply Christian ethics in social and political reforms. The principal exponent of the theology of liberations is "Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian Jesuit and theologian and a friend of the Colombian "guerilla priest" Camilo Torres who was killed while fighting for the Castroite Columbian terrorist group ELN in 1966. Gutierrez, in the words of Richard L. Rubinstein, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Religion at Florida State University, "explicity links it [his theology] with the young Karl Marx's call...for a revolutionary praxis whose objective was to be the destruction of the bourgeois-capitalist world."
Liberation theology has played a major role in forming the ideological and political framework for the revolutionary activism and collaboration with terrorist and insurgent organizations of many Latin-American clergy. Thus Ernesto Cardenal, a Trappist monk who studied under liberation theologian Sergio Mendez Arceo and is now Minister of Culture in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, developed his version of the theology of liberation in the 1960s:
Reversing the traditional Christian doctrine that spiritual conversion was the key to the construction of a better society, Cardenal argued that a political revolution was the necessary prerequisite for a change in the hearts of men. In Cardenal's theology, the growth of revolutionary consciousness was the Second Coming of Christ, the armed struggle represented the Battle of Armageddon, and the communist society, like that of the early Christians, constituted the Kingdom of God on earth. Quoting Matthew 10: 34, Cardenal declared that Jesus had come, sword in hand, to liberate the oppressed, not to defend the peace of apathetic exploitation, and that the will of God demanded armed revolution against the capitalist system. During his trips to Cuba in 1970 and 1971, Cardenal became so infatuated with the austerity, morality, and humanist faith of socialism that he came to believe that if Castro could avoid bureaucratization, the Kingdom of God was indeed at hand in Cuba. His faith in God and in the revolution became intertwined to the point that he felt "that not only can a Christian be a Marxist, but
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