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The Ideology of Sanctuary
| Article
# : |
10886 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1986 |
3,620 Words |
| Author
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Samuel Francis
Samuel Francis is an expert on terrorism and national
security. He is presently connected with the U.S. Senate
Subcommittee on the Courts. |
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
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