The religious construction of sanctuary provision in two congregations

This research examines how two congregations constructed their participation in the sanctuary movement for Central American refugees as “religious” activity. Although members of Morristown Quaker meeting and Smithville United Methodist Church framed sanctuary provision as religious, political, and humanitarian activity, they needed to validate further the primary religious motivation and essence of their refugee sponsorship. Members established the religiosity of sanctuary participation through four main definitional and strategic negations: (a) they worked within conventional religious networks and appropriated official religious symbolism, minimizing use of available secular alternatives; (b) they enacted sanctuary as nonpolitical, humanitarian, and thus religious action; (c) they defined and experienced sanctuary decision making as extraordinary and sacred, and (d) they designated and experienced costly and risky sanctuary activism as religious activity. This last definition and strategy illustrates the sacrifice theory of value, which argues that individuals adopt sacrifice as a means to affirm and publicly demonstrate cherished but nonempirically verifiable beliefs and identities.