Churches: The Concept of Sanctuary

Versus the Draft In Welksley, Mass., last week, FBI agents walked through the open door of the local Unitarian-Universalist Churcharmed with an arrest warrant. The man they wanted was Richard W. Scott, a 20-year-old soldier who had deserted his unit as a war resister, and they had come to the right place to find him. The Rev. Robert Gardiner, with the approval of his congregation, had just granted the youth the ancient right of church sanctuary. It was a symbolic gesture, of course, since neither Scott nor his protectors tried to stop the FBI from taking him away.

To the consternation of the Government, however, it was a gesture that is suddenly becoming familiar in churches throughout the nation. Virtually the same scene was played out two weeks ago in Manhattan’s Washington Square United Methodist Church, which had offered sanctuary to Draft Resister Donald C. Baty. Two Rhode Island draft evaders holed up for four days in Providence’s Unitarian Church of the Mediator this month, before police moved in and arrested them. Boston’s venerable Arlington Street Unitarian Universalist Church has twice offered similar haven, and three San Francisco churches—one Presbyterian, one Methodist and one Episcopal—have opened their doors to civil disobedients. This year’s general assembly of the Unitarian-Universalist Association called on all its churches to offer war resisters “symbolic sanctuary at the time of arrest,” while the Guild of St. Ives, an association of Episcopal lawyers, is in the process of completing an advisory memorandum to the clergy on the legality of sanctuary.

Mosaic Refuge. The concept of sanctuary dates back to Mosaic law, which held that fugitives from the laws of man could take refuge at the altar of God, who, as the ultimate source of justice, would protect them if they were innocent. Christianity broadened the idea to include protection of the guilty. The Justinian Code of the Byzantine Empire, for example, denied church sanctuary primarily to criminals convicted of high treason or sacrilege. In medieval Europe, churches were allowed to protect convicted criminals—like Esmeralda, the condemned witch and murderess of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame—on condition that they forfeit all their property and belongings to the state. The privilege of church sanctuary began to give way during the Protestant Reformation, and there has never been any legal precedent for it in U.S. jurisprudence.

Churchmen do not pretend that there is. “We are not trying to protect these boys,” says the Rev. Harold R. Fray Jr., a United Church of Christ pastor who heads Massachusetts’ Committee of Religious Concern for Peace. “We are not harboring them against the law. What we are doing is setting up a platform where their ethical and moral convictions can be made public.” Adds the Rev. A. Finley Schaef, a hip-talking Methodist pastor in Greenwich Village: “This is a conscience thing, and that is what the church is concerned about, the conscience.”

Since many U.S. church groups are on record as being opposed to the Viet Nam war, there is some likelihood that the symbolic expression of the right of sanctuary will spread further. And it might be more than symbolic. Some lawyers contend that churches could offer temporary protection to draft resisters or other violaters by demanding that police pursuers produce warrants before searching pews and manses.

Place of Confrontation. Exercising sanctuary privileges will, at best, only delay the inexorable law. Yet many clergymen are delighted with the opportunity to use their houses of worship in what they feel is an openly defiant way of supporting dissent. Roman Catholic Monsignor George W. Casey of St. Brigid’s Church in Boston says that he finds some comfort in the fact that draft resisters—most of them nonreligious—have sought the church “as a place of confrontation. Church has been fading from the sight of young America. We hear the word ‘irrelevant’ so often it makes us wince. It is good, in a strange way, to know that in the minds or maybe just in the memories of youth, a church is still a sign of moral force.”