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But he feels that the New Sanctuary Movement goes further than the Bible mandates. "I think that's an awfully drastic step, to say that we are going to disobey the law," he says. [Actually, Movement lawyers claim it is technically legal, although others disagree. But part of Sanctuary's magnetism is unquestionably that by boarding illegals in a church, which the INS is unlikely to raid, it provides them de facto protection from the law.] Says Land, "I would never turn someone away. If they showed up, you should help them. But that's different from me saying, 'If you're illegal, then we will protect you from the government.' I don't think the Bible requires that."
To back his position, Land and almost every other Sanctuary opponent cite Romans13: 1-7: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God."
The obvious problem with this verse is that it makes no mention of sanctuary or even immigrants. Land is simply saying you should obey the law. And he acknowledges that there are times when obeying a law — he names the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — is contrary to Judeo-Christian morality.
Nonetheless, the passage is an important bridge to a larger — if extra-Biblical — argument. Unlike the Old Testament, the New is not overly concerned with the details of national governance. Partly because first-century Palestine was so firmly under the Roman heel, and partly because early Christianity was oriented toward citizenship in the Kingdom of God rather than of man, there's not much on how to drive down inflation or protect a border.
But as Christians became more powerful, theologians starting with St. Augustine of Hippo in the early 5th century, expanded the little there was into theories of empire and social good such as "tranquility of order," which the saint thought the state could attain through tempered justice.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, shares Land's conviction that the Bible doesn't mandate Sanctuary participation. She writes that the prooftexts refer to a situation where "there is a terrified, perhaps bleeding, usually hungry person at one's door and one takes him or her in. It has nothing to do with countries or nation states, and once one starts to move to big collectivities it gets much trickier."
Nonetheless, Elshtain, an Augustine expert, is willing to project Biblical morality into circumstances when denying entry to groups of immigrants is flat wrong, such as Franklin Roosevelt's unwillingness to admit a boatload of Jewish refugees from the Third Reich, resulting in their almost certain doom. But this, she writes, "is completely different from uncontrolled border crossing by people whose motivations are not life and death in the sense I am describing it but, rather economic."
In such cases, she feels, we may weigh philoxenia against other values. One is fairness — "there are people lined up waiting ... 10 years on lists to enter the country legally." The other is the integrity of national borders: "Hannah Arendt argued that if the state means anything, it means a territorially bounded place, a civic place that sets up terms for citizenship," and where Augustine's "tranquility of order" can be established.
Elshtain also questions the Sanctuary advocates' use of prooftexting. "When the religious conservatives do it," she observes, "liberals go bonkers. But when the left does it, they are being good Christians."
Well, that depends largely on to whom you're talking. But being on the wrong side of a prooftext battle may actually not be such a bad thing: It stretches the interpretive muscles and makes the Gospel a bit more real for having been questioned, even in soundbite form.