An Unorthodox Comparison: Churches and Schools within U.S. New Sanctuary Movement

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Issues regarding imperialism, gender, as well as conventionalism in examination of religion, education, and society

Proposal

A doctrine in comparative education is that we compare similar types of educational institutions (Phillips and Schweisfurth, 2014). Indeed, models inducting students into the field assume an essential truthfulness in comparison between similar types of institutions, such as school districts, and direct our attention instead to differences in the contexts within which these institutions exist (Bray and Thomas, 1995). However, when comparative methodology is broadened to examine across institutional types (that is, for instance, between schools and non-schools), questions arise regarding the conditions within which this might be soundly done. Is the comparison legitimate? Is the comparison sound? What justifies such a cross-institutional examination? Taking up the instance of comparing U.S. Christian churches with secular public schools in the U.S., I focus on the following question: When might a cross-institutional comparison provide unique insights into the identities and behaviors of schools? In addressing this question, I focus on The New Sanctuary Movement (NSM) in the U.S., with a look at churches as well as schools that have mutually identified themselves as “sanctuary institutions.”
The literature review is divided into the following areas: 1) Institutional Distinctions and Convergences; 2) Christian Churches in Social Justice Movements; 3) Public Schools in Social Justice Movements; 4) The New Sanctuary Movement. In the first area, I examine how U.S. churches and public schools are differently defined, and carry out in many ways fundamentally different missions. I further the discussion of institutional distinction through an overview of church-state law in the U.S. context, with particular reference to seminal U.S. Supreme Court cases that have enforced the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The paper quickly follows with a discussion of “convergences” between the two institutions, noting firstly the long history of church involvement in the schools, particularly with reference to Protestant hegemony (Fraser, 2000; Moore and Kerby, 2018), and secondly the imprints of this hegemony, particularly with reference both to a common moral framework, as well as the current “culture wars” over school practices and school curriculum (Zimmerman, 2022). In discussion of their mutual roles in social justice movements, I next examine Kowalewski and Greil (1990)’s delineation of key environmental conditions that affect the structure of relationships among religious and political elites. Specifically, Kowalewski and Greil take up the social contract, whereby the church provides socialization into the state’s political, economic, and social norms through providing religious services, education, and the like “in return for the state’s non-interference in, and / or support for, the church’s activities” (p.3). Where the church has reached a positive concordat, the institution should have ample motivation to engage in ideological and organizational battles against rebellious political movements. However, as the concordat becomes strained, so also are churches more likely to play at least partially supportive roles in rebellious political movements, and in the cases where the social contract has been completely severed, quite heavily involved in rebellion. Like churches, public schools historically have more typically been a part of social formation supporting tradition and order rather than agents spearheading radical change vis-à-vis social justice movements (Williams, Rhodes, and Dunson, 2007). However, also like the church, when tensions with the state arise, so also do schools begin to embrace social justice themes and actions. This latter point in fact describes and captures the co-emergence of church and school involvement in the New Sanctuary Movement.
The New Sanctuary Movement (NSM) was publicly launched in U.S. major cities in May 2007, during the George W. Bush administration. The focus of the church movement has largely been around providing sanctuary in various forms to undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation. Following the 2016 presidential election of Donald J. Trump, hundreds of school districts across the United States also started declaring themselves as sanctuary spaces, meaning that they would guarantee certain legal protections including the federal right to public schooling regardless of immigration status, and they would enact limits on immigration enforcement actions in the schools. This was in direct response to the Trump administration, which framed the sanctuary seeker her or himself necessarily a criminal. Key in this the paper is the discussion that NSM has been a movement supporting sanctuary from the state (Caminero-Santangelo, 2013; Yukich, 2013; Ridgley, 2013). This is critical to the comparative case; while the provision of sanctuary has served a historical role for many churches dating to at least the Medieval period (Shoemaker, 2011), the provision of sanctuary is not a theme closely coupled with the history of U.S. mass schooling. In essence, mass schooling would be geared toward socializing young people into the state, rather than refuge (or “sanctuary”) from the state, through personal identification and role performance. In summation, while one may hold that sanctuary is indeed intrinsic to the practices if not identity of the church, the evolution of mass education implies nearly the opposite for the public school, in that students would (in principle and design) learn to love and identify with the state, rather than fear the state and find protection from such fear within the school.
This paper advances that sanctuary churches and sanctuary public schools have thus emerged within an historical moment marked by a profound ideological schism with the state. Sanctuary identification represents an important break with normalcy; for the religious community, a strain in the concordat with the state, and for schools, a strain within the state “body”. I argue in this paper that this suspension has allowed for a convergence of identities that might not normally take place. While the paper is largely conceptual, to substantiate the above claim, I also draw upon a multi-phased and multi-year examination of sanctuary churches and public schools in the U.S. that Luis Macías (Fresno State) and I have been engaged in.
This paper is relevant to the 2024 CIES theme as the NSM is indeed a form of resistance. Further, the paper makes a novel contribution to the literature on comparative methods, opening a space for considerations of where cross-institutional comparisons might reveal unique insights about the identities and behaviors of schools.

Author

• Bruce Collet, Bowling Green State University