Sanctuary and Subjectivity: Rethinking Practical Theological Categories in Light of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s

Abstract

This dissertation utilizes interviews with participants in the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s to situate the movement as an object of practical theological inquiry. Much of the scholarship on the movement focuses on the experiences of activists, while this dissertation centers the voices of recipients of sanctuary. That focus reveals the extent to which recipients’ recitation and embodiment of fear and trauma constituted the practice of sanctuary, even as white activists found their agency augmented by participation in the movement. Through the cultivation of refugee identity for recipients, the movement restricted their agency, leading to tensions between the two groups.

This dissertation makes power as a central category of analysis for the movement and practical theological inquiry. I argue that Macintyre’s practice framework fails to account for the power differential between recipients and activists, replicating the power-obliviousness of the movement. This failure to account for power necessitates a new orientation in practical theology, and I develop a practical theology that utilizes Judith Butler’s accounts of subjectivity. In adopting Butler’s theoretical frameworks, recipient struggles for agency come to the fore, leading to a generative analysis of the movement as a site for white subject formation. Building off these insights, I offer a constructive proposal for an insurgent collaborative ecclesiology that centers fugitivity.