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Grace Yukich

Dissertation Summary: “Praying With Our Feet: Religion and Immigration Politics in the New Sanctuary Movement”

Religion’s supposedly problematic “intrusion” into politics is a hot topic in public debates. Despite the theoretical and ideological conceit of the separation of church and state, however, religion and politics are rarely separate in everyday practice. Current sociological accounts of the relationship between religion and politics have failed to sufficiently represent this empirical reality. While existing research recognizes their penchant for interaction, most analyses treat “religion” and “politics” as separate spheres with the potential to influence one another. This research challenges existing frameworks, arguing that at times the two spheres converge to the extent that they become virtually indistinguishable. To better account for this complex, shifting relationship, I develop a “theory of the overlap”. Using an extreme case of religious-political commingling to investigate the tensions emerging from the overlap of religion and politics, the theory of the overlap isolates the processes and mechanisms by which these abstract tensions become manifest at the local level in practices that are peculiarly “religio-political”. This theory is grounded in extensive fieldwork on the New Sanctuary Movement, a growing social movement based in religious communities and working for immigrant rights. The New Sanctuary Movement (NSM) is an interfaith coalition of religious communities who partner with mixed-status immigrant families, in which some are U.S. citizens and others are undocumented and undergoing deportation proceedings. NSM activists offer these families “sanctuary” in the form of spiritual, legal, and financial advocacy and accompaniment. Rather than portraying this movement as “really” politics masquerading as religion (a common theoretical approach in sociology), this project moves past this false dichotomy by emphasizing the ways people “pray with their feet,” fusing the typically religious with the traditionally political in innovative and compelling ways.

My dissertation, “Praying With Our Feet”, is based on a combination of a year and a half of participant observation and 70 interviews with New Sanctuary Movement activists in New York and Los Angeles. I find that the initial organizers’ commitments to a religious-political vision for the movement led them to choose “sanctuary” as their main strategy and rallying point because of its historic association with religious-political action- most famously in the case of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, which sheltered Central American refugees in houses of worship to prevent their deportations. While activists expected “sanctuary” to enable them to build off the powerful religious-political symbolism of the former movement, the goals, strategies, and context of the New Sanctuary Movement differed too significantly from earlier incarnations of sanctuary, forcing activists to “re-imagine” sanctuary. The confusion, ambiguity, and disunity that resulted from the reframing process played out in various struggles at the local level. These conflicts were shaped in part by the movement’s desire to maintain a balance between the religious and the political, making them peculiarly “religiopolitical” in many ways. For instance, activists’ struggles over the appropriate form and content of movement leadership became intertwined with disagreements over such issues as the nature of God as authority figure versus co-worker and the long-existing tensions between interfaith “inclusiveness” versus genuine equality of faith traditions. Similarly, conflicts over whether to present sanctuary families as “victims” of the system or as “prophet/leaders” of the movement became entrenched in larger religious debates about whether charity or justice is the better model for religious activism. By understanding these practices as embedded in larger, more transcendent battles over appropriate religious-political belief and practice, I reveal how focusing on the overlap of religion and politics (rather than treating them as separate spheres influencing one another) produces richer, more empirically-grounded analyses of movements like the New Sanctuary Movement.

In illuminating these processes, this project furthers “lived religion” critiques of conceptualizations of religion that are based too heavily on religious content or the practices of religious institutions, highlighting the ways that religion is “lived out” in activist practices. It also demonstrates the inability of previous theories of religion and politics to explain the full range of the New Sanctuary Movement’s identity, perceptions, and practices, showing how the theory of the overlap is better able to account for its complexities. As the public role of religion increasingly makes headlines, more thorough understandings of the relationship between religion and politics become all the more salient. “Praying With Our Feet” not only provides a fresh, nuanced way to theorize this relationship, it also offers the first empirical account of a growing movement dealing with the contentious yet vital issue of immigration policy.