Sanctuary History

When the class split between the history, policy, and NYU groups for the teaching module, I decided to join the history group because of my interest in history in general and due to the fact that it was the topic out of the three that I knew the least about. Though I didn’t know much about the other two, they were at least in the news and President Hamilton’s emails, whereas the only thing I could think of at the time in regards to the history of sanctuary was the picture of Jean Valjean finding sanctuary in the church in Les Misérables. So, needless to say, there was much more for me to learn. When splitting into research subgroups, I took on research into the religious history of sanctuary and the history of sanctuary in New York City. We eventually scrapped the idea of talking about New York City’s history of sanctuary, but I did find a deep and rich religious history behind both the term and the action of sanctuary.
I learned about the thousands of years old history of sanctuary in the church, until in post-medieval Europe sanctuary became a tool of the state. I also learned how the idea of sanctuary was reclaimed by churches, from some houses of worship protecting Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, to churches protecting objectors to the Vietnam War, to finally the most well-known Sanctuary Movement to protect Central American refugees in the 1980s. I also found the origins of the biblical understanding of sanctuary in an interview from a pastor in the ‘80s sanctuary movement. The main source of information I used was the fantastic article “Understanding ‘Sanctuary’: Faith and Traditions of Asylum” by Philip Marfleet from the Journal of Refugee