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Will you harbor me?
The word “harbor” becomes ever more urgent when Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), raises the ante by suggesting that colleges and universities should lose federal funding for providing sanctuary to students whose immigration status is in question.
“Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you? Would you harbor a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew?” The haunting lyrics from Sweet Honey in the Rock, a women’s singing group, need to reverberate through our individual and collective conscience today. Thanks to divisive, scapegoating rhetoric promulgated during the elections, we could add more categories still, including and especially “immigrant.”
{mosads}University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann is leading the way with a clear ethical response: her institution will become a sanctuary campus by not releasing data on undocumented students to federal agents or allowing them access to campus without legal injunctions.
Her actions to safeguard the freedom and spirit of the academic community are a model worthy of emulation and soul-searching among heads of educational institutions, faculty and students nationwide.
Soul-searching is already happening, including at Fuller Seminary, an influential evangelical institution and the largest multidenominational school in the country. This debate in the academic community mirrors similar ones happening among mayors and law enforcement officials who must consider how to safeguard the people in their jurisdictions. It strikes at the heart of who we are as a nation and how we will ensure the dignity of everyone within our borders.
Some people are taking a “wait and see” attitude, believing that the rhetoric of the incoming president will be worse than his actions. I take him at his word, however. This is a time when people of conscience must be prepared to make the moral choices needed to save lives.
Sanctuary movements have a long history of people of faith and moral courage rejecting immoral policies and practices to stand up for those targeted by the principalities and powers of their day. Such movements have taken many forms through the years.
Think about the underground railroad: a network of people risked their own lives to provide safe passage for slaves seeking freedom; or regular citizens all over Europe during WWII, who resisted by whatever means to save Jews; or in the 1980s when churches provided sanctuary for refugees fleeing repressive regimes in Guatemala or El Salvador, who were seeking asylum. Churches like Southside Presbyterian in Tucson, Ariz. were part of the sanctuary movement then and are still leading the way today.
For Christians, this season of Advent is one of “active waiting.” Active waiting means that we work to “prepare the way of the Lord” through acts of justice and resistance, even as we wait for the coming of Jesus, the one who was born to poor parents of questionable status. We believe in a God who is our “refuge and strength,” and who requires us to be refuge for each other, to welcome the stranger, to be of service to brothers and sisters and all those “others” created in the image of God.
It’s time for Christians to remember that we are those whom God calls to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly. It’s time to denounce the voices that try to divide us from one another by creating a mythical fear of “the other” alongside a mythical false hierarchy of value — that some lives are more deserving and worthy than others. These values of justice and kindness are not just Christian but mirrored in the tenets and practices of people of many faith traditions, who work together to build multifaith movements for justice.
We will not support federal agents operating in such a way that they exacerbate an atmosphere of intimidation, suspicion and fear. We cannot yield as individual entities or sectors to the intimidation and threats about loss of funding.
What we do need from our elected officials are fair and just immigration policies that keep families together, honor the labor that immigrants of varying status do everyday to build this country, just as our immigrant ancestors did in their day, and offer refuge to those brought here as children, who have spent their whole lives among us as students, workers and neighbors.
There always comes a time for an individual or a leader or a people to choose, to make ethical decisions of consequence for the short and long term. The moral question regarding sanctuary and refuge is already upon us. “Will you harbor me? Will I harbor you?”
Henderson is president of Auburn Seminary.
The views expressed by authors are their own and not the views of The Hill.
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