A Conversation with the Rev. John Fife on Civil Initiative and the Sanctuary Movement by Geoff Browning

The Rev. John Fife says it was all the fault of Jim Corbett, a Quaker and rancher in the Tucson area. In fact, he says, almost all the good trouble he has gotten into in his life is because of those Quakers. It all started one day when Corbett confronted John about two times when the church was challenged to live out the biblical call to welcome the stranger. The first was the abolitionist movement of the 19^th century which was empowered by the church. The second was in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s when the church utterly failed to defend the poor and powerless Jews that led to the Holocaust.

Then Corbett said that the Salvadoran refugees fleeing the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s are the next challenge to the church. John explained that Corbett asked if he was ready to get involved for the purpose of saving lives. John confesses that he tried to dodge the question saying, “I’ll pray about it.” Well, as we all know, the Rev. John Fife did get involved, deeply involved in the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s. John, Corbett and many others began an “underground railroad” throughout the country to more than 500 sanctuary congregations. This eventually led to many of them, including John, being indicted and convicted of harboring and transporting “illegal aliens.”

John explained that they realized that they should not call their work “civil disobedience” because they didn’t believe they were breaking the law; it was the federal government that was breaking the law by refusing to provide asylum to refugees from the Salvadoran war. The reason the government was unwilling to provide asylum was because the Reagan administration was supporting the dictatorship of El Salvador and providing asylum would force the administration to admit that the Salvadoran government was responsible for gross violations of human rights. Consequently, all requests for asylum from Salvadorans were denied and many were repatriated to the country only to be executed or disappeared.

The alternative description that John and Corbett came up with was “civil initiative” which they define as “the legal right and responsibility of every citizen to protect the victims of human rights violations when the government violates human rights.” The Sanctuary Movement ultimately sued the Attorney General of the United States for failure to uphold US asylum law. With the threat of depositions being exposed to the public, the US Attorney General promised to begin upholding US asylum law and withdraw sentencing for those who had been convicted.

But the question which the church must answer is this, are we ready to welcome the stranger? Are we willing to commit ourselves to “civil initiative” again in order to protect the victims of human rights violations when the government violates human rights?