Transcript
F: I would like to introduce to you Professor [Catherine Connor?].
CONNOR: I'm delighted to see you all here tonight. I get the rare privilege of introducing John Fife. I've known John for a number of years. When my husband, John, and I, went into Tucson, John Fife was there to meet us. We'd already, my husband had known him, and I'd heard about him, because of all his
work with MRTI. That's, what is it? Mission Responsibility Through Investment. He also had served on the General Assembly Mission Council, and he and John were on it together for several years. He is pastor of the Southside Presbyterian Church there in Tucson. This church has about 200 members. There are Native Americans, Hispanic, blacks, and some
Anglos. I have been there. It is a very worshipful, and a joyful place to worship. He studied at Washington and Jefferson College, got his BA degree there in 1962. Masters of Divinity from Pittsburgh, and recently was honored with a Doctor of Divinity from McAlester College, or perhaps they were honoring themselves in presenting this degree to him.
Other awards which he has received, the Union Medal from Union Theological Seminary in New York, 1987, Roscoe Chapel Human Rights Award in Houston in '86, Citizen of the Year, Arizona Chapter of the National Association of Social Works, Tucson, 1985, Community Services Award, University of Arizona Law School in Tucson in '85, and the Presbyterian Peace Seeker Award
in 1984, given by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. He has two sons, both of them in college. One of them is studying at McAlester College and the other one at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. His wife, Mary Ann, is a medical technologist. And she is doing clinical work with patients of AIDS, and also doing research with the AIDS
virus. John has been a good friend. I'm not sure whether he's going to tell you how he got into sanctuary work or not. Where are you, John? Oh, there you are. Gee, where can I get me a lawyer? Are you going to tell them? Good. So I will not tell you how he got into the work. It's enough to say that he was one of the ones
convicted on May 1 of conspiracy in 1986, for transporting illegal aliens, and was sentence to five years probation, and this is being appealed. And he will tell us more about that also. Without further ado, I give you John Fife.
FIFE: Thank you, Cathy. It's delightful to be here, and it, it is indeed an honor to be asked to share in this evening in memory of John Connor. John, I need to say a word about John, because all of us, on the ride down, and while we've been here in this community, have been talking about memories of John Connor. And it's one of the purposes for gatherings like this, I assume. It's a,
it's a joy. In Latin America, they have a custom that I have grown to appreciate very much. That is, when they gather together as a community of faith, they remember the names of those who have died in the faith, and who have been critical to the formation of that community, and particularly those who have been martyred in the faith. And as they repeat those persons' names, the word uttered by the congregation assembled
is "presente." They evoke the spirit of those who have gone before. The New Testament calls that "the cloud of witnesses" or "the communion of saints," or whatever you want, phrase you want to use. But in Latin America, they simply name that individual and use the word "presente," and so the name of John Connor and the response presente is very much a part of the spirit of this gathering. John was, very simply, a
model for us all in the faith, and particularly in the work of peacemaking. He was also a model for many of us, as to what it means to be a moderator of a Presbyterian church. With all due apologies to past moderators, every moderator in my experience who was elected, was elected because they had a specific concern or agenda that they wanted the church to pay attention to, and
to implement. And it is true that the track record of most moderators is that they come and they go, and they itinerate, and the church goes on and elects another moderator the next year. And the church very, is altered very little by those one-year sojourns and itinerations around the church. But more than almost any other moderator,
with the exception of the present one here, who impacted this church in ways that this church will be aware of for generations to come, John Connor and his word of peace and his sense of urgency about the work of peacemaking for this church has impacted the Presbyterian church in ways that almost no one else has ever made that kind of mark on the work of the church. And that is a great record. And also, I'm grateful to Cathy,
because Cathy and John really were in ministry together. And, and when we were on trial, and before our trial in Tucson, time and time again, at critical points, I would look up and there would be Cathy Connor, from Oregon. Just came down to be supportive, and to tell us how much, tell you how much we care about you. That kind of care and nurture of a community of peacemakers, I think is John and
Cathy's enduring gift to this church. And I, as a part of that community, am very grateful to both of you. One last thing. Cathy and I were talking earlier about that honorary doctorate at McAlester College this year. And she reminded me, and I'd heard John talk about it before, of John's word about his honorary doctorate from Lewis and Clark shortly after he became moderator of the church. There were those who thought that
moderators of the Presbyterian church must have doctor before their name. So John was given an honorary doctorate, for good reason. But John used to say it was kind of like the tail on a pig. He said, "Not much use, and it's mostly decorative, but it sure does tickle the pig every once in a while."
I want to begin by setting the context for what I want to talk to you about, because it's critically important for us to share some common understanding of how this phenomenon called the sanctuary movement, which is what I want to talk to you about, as a model, as a vision for what resistance, faithful resistance might mean for the future of the kinds of communities
of faith in which, to which we're accountable. It's important for us to have some common understanding of the context out of which, not only of the sanctuary movement, but other resistance movements in this nation in the past decade, have arisen. Witness for peace, pledge of resistance, all sorts of other resistance movements in addition to the sanctuary movement. But my experience is with sanctuary, so I'm going to use that as an example of praxis
in faithful resistance. Context began in 1979. At least, that's the frame of reference I want us to use. And that is the fact that in July of '79, there was a revolution, which succeeded in overthrowing the military dictatorship in Nicaragua. And a new revolutionary government came into power in Nicaragua, which,
because of certain, not only because it was a revolutionary government, not only because it had successfully overthrowing a client military dictatorship of the nearest superpower, the United States, but also because of the new elements in that revolution. Namely, the uniquely Christian cooperation and indeed formation of many of the revolutionary
understandings and institutions that were being developed in Nicaragua. Both the United States, that nearest superpower, and neighboring client military dictatorships were terrified by that prospect. And the nearest one, El Salvador, and the most fragile, was already experiencing widespread popular organizations of resistance
and press for revolutionary change in that nation. And the response of the military and security forces of El Salvador were to, with the advice and counsel and assistance, no, I'll take that back. I don't know assistance for a fact. I suspect assistance, but at least with the knowledge of the United States. Military
and security forces of El Salvador received direct personal and intelligence assistance from the military regime of Argentina in how to organize an intelligence and death squad operation in El Salvador. They were directly advised by the same battalion of Argentinian intelligence and security
forces that had been responsible for the torture and disappearance and death of some 20 to 30,000 Argentinians in the middle seventies. As a way of maintaining the status quo in the nation of Argentina. They directly sent advisors and training facilities to the military and security forces of El Salvador, beginning in 1979 and into 1980, and continuing
until the Malvinas War of, the war with the Falklands, when the United States sided with that war and Argentine pulled out in a fit. And of course they were replaced by Israeli security and intelligence forces in an advisory capacity. But what they were advising the Salvadoran military and security forces to do was to develop a system of intelligence
identification of the best and the brightest people of El Salvador, in order to not only identify them, but when the appropriate time came, to interrogate them through the use of torture. Some of the most highly developed and sophisticated techniques of torture. And then, after they had learned all that they could about associates and the organizations which were pressing for revolutionary change in El Salvador,
to eliminate them. And they instituted that reign of terror through intelligence and security forces in 1980, in March of 1980, to be exact. And continued through, in a systematic way through 1984, in that pattern
of identification of the leaders of those institutions, namely, labor unions, church, public health, university, teachers unions, educational institutions. To identify, gather as much intelligence as they could through sophisticated means of torture, and then to eliminate those who were considered to be the leaders of those institutions and organizations which were pressing for substantial social change, in order to maintain the
status quo. In 1984, because of at least 40,000 deaths, and that is an extraordinarily conservative figure, as a direct result of that strategy of torture and death squad and disappearance, the United States, in increasing increments of aid and assistance to that government and military
institution of El Salvador, because of the outrage of the American people against that kind of extraordinarily well-documented pattern of gross violations of human rights, basically communicated to our government, through the Congress and through various incremental votes in Congress with regard to human rights violations and military aid to El Salvador, that we would no longer stand for
that gross pattern of torture and disappearance. Especially was the outcry coming from the church, which was experiencing a rate of martyrdom unprecedented in recent history. And in 1984, the administration, recognizing that continued increments of military aid were going to be impossible to secure from, from Congress,
which was becoming more and more insistent on some diminishment of human rights violations, sent the Vice President of the United States to El Salvador. He stopped first in Miami and told Salvadoran residents in exile, members of the oligarchy there who had moved to Miami, that they must stop sending money to El Salvador from Miami to finance the
death squads and that sort of intelligence and disappearance activity. And then went directly from there, as he says, and as was reported in the hearings last summer before the Congress, to meet with what he identified as 27 Salvadoran generals and colonels who were responsible for the death squads. And told them to stop it. And they did. After four years of denying
that they knew who was doing the killing and the torture, that they had any idea of the dimensions of that matter, in one short meeting, the Vice President of the United States was able to tell 27 generals and colonels of the Salvadoran armed forces, "Stop it," and the reduced it by a factor of 10. Instead of 700 to 800 deaths a month, which had been average, they reduced it to a matter of 60 to 70 deaths a month. An incredible accomplishment for supposedly people
who did not know what was going on and could not explain it. But `instead of simply bringing about some incredible change in the rate of murder and torture in El Salvador, we also took a new word to the military institutions of El Salvador, that we would show them a better way. And that better way, of course, was to meet the new reality of El Salvador, which was that
all that death squad activity and torture had created another reality in El Salvador. It had left the members of institutions which were pressing for social change in El Salvador only three choices. One, of course, was to stay, be identified, be tortured, and die. And many people chose to remain and to endure as long as they could. And the list of martyrs in El Salvador, I don't have time
to share with you. But you know their names. We need to know more of their names. The second choice, of course, was to flee. And the Salvadoran military didn't much care whether they finally tortured and killed you, or whether you fled. The result, from their perspective, from a military strategy of survival for an oppressive and, and, extraordinarily oppressive military dictatorship, was exactly the same.
They got rid of the problem. Or the third choice, of course, was to go to the mountains with a gun. And so when the Reagan administration took office in 1981, the best estimate that they provided was that there were as many as 1500 people under arms in El Salvador. Now, the estimate is that there are somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000, depending on who you're talking to and who's estimating. But that creation
of a highly motivated guerilla army in the mountains, moving among a highly supportive civilian population, which not only fed and camouflaged that guerilla army, but supported it in terms of intelligence and motivation, was the problem that had been created by 1984. Severe military problem. And so drawing from
Mao Zedong's dictum, that if you can't catch the fish you drain the lake, and then you catch the fish, we set about to train the Salvadoran army in how to drain the lake. Which is, of course, what is called counterinsurgency warfare, low-intensity conflict, whatever you want to use the name for -- pacification
programs, AID programs in El Salvador. However you want to call it, it is clear what the strategy is. It is not a war against the guerilla army. You ignore the guerillas. What you do is you've got to get rid of the civilians from the countryside. And it's not easy to do. It's not an easy accomplishment. The Russians have been trying for years in Afghanistan. We've been trying for years in El
Salvador. Neither one of us have figured out how to do it very successfully. People resist leaving their homes and their land, particularly an agrarian people tied to village, culture, land, home. The only way we figured out how to do that is to wage war on that civilian population by starvation and terror. Starvation comes from burning everything that will sustain
human life. All crops, fruit trees are dug up, the roots are burned. Seeds are an instrument of war in counterinsurgency warfare. And so what you hear people talk about is that they're stopped at roadblocks, and they're checked for two things, guns and seeds. Can't let seeds back into the countryside. Refugees coming to our border will talk to us about the fact that, can you explain to us
why, when the Salvadoran army came through our village, they smashed all the cooking utensils and dishes? Why would they do that? Well, the military objective is to starve people out of the countryside so that they have nowhere else to go except to areas of army control, where they are dependent upon the military for food and security. That's pacification, Pentagon style. And it has become
our answer to the critical needs of the Third World. Third World cries out for bread and justice. And we give them low intensity warfare. Starvation and terror. Because starvation doesn't work very well with an agrarian people. They're too used to living on the land in hard times, through drought, all of the conditions
that they have known for generations and have learned how to endure in the midst of. They can survive in incredible ways on the land. And so what we found is its necessary not only to burn and starve people out of the countryside, but in addition to that, random bombings, military sweeps, and all of the terror that can be inflicted by a military operating in random ways
in the countryside have been employed as well, against civilian populations. And the effect is to try and drive people from the countryside. It is a war against the civilian population which we're waging in El Salvador. And in Guatemala in the highlands. We have not yet touched upon Guatemala. They were about two years behind El Salvador in that cycle. In Guatemala, the
institutions and popular organizations were less well organized than in El Salvador, and so the death squads had a shorter time frame in which to eliminate the leadership of all those institutions they could identify. But much more time to conduct the reign of terror in the highlands against the indigenous people of Guatemala, beginning in 1982. We're talking at least of 40,000 deaths, and the continuing reign of terror,
and of the institutions of pacification programs in much more effective ways in Guatemala than in El Salvador. The [model?] villages and the complete dependence on the army, and the continued sweeps throughout the highlands are a current state of affairs in Guatemala, even though Guatemala denies, for the purposes of the peace process that there's any insurgency at all in that land. And of course, we're not talking at all about the institution of
a CIA-sponsored mercenary army to make war against the sovereign nation of Nicaragua, of gross violations of international law. The decision of the World Court about the illegal activity of the United States in mounting a mercenary attack against the recognized sovereign nation, with which we still have relationships. That context of
murder, deliberate tortured, murder of tens of thousands of innocent men and women and children, some of the best and the brightest people of Central America, sponsored and with the full knowledge of our government. The institution of a mercenary army designed
to overthrow a sovereign nation with which we still have relationships in, and the verdict of the World Court against us. And in order to stop an illegal war. That context is important for us to all understand, as the context for what I want to talk to you about. I want to revisit a question that Phil [Coffin?] had with this afternoon. He doesn't usually have difficulty with questions.
But it was fun to watch, because the question came from over here, and it was, Dr. Coffin, you're a real bright fellow. And you're very good. You're a genius, and you have a lot of clout. But me, I'm just a student here, and I'm not that bright. I struggle to get through seminary. And I'm pretty fragile, and I don't have any power at all, and I'm probably always going to
be just an ordinary average person. Nobody had even noticed particularly on the street. I can understand you standing up there and saying, "You've got to get out and, as an individual, be tough and smart, and you can make a difference." He said, "What do you say to me? How do I go about this peacemaking stuff? I understand what you're saying. But what do you say to me?" And Phil struggled. And I was back there saying, "That's what I want to talk about." I want to talk about
all of us who are ordinary. And the other question came from right there, Gordon. What about those of us who are frail and who aren't all that heroic and all that touch, like Dan Berrigan or Winnie Mandela or Dorothy Day? Or the other names we've mentioned around here? What about just us ordinary folks? In that context of widespread, deliberate illegality by our government,
massive civil disobedience by the highest elected members of this government, deliberate, intentional, public, documented civil disobedience by the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the CIA, the Attorney General of the United States, the Director of the National Security Council, to name just a few.
Guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and torture and illegal war, which has cost thousands of lives. Children, men, women. What do we frail, less than genius, powerful people do? And that's where I think
the sanctuary movement has some helpful guidance, and may provide a vision for just us ordinary folks who are very frail and who cannot do it as individuals. We have neither the personal resources, nor the wherewithal to withstand the kind of attack and pressure that the government can mount against resistance movements and individuals who are engaged in resistance.
And we know that, deep down within our souls, we would like to be like Dan Berrigan. We would like to be like Dorothy Day. We would like to be like Winnie Mandela. But we know we are not. What do we do? Well, that's the question that confronted churches along the border, beginning in 1980, as that slaughter began in El Salvador. And then
in Guatemala and then in Nicaragua. And as the number of victims appeared in our streets and on our borders, and the church, and those of us as individual faith members of faith communities were confronted by that refugee population in our midst, and in our prisons, and being deported back, in some instances, to their deaths,
we had to grapple with that question. And to a person, all along the border, the response was the same. We'll do what we can as individuals, but we can't do much in the face of the kind of overwhelming pressures which were being applied by law enforcement and immigration authorities, to abandon, turn our backs on the refugee victims of that policy in Central America,
which were appearing on our border and in our streets. We began where all of us probably would begin, if we had to take a, for instance, out of context. We began by acknowledging that we knew almost nothing about refugee law and immigration law. It's not a subject I learned much about in seminary. It's not a subject most people have any awareness
of at all, and not much opportunity to be aware of it. So we went to the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a faith community, representatives of churches. Met with INS officials in Tucson, and I know in Texas, and I know in Southern California, and I assume all along the border, as those victims began to show up. And their plight became obvious to us. What we said was,
"How can we help?" And they said, "Well, we have good law in the books. Political asylum is how you can help. And what you need to do is help these people apply for political asylum. You need to get them lawyers. You need to work with paralegals. You need to develop translators and people who can help them fill out their forms and provide counseling for them. And if they're eligible for political asylum under the law and the international law and language of that.
Those statutes have been adopted now in United States law, just in 1980, just this year. Why, we then will, will be sure that they get political asylum if they deserve it." Well, we began to do that. And the churches and faith communities decided to work in as much cooperation with civil authority as we could, in order to accomplish what we understood
good law was intended to accomplish. And that was our responsibility, governments' responsibility, to protect refugees and human rights. The bottom line. And especially to protect them from deportation back to a place where they had a fear of persecution or where their lives were in danger. And so we did that. Just in Tucson alone, we raised and expended over
$100,000 within six months. From individuals and faith communities just in Tucson, Arizona alone. And that record was multiplied all along the border. But all along the border, churches who began out of a spirit of cooperation with civil authorities soon made devastating discoveries through their experience. And that was that the administration which took office in 1981 had said to
everyone, "We think that this human rights stuff is a direct threat to our national security." And when they took office in January of 1981, they said, as clearly as the Secretary of State Haig could say, "We are no longer going to emphasize human rights. We're going to emphasize a concern about terrorism." Nobody asked him about why they couldn't do both. But that's what they said. We should have taken them literally. And the law, the 1980
Refugee Act, which was passed under a previous administration as a kind of culmination of their emphasis on human rights and their concern for human rights and their desire to institute a concern for human rights at a policy level, throughout the whole policy of the government, particularly in the matter of foreign and military affairs, was gone. And the administration which took office in 1981 decided to
ignore that law. And to go back to what the law had been before 1981, which was very clear. That law, adopted in 1952, at the height of the McCarthy era -- not Gene, Joe -- said, "United States refugee policy will reflect our Cold War political ideology. And we will give political asylum to those who flee communist countries
and some areas of the Middle East." That was it. No one else. And we will use refugee policy in order to emphasize the good guys versus the bad guys aspect of Cold War ideology. That our enemies create refugees because they persecute people, but our friends and allies do not.
And we will institutionalize that in terms of policy. So what we saw, of course, was that no one from El Salvador or Guatemala was granted political asylum. That's not literally true. Nineteen eighty and 1981, while the Salvadoran military, with the full knowledge of the United States, were seeking out, hunting down, torturing, and then murdering or disappearing somewhere between 22,000 and 25,000 Salvadorans.
We found two people from El Salvador to whom we granted political asylum. Two. Everyone else, everyone else was ordered deported, that we could get our hands on. And where we mostly got our hands on them was at the border. There, helicopters, tracking dogs, electronic systems, infrared scanners, all of the high tech ways of keeping track and capturing people
were employed against the most helpless, defenseless people on the face of this globe, namely, refugees. Without documents. Fleeing for their lives and the lives of their families. Well, it was obvious that we had to move from cooperation to protection. First move in the development of a resistance movement. Cooperation with civil authority, when
that failed and we realized that widespread illegality, defiance of the United States in international law, widespread violations of refugee and human rights, which were being deliberately institutionalized by the highest levels of authority in our government. Then, of course, the immediate need was an immediate response of, we must provide protection for the victims. And
as we searched for ways to do that, the only way we could think of was the ancient gift of God to the church called sanctuary. It was all that we had left. And I want to throw in a disclaimer here immediately. And that is, of course, that we did not know what we were doing. What I am telling you is the result of reflection. When we were
doing it, we were in the midst of a whole series of human crises. And all we were trying to do was do what, kind of desperate people, what occurs to desperate people in the midst of a crisis, and we only had time to reflect on it years later. But the move was from cooperation to protection, and we conceived of that as the ancient tradition of sanctuary in the church. And so our first move
was secretive protection within the church. And of course, we realized the futility of that after a while, because only a few lives could be saved. But the systemic problems endured. Because they were as a result of widespread, deliberate policy decisions by civil authority. And so the next move was the critical one. It was the move
from protective community to prophetic community. And it was the point at which we frail individuals realized that we needed each other, and we could not endure for very long alone. And so the decision was made to move to a corporate decision by a congregation
to provide public sanctuary for Central American refugees. And that process of that decision-making, in our congregation and in congregations since then, across the country, has been truly miraculous. Four hundred fifty Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish congregations have now corporately reached a decision that they must be in faithful resistance to civil authority.
And have taken that position by decision of that community of faith and have made that witness public as their understanding of what faith requires them to do. And that community became truly prophetic when we stumbled upon, quite by accident, the phenomenon of
refugees, the victims of themselves. From within that protective community, being able to speak truth to power. At that point, prophetic community became a true reality when we embodied the truth that, not only does God dwell with the poor and the oppressed, but we must allow the victims of the selves to become the voice
which speaks truth to power. This prophetic community, what, understanding that in the face of massive illegality on the part of civil authorities, massive civil disobedience, massive crimes against humanity being committed by the highest authorities in our government, required
us to not only protect the victims, but publicly give witness to what we believe the faith required us to do and to be. And allow, give protection to the victims to speak about their suffering. And about the human dimension of policy decisions which government was deliberately trying to disconnect us from.
That does two things. It holds government accountable for their crimes, and that's most important. It is only the public prophetic witness of communities of faith in the sanctuary movement that have tried to, over and over and over again, in grassroots communities across the United States, hold government accountable for their crimes against humanity. And secondly, it does
hold the community of faith itself accountable to the civil authorities and the civil community. What we do, we must do publicly. Not only to hold government accountable, but so that we might be accountable, too, for our actions. Accountable to the law, because if our contention is that it is the civil authorities who are engaged in illegal
activity and civil disobedience, then if we are to be at all a community that creates justice, we must be accountable to the civil courts, and to the civil authorities, and to the civil community for our actions. One of the facts that tempt us all, must tempt as all, must compel us all, to move from individual acts to community-centered acts, to
communion-centered acts in faith communities, is the fact that individuals can resist injustice, but only communities can do justice. And if government fails in their responsibility to protect human rights and to protect refugees, then communities must arise that take that responsibility. And I will make the point in a
moment, that it is only the church that has that capability as an institution. But I want to hold that for just a moment. That's the face side of the question. What I want to talk briefly about is the civil side of that question. In addition to our faith responsibilities, which I don't think there's any question about,
it is clear that we have an accountability and a responsibility under the law to defend human rights and to defend refugees' rights when they are placed in jeopardy by government, by civil authority. That was first articulated in our own Declaration of Independence in this nation, when the framers of our own revolution and the institution of democratic government
here in this land said that there are certain inalienable rights, which they said, were God-given. They both made it a civil and a faith framework. Said they agreed. There's no quarrel here. That no government, no magistrate, no legislature, no king or queen can ever take away.
And if they do, if they do, if they try, then they lose any claim to legitimacy or allegiance. Automatically. It's not a quarrel. Nuremburg, and the Court at Nuremburg, understood that clearly. Said that just following orders, just being civilly obedient, is no defense when it comes
to human rights and human life and refugees' rights being placed in jeopardy. That every one of us, as individuals and each of us as institutions, has a responsibility to the international community that transcends national obligations of obedience. And that not only each of us, but each institution has a responsibility to defend human rights when national
orders and obligations compel their violation. And that just following orders is not a defense. If refugees' lives are placed in jeopardy, if refugees are about to be deported to a place that is a gross violator of human rights, that utilizes torture as an
institutional means of interrogation, and a legal means of interrogation, if there is a regional war which is affecting entire civilian populations, and which has displaced entire populations as a result of starvation and terror, if those conditions exist, and people are being deported back to those conditions, we have no choice under the law. We must resist civil authority
engaged in those crimes against humanity, those gross violations of human rights. And if we fail, we fail in our legal obligation as well as our faithful obligation to resist. In this case, there is no difference. We call it, in order to distinguish this kind of activity, this kind of legal
activity, civil responsibility from what is normally understood as civil disobedience, which was so eloquently described by Dr. [Dryer?] earlier this afternoon. We call it, for want of a better term and in order to distinguish this kind of activity, civil initiative. That each of us civilly, under the law, has the responsibility to take that sort of initiative and responsibility
in the face of widespread illegality by civil authorities. In the new paper, which is going to this general assembly, regarding Christian obedience in a nuclear age, there is an appeal for the church to move from civil resistance to the creation of a just peace and the creation of institutions which will manifest a just peace in the midst of our life together,
as faith communities and within the civil community of which we're a part. The church has a unique opportunity, this paper says, to create throughout the world concrete, local expressions of just peace in the midst of and around all of the lines of conflict and enmity. The church of Jesus Christ is a worldwide community. It is not defined or bound by the borders and limits, the conflicts and enmities of the many nations within which it exists.
While the church understands that nations may serve God's purposes in history, and works to influence their political and economic policies towards just peace, the church neither waits nor depends on the civil authorities to build it. We must take the initiative. We must be that kind of community of vision, which leads me to my conclusion. In all the world,
in all the world, there is no other institution which has the capability of defending human rights and refugees' lives, other than communities of faith. In order for refugees and human rights to be defended, the institution which undertakes that defense and institutes justice in the absence
of that responsibility by civil authorities, or even in the presence of gross violations of human rights by civil authorities. The institution, that institution must have and embody certain characteristics. It must be global. It must be global. Because there are 16 million refugees scattered across the face of this earth. The most helpless, defenseless people
you can ever imagine. It must be present in locations other than capital cities and centers of offices and institutional presences of what one would normally consider those institutions to be responsible for this thing. Amnesty International, America's Watch, certain human rights groups, even the International Red Cross. Because refugees usually show up
in the middle of the desert in the summertime in Arizona, or on the horn of Africa, or in Botswana or South Africa. Mozambique. Out in the bush, out in the most desolate areas, out in the midst of a jungle between Guatemala and Mexico. Places where only faith communities are present. And if the most helpless people on the face of the earth, and if
victims of violations of human rights are to be defended, we either have to create an institution with that kind of global presence, or recognize we only have one, and that is a faith community. And that institution must embody an ideology that transcends, a commitment that transcends, an understanding that it must transcend national duties to
civil obedience. And only faith communities have that sort of self-understanding embodied in their very existence. What I think the sanctuary movement, in just a tiny way, points to, is that as faith communities, we have an enormous responsibility before us in the world. And that is to educate our leaders and to understand
ourselves that within that community of faith, we have the responsibility to defend refugees' rights and human rights on a global scale. That so many lives are being threatened, so many people are being tortured, so many refugees are being used by Cold Warriors, and used up in so many ways. Across the face of this globe. That I believe
in increasing numbers of people who look at this question, are beginning to believe that the church is being called to a new and critically important mission in the world today. And that's going to affect all that we do and all that we understand about ourselves and our mission. If we can, if we can institutionalize that understanding of the call of God to faith communities today, then we will be prophetic communities
that do exercise civil initiative, and how many lives can, would be saved, we can only begin to imagine. Thank you.