Sanctuary as Insular Constitutionalism: Religious Resistance and the Church as a Zone of Exception

The revocation of the “sensitive spaces” policy, which once shielded churches from immigration actions, has made them stages for security theater that uses spectacles of enforcement and illegality to cast “aliens” as figures of enmity.  Yet this policy also amplifies religious actors’ ability to assert counter-narratives that recast migrants as subjects of moral concern.  Drawing on Robert Cover’s narrative theory of law, I contend that when these counter-narratives are mobilized in the courts they make not only a symbolic, but a material difference.  Such a difference can be seen in Evangelical Lutheran Church in America et al. v. Department of Homeland Security et al., where the plaintiffs’ rights of religious conscience, enacted through the provision of sanctuary, are externalized from the private sphere of belief and projected into public space as zones of exception that halt the advance of federal power and glimpse a world more compassionate than our own.