Loaves & Fishes, November-December 1991

THE SEAMY SIDE OF CHURCH-STATE CHARITIES

(Editor's note: The following is the first part of an address given at Clairvaux Farm on October 12, 1991 at the conference: "On Homelessness and the Church." Jim Corbett is from Tucson, Arizona and is a co-founder of the Sanctuary movement.)

by Jim Corbett

Eight years ago this month, I attended a gathering of about thirty people at the Mission Center in Ventnor, New Jersey, for several days of discussion about the role of the church vis-a-vis Guatemala. The organizers had agreed that there would be no minutes, no report, and no record of persons in attendance.

The lack of official records encouraged candor, but the chief reason for keeping no records was that some of the participants didn't want their constituencies to know they had been talking with "the enemy." One of the organizers, The Church of the Word, had dropped out just before the gathering, since General Efraim Rios Montt, their best-known preacher and the self-selected President of Guatemala had been ousted by a coup, which made the Church of the Word's status in Guatemala uncertain. Nonetheless, the participants came from the full spectrum of the Christian groups then involved in Guatemalan missions, including those who had been assigned the task of dishing out beans in a counterinsurgency program that Rios Montt called "Beans and Bullets."

On the other side of the gathering's political spectrum was a Spanish Jesuit leader of the Guatemalan Church in Exile for whom armed revolutionary struggle in accordance with Marxist-Leninist discipline represented the highest Christian faithfulness. Somewhere in between were Maryknollers and representatives from Church World Service and Wycliffe. And outside this spectrum were various evangelical missionaries who had gone to save souls but then had been converted by their flocks -- particularly by the martyrs among them -- to a communitarian view of the gospel.

This conversion to a socially concerned Communitarian gospel reinforced the evangelicals' rejection of politicized Christianity. They saw no place on the political spectrum for the church to align itself with the use of armed force to further church missions. Coming from a Quaker and Jewish reading of the gospel (as the religion of Jesus, not the religion Paul invented about Jesus), I found myself disagreeing with them about the nature and boundaries of the church and yet agreeing about the need to avoid politicizing its role.

I was asked to be at the Ventnor Mission Center for much the same reason I've been asked to be here, to discuss the role of the church in relation to undocumented refugees -- which, as I saw it was to provide sanctuary from government violations of their right to safe haven. From its beginning sanctuary for undocumented refugees had been on a radically different track from church programs for government-accredited refugees. Where the programs for approved refugees sought money and other governmental assistance to provide food, housing, and other social services, sanctuary simply sought to protect undocumented refugees from governmental violations of their basic rights. During the early eighties several hundred thousand Central American refugees flooded into the United States and managed to find food, shelter, and other social services one way or another. Their most urgent need was to avoid capture and return.

My experience with sanctuary had led me to the conclusion that the church simply can't be Church when it enters into any kind of partnership or coalition with a politico-military organization --whether governmental, revolutionary, or vigilante makes no decisive difference. This may seem clear enough when the subject is the use of torture by the inquisition ... or dishing out beans and Pauline obedience for a counterinsurgency campaign ... or serving as chaplain and propagandist for revolutionary warfare. But what about politico-military coercion that most of us would see as more benign, such as the collecting of taxes to support church-administered social-service programs? And what about the church as a lobbyist for governmental social services? The question here is not whether armed coercion by government is necessary to maintain civil society or whether the state should use its coercive powers to provide or support social services. The question is about the church and its powers -- and whether state powers, which are inseparably rooted in armed force, can be used by the church to be faithful to its mission. The choice is between a Constantinian and a post-Constantinian church.

The question of politico-military alignment battered the growing sanctuary movement at every turn, and every stage of its growth meant going free from some aspect of the church's Constantinian captivity. This continues to be the case, but I'll illustrate with a situation from another country and another time -- the situation that was uppermost in my mind when I went to the Ventnor Mission Center to discuss the role of the church vis-a-vis Guatemalan refugees.

During much of 1983, I'd been traveling with refugees and doing sanctuary networking in Mexico. Revolutionary groups in Mexico generally considered Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees to be deserters from the struggle except for the indigenous Guatemalans who had remained in camps on the Mexican side of the Mexican-Guatemala borderlands. These anti-refugee policies of revolutionary solidarity groups were reinforced by the policies of the U.S. and Mexican governments. The U.S. government insisted that the Mexican government take concerted action to catch and deport Central Americans, so migrant refugees were targeted throughout Mexico, not just for summary deportation, but for robbery, rape, forced prostitution -- all the many ways that refugees are abused and exploited when they must live as "illegals" who are beneath the law.

For a variety of reasons that included the need to comply with U.S. anti-refugee policies, the Mexican government wanted a free hand to deal with the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans flooding into Mexico, so all its programs and published policies pretended that the only refugees in Mexico were the indigenous Guatemalans in the government authorized camps in Chiapas. This approach required church and press collaboration, and the church was the key to foreign press contacts that the government couldn't control. Church groups were therefore informed that they could enter the process, mobilize international support, work with the government's official refugee agency, and openly argue about policy issues only if they limited their concern to the camp refugees. Nothing was to be said or done about the much greater numbers of uprooted migrant refugees.

In large measure, the church groups complied. The few that dared to develop social service programs for non-camp refugees went to great lengths to keep the word "refugee" out of the names of their organizations. The Mexican government's massive, systematic violation of refugee rights went mostly unreported. Visiting journalists, clergy, and philanthropists were shepherded off to the camps in Chiapas, with little or no mention of the suffering or even the existence of the hundreds of thousands outside the camps. At a congressional briefing in Washington, D.C., I made a report on the systematic violation of refugee rights in Mexico, but it did little to counteract the credibility of the church organization in Mexico City that was the primary source of information about refugees in Mexico[1]. This church-related clearing house for refugee information agreed with the U.S. State Department that Mexico was a safe haven for migrant refugees, so those in need of political asylum had no reason to go further north.

I went to the gathering at the Mission Center intensely aware that everyone there would see how other branches of the church were captive but that few would see that they themselves were. To discuss the emergence of the post-Constantinian church as I was meeting it through the growth of the sanctuary network, I would therefore need to peel away several layers of Constantinian preconceptions. Ivan Illich had exposed the first layer in "The Seamy Side of Charity," an essay that circulated widely during the late sixties[2]. It criticized the assumptions behind a high profile campaign to send Maryknoll and other missionaries throughout the Third World as a kind of spiritual Peace Corps to promote economic development. The U.S. missioners' assumptions about "underdevelopment" were often derived from The Ugly American, a novel that suggested almost any American goodwill can introduce urgently needed improvements into the Third World because ordinary Americans are like visitors from the future in the underdeveloped countries. At the heart of Illich's criticism was awareness that poverty in Latin America is rooted in established injustice rather than ignorance. He also rejected the idea that liberal reforms could fix the structural foundations of this injustice, and he makes his point with the following confession:

It is hard to help by refusing to give alms. I remember once having stopped food distribution from sacristies in an area where there was great hunger. I still feel the sting of an accusing voice saying: 'Sleep well for the rest of your life with dozens of Children's deaths on your conscience.' Even some doctors prefer aspirin to radical surgery. They feel no guilt having the patient die of cancer, but fear the risk of applying the knife.

The surgery Ivan Illich recommended (soon a commonplace prescription among many church missionaries) was the revolutionary restructuring of society, which required the cutting away of social cancers. Only weeks before the Ventnor gathering, I'd watched General Rios Montt act out exactly the same metaphor on his Sunday TV sermon, jabbing and sawing with an imaginary knife at an imagined cancer on his forearm as he explained his great pain and sorrow about the unavoidable violence of Christian counter- insurgency.

Just as I'd come to Rios Montt when I read Illich's words about cutting out cancers, I'd come to see a single system of violence in the civil war raging in Guatemala and El Salvador, so the insistence of liberation theologians that one must choose sides -- between the violence of established oppression and the counter-violence of revolutionary struggle -- made no sense. The only choice I saw was entailed by the gospel insight in the Book of James: To harvest justice, sow peace[3]. When this relation between peace and justice is reversed, the result is the pivotal premise of the just-war doctrine, but in relation to revolutionary wars in Central America, the slogan, "If you want peace, seek justice," has been most widely used by anti-war Christians who have wanted to serve revolution in some noncombatant capacity.

"Helder Camara isn't really a liberation theologian," a parish priest told me in early 1983, "because he doesn't believe in violence." This priest trained indigenous Guatemalan catechists on the Mexican side of the border, and in his explanation of the gospel he placed special emphasis on First and Second Maccabees. He undoubtedly agreed with the quote that Ernesto Cardenal cites with approval in The Gospel in Solentiname: "Christ forbade the sword, but not the machine gun." In much of Mexico, one of the strongest strains of liberation theology argues that Jesus wasn't a zealot in his day but would be now because conditions didn't ripen until now for truly Christian revolutionary warfare.

From the outside peeling away this layer of the church's Constantinian captivity looks like gospel nonviolence, but from the inside it's simply the co-creativity that has always been proclaimed by the prophetic faith. Even for just-warriors, the prescription of counter-violence is correct. The prescription is wrong if Zechariah is right: "Not by might, and not by power, but by my spirit -- said the Lord of Hosts" (Zech 4:6). Here's how I put it at the Center:

"When we go free from Pharaoh's rule and find ourselves gathered together at Sinai ... we discover that the power of creation is here among us, forming us into a people called to hallow the earth. The power is not in Washington, D.C.; we are not dependent on Pharaoh's deciding to serve the kingdom of love. The power is not in money; we are not dependent on ways to finance our service. The power does not come from the barrel of a gun; we need not capture the coercive forces of the state in order to serve. Rather, we are empowered to participate in the creation of humanity whenever we gather together as a congregation prepared to seek, hear, and do Torah ..." If in light of the Gospel revelation of the way the Torah is fulfilled, we were to suggest a minimal differentiation of the community of faith that follows Jesus, what would it be?

First it would be Jewish. A people forms at Sinai by dedicating itself to instituting the Kingdom of God among humankind. A Book of Books records and transmits the unfolding revelation of this people's creative-redemptive task. Within Israel, one can follow Jesus; outside it, individuals lack the historical foundations that make such a choice possible ... To serve the Kingdom, we must find a congregational place that permits us to live as the co-creators we are meant to be. In this sense, establishing sanctuary is the fundamental mission of the church in a war-making society. In an unredeemed world, we are all refugees.

Second, the community of faith that follows Jesus would reject ritualistic and legalistic reductions of Torah, insisting with the prophets that it is to be fulfilled in spirit and truth, by our becoming a people that serves to institute the Peaceable Kingdom here on earth. As the initiating act of allegiance to the Kingdom -- as the essential and fundamental sacrament -- the community would join the poor, disreputable, and persecuted in the face of established oppression.

Third, the community of faith that follows Jesus would renounce the use of violence for establishing or defending the Kingdom.

The communitarian evangelicals at the gathering disagreed with my emphasis on doing torah (which is the substance of a one-covenant theology), since they didn't agree that the church is a fully catholic people of peoples grafted inseparably onto Jewish roots -- roots reaching back to Sinai that have never been replaced by a new covenant. They agreed, though, with my peeling away the first two layers of the church's Constantinian captivity. The third layer was another matter.

The first two layers concern the fulfillment of torah as revealed by Jesus -- a gospel I can neither find in First or Second Maccabees nor celebrate as Hanukkah. But the third layer of the church's Constantinian assimilation smothers the prophetic heart of the faith that is common to the Maccabees and Jesus. The prophetic faith's insistence on justice, which means holding the state accountable for its violations of human rights, is essentially the same, regardless of the covenant community's attitude toward the use of armed force to protect itself or to further its mission.

This is where the word "political" becomes dangerously slippery. To protect and establish refugee rights, we had to insist that the sanctuary movement could not politicize them, as the Reagan administration had. But to protect refugee rights and weave them into the social fabric, we also had to remain fully engaged with the state and its legal process, which many Pauline Christians see as being political rather than spiritual. Here's how I explained the sanctuary movement's prophetic task at the Mission Center:

We do not yet know what sanctuary will become in the post-Constantinian church, but we can see that the exposure of institutional violations of human rights is emerging as an integral characteristic. Sanctuary is the emerging community setting from which those who are being violated can speak truth to power; as assimilation ends, the prophetic church emerges. At the time, we had just begun to realize that when basic covenant communities fulfill human rights law in the face of government violations, community practice can establish the law as an integral part of the social order, in spite of government violations. Moreover, the law of liberty (as the Book of James calls it) can only be established and preserved through community cohesion, not through state coercion. We came to call this practice 'civil initiative' in order to distinguish it from civil disobedience, which (conceived as the violation of law) generally fails to engage government in a way that preserves those basic liberties that are dependent on the rule of law. Civil initiative starts with the recognition that certain freedoms or rights are at the heart of the law, and that in this respect there is but one torah -- or law -- for church and state.

This assertion raises a host of further questions about more Constantinian preconceptions that must still be peeled away, which I won't try to do now[4]. I'll just point out that here we need to deal with misconceptions about law that the modern church inherits primarily from Thomas Hobbes rather than the Apostle Paul; that the post-Constantinian church must insist on a single standard of law, as a body of basic rights; and that a community's nonviolent preservation and protection of these basic rights from government violations is never illegal.
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[1] Jim Corbett, "The Mexican Government's Alignment with U.S. Violations of Refugee Rights," presented to the Central American Refugee Briefing called by Congressmen Moakley and Barnes, June 9, 1983.

[2] Ivan Illich's "The Seamy Side of Charity" was first published in the January 21, 1967, issue of America.

[3] The Latinoamerica translation of James 3:18 into Spanish is especially straightforward: Los pacificos siembran la paz y cosechan la justicia.

[4] See Jim Corbett, Goatwalking, (Viking, 1991), chapters 6 and 9, for more about the theory and practice of civil initiative.