Throughout history, religion and politics have approached each other with a wary appreciation of mutual power. One of the latest offspring of this uneasy relationship is the Sanctuary movement. On 24 March 1982, Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona and five churches in Berkeley, California publicly proclaimed their status as sanctuaries for Central American refugees. Three years later there were 214 churches involved and eleven church workers were about to be tried in Tucson. This study is an analysis of the rhetoric used by the movement as it sought to extend its mantle of authority and thus move from the social periphery to the center of society evoking a new public vision of reality. The rhetoric of religious critique of the governmental and social order has been designated "prophetic rhetoric" after the often modeled discourse of the Old Testament prophets. Such discourse can be sectarian and polarizing in tone and impact, but to achieve social transformation the prophet needs some central acceptance. This study examines the potential of prophetic rhetoric within the Sanctuary movement in southern Arizona. It explores how Sanctuary rhetoric draws on the prophetic tradition; how that rhetoric expands or leaves the tradition; and how the rhetoric employs prophetic themes, authority claims, and emotional imagery. The letters and statements of Jim Corbett introduce major Sanctuary themes of the God/Love-Money/Government conflict, prophetic action, civil initiative, and the WWII parallel. The predominantly in-group rhetoric of Southside Presbyterian develops religious justification arguments, while ecumenical Sanctuary services use varied texts, church authority figures, and bonding rituals to build prophetic community across denominational lines. In public debate, religious argument is deemphasized as Sanctuary speakers focus on legal justification and assertion of general social values through image manipulation. Sentencing statements of eight Sanctuary workers vary as some are harshly polarizing, others focus on secular images and legal values, and still others deftly interweave religious and secular justification. Sanctuary speakers use prophetic discourse to critique, without falling into the trap of purely secular political campaigning. A tiny core of dissenters, viewed as extremists, grew into a movement with worldwide support. The justifying message adapted and was at times diluted, but it did not lose prophetic essence.

Central American leadership in the 1980s Philadelphia Sanctuary Movement was cultivated through long experiences with social injustice, along with deeply political religious sensibilities rooted in Latin American labor organizing and the base Christian community movement. While it is sometimes assumed that they carried with them only an undifferentiated past of victimization and violence, Central American sanctuary activists and collaborators brought refined community organizing skills, which they intentionally employed to expand solidarity and sanctuary coalitions across Northern America. This dissertation explores some of the ways in which displaced Central American human rights workers moved within this international, interreligious context to further their liberationist goals. In a religious environment steeped in long histories of racialized missionary intervention and human exploitation, Guatemalans and Salvadorans asserted a different vision of sanctuary not only concerned with personal safety, but also with the opportunity to educate the U.S. public while they transformed the practice of sanctuary from the inside out. Harnessing the resources of their own cultural and religious histories and experiences, Central American human rights workers gained access to certain critical segments of the human, social, and political capital of the Philadelphia region to advance the cause of their own survival and flourishing. / Religion