INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the plausibility, coherence, and justness of public reason has been called into question, and one of the most enduring struggles has concerned the status of religious reasoning in the public sphere. Outstanding examples of how religious-based activism has furthered the democratic project — such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Abolitionist Movement — call for some way to accommodate religion in political discourse. Yet while most public reason liberals now embrace some version of inclusivism — the view that “a citizen is morally permitted to support (or oppose) a coercive law even if he has only a religious rationale for that law” (Eberle Reference Eberle2002, 10) — these formulations seem poorly equipped to evaluate religious contributions when new modes of political contestation arise. This is because emerging publics — diverse democratic actors such as social movements, community organizing, and grassroots activism — often employ language and tactics that defy prevailing notions of civility, reasonableness, and mutual respect which form the bread and butter of normative accounts of public reason. Relying on ideal standards of assessment, public reason frequently obscures the roles religion actually plays in public claim-making, the reasons actors employ religious reasoning, and as a result, the very meaning of these acts.
Even for those who think public reason captures liberal intuitions about justice concerning the status of religion in law and legal decisions, the need for a greater sensitivity to political discourse within the wider public sphere has moved the public reason literature closer to the standards and assumptions of deliberative democracy. Public reason finds itself in a bind, where it either suffers from the critique that it is insufficiently democratic for failing to incorporate civil society within the proper sphere of the democratic “public” (Benhabib Reference Benhabib2002; Habermas Reference Habermas1995; Rawls Reference Rawls1997) or it struggles to balance the ethical principle that differentiates public from private forms of reasoning in a way that can incorporate religion without making it threatening to the liberal state. And as public justification liberals have increasingly come to doubt whether the project of finding overlapping reasons can ever coherently accommodate religious claims, other strands of liberal, multicultural, and critical theory have pointed to the insufficiency of such a project to confront the role of power in perpetuating the injustices of the status quo (e.g., Button Reference Button2005; Fish Reference Fish and Macedo1999; Ivison Reference Ivison2002; Maclure Reference Maclure2006; Sanders Reference Sanders1997; Zerilli Reference Zerilli2012). The debate over the status of religion throws into question not just public reason's claim to neutrality, but also liberalism's resources to confront its own shortcomings and blind-spots.
This article proposes a corrective based in John Dewey's understanding of the public as laid out in his 1927 seminal work, The Public and Its Problems. I argue that a Deweyan perspective on the tasks and challenges of the democratic public offers a richer, more contextualized approach to the status of religion in the public sphere as well as other emerging publics whose modes of engagement seem to defy standard notions of reasonableness and civility. Therefore, even as this article focuses specifically on religion, I suggest that this Deweyan insight offers ethical resources for evaluating other forms of “uncivil” claim-making, and thus may also shed light on diverse modern movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter.
I ground my argument in discussion of a particular religious social movement with which public reason liberals are likely to be sympathetic, but which they nonetheless tend to misunderstand and misrepresent: The 1980s Sanctuary Movement. At its height, this nationwide interfaith movement consisted of over 500 congregations and 2,000 supporting congregations that defied U.S. (United States) immigration enforcement by offering sanctuary for Central American asylum-seekers under threat of deportation. By rooting my discussion in Sanctuary, I seek to reveal what public reason accounts fail to see, while also showing how a Deweyan approach can help us better understand and evaluate this and similar movements. In building my argument, I will review the basic features of Sanctuary and demonstrate how public reason falls short in capturing religious claim-making in the movement. Then, I will introduce Dewey's corrective to this debate by showing how his conception of the public shares features of a public reason account, but nonetheless shifts the ground for evaluating public reasoning in ways productive for understanding emergent forms of religious activism. Finally, I will use this Deweyan perspective to highlight some important ways in which religion operated in Sanctuary in order to evaluate the democratic successes and shortcomings of the movement.
PUBLIC REASON AND SANCTUARY
Before considering how religion operated within the Sanctuary Movement and advancing my critique of public reason in light of this interesting case, we must note that the Sanctuary Movement can be read as consistent with even the strictest version of Rawlsian public reason, would almost certainly pass under the later revised proviso, and is easily accommodated by many of the prominent innovations to public reason that have saturated the literature in recent years.
While Rawls's initial formulation of public reason would have excluded religious rationales as sufficient justification under any conditions (although they might still serve as supplemental rationales), he later revised his approach to allow citizens to draw justifications solely from comprehensive doctrines to further the principles of liberal society if “in due course proper political reasons […] are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support” (Rawls Reference Rawls1997, 784). In this respect, the Sanctuary Movement seems like a star case. Not only have many religiously-rooted arguments about the rights of asylum-seekers and critiques of U.S. foreign policy found secular equivalents today, but many secular rationales were also available at the time, frequently working in tandem with the religious messaging of the movement.
Sanctuary would be similarly justifiable under many leading alternatives to the Rawlsian model. Even if Sanctuary participants understood their own participation largely in religious terms, because secular rationales were available if anyone doubted their liberal commitments, it would be unlikely to present a problem for Paul Weithman's (Reference Weithman, Baily and Gentile2015) mutual assurance approach, nor to Jürgen Habermas's (Reference Habermas2006; Reference Habermas2008) translation standard. In addition, because what the Sanctuary Movement primarily advocated in direct appeals to the state was “that ‘extended voluntary departure’ be granted to refugees from Central America and that current deportation proceedings against these victims be stopped” (MacEoin Reference MacEoin and MacEoin1985, 22), the type of coercive legislation sought would likely pass under Robert Talisse's (Reference Talisse, Bailey and Gentile2015) “severity” and “irretrievability” spectrum, as well as Andrew March's context-sensitive approach, as the goals of Sanctuary certainly fall into the category of “expanding the sphere of the most basic moral obligation to others” (March Reference March2013, 535) by advocating for the rights and welfare of asylum-seekers.
Considering that the use of religious reasons in the Sanctuary Movement would be unlikely to present a problem for the standard Rawlsian approach or many leading alternatives, it may seem an odd choice of case to ground a critique of those frameworks. And perhaps it would be, if I were seeking to replace public reason with a new standard capable of achieving the same goals through more inclusive or consistent means. But this article pursues a different goal: I demonstrate not so much the faults of Rawlsian public reason as its limits, not what it gets wrong but what it fails to see, and thereby seek not to reject public reason but rather to complicate, enrich, and lend it more flexibility in accounting for the forms of reason-making we see in public today, particularly those that occur outside of — sometimes in opposition to — the formal coercive institutions of the state. This section therefore sets out an overview of the basic history and key features of the Sanctuary Movement, and considers two key ways in which Rawlsian public reason obscures the role of religion in this and similar movements.
Introduction to the Sanctuary Movement
The Sanctuary Movement began in the summer of 1980 when a group of churches in Tucson, Arizona, started fundraising to bond out 13 Salvadoran migrants in detention. These Salvadorans had garnered public attention as the only survivors of a group twice their size that was abandoned by smugglers in the Sonoran Desert, suffering brutal heat, dehydration, and the death of their companions before being arrested by U.S. Border Patrol. The story became a central piece of folklore for the Sanctuary Movement, initiating a moment of public reflection when the appearance of spectacular suffering occurred alongside the identity of migrants from a Central American country in the midst of a bloody civil war. These migrants claimed to be refugees and told agents that sending them back to El Salvador would be tantamount to a death sentence; yet the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was collecting large numbers of Salvadorans and seeking to quickly deport them. Guatemalans, fleeing a government-led ethnocide of Maya Indians in the midst of their own civil war, soon joined the Salvadorans. In subsequent months, two features of the situation motivated this local church network to expand their efforts. First, Salvadorans and Guatemalans received asylum at a much lower rate than one would expect given the severity of the situation, leading many to believe that Cold War ideology was influencing asylum decisions, and second, U.S.-backed security forces and military aid were involved in the wars of both countries.
A task force on Central America (Tucson Ecumenical Council Task Force on Central America) was instituted “to harness and direct a response of faith at all levels” (MacEoin Reference MacEoin and MacEoin1985, 16). For a year, these churches organized prayer vigils, community-based legal services, and fundraising to bond out asylum-seekers. But a change in presidential administration (from Carter to Reagan), intensifying flows of refugees, and increasing difficulties among the INS in dealing with the situation led the movement to start imagining a larger response to the problem. Prominent personalities arose, including John Fife, minister at Southside Church in Tucson and a national figure within the Presbyterian Church, and Jim Corbett, a rancher and Quaker, who had largely distanced himself from “traditional religion” but entered the movement through his experience tracking a young Salvadoran hitchhiker in INS detention. On March 24, 1982, on the second anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination, the movement officially launched as churches in Tucson and Berkeley, California declared themselves public sanctuaries.
As Sanctuary spread, the movement employed a mix of legal and religious claims in its public messaging. On the one hand, as Fife stated in his letter to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith announcing Southside as the first Sanctuary congregation, the movement advanced a legal claim that “our government is in violation of the 1980 Refugee Act and international law by continuing to arrest, detain, and forcibly return refugees to the terror, persecution, and murder in El Salvador and Guatemala” (MacEoin Reference MacEoin and MacEoin1985, 21). On the other hand, as Corbett expressed to a National Council of Churches conference on immigration, the principle of sanctuary entailed a fundamental rethinking of individual and collective practices of faith and community caught in a wider battle for the nation's soul: “Much more than the fate of the undocumented refugees depends on the religious community's participation and leadership […] If the right to aid fugitives from government-sponsored terror is not upheld in action by churches […] the loss of many other basic rights of conscience will certainly follow. No one who lives in this century can have missed that lesson” (Davidson Reference Davidson1988, 60).
By 1984, the INS had launched a 10-month “Operation Sojourner” investigation sending informants into sanctuary communities, which, even in the surveillance-heavy atmosphere of the Cold War, was the first time a government agency admitted to sending undercover agents into a church (Hentoff Reference Hentoff1985). The indictment of 16 activists, including Fife and Corbett, led to the highly publicized “Sanctuary Trials” where the government prevented debate surrounding the legitimacy of sanctuary practices according to anything but domestic legal criteria. The prosecution succeeded in barring testimony from the defense on “‘international law, the Refugee Act of 1980, religious conviction, events in El Salvador or Guatemala, United States foreign policy […] stories of the refugees fleeing persecution,’ United States immigration policy, or the political bias characterizing asylum statistics” (Pirie Reference Pirie1990, 384). Despite this attempt to control the public interpretation of the movement by convicting some of its most well-known leaders, the trials were met with an outbreak of demonstrations at INS facilities, a surge in membership, and a renewed sense of purpose. At a 1985 two-day Sanctuary Symposium, at which Elie Wiesel gave the opening address, Sanctuary worker Gary MacEoin proclaimed the movement “the Great Awakening of the 1980s” (MacEoin Reference MacEoin and MacEoin1985, 28).
New Publics and the Challenge of Publicity
How do new publics emerge? How do they achieve recognition of their issues as objects of public concern? The idea of the “public” plays an enormously important role in public reason, but often the principle of publicity treats the concept of the public in a highly abstract, static, and totalizing way. Public reason suggests that outcomes of decision-making are legitimate if the justifications behind them are non-coercive to all reasonable discourse participants. Through reflective reasoning — “not simply valid reasoning, but argument addressed to others” (Rawls Reference Rawls2011, 465) — citizens offer justification for political preferences in terms they believe their fellow discourse participants could recognize as valid, even if they disagree on the outcomes of such reasoning in any given situation. Public reason assumes a certain audience — the “public” — usually defined as “all those affected” by the outcome of a politically coercive decision. In Rawls's case, the assumptions we make about the public both presume and are meant to socialize us into identification with a specific social role — that of “a particular type of liberal democratic citizen” (Button Reference Button2010, 255). While this conception of “public” is theoretically flexible with respect to recognizing new actors and claims, its tendency to work from ideal assumptions in delineating the public threatens to tie it to reigning norms of membership and legitimacy in defining the bounds and character of our moral concern for others.
Yet in the Sanctuary Movement, the policies and principles that were the subject of critique stood in a complex relationship to the concept of “all those affected” because the movement was contesting how those lines were drawn in legal categories, public discourse, and the nation's moral imagination. Participants were waging a double publicity battle in both calling attention to the modes of violence and erasure enacted routinely by the INS upon Central American migrants and the complicity of the U.S. in creating those migration flows in the first place, while simultaneously reconfiguring the terms of the conversation from “law and order” and “illegal aliens” toward “human rights” and “refugees.”
To talk about something in and as a public, it first must be seen as an object of public concern, and the dictates of public reason often lack the internal resources to introduce new voices and themes. As Iris Marion Young notes, “in the real world of politics, where structural inequalities influence both procedures and outcomes, democratic processes that appear to conform to norms of deliberation are usually biased toward more powerful agents” (Young Reference Young2001, 671), and thus often favor the status quo. James Bohman suggests that in large-scale societies, social movements tend to introduce new focuses and forms of communication more often than do individual critics, offering “a new ‘frame for public deliberation,’” including a reconfiguration of traditional understandings of values and “taken-for-granted” norms (Bohman Reference Bohman2000, 207–210). Public reason's capacity to allow the introduction of new framings may not be sufficient, and “extraordinary actions, arguments or experiences may be required to bring about a practical shift in frames in public discourse” (Medearis Reference Medearis2005, 58).
The justificatory role of religion in Sanctuary sought to portray the influx of asylum-seekers as a matter of properly public concern. Often religion worked as a frame for understanding the relationship between concerned citizens and the migrants who appeared in their midst as one of active political responsibility, rather than sympathy or altruism. Reflecting on his own reasons for engaging in Sanctuary, Corbett wrote, “as I struggled to cope emotionally with having become a peripheral witness to the crucifixion of the Salvadoran people, a suspicion grew that the Cross opens a way beyond breakdown — as revelatory depth meaning rather than salvationist egoism. In contrast to ideologies, which we fashion out of words in order to justify ourselves, the way of the Cross is communicated by being lived” (Davidson Reference Davidson1988, 37). Religion helped Sanctuary participants to develop identity, language, and motivation to understand a new problem as a proper object of public redress. Their goal was not just to enter the public, but also to reconfigure its bounds by justifying themselves as constituting a shared public with Central American migrants.
Epistemology, Vision, and Religion
One of Rawls's initial goals in promoting public reason was to allow discourse participants to speak with a common language without presupposing more epistemologically-rigorous agreement on the proper grounding of truth claims, which at least theoretically suggests that religious and non-religious can participate on equal grounds as long as they justify themselves in a manner accessible to others. Yet despite Rawls's intentions, the critiques of and subsequent innovations to this framework from the standpoint of religious reasons have frequently been epistemic ones. This is unsurprising; the promise of a common language thick enough to express intuitions about justice but thin enough to find support in a variety of comprehensive doctrines tends to assume some realm of “common human reason,” in which we can ground moral conceptions of our political order without suffering significant moral loss or cognitive hardship. Thus, even if the purpose of public reason is to avoid epistemic conflict, it is nonetheless premised on certain epistemic assumptions, meaning that those who want to make room for religion within this framework usually must engage in epistemic arguments about “religious” versus “secular” reasoning.
The result of this is that public reason accounts tend to over-state the uniqueness of the “religious” as a special kind of epistemological problem while also reducing the multifaceted roles religion actually plays in the formation of public claims. Even if one accepts that certain understandings of religion constitute an epistemological break from whatever is taken to be “common human reason,” we must also note that other epistemological distances permeate U.S. society on race, class, and gender, and citizenship lines. Lynn Sanders suggests that the gulf between Black and White Americans, for instance, is not just a matter of differences in income, safety, employment, health, or education, but also that in a real way, “[they] see different worlds” (Sanders Reference Sanders1997, 371). In Sanctuary, participants were negotiating a number of epistemological ruptures created by the encounter with asylum-seekers, not least of which was the challenge presented by the gap between what government agencies were claiming and what asylum-speakers were experiencing. The resources in terms of narrative, testimony, authority, and history generated through religious networks often helped Sanctuary members to make sense of these ruptures, and well as figure out how to speak and act in light of them.
Indeed, as the movement progressed, members often described their involvement as an act of conversion substantially different from whatever religious or moral commitments led them to initial participation. At a 1985 symposium sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, Sanctuary supporter Rev. Phillip Wheaton suggested that during the movement many participants, whether religiously motivated or not, “[began] to re-examine the Biblical bases which many had forgotten or had never paid very close attention to” (Thomas Reference Thomas1986, 68). Similarly, Jim Corbett, who like many in the movement rejected calling Sanctuary a practice of civil disobedience, wrote, “[our] practice of sanctuary on the border has led to the discovery that, as community with the persecuted, sanctuary is the foundation for peace-making that is in significant measure outside the range of civil disobedience. Misconceiving sanctuary as a variant form of civil disobedience blinds us to its actual dynamics as a socially constructive practice of our faith” (Gerety Reference Gerety and Martin1988, 161). Sanctuary members were involved in a process considerably more multifaceted than straightforwardly bringing their private religious convictions to acts of public claim-making; their politicization also fostered and transformed their religious identity and practice.
JOHN DEWEY'S PROCEDURAL PUBLIC
John Dewey has increasingly been recognized as an important, but controversial, predecessor to deliberative and participatory democracy. Thinkers like Robert B. Westbrook (Reference Westbrook1991), Hilary Putnam (Reference Putnam, Brint and Weaver1991), and Cornel West (Reference West1989) paint an image of Dewey as a radical democrat while critiquing the apparent tendencies in his thought friendly to elite rule and unfriendly to pluralism. Some critics argue that Dewey's proposal for modeling democracy on science communities engenders an elitism ill-suited for participatory democracy, while others suggest that Dewey's emphasis on “community,” “intelligence,” and “democracy as a way of life” essentially views social conflict as a symptom of ignorance, making Deweyan democracy “a substantive conception […] that cannot countenance the fact of reasonable pluralism” (Talisse Reference Talisse2007, 41). Melvin Rogers (Reference Rogers2009) has defended Dewey on both counts, arguing convincingly that Dewey recognized the irreducibility of social and political conflict, and through his attention to human fallibility and tragedy, offers ethical resources considerably more congenial to acts of religious reasoning in the public sphere than those of Rawlsian public reason.
While pointing out that Dewey seems to share Rawls's commitment to “political, not metaphysical” principles, Rogers argues that Dewey would reject Rawls's rationalist notion of public reason as a regulative ideal of political discourse. Indeed, Rogers argues, Dewey would likely view Rawlsian public reason as a hindrance to the democratic project because Dewey “understands one's narrative of experience to be an essential resource in filling out the content of inquiry” (Rogers Reference Rogers2009, 133). Collective problem-solving requires reflection on the context of our problems, and excluding any of the sources by which we make sense of the world could impoverish and misdirect that process. This would seem to place Dewey's view in line with the more process-oriented deliberative approaches of thinkers such as Simone Chambers (Reference Chambers2009), Christopher Eberle (Reference Eberle2002), or Jeffrey Stout (Reference Stout2004) (Rogers cites Stout specifically), where the regulative principle guiding public speech acts shifts from content of speech to the spirit with which speech acts are made. For Dewey, Rogers argues, if we wish to use our religious commitments to advocate for political positions “we must do so responsibly and prudently” (Idem, 134).
Rogers's reading of Dewey on religion is well-informed and compelling, but being able to say that there are good, specifically democratic reasons not to exclude religion from the public sphere does not offer positive resources for evaluating real-world acts of religiously-grounded claim-making. Furthermore, unless we articulate some clearer regulative principle of deliberation in Dewey's thought, we risk rendering his approach a kind of affective agonism. In this section, I argue that Dewey offers more evaluative and directive resources for thinking about the performative acts and claim-making of the public sphere than the agonist while nonetheless fundamentally shifting the methodological ground of public reasoning as it operates in Kantian rationalism. Dewey himself did not write in the terminology of public reason, but I suggest his thought nonetheless offers a view of public reasoning amenable to the challenges of emerging publics, and is particularly useful for evaluating religious-based activism outside the formal decision-making bodies of governance. In so doing, I will move through Dewey's thought as represented in The Public and Its Problems in the way public reason accounts are typically built — from the conception of people as free and equal, to the purpose of public reason in light of the relationship between public and state, ending with the proposed regulative principle which should inform deliberation — while simultaneously highlighting the distinctiveness of Dewey's view.
Dewey, like Rawls, objected to any moral view of politics grounded in a fixed or essential view of human nature, but unlike Rawls, Dewey thought it important not to be blind to the psycho-social dynamics of modern society with which any ethical prescriptions would have to contend. Dewey saw vast changes in human social existence brought by “the new industrial movement” and “democratic political machinery” yet noted that habits of human behavior and thought remained remarkably unchanged. Political democracy as a system of government had not kept pace with the infusion of a democratic ethos to support and direct it. This contradiction suggested to Dewey that human nature was a great deal more flexible and rigid than earlier liberal thinkers had ever supposed. Since “all distinctively human action has to be learned,” very little of our “human” identity is fixed across time and context, but the fact that our “nature” (and most of our thought) is habituated means that humans tend nevertheless to be a conservative species. Political revolutions might overturn established rule and privilege, but because of the necessary instruction of habit, “the creation of a tabula rasa in order to permit the creation of a new order is so impossible as to set at naught both the hope of buoyant revolutionaries and the timidity of scared conservatives” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 161–162).
Yet for Dewey a new kind of democratic indoctrination was hardly a palatable option. After all, Dewey noticed that the modern “eclipse” of the public was less a result of the lack of democratic values than the fact that when such values become detached from the context which makes them meaningful and the material conditions which make them possible, they quickly become nonsensical. Dewey emphasizes that it is not ideas and principles that create democratic institutions, but rather “technological discoveries and inventions working to change the customs by which men had been bound together” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 144). This is not to say that ideas do not matter, that they are simply ideological frosting atop the real determinants of social relations. They matter because they help people make sense of their changing world and offer resources to engage with it. Our principles and theories can help illuminate present conditions so that we can engage with them toward productive ends or, if they stand in contrast to our conditions, they can create confusion, dissatisfaction, and the kind of political apathy that undermines faith in the whole democratic project.
Dewey's analysis of the democratic crisis implied by the lack of an organized public is that our old democratic principles, despite their importance, have often turned into hallowed, abstract platitudes, more useful for waging rhetorical wars than confronting ongoing problems; “[living] to cumber the political ground, obstructing progress, all the more so because they were uttered and held not as hypotheses with which to direct social experimentation but as final truths, dogmas” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 146). Furthermore, Dewey noticed certain modern trends of social psychology threatening to make this democratic encumbrance something far more destructive. He suggested that humans gain satisfaction from “a sense of union with others, a feeling capable of being intensified till it becomes a mystical sense of fusion” (Dewey Reference Dewey, Morris and Shapiro1939, 212). This tendency fosters belief in “bald single forces” and “wholesale reasons” (Idem, 214), such as constructing a single common enemy, because it makes this feeling of union easier to manifest and more intense in realization. Combined with modern technology and increasing “economic centralization” (Idem, 213), Dewey worried this could brew a cocktail deleterious to an integrated and organized public sphere capable of crossing class, racial, and religious divisions, a situation unsatisfying at best and dangerous for democracy at worst.
Dewey thus was skeptical that “equality” as a value capable of directing human speech and action could be abstractly assumed in any meaningful way. People simply are not all qualitatively alike, and to try to ground a sense of moral equality in some supposedly shared quality of self-interest or rationality, while letting competition reign free in the economic sphere, virtually guarantees that moral values will be at variance with social conditions. If the vision of individual rational self-interest became the grounding of legal and political protections, Dewey argued, it was also “bound to result in putting a premium on mastery over others” within economic and social life (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 79). Rather than ground moral obligations on intrinsic human qualities, Dewey emphasized that moral equality issues from unique qualities manifesting in a shared social space. Moral equality, far from speaking to the sameness across individuals, designates “incommensurability, the inapplicability of common and quantitative standards […] intrinsic qualities which require unique opportunities and differential manifestation” (Idem, 79). Unlike Rawlsian public reason which views “society as a fair system of cooperation over time among citizens as free and equal persons” (Rawls Reference Rawls1985, 229), Dewey argued that one cannot simply assume the freedom and equality of another because these are values only fostered in the concrete interplay of communal life. This is why, even though Dewey saw our fragmented social condition — which he termed “the Great Society” in contrast to a possible coordinated social future called “the Great Community” — as a failure in communication, it would be insufficient to view this failure as a matter of language. Instead, Dewey's idea of communication-failure has much more to do with visibility, recognition, and social trust than with the need for a common language of expression.
Yet Dewey thought one aspect of human social existence held great promise for fostering a participatory democratic public: the fact that “the consequences of conjoint action take on a new value when they are observed” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 24). Humans evinced to Dewey a unique ability to reflect on the impacts of their actions on others, making those connections an object of attention such that this knowledge could significantly change their future actions, not just prudentially, but also in a value-constituting way. This led Dewey to rethink what made “public” as distinct from “private” not according to the substance of speech, the issue at stake, or the identity of the actors involved, but rather, according to the real consequences generated between different members of society. Those issues that became “public” spoke specifically to the unintended consequences of human behavior, an emphasis which Dewey meant to speak more to a shift in consciousness surrounding social cooperation rather than to establish a new static quality of identification (avoiding the difficult, and beside-the-point question of what exactly constitutes an unintended versus intended consequence). Dewey's point was that, despite the complexity and mobility of modern society, a public could identify itself through a shared interest in better regulating the unintended consequences generated between different individuals and groups.
But Dewey's view of the public is also procedural in the sense that, even if encroaching consequences are what generate the need for a public, an actual public comes into existence “only when indirect consequences are perceived, and when it is possible to project agencies which order their occurrence” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 131). Imagining a public in the abstract is not sufficient; we need to be able to see publics to engage with them. Therefore, as Axel Honneth explains, what and who receives the name of public in Dewey's conception “is attributed to that sphere of social action that a social group can successfully prove to be in need of general regulation because encroaching consequences are being generated” (Honneth Reference Honneth1998, 774). Publics must render themselves visible within the wider public sphere in such a way that the problems they point to generate a sense of political responsibility, and subsequently become “an object of desire and effort” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 151) for the collectivity that recognizes them.
This view also implies a shift in how the public relates to the state since, for Dewey, the state is an association that the public in a large sense (composed of a variety of smaller publics) employs “to organize itself for oversight and regulation” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 29). The difficulty is that once a public generates the institutions to address and regulate encroaching consequences that mechanism typically becomes engrained and operates according to its old public mandates. In that case, the state may end up preventing new publics from forming and organizing. In Dewey's words, “[t]he public which generated political forms is passing away, but the power and lust of possession remains in the hands of the officers and agencies which the dying public instituted. This is why the change of the form of states is so often effected only by revolution” (Idem, 31). The state is not a fixed entity responsible for certain set tasks across time, from which the nature and limits of the public can be derived; new publics generate transformations in the state, and “[b]y its very nature, a state is ever something to be scrutinized, investigated, searched for” (Idem, 32). This suggests that the state might imply something more or less than the formal decision making bodies of executive, legislative, and judiciary, depending on the problem at hand. It also foregrounds the idea that the task of the public is not just about making claims to the coercive mechanisms of the state (or to others, which the state must navigate), but also in producing the conditions of transformed visibility and political responsibility for itself and its connection to other publics.
To return at last to the status of religion in public-formation, a Deweyan perspective suggests that religion per se need not pose any fundamentally unique problem or solution to the process of inquiry into the consequences of conjoint action. Since public-forming communication aims to explore the connections within society and collectively seek to better regulate their effects, the fact that the religious might use distinct symbols and rituals for this inquiry need not present an obstacle. Unless religion ipso facto obstructs the ability of individuals to organize themselves as a public and to address their problems in conversation with the wider constellation of publics, there is no reason to treat it separately from other (non-religious) modes of speech and action. This would render unnecessary — and potentially even harmful — a priori rules or categorizations to definitively distinguish acceptable from unacceptable forms of religious reasoning.
This does not suggest that all reasons and tactics should be considered fair game or that the public sphere should secure freedom of speech and be left to its own devices with the expectation that democracy will flourish on its own. Authoritarian uses of the public sphere are always unjustified in pluralistic democratic societies, and Dewey certainly believed that a democratic public sphere needed active and careful cultivation. But it does shift how we evaluate the health of the public sphere, and how we understand the discourse within it. As citizens (and non-citizens) of a liberal state, we rightly worry about the state's use of arbitrary power, particularly on issues we understand to be within the purview of negative liberty. But in fighting one kind of domination we can lose sight of other, less visible and harder to combat ones. Outside of law, the substance of reasoning and the particular way in which it is expressed matter less for the viability of a participatory democracy than the structures of access, the resources for vision, and the conditions of judgment shaping the public sphere.
Truly public-forming speech and performance in Dewey's sense promotes a moral imaginary that focuses on exactly those structuring conditions in making our political claims, learned from real investigation into the effects we have on each other. The ethical directive should not be primarily to justify oneself to others as if one's interests and agency operate independently, equal competitors in the eyes of the neutral state; but rather, to express our political goals by putting them within a wider narrative, and setting this narrative within a wider context. Emerging publics should speak about identity and goals with reference to the consequences societal actors have on each other, and include in the formation of their claims engagement with and response to the social accounts/analysis of others. Whether and how religion helps or hinders this process will depend greatly on the particular circumstances at hand.
RELIGION IN THE SANCTUARY MOVEMENT
Taking a Deweyan perspective on the public, we can now suggest that what made Sanctuary democratically productive was that it was a movement that used religiously-grounded narratives and opportunities for appearance to bring people who might otherwise feel no political responsibility for one another into a common social space and transformed them into a distinct public. Religion here engendered modes of analysis and visibility that worked against the exclusions and erasure of the INS in that it provided opportunities for making consequences that were formerly invisible visible through the movement's own unique terms, and with this new visibility, offered the chance to rethink practices of faith, community, responsibility, and law.
Typically when we speak of “religion” we refer not only to beliefs, but also to particular orientations, expressions, and practices in daily life. In this view, much of what religion is said to do — establish symbols and rituals dealing with transcendent truths, define identity, membership, and meaning through norm formation, externalization, and internalization, etc. — is not exclusive to “traditional” religions. The extent to which religion might have special, exclusive qualities is an important question, particularly for many believers whose own experience of faith offers them an orientation to the world which would seem to them unavailable through other means, but this is an inquiry which lies outside the purview of this article. Adopting a Deweyan perspective is not meant to reduce the complex and varied experience of faith for the believer, nor to exhaust the realm of politically-relevant religious experience, but rather, focus on what religious features of emerging publics like Sanctuary might prove productive or harmful in the task of democratic public formation.
To speak of religion in this way is to pay attention to what religion does or might do within particular contexts. Accounting for specific historical environments makes us recognize that “religion” is not a single, monolithic force operating in the same way politically regardless of where, when and through whom it appears within the public sphere. It also recognizes that not all groups identifying or identified as “religious” work within the same structure of opportunity and protection, or conversely, prejudice and persecution.
Sanctuary as Focal Point
As we have seen, the main obstacle for Dewey to the identification and organization of the public was the need for “perception of the consequences of a joint activity and the distinctive share of each element in producing it” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 188). With Sanctuary, the task of forming a public capable of reflecting on the relation between U.S. foreign policy and the refugee flows issuing from Central America required a language and symbol reservoir capable of justifying challenges to the INS “in the eyes of many people who would normally not have been inclined to question U.S. policy” (Chinchilla, Hamilton, and Loucky Reference Chinchilla, Hamilton and Loucky2009, 122), as well as concrete networks allowing the movement to materially realize its purpose by providing physical refuge, goods, and services to help asylum-seekers navigate a bureaucratic and police order incentivized to ignore their claims. Faith-based conversations and networks were central to the process of joining the movement, requiring that in any congregation, the decision “should come from a faith commitment” (MacEoin Reference MacEoin and MacEoin1985, 200).
The movement actively drew on existing faith networks, both locally through groups like the Tucson Ecumenical Council, and nationally, through organizations like The National Council of Churches, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. It also created new ones. Perhaps most famously, Jim Corbett's “Dear Friends” letters called on a sense of responsibility rooted in but not exclusive to Quaker religious commitments and identity. In a letter dated May 12, 1981, for instance, Corbett writes, “This letter is addressed primarily to Friends because their history presents them with special responsibilities” (Cunningham Reference Cunningham1995, 25). Similarly, at the public launch of Sanctuary at Southside, Presbyterian minister G. Daniel Little delivered a sermon drawing on the identity of Christians and Jews to frame the arrival of refugees as an opportunity to transform both politics and religion:
We allow the power of law to cause further hardship and possible death, because great power works to create distance, which deceives us about the real effects of our power. Our basic problem is that we do not even consider the consequences […] We are part of Biblical and prophetic tradition that confronts such deception by acknowledging it in ourselves, by calling for a new consciousness, and by ringing the alarm bell to wake up and pay attention to the unjust effects of our power (Davidson Reference Davidson1988, 71).
This was frequently a way Sanctuary workers called on religious networks to support the movement. By recalling the particular history of a religion, sanctuary could be incorporated into a longer, deeper spiritual narrative which brought participants’ own understanding of persecution and statelessness in service of giving meaning to the Central American refugees’ claims for asylum.
Open but Demanding Membership
At the same time, asking congregations to root their support of Sanctuary in their own faith commitments entailed great local independence in decision-making processes. This protected the movement as a whole if any individual congregation was prosecuted, and it gave participants direct control over their own practices of sanctuary. After all, Sanctuary required an entire congregation being willing to vote, through democratic participation, to become a sanctuary. It was not something that a religious leader could decide on behalf of a congregation, which meant that the process of deciding whether and how to participate generated diversity in forms of concrete reasoning about the meaning, purpose, and operation of sanctuary practices.
But sometimes this made distilling the theological aspects of Sanctuary into clearly identifiable political arguments difficult, as one speaker expressed as a disclaimer before speaking of the movement: “There is no single or agreed upon theology within the sanctuary movement, thus reflecting the spontaneity, diversity, and congregational nature of the movement. A variety of emphases exist within the movement so that no one person or one city speaks for the whole movement” (Thomas Reference Thomas1986, 68). This could prove to be a weakness in direct legal or policy claims, and contributed to a significant conflict between the Chicago and Tucson branches; the former wanted a more identifiable and unified political critique and a centralized national infrastructure, whereas the latter believed in helping individual refugees through evasion services, cultivating the integrity of sanctuary as a religious and moral symbol, and maintaining the independence of local congregations to pursue efforts in line with their own conscience.
Indeed, as the movement grew, it had to reconcile the faith aspects of Sanctuary with the desire to align itself with more varied religious and non-religious groups. In this process, sanctuary was increasingly interpreted not just as a principle grounded in faith, but also a larger sense of tradition, while still emphasizing that it had to be a deeply established principle. A 1984 meeting of Sanctuary leaders spoke of the faith component of sanctuary as follows:
We agreed that groups participating in Sanctuary — whether religious or secular — must be those for whom Sanctuary is deeply rooted in their tradition and heritage … Unless the declaration of Sanctuary is rooted in tradition, it has the great potential of being a weak decision with a diffuse identity … We must also recognize that the church is not a vanguard movement. Sanctuary, in terms of the history and the tradition of the church, is a unique expression of church solidarity. It is a dynamic movement that is no longer just place but more than place, an event and a community (MacEoin Reference MacEoin and MacEoin1985, 198–199).
This is what allowed the movement to build a strong base around individual congregations while simultaneously working productively with secular groups such as Campus Sanctuary Committees. It is also lent the sanctuary principle flexibility across time. The New Sanctuary Movement, which arose in 2007 in response to increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts and the 2005 Sensenbrenner Bill, recalls and builds on the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, even as it lacks its particular focus on Central American refugees. And over the last year, diverse religious and non-religious organizations following the election of Donald Trump have used the rallying call of sanctuary to petition cities and universities to protect undocumented residents, reflecting adaptions from mainly religious spaces to cities, streets, workplaces, schools, and other public and nonpublic spaces, and apparently secularizing the concept as well as incorporating it into more explicitly political practices.
These questions of membership and exclusion involve trade-offs structured by contextual opportunities and limitations. As Dewey suggests, democratic values should be sensitive to concrete contexts, but of course critique is still possible and necessary. One distinction between the 1980s Sanctuary Movement and some of the more recent revivals of the principle of sanctuary is the membership of the movement on ethnic and citizenship lines. For although I have been arguing that Sanctuary formed a public between citizens and refugees in the Deweyan sense of reflection on encroaching consequences, the 1980s movement was “a movement about, rather than of, Central Americans” (Coutin Reference Coutin1993, 11). Activism efforts were largely performed by Anglo, middle-class Sanctuary workers, and the refugees themselves served as the focus of Sanctuary efforts, rather than playing an active role in the movement's leadership. This was not always the case, as refugee testimonies were always at the center of sanctuary practices and some refugees were politically active, but others needed to spend their time eking out a living, were worried about retaliation against their families in Central America, or did not wish to relive their traumas by speaking publicly about political violence in their homelands. But even with unintentional causes, this exclusion created a concerning situation for the democratic claims of the movement. As one Sanctuary worker remarked reflecting on the relationship between Anglo members and refugees: “Obviously, it is paternalistic […] I think it is impossible […] to escape our racism and classism in dealing with Central Americans … We can always walk away … that makes us inherently different [from them]” (Cunningham Reference Cunningham1995, 145).
In contrast, more recent “sanctuary” efforts surrounding universities and cities, as well as the non-sanctuary-based work of the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) Activists, has involved undocumented migrants “coming out” and organizing on their own behalf. There are undeniable democratic benefits to undocumented people being able to represent themselves, since in Dewey's words, “[t]he man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 207), but before condemning the older movement because of the democratic innovations of the new, we might also note that many of these present-day activists have an education and class level, cultural competency, and English language skills, above that of many of the refugees in the 1980s Movement.
Public Authority
The religious aspects of Sanctuary also played an important external role in protecting the movement from an administration and public largely predisposed to be suspicious of it, both because it was involved in resisting the authority of the INS, and because the countries from which these refugees were fleeing were ones that the U.S. government considered to be experiencing a communist threat. Congregations operated with the understanding that sanctuary actions were performed not just by religious people, but as religious people and as religious practices. When the Tucson wing of the movement decided to go “public” with Sanctuary, it was because one of the members of the movement had received a message from an INS lawyer warning them to stop their border-crossing assistance. Noting that INS officers were wary of carrying out enforcement in places such as worship spaces, schools, and hospitals, one early member wrote, “Maybe the church as sanctuary will change some patterns of violence, of bureaucratic red tape, of waiting in prisons for hearings, of documentable people being precipitously sent away, of court decisions coming down so heavily against ethnic people, and of punishment that forgets the victims” (Davidson Reference Davidson1988, 67). The movement drew on the sense of worship spaces as “sacred” in order to publicly defy the INS, predicting that the image of an INS officer dragging an alleged refugee out of a church would create a public relations disaster for the government. The movement also actively sought the greater participation of Catholics, both because Catholics were the largest church body in the U.S., and in the hopes of influencing the positions of the Catholic hierarchy “because traditionally it had unquestioningly supported the U.S. administration, especially on foreign policy” (MacEoin Reference MacEoin and MacEoin1985, 26).
Sanctuary was therefore employing religious public authority in order to launch a critique of state policy, while also banking on the specialized treatment of religious claims within American society. This is a use of religious reasoning of which standard public reason accounts are rightly suspicious. After all, to take part in the practice of public reason-giving, an argument must be open to defense and critique, which “sacred” religious claims typically are not. And yet from a Deweyan perspective on the public, what matters is that the setting is created for collective reflection. By declaring worship spaces to be sanctuaries, the movement was not simply asserting private religious claims as if they were public interest (even as it was certainly representing particular interests); it was leveraging the privileged place of (certain types of) religion in the American public sphere by creating a confrontation between the value and reverence accorded to worship spaces and the appearance of new people and issues occupying those spaces.
CONCLUSION
A Deweyan perspective on the public opens up promising possibilities for how we might better evaluate religious and non-religious emerging publics. As we have seen, public reason accounts fail to capture significant aspects of real-world religious claim-making and other “uncivil” emerging forms of political contestation. Rather than rejecting public reason wholesale, or trying to replace it with a regulative principle which can achieve the same thing in a more inclusive way, however, I suggest that Dewey offers a fruitful methodological advance by contributing important ethical resources for thinking about the tasks and challenges of democratic liberal theory moving forward. As Dewey reminds us, when our democratic values and our very conception of the public fall out of pace with our lived reality, the appearance of new actors, claims, and problems tends to be obstructed, and our democratic commitments threaten to become empty. “To form itself,” Dewey argued, “the public has to break existing forms” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 31). Emerging publics thus must often defy prevailing norms of political engagement in order to shift perceptions and imaginaries that form the conditions for judgment.
Yet Deweyan public reasoning is distinct from agonism in that it maintains “common ground” for discourse and inquiry based on the consequences that bind us rather than any interests or rationality we supposedly share. With this shift, religion can be incorporated in a more contextualized and nuanced light that can help us recognize emerging modes of political performance and meaning-making, sensitive to the reality of trade-offs and structures of opportunity, but nonetheless still capable of principled critique. Dewey believed that democracy was as much an ethic and cognitive process as it was a question of institutions and procedures. To realize this hope, people cannot just be constrained to behaving as if their political action has consequences on others (i.e., justifying themselves); they also have to be able to reflect on those connections as an integral part of reasoning and value formation. For Dewey, this is what true public judgment requires.
