From inside the Churches

By: Evan Underbrink

From inside the churches, the Romans could hear their great city burn, boil and at last, fester from Alaric’s armies. Rome, the city whose ancient gods declared would have no end, was no longer indomitable. Wealth was taken, art left to the savage whims of invaders, and the women and children left outside subjugated to injustices which may look all-to-familiar to us, in stories both emblazoned upon our news sources and from those first-hand accounts. It does not take great leaps of imagination to see how the police brutality and protests will flavor each mind’s reading of this ancient story for this generation and those that come after.

But the churches were a curious thing. By the command of Alaric I, king of the Visigoths, and Arian Christian, no Christian churches were to be touched by the swarm of soldiers plundering for booty. Those souls inside were considered safe, away from the atrocities which so often accompany war. This safety was not determined by one’s faith, or creed, or color. To be within the church was to be protected by God; to harm the people inside was to perhaps experience that wrath of God, and certainly feel the wrath of king Alaric.

On Monday, June 1st, amid national and international riots and a global pandemic, President Donald Trump dispersed a group of peaceful protesters in order to have photos taken of himself holding a bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. We could, and many have, decried this utilitarian usage of the church: a political figure terrorizing his people because he “wanted the visual” of him as a Bible-holding churchman – despite, we may add, much evidence to the contrary. A more curious question that has not been raised is, if those protesters were to rush to St. John’s Episcopal Church, would they be admitted for sanctuary? Indeed, would there be anyone at the door to let them in?

St. Augustine begins his famous City of God with the argument that those criticizing the church of his day were only alive because Arian and Orthodox Christians alike could agree that the church was a place of safety, a place that ought to be outside of our violence. Regardless of fundamental differences of belief, the Orthodox and the Arian could also agree that this safety was not merely for those “within” the church. The most vituperative Celsus would be welcome inside during the devastation, should he choose to accept the offer. For St. Augustine, this “open door” policy was not a capitulation to the divisions of the Arians, nor to the critics of Christianity who saw the turn away from the old gods as the reason for Rome’s fall. Indeed, such compassionate action was ingrained into the saint’s moral teaching of compassion, and formed the powerful witness to the transformative work of Christ within communities; it was something distinctively Christian in this context for Churches to be respected as a sacred and nonviolent space. From this argument, the City of God begins: the symbol of the church as a place of sanctuary beyond the violent cultural and social conflict surrounding it.

Churches in the past decades have not been the symbol of sanctuary they were in the fifth century, where people of fundamentally different beliefs could still gather and expect a respite from the violence. They have been the places of martyrs, like Oscar Romero. They have been set ablaze. Ideologues of the worst degrees have seen them as targets. If indeed in the fifth century there was the church of sanctuary, today we have the church on fire. This is not how it ought to be.

We must ask ourselves, how are our churches today sanctuaries for all peoples, even its critics? If we rightly decry the hypocrisy of President Trump’s “visual,” then what is the right visual for the church to be seen at this time? With what power we have, let us not let the image of the church in the 21st century be that of a building with closed doors, bullet holes from the inside, and blood on the altar. It begins with our reclaiming the idea of sanctuary for all before the altar, before the cross.