Religion's Oldest Habit? Hiding the Hunted

In 1943, French police came to the mountain village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon demanding a list of the Jewish refugees hiding there. Pastor André Trocmé gave them nothing. "We do not know what a Jew is," he told them. "We only know men." By the war's end, the village of 5,000 had sheltered roughly that many Jewish refugees, forging papers, sneaking families across the Swiss border, and treating strangers as neighbors.

That same instinct is unfolding again right now, amid the ongoing ICE crackdown and as Temporary Protected Status runs out for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians. Faith communities across the nation are responding. We'll get to that. First, it helps to see how far back this pattern actually goes.

Is This Pattern Older Than Any Single Crisis?

Trocmé's villagers weren't improvising. Le Chambon was Huguenot country, descendants of French Protestants who had spent two centuries as a persecuted minority themselves. When the danger shifted to someone else, the community's own history of being hunted became the reason to hide people being hunted now.

That pattern shows up again and again in American history, well before this month's headlines about immigration. Quakers, the same tradition persecuted for refusing to swear oaths or fight in wars, became the backbone of the Underground Railroad, hiding escaped slaves in barns and cellars on the theological conviction that every person carries 'that of God' within them.

A century later, Black churches supplied the meeting halls, the money, and much of the leadership that fueled the nationwide civil rights movement, drawing on Exodus and the prophets to frame segregation as a moral crisis rather than merely a legal one. In the 1980s, congregations across denominations declared their buildings sanctuary for Central American refugees fleeing wars that the United States had helped fund, reviving a legal concept nearly as old as the church itself.

Was America Ever Meant to Be One Faith?

That history collided with current politics this week. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, promoting a children's book on the Declaration of Independence, told PBS that America was never supposed to be built around a single race or religion, breaking publicly with Vice President JD Vance's argument that the country's founding was fundamentally Christian. "It's demonstrably not true that we came from the same religion," Gorsuch said, pointing to the Amish and the Quakers as evidence.

The same dissenting religious minorities he cited as proof of pluralism are the ones who built this country's tradition of protecting other minorities once they'd found their footing. Our earlier piece on Is America a "Christian Nation" After All? traces how every generation that insists otherwise tends to surface at moments of anxiety about diversity, not confidence in unity.

What Holds These Movements Together Theologically?

Underneath the specific history sits a shared instruction that shows up across traditions. The Torah repeats it more than almost any other social command: love the foreigner among you, because you were foreigners yourselves in Egypt. It's a shared memory that became law, based on the notion that people who forget what displacement felt like will eventually inflict it upon someone else.

Christianity inherited that logic and sharpened it. In Matthew's account of final judgment, Jesus tells his followers that welcoming a stranger is the same as welcoming him directly. The Book of Hebrews goes further, warning that hospitality to a stranger might mean unknowingly hosting something holy. If you recently saw Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey you probably noticed a similar sentiment mentioned several times, cited as 'Zeus's Law'. 

Islam's founding story runs on the same current: when the Prophet Muhammad's followers fled persecution in Mecca for Medina, the Quran praised the Medinans who took them in for preferring the refugees' needs over their own, even while poor themselves.

None of this makes any single tradition innocent. The same scriptures invoked to defend the vulnerable have also been twisted to justify conquest, forced conversion, and worse, a tension we explored in our piece on whether Christianity's violent history is unique. In reality, religion doesn't have one settled answer to how outsiders should be treated. Across the faith spectrum it's been a centuries-long argument, and everyone keeps citing the same books.

Is This Still Happening Today?

That argument is playing out again right now. A 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court recently voted to allow Trump to end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian people currently living in the United States. The Haitian and Syrian refugees are largely here as a result of an earthquake which devastated their home country and an ongoing civil war, respectively.

In recent years, even before their TPS was revoked, their welcome in the United States appeared to be rapidly dissolving - perhaps most noticeably after Donald Trump and JD Vance both repeated a debunked claim that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of their neighbors in an Ohio town.

As the federal government continues to step away from these communities, faith groups from Ohio to Texas have revived an old Catholic framework called 'accompaniment', staying physically present with people facing deportation rather than only advocating from a distance. In effect, it's a practice in which a person, rather than a physical building, acts as a source of sanctuary for someone being persecuted.

In Ohio, that theology becomes grocery runs, translation help, and rides to Cleveland. It looks like a Mennonite church in Columbus that housed a mother named Edith Espinal for more than three years while her deportation case worked through the courts, and a Catholic parish in Lorain that helped Puerto Rican families displaced by Hurricane Maria find housing, jobs, and English classes.

It also looks like the quieter shift our earlier piece on ICE Arrests Nun On Her Way to Mass described: a Texas sister now telling every nun in her diocese to carry identification, since a church building no longer guarantees the protection it once did. For more on how clergy across the theological spectrum are wrestling with where obedience to law ends and obedience to conscience begins, see Clergy Deeply Divided On Immigration Crackdown.

What connects Le Chambon to a Springfield church basement is not a single doctrine or a single political outcome. It's a pattern: people who remember, or were taught to remember, what it felt like to be the stranger, choosing again and again to be the ones who answer the door.

Would You Answer the Door?

If a religious tradition's history of persecution creates a moral claim on how it treats today's outsiders, does that claim expire after enough generations have passed? Where does your own tradition, or your own family's history, sit inside this pattern?