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Changing clothes would have been safer than going to church for Christopher Peterson. His distinctive shirt had appeared in the newspaper, in a surveillance camera photo of an August 16 bank robbery, worn by a man who looked a lot like him. When he wore it four days later to Crossroads Grace Community Church in Manteca, California, another attendee recognized him, called the police, and told them the man in the photo was sitting in the back pew. Officers came in during the service, tapped Peterson on the shoulder, asked him to step outside, and arrested him as the rest of the congregation worshiped obliviously.

Conventional wisdom holds that church sanctuaries are, well, sanctuaries where lawbreakers can take refuge. We learned about it from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Zorro movies, and Whoopi Goldberg's Sister Act. But as a legal principle, it's a bit dated: King James I abolished it four centuries ago.

The right of sanctuary had a good run. The Pentateuch repeatedly stakes out refuges at the altar and at special cities (Ex. 21:12-14, Num. 35). In the first few centuries after Constantine, church and state officials codified sanctuary in detail: How much of the body needs to be within the sanctuary? Do church graveyards count? What about the bishop's residence? Can you claim sanctuary if your crime is blasphemy?

Judeo-Christian laws weren't unique. Greek temples worked the same way, as did the Hawaiians' sacred pu'uhonua sites. But the reason for such sanctuaries was the same. "As a product of a time when justice was rough and crude," law professor Wayne Logan summarized in a 2003 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review article, "sanctuary served the vital purpose of staving off immediate blood revenge." If the church could be convinced that the sanctuary seeker's life was not in danger, it would turn him over. "The church, in short, played a foremost role as intercessor," Logan writes. Fugitives in medieval English sanctuaries, about 1,000 a year, were able to negotiate financial compensation or a punishment like scourging or exile.

Abuses (sanctuary cities tended to be characterized by disorder rather than by sanctification) grew as public faith in civil law rose, civil punishments became more diverse, and kings lost their fear of ecclesiastical retribution, especially after the Reformation. Henry VIII severely curtailed sanctuary in 1540. Less than a century later, it existed only in civil matters. (France maintained the right of sanctuary until the Revolution.)

Roman Catholic canon law continued to regulate the right of sanctuary in principle, but even this was dropped in 1983. Too bad: That's when churches rediscovered the principle. Hundreds of congregations across denominational lines joined the 1980s Sanctuary movement, assisting and sheltering Central American refugees, largely from El Salvador and Guatemala. The U.S. government called it alien smuggling and convicted several of its leaders (they received probation, not jail time).

Today, it's public relations, not law, that keeps the idea of sanctuary alive. And this year, it is very much alive. In June, the First United Methodist Church of Tacoma opened its doors to an Army officer who didn't want to go to Iraq, with an offer to any likeminded service members. The action got a lot of press, but the limitations didn't: Beds were only offered for a maximum of three nights. In August, the church of 60-80 active members vacated its building because it couldn't pay for insurance and upkeep.

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October 2006, Vol. 50, No. 10