Rome was sacked in AD 410. It was the greatest tragedy in the empire’s living memory: the former seat of the empire’s power conquered by Visigoths and their vicious leader, Alaric.
The suffering of Romans who experienced the sack was brutal. Cruel, greedy, and savage—Augustine would call the invaders “barbarians” in City of God—the Visigoths inflicted every horror imaginable upon the civilians they encountered. They perpetrated mass rape on Rome’s women and girls, tortured people of all ages (often trying to force those who appeared wealthy to give up their valuables), and murdered random people in the streets.
But there was one place, and one place alone, the Visigoths dared not enter: church. For all their cruelty, the Visigoths were Christians, albeit of the Arian heresy. And while their faith didn’t otherwise translate into their conduct of war, it did lead them to respect Christian houses of worship. Though Augustine doesn’t comment on this, if any of the Visigoths had wanted to attend church on a Sunday during the sack, they might have worshiped in Roman churches themselves. Indeed, toward the end of the fifth century, the Visigoths accepted the Nicene Creed. Could their adoption of Trinitarian theology have begun here?
I thought about this history of respect for churches as sanctuaries while reading CT’s recent report on US officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) going to an Atlanta church to arrest a Honduran man, Wilson Velásquez—on a Sunday, no less.
The man was in the US with his family, waiting for their asylum application to be adjudicated. As CT’s Andy Olsen reported, he “had made all his required check-ins at an Atlanta ICE office. He had the government’s permission to work and had an appointment on a court docket. He was deported once nearly 20 years ago—a significant strike on an immigrant’s record—but otherwise had no criminal record.” He had helped found the church where he was arrested.
When ICE Comes to Church
But my aim here isn’t to litigate this one man’s case. Nor am I trying to say how to reform America’s policies toward immigrants (of whom I am one, as well as a naturalized citizen for nearly 17 years now). I am simply asking what it says about this administration that it is willing to thus disrespect spaces set apart for God—that it has no regard for the centuries-old tradition of sanctuary.
What does this arrest say about churches? What message does it send when state agents use Christians’ obedience to the biblical command to meet together (Heb. 10:25) to make a political point? Why would US officers conduct this arrest during the Sunday service? Even the Visigoths balked at that.
There are seven days in the week, and people who wear a GPS-tracking ankle bracelet, as Velásquez did, are very easy to find. Even if we all were to agree this arrest was legitimate and necessary, it could have been planned for any other time and place. Church was a choice. And why? Why choose to arrest a man at church?
When Augustine wrote in City of God of the horrors of the sack of Rome, he saw the Visigoths’ respect for sanctuary as a remarkable witness of God’s provision for Christians and non-Christians alike. Vicious to everyone and disrespectful of every other space, the Visigoths at least understood that churches were unique, a space set apart for God.
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The result, Augustine said, was nothing short of a miracle. Christians and pagans alike took shelter in churches throughout Rome and were spared. What “was novel,” Augustine states in City of God, “was that savage barbarians showed themselves in so gentle a guise, that the largest churches were chosen and set apart for the purpose of being filled with the people to whom quarter was given, and that in them none were slain, from them none forcibly dragged; that into them many were led by their relenting enemies to be set at liberty, and that from them none were led into slavery by merciless foes.”
This was utterly unlike city conquests known to the pagan world. Pagans did not respect even their own gods’ temples when sacking cities, Augustine duly observed, citing the mythical sack of Troy as described in Rome’s national epic, Virgil’s Aeneid. There, Troy’s aged king, Priam, seeks refuge at the altar of Jupiter, king of the gods. But a Greek warrior slaughters him anyway, and the altar flows with royal blood, a sort of perverse sacrifice.
Virgil indicates his disapproval of this impiety, but he isn’t shocked. This story was nothing unusual in the ancient world. People often sought sanctuary, and they were often dragged from their refuge to be killed or enslaved.
Arresting Wilson Velásquez may have been defensible on legal and political grounds, though I have strong doubts. And an arrest by ICE is not a horror on the scale of an ancient city conquest. Still, the choice to arrest Velásquez during Sunday worship at church was downright pagan. It implies church buildings are nothing special—no different from any store or office. It is an act of disdain for the worship of God.
When Augustine reflected on the meaning of the Visigoths’ respect for sanctuary, he saw in this miracle an opportunity to preach the gospel to those still skeptical of the good of Christianity. God’s mercy is so great we can see it even in the merciless Visigoths, Augustine argued; Christ’s power is so great that even corrupt earthly powers may respect it.
And though the city of God is a spiritual realm, physical spaces matter too, Augustine said, especially if they point people to God. Churches are set apart as no other buildings are. They should be respected as sanctuaries not in the name of a polite fiction but because they are devoted to God.
Augustine’s reflections on the sack of Rome remind us that churches have a long history of offering temporary respite to the powerless, weak, and suffering. That is a history American congregations should continue.
Most of us are not called to figure out US immigration policy, to determine who may be justly arrested or deported. We are called to minister to those in our midst (Matt. 25:34–40). And because the vast majority of immigrants and refugees who arrive in the US are Christians of some sort, it is churches specifically to which they are likely to turn when in need.
Such works of mercy are not political but theological, and it is the church’s prerogative to ask immigration enforcement officials to do their work in mercy, too. Specifically, it is the church’s prerogative to ask ICE to make arrests without interrupting Christian worship and ministry. It is not too much to ask for the long tradition of sanctuary to be respected.
“The Most High does not live in houses made by human hands” (Acts 7:48), and it is not any building but Christians as God’s people who are his home (Heb. 3:6; 1 Pet. 2:5). But our church buildings are given to God, too. They are sacred places of refuge and provision for souls, places where mercy flourishes for anyone within. ICE agents are always welcome there—if they have come to worship.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
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