Panel: BEYOND INNOCENCE: THEOLOGY, VULNERANCE, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY



35.3 - MIGRANT POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY, VULNERANCE, AND THE GENEALOGY OF ETHICS: RETHINKING THEOLOGICAL INNOCENCE THROUGH MIGRANT SUBJECTIVITIES

AUTHORS:
Villas Boas A. (Universidade Católica Portuguesa ~ Lisbon ~ Portugal)
Text:
This paper analyses the emergence of a discursive dispositif that shifts responsibility for structural social problems onto migrants, reinforcing their precarious conditions and sustaining broader patterns of inequality. Through the lens of vulnerance—the active capacity to harm, also embedded in Christian theological imaginaries—the study argues that this apparatus is not only political but also reinforced by religious discourses that shape subjectivities, regulate expectations, and define how migrants are permitted to appear in public. Drawing on a polyhedral analysis inspired by Pope Francis and articulated with Foucault's genealogy of ethics, the paper shows that self-referential forms of spirituality and soteriology remain inert in the face of this apparatus. Focused on interior consolation, moral adaptation, and passive endurance, such frameworks lack a public commitment to justice or structural transformation. As a result, this "innocent" theology reproduces asymmetries, sacralising patience, gratitude, or redemptive suffering and, at times, naturalizing housing precarity as spiritually meaningful or morally expected. Conversely, when the religious and political agendas intersect critically, a political spirituality emerges that is capable of generating alternative subjectivities that resist both blame and subjection. Based on empirical research with migrants in Lisbon, the study demonstrates how spiritual practices, such as rituals, community networks, embodied memories, and narratives of dignity, function as forms of resilience and resistance. These practices expand collective agency, offering ethical and social resources to guide communities and lawmakers in developing public policies that create real safe places of inclusion. Migrant political spirituality thus becomes a generative locus for reimagining theological knowledge as a responsible, public, and justice-oriented practice beyond claims of innocence.