The shooting of an American woman in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, has overtaken the news for obvious and tragic reasons. This has upended much of my planned writing for this Friday, and I have heard from readers that you want my take. I will write my thoughts on the subject this weekend, as I want to think a bit more, and be clear before I post about such an important current event. I also will have more to say about the shift in American foreign policy.
So, for this Friday I thought it prudent to first speak directly to some sentiments I have seen expressed to dismiss critics of the current administration’s domestic and foreign policy. Dismissals, which I think, are slightly flippant and contradict core traditional principles. In some cases, those who have made such comments should know better, in others, well, I am not surprised they do not.
The American “Right” has abandoned Romans 13
1Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.
2 Whosoever therefore resists the power, resists the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.
3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:
4 For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he bears not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
5 Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.
6 For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.
7 Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.
8 Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.
9 For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
10 Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
11 And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.
12 The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.
13 Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying.
14 But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof. — The Letter to the Romans Chapter 13, Christian Bible
Those with a habit of invoking the Christian scriptures to defend their authoritarian takes on government and politics, tend to focus on the “obey authority” portion and miss the rest. A government is supposed to terrify the wicked—like Jeffrey Epstein—and it should never terrify the innocent. The idea is that if you are doing what you are supposed to you should have a reasonable expectation that the state will leave you alone. The government cannot habitually do bad things to the innocent and still be God’s agent, which should be plain, because the Sermon on the Mount clearly does not deputize the powerful to exploit the weak. Romans 13 is a clear indication of the proper order: government is just, the people obey just government, and anyone disobeying justice is clearly the problem. If habitually terrifying of the innocent is okay, meaning if the conditionality of good government does not matter, then Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders were wrong when the Declaration of Independence says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
If a preacher uses their pulpit to denounce what they plausibly think is a campaign to terrorize innocent citizens in the name of enforcing immigration law, that is not necessarily a bad use of their station unless the Founding Fathers were wrong. The preacher may be mistaken, but the idea that public justice is not a topic for a sermon is un-American and does not make Biblical sense. If anything, a preacher who speaks against injustice may be calling officials to repentance.
According to his family’s legend, the ordained Anglican clergyman, of a Lutheran parish, German American and Major General John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, started his career in the Continental Army by reading Ecclesiastes chapter three from his pulpit in Woodstock, Virginia:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. —Book of Ecclesiastes Chapter 3:1-8
and then when he got to verse eight, the story goes that he took off his clerical robes and revealed his colonel’s uniform for the Virginia 8th Regiment, aka the German Regiment. That’s the story his great nephew supposedly told in 1849, years after the event, and that is the one that has passed into Virginia legend. But the question is, if the legend is accurate, was he wrongly politicizing his pulpit? And were the Founding Fathers wrong to rebel against King George III, Supreme Governor of the Church of England? The only way the Founding Fathers can be justified in their rebellion against the British Crown while remaining in accord with Romans 13 is if the obedience to the state is conditional on habitual justice rather than habitual injustice.
Which is it? Were they right or wrong?
The same applies to international law. Is honor real, or just something for suckers.
If we accept that the legitimacy of a government rests on its adherence to justice rather than its raw capacity to inflict violence, we must apply this same standard to our dealings with other nations. The rejection of 'might makes right' does not stop at the water's edge. Yet, many conservatives who correctly identify that domestic power is subject to moral law appear to suddenly become materialists when looking overseas as they join with the illiberal so-called “Right.” They argue that without a “world police” to force compliance, international agreements are meaningless. But this confuses the enforcement of a law with the validity of a law.
The idea that countries, and in particular, the United States, have not taken international law seriously ignores the American viewpoint on the War of 1812, the rights of neutral states, the freedom of the seas, and why the League of Nations and the United Nations sprang from American minds. If some American leaders have been hypocrites—George W. Bush is the usual example—does it follow that Harry S. Truman in Korea, or George H.W. Bush in Kuwait were just wasting their time? Was Dwight David. Eisenhower wrong to criticize Israel, France and Britian for their imperialism at Suez? Occasional hypocrisy is wrong, but not so powerful as to transition itself into righteousness.
To argue that international law is 'not real' simply because it lacks a central sovereign enforcement mechanism is to adopt a crude legal positivism that conservatives essentially reject in every other sphere of life. This reasoning mistakenly equates the validity of a law with the presence of a policeman, ignoring the traditional principle that true obligation arises from covenant and consent, not merely the threat of state violence. Much like marriage, which is a binding covenant where the primary consequence of fundamental violation—such as adultery—is the dissolution of the relationship rather than imprisonment, international law relies on the honor of the pledge and the catastrophic cost of broken trust. If we claim that an agreement is only 'real' when there is a gun to enforce it, we delegitimize the very concept of moral obligation that undergirds what should be our view of civil society.
This week’s news at home and abroad requires us to recall our historically lived principles and to dismiss the fake sophistication of the cynics.
