Keying Teslas and firebombing Tesla dealerships because you disagree with certain governmental actions is not legitimate resistance, especially since these actions are levelled against private property. Under what circumstances and conditions is it morally viable to resist a civil government? Dr. Gary North sets up a possible scenario.
It is 1942. The Nazis who control your nation militarily have just announced a new policy requiring all Jews to come to the local city hall and register. The most prominent church leader in your denomination has recommended obedience to all “lawful” directives of the German authorities. He has not recommended disobeying this new directive, and you have no reason to believe that he will. Your denomination will not speak directly to this issue, and you think the civil authorities will threaten to shut down churches or in other ways pressure the church’s leadership to remain silent or even recommend compliance with the order. Then a Jew you know comes to you and asks for asylum. He wants you to hide him in your attic or barn. You know that this would be illegal. Will you hide him or turn him over to the Nazis?[1]
Was it wrong to disobey these laws? In terms of Nazi law, yes. But what about in terms of a higher moral law? How would your pastor respond if a similar law was passed today? Of course, there were consequences for defying Nazi law. People who hid Jews from the Nazis risked their own lives.[2] Those who spoke out publicly about the Nazi regime were often sent to concentration camps.[3]
Resistance movements like those practiced by Christians during World War II have been accepted as morally justified by nearly all ethical thinkers. The Diary of Anne Frank and Thomas Kineally’s Schindler’s Ark (later made into the film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg) show the highest praise for those who defied what was a “legal” government policy.
Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths
Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths takes a closer look at God's Word and applies it to erroneous misinterpretations of the Bible that have resulted in a virtual shut-down of the church's full-orbed mission in the world (Acts 20:27). Due to these mistaken interpretations and applications of popular Bible texts to contemporary issues, the Christian faith is being thrown out and trampled under foot by men (Matt. 5:13).
Buy NowIn Give Me the Children: How a Christian Woman Saved a Jewish Family During the Holocaust, Pola Arbiser describes how her nanny defied the law and hid her and her sister from Nazi officers. The Jewish community of survivors has described these resistors as “righteous gentiles”[4] or simply “Christian rescuers.”[5] Were these acts of resistance moral even though they violated Nazi Reich law?
Will governments plant “spies” in churches to entrap ministers who preach from parts of the Bible where homosexuality and new “gender norms” are condemned? It happened before.[6] What about new laws being passed in Colorado labeled the “Kelly Loving Act”?
• Colorado’s Kelly Loving Act could allow the state to revoke custody from parents who misgender their children by defining it as ‘coercive control.’
• The bill has passed the Colorado House and is now headed to the Democrat-majority Senate before potentially reaching Gov. Jared Polis’ desk.
• Similar legislation in Canada has resulted in severe penalties, including imprisonment for a father who misgendered his daughter.
“Radical legislators are rushing HB 1312 through the General Assembly under the guise of providing “legal protections for transgender individuals.” But far from protecting an allegedly discriminated-against minority, this bill could facilitate Child Protective Services kidnapping children from parents who refuse to affirm their child’s ‘gender identity.’” (Christian Post)
Colorado has been pushing the perversion agenda for many years. “Baker Jack Phillips was sued by attorney Autumn Scardina in 2017 after his Denver-area bakery refused to make a pink cake with blue frosting to celebrate her [sic] gender transition. The attorney who brought the suit is a man who claims to be a woman…. In 2018, Phillips scored a partial victory before the U.S. Supreme Court after refusing to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding…. The Colorado Court of Appeals also sided with Scardina, ruling that the pink-and-blue cake—on which Scardina did not request any writing—was not speech protected by the First Amendment.” (AP) If Scardina had only asked for a pink-and-blue cake, Phillips would have made it. The goal of Scardina was to prompt a lawsuit.
How will churches respond to the upcoming “Kelly Loving Act”? Will they buckle like most churches did under COVID restrictions arguing that Christians must obey civil governments under nearly all circumstances. What will church leadership do if a child is removed from a member’s home because of “misgendering”?
What will be the response of churches in America if the increasingly secular and anti-Christian courts rule that misgendering a child is a criminal offence? For what may be in store for American churches, see Chuck and Donna McIlhenny’s When the Wicked Seize a City: A Grim Look at the Future and a Warning to the Church.
The civil rights movement in the United States had its turning point when Martin Luther King, Jr., defied a court order because laws discriminating against blacks were immoral and unconstitutional. In his account of the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, King “speaks of a court injunction obtained by the city administration on April 10, 1963, directing that demonstrations be halted until the right to such activities might be argued in court. Dr. King continues: ‘Two days later, we did an audacious thing, something we had never done in any other crusade. We disobeyed a court order.’”[7]
If we take the position advocated by some that civil government is the final arbiter of what’s legal, moral, and right, with no higher law binding the magistrate, there can be no higher court of appeal. The most oppressive tyranny must stand as the people turn a blind eye to injustice and retreat behind a doctrine of impotent quietude. As soon as this happens, by default, the State has established itself as the new god to be honored, worshipped, and obeyed without debate or objection. R. J. Rushdoony describes the inescapable logic of denying a higher law ethic:
The universe of evolution and humanism is a closed universe. There is no law, no appeal, no higher order, beyond and above the universe. Instead of an open window upwards, there is a closed cosmos. There is no ultimate law and decree beyond man and the universe. In practice, this means that the positive law of the state is absolute law. The state is the most powerful and most highly organized expression of humanistic man, and the state is the form and expression of humanistic law. Because there is no higher law of God as judge over the universe, over every human order, the law of the state is a closed system of law. There is no appeal beyond it. Man has no “right,” no realm of justice, no source of law beyond the state, to which he can appeal against the state.[8]
Christians have a stark choice to make. They can remain passive, capitulate, hope they will be raptured “soon” (they won’t be), or engage in every aspect of public life, and that includes politics. The political goal is to reduce the authority and scope of civil government. I’ve outlined the biblical operating principles related to government (not solely politics) in my comprehensive work God and Government.
God and Government
With a fresh new look, more images, an extensive subject and scripture index, and an updated bibliography, God and Government is ready to prepare a whole new generation to take on the political and religious battles confronting Christians today. May it be used in a new awakening of Christians in America—not just to inform minds, but to stimulate action and secure a better tomorrow for our posterity.
Buy NowChristians offer numerous qualifiers as to why the Bible tells them not to be involved politically. Your pastor may have said or you’ve been told, Jesus didn’t get mixed up in politics, there’s a separation between church and state, our citizenship is in heaven, politics is dirty, you can’t impose your morality on other people, we don’t want to offend people, we’re told not to judge, we are to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, Satan is the god of this world, etc., therefore the political realm is outside the bounds of the Christian worldview. I discuss the myths of non-involvement in my book Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths.
Faced with this evil and immoral bill, Coloradans must say one of the most powerful words in the English language: No. We refuse to comply. We will oppose every attempt to destroy parental rights, to harm struggling and confused children, and to force us to use reality-denying and biology-defying language.
Speak up now by signing a petition to all Colorado legislators opposing HB 1312. Sign up to testify before the Colorado Senate or submit a written testimony against HB 1312. The best time to speak up and act was yesterday. The second-best time is now. (Christian Post)
But will Christians speak up? Will pastors speak up? Will rational people speak up?
[1] Gary North, “Editor’s Introduction,” Christianity and Civilization: Tactics of Christian Resistance (Tyler, TX: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1983), xii.
[2] Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
[3] Basil Miller, Martin Niemöller: Hero of the Concentration Camp (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1942), 112.
[4] As reported in Catherine E. Shoichet, “Christian nanny hid Jewish family from Nazis,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 27, 2003), E1 and E6. See Pola Arbiser, Give Me the Children: How A Christian Woman Saved a Jewish Family During the Holocaust (Altona, Manitoba, Canada: Friesens, 2003).
[5] David P. Gushee, “Christians as Rescuers During the Holocaust,” Must Christianity Be Violent?: Reflections on History, Practice, and Theology, eds. Kenneth R. Chase and Alan Jacobs (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2003), 71.
[6] “Now, the charge against [Martin] Niemoeller was based entirely on his sermons, which the Gestapo agents had taken down stenographically…. [W]ritten laws, no matter how explicitly they were worded, were subjected to the interpretation of judges. The totalitarian principle which governs Nazi Germany, as I have indicated before, includes religion as a function of State. Therefore, by recognizing Christ only as his Leader, Pastor Niemoeller was denying the right to divine leadership to Hitler. His offense was all the more serious because he had exhorted his followers to do likewise” (Leo Stein, I Was in Hell with Niemoeller [New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1942], 175).
[7] Daniel B. Stevick, Civil Disobedience and the Christian (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), 1.
[8] Rousas J. Rushdoony, “Humanistic Law, introduction to E. L. Hebden Taylor, The New Legality (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1967), vi-vii. A revised version can be found in Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: The Doctrine of Creative Destruction (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1968), 118-119.