Romans 13 and State-Ordered Church Closures

 The thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans poses a problem for those who profess the Christian faith and also subscribe to either the doctrine of civil disobedience as taught by Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth century and exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth or to any other version of Whiggism, for that matter, including the founding ideology of the American republic.    This dilemma has inspired a number of very creative attempts at interpreting the passage to  say other than what it says.   Perhaps my favourite of these is the one thing that says St. Paul was being sarcastic.

I do not have this difficulty myself.   I have always thought Thoreau to be an overrated nincompoop, am not part of the idolatrous cult that worships Gandhi and King, do not believe in civil disobedience, and wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Johnson that "the first Whig was the devil."    I therefore accept the New Testament passage at face value, as enjoining civil obedience upon Christians and teaching the "divine right of kings".  As you have probably deduced from the title of this essay it is the first of these two items that is our primary concern here.   Therefore, I shall discuss the second first to get it out of the way.

The divine right of kings is a doctrine that is widely misunderstood.    This is undoubtedly due to the fact that its opponents, the Whigs to whom we have already alluded and their myriad of ideological descendants, have written most of our history books since the late eighteenth century.   Although Herbert Butterfield  exposed the fundamental fallacies of their method of interpreting history , id est to take the progressive liberal values of the present and interpret the past as movement towards those values with people cast in the role of hero or villain according as they are perceived to have advanced or fought to retard the march of progress, in a short volume first published in 1931, with a few notable exceptions such as the dean of Canadian historians Donald G. Creighton and the Hungarian-American Catholic historian John Lukacs, the Whigs have continued to dominate the field.  Most people, therefore, first encounter the divine right of kings in the caricature of its foes.   The doctrine does not mean that God gives kings unlimited, autocratic, power to rule their subjects as they see fit.   It means precisely the opposite of this, that because the king's office is vested with authority the recognized ultimate source of which is God, the exercise of that authority is a sacred duty and vocation for which God holds him strictly accountable and he is therefore by no means free to abuse his authority by tyrannizing his subjects.   Should any of you have been reading my essays since the beginning you may recall that the first posted here, "The Divine Right of Kings versus the Tyranny of the People", made the case that contrary to the Modern belief that freedom and democracy go together, it is democracy and not divine-right kingship, the internal logic of which leads inevitably to tyranny and totalitarianism.   If government exists by the will of the people, whatever that nonsensical phrase which attributes to a collective something that only individuals possess is taken as meaning, and to serve that will, then it need not recognize any limits on what it does to the people it governs, provided that is what the people want.   That this is where the internal logic of democracy ultimately leads was recognized as a problem long ago.   Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous commentary on Democracy in America (1835, 1840), warned about the "tyranny of the majority" and the twentieth century attempt to get around this by redefining the principle of democracy from "whatever the majority wants" to "whatever we all agree upon" was no improvement in this regards for it ultimately means that everybody must be forced to agree and dissent not tolerated, tyranny in its most extreme, totalitarian, form.    The ancient wise men, such as Plato and Aristotle, knew that democracy is the mother of tyranny.   The Whiggish attempt to circumvent the destiny of democratic tyranny by moderating democracy with liberalism, the recognition of individual rights as a limitation on even democratic government , was doomed to failure.   The evidence of that failure now surrounds us.   All it took for elected politicians to shatter completely the fetters placed upon them by constitutional protections of rights and freedoms was for the public to be persuaded that it was "necessary" to "save lives".   Democracy, far from being held back from evolving into its tyrannical, totalitarian form, by liberalism, broke liberalism's bonds like they were made of straw.    Indeed, it broke not only liberalism but the older safeguards of freedom that predated the rise of Modern Whiggery.   Parliamentary control over government spending, a safeguard of freedom the roots of which go back to the Magna Carta, was attacked in both Parliament and our provincial legislatures as both levels of government sought to be released from this oversight in order to deal with the pandemic.   The distinction between public and private, another safeguard of freedom which goes back to the feudal recognition that "every man's home is his castle", was obliterated by the public health mandarins' demands for technology-enhanced total surveillance of everyone to facilitate "contact tracing" in the name of keeping us safe.   These and other examples of pre-Modern safeguards of liberty, belong to the ancient ideal of constitutional government, with which the divine right of kings is consistent and compatible, and which can be summed up as the idea that the civil authority itself is subject to and bound by the law.   Indeed, the divine right of kings properly understood, and not as the Whigs caricatured it, requires the ideal of constitutional government, which is why monarchs are required as part of their sacred coronation oath to vow to uphold and protect the law.   Democracy, as we have seen from the events of this year, is not consistent with this ancient ideal, and indeed, it could be said that democracy in Modern thought has usurped the place of constitutional government in pre-Modern thought (remember that tyranny and usurpation were originally one and the same concept).

When the divine right of kings is stated within the context of moral theology rather than political philosophy it is pretty much what you find in the thirteenth chapter of Romans.   St. Paul says that the civil authority, the "higher powers" in the Authorized Bible, are "ordained by God" and, switching to the singular, are "the minister of God to thee for good".   More specifically "he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."  Some might object that this is a generic "divine right of civil authority" that contains no endorsement with regards to specific constitutional forms.   I will grant that, but point out that the Scriptures as a whole are hardly silent on the latter subject.   If you turn to the passage that "Christian" republicans use as their chief proof-text, the eighth chapter of I Samuel, and read it through, note first that a democratic republic was not what Israel had prior to this chapter and second that every single negative thing Samuel is instructed to tell the Israelites about what the king they have asked for will be like, has historically also been true of republican and democratic governments, and, indeed, democracies and republics have been historically much harder on their people in the way of taxes than kings ever were.   You will find good kings and bad kings in the Bible, and God Himself is identified as the King of kings.   You will not find a good republic or democracy mentioned in the Bible and, indeed, in the numerous examples from Genesis to Revelation of the people getting together to demand something, either of their governors or of God, it far more often than not displeased God, Who not infrequently punished them by giving them exactly what they asked for.

Now, let us turn back to the civil obedience enjoined upon Christians in this passage.    Does this passage require that the Christian Church close its doors and cease meeting together when the state orders it to?   Is there any way I can answer that question with "no" that does not require a clever re-interpretation of the passage like the ones I referred to and rejected at the beginning of the essay?

The answer to the first question is "no" and the answer to the second question is "yes".

The reason the answer to the first question is no is because it involves a situation that is an obvious exception to the general rule.   It is an obvious exception for two reasons.

The first is that if the civil obedience St. Paul enjoined upon Christians involved shutting the Church down and not meeting if so ordered by the state, then Christianity would not have survived the first century.   Christianity began within the Roman Empire and while the Empire was for the most part quite tolerant when it came to religion in various locations the Roman authorities became hostile to the Christian faith, usually when enemies of the faith went to them and accused Christianity of being a subversive political movement.   That Christianity is nothing of the sort is evinced by the passage we are considering, whose author likely had the false accusations against the Church in mind when he penned it.   However, at various times the accusations against Christianity reached to the very highest level and a general persecution of the Christians was ordered by a Caesar.   If St. Paul did not mean meeting together as a Church to be an exception to civil obedience if forbidden, then all a hostile Caesar would have needed to do was forbid the Church to ever meet again and it would have had to have dissolved permanently.   The Roman authorities did, in fact, outlaw Christianity at various times, and the Church had to meet in secret.   This was not "civil disobedience" in the Thoreau/Gandhi/King sense of defiantly breaking the law to challenge injustice.   It was simply not obeying a civil order that would  have required them to disobey a command from the Highest Authority.

This brings us to the second reason, which is that this very type of scenario occurs in the Scriptures and the way the Scriptures deal with these scenarios makes it clear that an exception to civil obedience is to be found here.

These examples can be found in both Testaments.   The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is set in the period of the Babylonian Captivity.   You might recall from the Book of Jeremiah that when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and carried everyone away captive, the Lord's instructions through the prophet were that they were to go away, be good subjects of the Babylonian king, and they would live and one day He would return them to the Promised Land.   Daniel and his three friends were among the youth of the Hebrew nobility who were taken captive.   Being devout, they set out to obey the Lord's command and be good Babylonian citizens.   At various points in the book, however, they were required to do something that would break the Law of God.   In the third chapter, for example, Nebuchadnezzar ordered a giant gold idol to be erected in the plain of Dura and commanded all of his high officials to fall down and worship it.   Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, Daniel's three friends who had been raised to such positions at the end of the second chapter as part of Daniel's reward for revealing and interpreting the king's dream (of a giant image with a gold head interpreted to be Nebuchadnezzar himself, presumably the inspiration for his misguided actions in this incident, and the reason, although the text doesn't spell it out, why the image is widely thought to have been of the king himself) were among those so commanded but, since this would be the idolatry forbidden by the Second Commandment, they did not worship the image, and were cast into a fiery furnace as punishment, from which they were miraculously delivered.   Later in the book, in the sixth chapter after the Persians have conquered Babylon, and Daniel is promoted to an even higher position, other officials envious of him persuade Darius to make a decree forbidding anyone to make a petition to any other God or man except himself for the period of a month.   When Daniel continues, despite the edict, to pray to the Lord three times a day, he is accused, and thrown into a den of lions.  Like his friends he is miraculously spared.

The second  example, you will note, is closer to the scenario we are contemplating because rather than requiring something wrong, idolatry, as was the case with the first example, it involves the forbidding of a duty owed to God.

In the New Testament, after the Ascension the disciples of Jesus wait in Jerusalem as commanded until the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost comes upon them and empowers them.   St. Peter preaches a bold sermon to the crowd and about three thousand are converted and baptized.  These continue to meet on a daily basis in the Jewish Temple and, for their specifically Christian fellowship, involving the Apostles' teaching, the Eucharist ("breaking of bread") and prayer, from house to house, as there were no buildings assigned to the purpose and consecrated for it as of yet.   Daily their numbers increased.   Evidently they did not believe in the Satanic lies of "social distancing" and "limiting gatherings" but this was because they put their faith in God, living two millennia before George Bernard Shaw could sadly but accurately say "We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession".   In the third chapter of Acts, SS Peter and John heal a man born lame at the gate of the Temple.  This leads to another sermon by St. Peter in Solomon's porch.   Five thousand are converted but the Apostles are arrested.   Brought before the chief priests the next day, they preach to them as well.   The Jewish authorities forbid them to preach and teach in the name of Jesus and their answer is "Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye.  For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard".  In the fifth chapter, after they have continued their ministry and the Church has continued to grow, the Apostles are imprisoned, miraculously set free, and, after they have resumed their teaching the next day, brought before the Sanhedrin.  Their answer to the council began with the words "We ought rather to obey God rather than men."

It is these words that express the response of the faithful when those in authority forbid the practice of the Christian religion.   

So clearly a command from the state not to meet as the Church is an exception to the civil obedience commanded of Christians by St. Paul in the epistle to the Romans.    This does not mean that when the state orders the Church to close, as it has done this year, that we ought to conduct sit-ins, or behave in any of the other ways that have come to be associated with civil disobedience.   When refusing to obey orders of this nature it must be with the attitude that this is an exception to a general rule that is necessary because to obey such orders would be to disobey the very Higher Authority that enjoined civil obedience upon us through St. Paul's words.

There is no Church if she does not meet.   This is something that those whose ecclesiology begins and ends with "the Church is the people not the building" overlook.   Yes, the Church is the people and not the building in which they meet.   The individualist spin so often put on this phrase has no warrant in Scripture.  The very name given to the Body of Christ in the New Testament, ekklesia, is the Greek word for "assembly".   It is people, but people joined together as an assembly or congregation, not people apart from each other doing their own thing on an individual basis.   When the state orders the  Church not to meet - and remember in the first days of the Church they met daily not once a week - it is commanding the Church not to be the Church.   When it tells the Church we can meet but only "virtually" not "in-person" it is commanding us to live a lie.   For that is what being apart, mutually watching an online video, and calling it "being together" is.   It is pretending that this artificial "virtual space" that exists only as an image on our computer screens is reality.   That is an incredibly dangerous road down which to go.

It has been very disappointing, therefore, that this year, the Churches have with few exceptions, chosen to obey man rather than God on this matter.   Medical doctors, who belong to the profession with the least respect for privacy, rights, and freedoms, and therefore ought never to be trusted with any sort of civil authority, have been handed dictatorial powers because of a virus that they have been allowed to blow completely out of proportion, and they have ordered Churches to close, to offer virtual services only, and, in the brief respite from this over the summer, to limit their numbers, forbid congregations from singing, require them to register in advance, sit in designated places, and muzzle their faces.   It is very sad that most Churches have followed these evil orders, despite their being a clear exception to the rule of civil obedience, while those following the Apostles in saying "we ought rather to obey God than men" have been mostly the separatist sects and outright heretics.

God save the Queen and may He punish the politicians who do evil in her name!

What Would the Non-Jurors Do?

Rodney Howard-Browne is not exactly my idea of a sound theologian. Those who would have recognized his name prior to the events of this week would have remembered this South African born evangelist-pastor primarily as a leading figure in the “Laughing Revival” of the 1990s. A Canadian manifestation of this, the so-called “Toronto Blessing”, began in January of 1994, during my last semester of high school and was the subject of much discussion that fall when I began my theological studies in Otterburne. My attitude towards the phenomenon at the time could have been summed up in the words of Shania Twain “that don’t impress me much.” It has not changed much since.

That having been said, I must say that I felt a certain degree of admiration for Howard-Browne this week when I read about his having been arrested and charged with “unlawful assembly” for holding services in defiance of Hillsborough County, Florida’s “safer at home” order.

Note that I said “a certain degree of admiration”. It is not an unqualified admiration. I am not a believer in Henry David Thoreau’s doctrine of civil disobedience, nor do I hold in high esteem those practitioners of the same that have been elevated to sainthood if not apotheosized in the last generation or two, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

That having been said, the state has no legitimate authority to suspend worship services and tell Churches to close. Some might point to the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, in which the Apostle enjoins us to be “subject unto the higher powers”, meaning the civil authorities, because they are “ordained of God” and the “minister of God to thee for good” as saying otherwise, but to do so would be to twist the meaning of the Scriptures. Does anyone seriously believe that St. Paul was telling the Church in Rome that if Emperor Nero ordered them to renounce their faith, disband, and never meet together as a Church again that they were to obey? Obviously that is not the case.

All across what used to be Christendom, Churches and sects are closed because an insane mass panic over the flu’s bigger, tougher, second cousin, twice-removed on its mother’s side has persuaded everyone to blindly trust politicians and public health officials, both of which groups are at the present high on the biggest power trip that I have witnessed in my entire life, and hence are completely unworthy of the trust they demand from us. Those politicians and public health officials have decided that to save us from the big, bad, coronavirus, they need to lock us in our houses, take away our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion, and dehumanize us by conditioning us to fear human contact and non-virtual social interaction. They are, in other words, doing evil of the kind and on the scale that is only ever done by those who are convinced that they are doing good.

There have been some “Christian” commentators who have spoken out in favour of the – hopefully – temporary closing of the Churches and sects. Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Benedict Option, who blogs at The American Conservative, has been commenting on the coronavirus for a couple of months now. His way of looking at the whole thing is very different from my own. He describes his approach as one of prudence rather than panic, although he has failed to convince me that the line between the cardinal virtue and the irrational, fear-driven, mob mentality falls where he thinks it does. Two weeks ago he expressed relief when his Eastern Orthodox Archbishop ordered the laity to stay away from the Liturgy, offering a justification from Eastern Orthodox theology that seems a bit bizarre when we consider that the lit in Liturgy comes from the same root as the word laity. I wonder if this was something like how the Anglican Church of Canada gave us a theological justification for Communion in one kind prior to the closing of the dioceses altogether even though this flatly contradicted Article XXX of the Articles of Religion. More recently he expressed his support for his Archbishop’s essentially cancelling Easter. Needless to say he does not think very highly of those pastors who have continued to hold services. He castigates Christians who argue that to refrain from our duty of coming together to worship as the Body of Christ during this pandemic is to allow ourselves to be governed by fear rather than to walk by faith, accusing them of being selfish and judgmental towards their brethren who support the anti-COVID measures, apparently without any sense of the irony of his own shrill, hysterical, self-righteous, and judgmental tone.

Dreher, who believes that “social distancing” and the other measures being imposed upon us to fight COVID are necessary, views the entire question as being that of a choice between human lives and the economy. Framed that way, the only moral answer to the question is to choose human lives. As I argued in my last two essays, however, this is the wrong way of framing the question. The non-economic cost of the anti-COVID measures needs to be factored into the equation. Instilling in people a fear of meeting with each other, shaking hands, hugging, and human contact in general is a way of killing social capital, robbing us of our sense of community. One would think that Dreher of all people, whose first book was very communitarian, would understand this point. The telephone, Skype, live-streamed liturgy, and other technological replacements for community are not adequate substitutes, especially not over extended periods of time. Conditioning the entire populace to look upon them as if they were is an extremely dangerous thing to do. Especially when this conditioning goes hand-in-glove with a request that we give up our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion. Moreover, it is quite evident that Dreher hasn’t got a clue about what the real cost of sacrificing the economy would be. As true as the words in the title he borrowed from Flannery O’Connor are, this is not a choice between poverty and death. It is a choice between the death of billions, which will be the Malthusian consequence of shutting down all but the “essential” sector of every national economy for too long, overloading that sector, causing it collapse under the strain, and creating a worldwide depression worse than that of the 1930s, and the death of the thousands or, at worst, millions who might die from COVID-19, apart from these measures. It is the choice, in other words, between what is potentially another Spanish flu and what could potentially be a global-scale Holodomor.

Given his point of view, it is perhaps understandable that Dreher has been taking the stance that Christians should regard the forsaking of Church assembly, voluntarily or involuntarily, as a self-denying sacrifice for the sake of others. I cannot help but wonder, however, what he would be saying if some world leader were to arise and tell us that the COVID-19 pandemic can be contained, but to do so we will all have to stay at home, except for essential purchases such as groceries, and that to ensure we do this everyone will be required to receive a mark on his right hand or forehead authorizing him to take part in permitted market transactions. Would he tell us it is our Christian duty to submit to the mark as a sacrifice to save lives or would he tell us, as St. John does, that anyone who submits to the mark will be permanently cut off from the Covenant of Grace?

Earlier this week, the Manitoba Public Health Officer ordered all “non-essential” services to close from April 1st to April 14th. The Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft, Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land in a directive on March 31st, remarked that “While several social service agencies were exempt, Churches specifically are not exempt.” Services had already been suspended as of March 16th by an earlier directive from His Grace. Some parishes, including my own, had switched to online services, either live-streamed or pre-recorded until the lifting of the interdict. Whether even this, inadequate, substitute for gathering together and worshiping will be available during the next two weeks under the limitations of the new directive remains to be seen.*

I bring this up not to criticize my bishop but to draw attention to what is implied by the Manitoba provincial government’s order. If “non-essential” services must close, and Churches are not exempted from that, then Churches are clearly deemed to be “non-essential” by the government. This is not a point of view which orthodox Christians are allowed to share. In my last essay I pointed out that the government’s distinction between “essential” and “non-essential” when it comes to businesses is a fraudulent one and that it is even worse that the government is treating our fundamental freedoms as if they were “non-essential.” If it is not the state’s place to tell anybody that the business he depends upon for his living is “non-essential”, and it is not, and it is not the state’s place to tell us that our freedoms of assembly, association, religion, belief, etc. are “non-essential”, and it is not, it is certainly not the state’s place to tell us that Christ’s Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is non-essential.

We live in an age in which our thinking about the proper authority of the Church and the state within their own spheres and in relation to each other has been fogged by the triumph of liberalism and its presuppositions derived from a secularization of the heretical view of Church and state held by the Anabaptists and the disestablishmentarian branch of Puritanism. This was not the case four, or even three, centuries ago.

In 1688, the Right Reverend William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, was imprisoned in the Tower of London by the order of King James II, along with Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wales, John Lake, Bishop of Chichester, William Lloyd, Bishop of St. Asaph, Jonathan Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol, Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, and Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough. The issue was that these prelates had refused to publish the king’s 1687 Declaration of Indulgence and had sent a petition to the king, explaining their opposition to it.

There were two elements to their opposition to the Declaration, its content and its legality. The Declaration relaxed the strictest of the Church establishment laws in two ways, first, by allowing private worship for Roman Catholics and Non-conformist Protestants, second, by suspending the Test Act, which required that all who hold public office belong to the Church of England. Today, most would find it difficult to understand why this was problematic, and regard it in a positive light, as moving towards freedom of religion. The second part, the suspension of the Test Act, was the reason why they viewed it so differently in the seventeenth century.

James II was a Roman Catholic. His father, Charles I, had been falsely accused by the Puritans in the English Civil War, of trying to bring the English Church back under the jurisdiction of Rome, as Mary Tudor had done. This, ironically, led to James becoming a Roman Catholic, because when the Puritans murdered his father after an illegal trial, he spent the interregnum in France where he was first exposed to and attracted to Romanism. He “crossed the Tiber” as the saying goes, during the reign of his brother Charles II. As king, he had the right to set aside the Test Act requirements for individuals. Suspending it entirely, however, was regarded as a step towards packing the government with Roman Catholics, as well as an illegal infringement on the rights of the Parliament that passed the Act.

The bishops were tried and acquitted. Parliament then invited William III, Prince of Orange, who had married James’ daughter Mary, to come over, depose his father-in-law, and take his place as king. This accomplished, Parliament then required the clergy of the Church of England to swear an oath of allegiance to the new king.

For five of the seven bishops – Lloyd (1) and Trelawney are the exceptions – as well as four other bishops, and over three hundred priests, this was a problem. If the king had overstepped his divine right by trying to overturn an Act of Parliament, Parliament had overstepped its authority by deposing the king. Furthermore, it had no right to command the clergy to commit an immoral act – to swear an oath, which contradicted the oath they had already sworn to James II and his heirs. They refused to swear the new oath, for which reason history remembers them as the “non-jurors”, and were deprived of their livings.

New bishops were appointed to their sees, turning what was already a political and a moral dilemma, into a theological one. The non-jurors maintained, and they had the weight of the consensus of Catholic antiquity behind them, that Parliament had no legitimate power to depose a bishop, that a bishop so deposed remained the legitimate bishop, and that the bishop put in his place was illegitimately consecrated and schismatic. George Hickes, who as a priest had refused the new oath, was later consecrated a bishop by the non-juring bishops, and become the de facto leader of the group after the death of Archbishop Sancroft, explained these principles at length in a posthumously published book entitled The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Consequences of Schism. Briefly summarized, it was that the Church and the State were two distinct realms, whose membership overlapped, in the former of which the bishops were the governors and kings as members were subject to them, in the latter of which kings were the governors and bishops as members were subject to them, each government having its own sword to enforce its authority, the bishops having the power of excommunication, the king’s sword being somewhat more literal, but neither had the right to depose the other, or to intrude into the other’s sphere of authority.

The non-jurors had a much clearer understanding than the vast majority of people today, of the distinction between Royal authority, Parliamentary authority, and Ecclesiastical authority, and stood up for the rights of each when infringed upon by one of the others at the cost to themselves of prison, deprivation and poverty. What would they think of today’s totalitarian health bureaucrats ordering Churches to close and “Christian” writers like Dreher who cheer them on?

(1) There were two bishops named William Lloyd. The Bishop of Norwich by that name did become a non-juror, but he was not one of the seven who had signed the petition against the Declaration of Indulgence.

* Update: On April 1st, His Grace updated this directive. He began by saying "In light of further information received from Minister Friesen’s Office and interview on CHVN Radio, it is clear that live-streaming celebration of worship is permissible. I therefore encourage you to continue the practice of live-streaming as you were, because they offer a much needed pastoral response and relief to our people."

Refusing to Worship a False God

*Notice*  Ordinarily it is my policy, once an essay has been published here, not to edit it other than to correct typos - mistakes, in spelling, punctuation, etc.  In this case, however, I had pre-written this essay and scheduled it to be posted at a certain time, then, upon re-reading it, realized that there were three places where further words would improve the essay.  I edited the essay as a Word document, the edits consisting of three new paragraphs.  I intended to insert these into the essay here before the post-time but was prevented to do so by technical difficulties.  I have now edited the essay to include them.   They are the paragraph between the last paragraph in the general history of white/black relations in the United States and the first paragraph in the specific history of MLK Jr., the paragraph which begins with "While civil disobedience may start non-violently", and the paragraph that is the penultimate paragraph in the edited version of the essay.  - GTN, January 22, 2013 *End Notice*

Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, explains the reasonableness of orthodox Christian doctrine by drawing analogies between God as Creator and the artist, especially the creative writer. In her last chapter she applies what she had written in her previous chapters by arguing against “the purely analytical approach to phenomena” which she maintains is something that “has gone seriously wrong with our conception of humanity and of humanity’s proper attitude to the universe”. In this purely analytical approach, the difficulties that we experience are regarded as a series of problems to solve. Drawing upon her own experience as a mystery writer she argues that the detective story formula of problem-solution should not be regarded as a model for dealing with things that arise in real life because such stories are written to make the problem fit the solution. It is not only the writer of detective stories, that includes and excludes details to fit a solution, however. Sayers writes:


Somewhat similarly, the popular game of debunking great men usually proceeds by excluding their insoluble greatness from the terms of the roblem and presenting a watery solution of the remainder; but this is, by definition, no solution of the man or of his greatness. (1)

In other words, the virtues, strengths, and achievements for which the man is considered to be great are ignored by the debunker who instead focuses his efforts on debunking other, lesser, aspects of the man’s life and character.

The game of debunking great men has not gotten any less popular since The Mind of the Maker was first published. If anything it has gotten more popular. It is not a game to everyone, however. In the classroom and in the media progressive intellectuals frequently attempt to debunk the founders and leaders of their countries and of the Christian religion, and the writers, poets, artists, and thinkers who have contributed to Western civilization for the last three millennia. For whatever reason the progressive enjoys doing this – Robert Frost’s famous quip about a liberal being someone “who is too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel” comes to mind – he takes his self-appointed task as the debunker of a civilization and culture built on injustice very seriously indeed. His arguments, however, read like they were written to illustrate what Dorothy Sayers had written about debunking great men seventy two years ago.

It would be a very simple matter to debunk the subject of this essay in this way. Martin Luther King Jr. was ordained in a church whose doctrines he no longer believed in (2), was awarded a doctorate for a plagiarized dissertation (3), was a life-long womanizer and adulterer and had ties to subversive organizations allied with the power that was his country’s biggest enemy at the time. (4) By concentrating on these things one can attack his reputation without ever having to address the ideas, actions, and accomplishments that reputation is built upon.

That will not be the method of this essay. Instead, we will criticize the very things King's reputation is built upon. Whether this will be a more successful method of debunking remains to be seen.

There are three overlapping but distinct levels of admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. He is admired by black Americans as a leader of their people who fought for their equality, justice, and rights against racial segregation and discrimination. The American federal government by making the third Monday in January to be a holiday in his honour declared him to be a national hero of the United States to be revered by all Americans. Progressive liberals have declared him to be worthy of universal admiration and have essentially made an idol out of him.

This third level of admiration – or rather adoration – is the reason for this essay. The question of whom they choose to honour as heroes is one to be decided by blacks and Americans for themselves. The rest of us have no say in the matter although we are free, of course, to comment on the decisions they make. When, however, progressives trot out the images they have erected in the United States before the rest of the world and, like Nebuchadnezzar, demand that we all bow down and worship them it then becomes our business.

The same ideas, words, acts, and accomplishments are the foundation of King’s reputation at all three levels. If that foundation is strong enough to support the edifice that has been erected upon it at one level that does not mean it is capable of supporting the structure the next level up. If King’s actions on their behalf justify the esteem in which black Americans hold him that does not necessarily mean that they warrant his being considered a national hero by all Americans, and even if it could be argued that his actions benefited the country as a whole justifying his status at that level it does not follow that he is worthy of universal adoration.

Our examination of the life and achievements of King must begin by placing him within his historical context.

European settlers began to establish colonies in the Americas in the late fifteenth century and in the sixteenth century they began to import slaves. Most of these slaves were Africans, purchased by the Europeans from African tribes who had captured them in war or raids. In the eighteenth century, several British colonies in North America broke away Great Britain to form the American republic. These colonies – now states – disagreed among themselves as to what kind of country they wanted to build. Some, based primarily in the south, wanted a traditional, rural, agrarian country. Others, based primarily in the northeast, wanted a modern, urban, industrial country. The African slaves were caught in the middle of the conflict between these two sides. The plantations in the south were the primary destination of slaves brought into the United States, but northern merchants were the primary importers.

In the early nineteenth century Britain and the other European powers abolished the Atlantic slave trade. Realizing that they were about to be put out of business for good the northern slave merchants decided that the south should be made to bear the burden of their costs, sold all their remaining slaves to the south, then became abolitionists overnight. The conflict between the northern, urban, merchant-industrialists and the southern, rural, agrarians continued to escalate until, a little under a century after the Americans declared their independence from Britain, it grew into an outright war in which the south sought to break away from the American republic and the north went to war to impose its vision of industrial modernity upon the entire country. The north won and one of the first things they did after securing their victory was to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States.

The question then, for north and south alike, was what to do about the fact that they now had a large population of newly freed ex-slaves on their hands. Initially the south could not do anything about it because they were under martial law, disenfranchised, and forced to watch while the northern opportunists they called carpetbaggers, aided by turncoats whom the other southerners contemptuously called scalawags, looted them. Once they regained control of their states they passed the Jim Crow laws establishing racial segregation. Under these laws blacks and whites would go to separate schools, drink from separate water fountains, use separate washrooms, etc. The north opted for a different approach. Initially, they banned free blacks from settling in their states altogether, then, when they realized they could use a supply of cheap labour, they invited blacks to move to northern factory cities like Detroit and Chicago. Needless to say these were not optimal circumstances for establishing good relations between the blacks who moved north and the northern white industrial working classes.

There is no way this history can be honestly interpreted so that blacks can be said to have been treated justly in all of this.  The popular narrative, however, in which slavery and segregation are blamed for all of the problems black people currently face in the United States, is not a valid reading of this history either, and a case can be made that in fact the post-emancipation actions of the north has contributed far more to the present problems affecting American blacks than either slavery or segregation.

Thus was the setting of the historical stage when Martin Luther King Jr. made his appearance upon it. King was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929. His maternal grandfather was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a position that would be taken over by King’s father when he was very young. Eventually, in 1960, King himself would join his father as co-pastor of this church. By that time he was already a leader in the Civil Rights Movement.

King grew up in Atlanta and graduated from his father’s alma mater Morehead College. Deciding to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, he pursued graduate degrees in theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and Boston University. The latter conferred upon him his doctorate in the spring of 1955. In December of that same year the incident took place that was to launch his career in the public eye. Rosa Parks was arrested and fined in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. King, who had become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery the year before, led a boycott of the public transit system in protest. This brought King into the spotlight and during the next twelve years, with the help of the media, he built up his reputation as a civil rights activist who used non-violent civil disobedience to achieve his goals. Before discussing that career, however, we should take note of something that occurred the year prior to the Rosa Parks arrest because the timing of the two events is of some importance to how we interpret King and his career. The event in question is the Supreme Court of America’s final ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Brown v. Board is not a textbook example of how a court is supposed to arrive at a decision. Indeed, it could be used to illustrate what a court is not supposed to do. Rather than making its ruling on the basis of the constitution, the law, and past precedent, the Warren Court based its decision to overturn the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson and to rule segregation in schools to be unconstitutional, on a United Nations fatwa against racism and the arguments of sociologists and psychologists. (5) Regardless, it is the significance of the decision that is relevant to our discussion. That significance is this – Brown v. Board meant that the end of de jure racial segregation in the United States was inevitable. The decision met with resistance, of course, and the American federal government ended up sending in troops to enforce it. Some interesting things could be said about how all of this contributed to the triumph of an empire centred in Washington D. C. over local and regional cultures in the United States but this too is not the point here. If segregation’s death knoll had sounded with the Supreme Court’s decision in 1954, what does this say about the arguments King gave in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” justifying the civil disobedience of a career which began in 1955?

There is a lot of confusion about civil disobedience due to a subtle distinction that is easy to miss. Of actions that are against the law, some we say, are mala prohibita. This means that it is wrong to commit these acts only because the law tells you not to. Other actions are mala in se, which means that they are wrong in and of themselves regardless of whether there is a law against them or not. Now, if there are acts which are wrong in themselves, apart from any law, that means that there is a higher law than the laws made by human societies, by which the laws made by human societies are to be judged. It is on this basis that we speak of just and unjust laws. A just law is a law which conforms to the higher law not made by man whereas an unjust law is a law which violates the higher law. One way in which a law can be unjust is if it imposes upon people a requirement to do something which is malum in se, which is wrong in itself. Think of, for example, a law requiring you to sacrifice your first-born son to an idol. There is a moral obligation to disobey such laws. This, despite the fact that it is the sort of thing those who believe in civil disobedience will point to in order to justify their theory, is not what is meant by civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience is not merely a matter of refusing to obey laws which order you to do something horrible. It is a deliberate disobeying of the law, perhaps a law that is itself unjust but not necessarily a law that requires you to do something unjust – note the distinction, as a form of activism. There are different kinds of civil disobedience. There is the ‘non-violent resistance” variety, in which the person breaking a law he considers to be unjust, does so with the expectation that he will receive punishment in order to make a statement about the law and the government, with the idea that in doing so he will gain popular sympathy and support wherewith to convince or compel the government to change the law. This is the kind of civil disobedience we ordinarily associate with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.. The nineteenth century American crackpot who dreamed up the idea of civil disobedience in the first place, however, Henry David Thoreau, did not limit the concept to such acts. A revolutionary and anarchist, he believed in violent civil disobedience both in theory, and in the practice of violent would-be reformers like John Brown.

In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, King attempted to give a prestigious pedigree to civil disobedience, by citing Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the Biblical book of Daniel, the early Christians under Roman persecution, Greek philosopher Socrates, and the Boston Tea Party as examples. Only the last of these is a true example of civil disobedience. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to break the law of their God by obeying Nebuchadnezzar’s decree that they bow down and worship his golden statue. They did not do so as a protest against the injustice of the king, whose authority they respected. Civil disobedience is against both the teachings and example of Jesus and His Apostles and the response of the early Christian apologists, to the unjust persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire, was to write defences of the Christian faith which included the argument that Christianity made people better, more law-abiding, citizens. Of all the examples King gave, Socrates is the most hilarious. King may have been thinking of Socrates’ refusal to take part in the arrest and execution of Leon of Salamis but this was a matter of not carrying out an order that commanded him to do something unjust. In Plato’s Crito, which is set three days before Socrates’ death, Socrates is visited by his lifelong friend Crito, a wealthy Athenian farmer, who informs him that his death is imminent and urges him to escape, offering his assistance. Socrates’ response is that while the Athenian judgement against him was unjust, it would be wrong for him to commit an injustice against Athens and its laws in return, which he would be doing so if he rejected their authority and made his escape.

We have a moral obligation to obey the law and we are only excused from this obligation when the law itself tells us to do something that morally wrong. Civil disobedience, the breaking of laws one disagrees with even if they do not require one to do something wrong, as a means of effecting social change is morally wrong. It is all the more inexcusable when the desired change is already in the process of happening which, as we have seen, was the case with Martin Luther King, whose career in civil disobedience began after the Supreme Court had made the end of segregation inevitable.

While civil disobedience may start out non-violently it does not stay that way.  It goes beyond both lawful dissent and the refusal to commit a morally wrong act that is required by an unjust law.   The deliberate breaking of the law in order to achieve one's ends, however noble those ends, and however restrained and conscientious one might be in choosing the laws one breaks encourages others to follow one's example and to go further than one would oneself.  One of the problems afflicting the black community in the United Stated today is crime.  While most blacks are law-abiding citizens, a disproportionately large percentage of blacks compared to the general population, commit and are victims of crime.  Progressives, when they acknowledge this problem at all, rather than denying it and blaming black overrepresentation among the arrested and convicted on police racism, say that it is the result of slavery, segregation and white racism in general.   Surely, however, any reasonable person would agree that a significant contributing factor must be the establishment and glorification of King, a man who used defiance of the law as a means to achieve his ends, as a hero of their people.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was in a number of ways a-typical of King’s activism. It was just a boycott, for one thing, which under most circumstances would be perfectly legal and therefore not be considered an act of civil disobedience. In this case he was charged with breaking an obscure law, but the point remains that it was far more reasonable and less deliberately provocative than would be typical of his subsequent actions. For another thing, it took place within the city where he lived and pastored at the time. Far more typical of King was the Birmingham incident of 1963.

In Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. did what he had been doing throughout the southern United States in the previous seven years and what he had established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to do. He came into a community where he was an outsider, bringing with him media agents who were even further removed from the community than he was, and stirred up trouble between local blacks and the authorities, so that his media friends could take pictures and write stories that placed the authorities in the worst possible light and made him out to be a saint. (6)

Although King continued to be an activist until an assassin ended his life in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, he reached the peak of his career in 1963. Later that year, in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he delivered the speech which contains his most famous words. The Civil Rights Act which the American Congress passed the following year was largely in response to the demands made in this march. In terms of its impact, this Civil Rights Act is King’s greatest achievement.

But what kind of achievement is it?

The Civil Rights Act did not just make de jure racial discrimination, i.e., racial discrimination enshrined in law, illegal in the United States. It forbade racial discrimination on the part of private individuals and businesses as well. This was the reason Republican Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona voted against the Act. It had a number of consequences.

It created, for example, the kind of situation in which a civil rights organization approaches an employer and says “you are located in a city where x percentage of the population is black, but only y percentage of your employees are black, you are guilty of racial discrimination and we are going to sue you.” How does the employer prove that racial discrimination was not a factor in his hiring decisions? It is virtually impossible to do so and in a sane legal system no one would ever be called upon to prove such a thing. Anti-discrimination legislation like the American Civil Rights Act, however, place employers accused of racial discrimination in the situation of having to try and prove their innocence.

To avoid being at the mercy of the civil rights shakedown employers had to set aside a certain number of jobs for blacks. The fact that this too was a form of racial discrimination did not matter – for the courts and civil rights organizations, discrimination only flowed in one direction.

Then the courts ruled that employers could not use competency tests in hiring if those tests had a “disparate impact” upon blacks or other racial minorities. In other words, if one of the results of the test was that less than the required percentage of blacks or other racial minorities, even if this was not intentional on the part of the employer or the person who made the test, the test was discriminatory and could not be used. (7)

None of this would have been possible without the Civil Rights Act the effects of which extend beyond the borders of the United States as imitation bills began to pop up in other Western countries – the Race Relations Bill of 1968 in the United Kingdom, for example, or the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. The American bill paved the way for these other bills which often went even further than the American bill.

The raising of King from a hero of American blacks, to an American national hero, to a universal figure to be revered by all, is based on the idea that in fighting for the rights of his own people, which earned him their esteem, he combated racism which is an evil that hurt the United States as a whole and indeed the entire world, therefore his fight against it deserves the respect of the entire world. At first glance that seems quite reasonable.

What is racism however? The word is of recent origins, however old the phenomenon it is supposed to denote may be, being no older than the 1930s, and there was a time in living memory when there was a consensus as to its meaning. It could be defined either positively or negatively. If defined positively, it meant the belief in the superiority of one’s own race. If defined negatively, it meant the dislike of and/or mistreatment of people of other races, whether this meant a general dislike of everyone who is not of your own race or a specific dislike of members of a certain race. Today, however, it is used in ways that seem to have no relationship with these definitions.

Take, for example, a rapper who fills his lyrics with hatred towards white people, expressed in violent and even genocidal terms. The term racist is far less likely to be applied to him than it is to a white person, who with no conscious belief in the superiority of his own race or dislike towards other races, gets an education, finds a job, builds a career, marries and has kids, and basically goes through life trusting the system to work for him. Progressive liberals, whose thought is pervasive throughout academia, the news and entertainment media, most churches, and, at least on this subject, all political parties, insist that the former is merely expressing his legitimate anger due to his disenfranchisement, whereas the latter’s refusal to acknowledge that he benefits from “white privilege” generated by “institutional racism” is itself a form of racism. Clearly, whatever these people think the word racism means, if they even know themselves, has little if anything to do with what everyone used to think the word meant. It is also clear, at least to those who are fortunate enough not to be trapped in this kind of Orwellian doublethink, that this kind of thought is itself racist against white people because it establishes a way of thinking in which white people are always racist, even if they have no conscious belief in their own superiority or conscious dislike of other people, whereas other people are never racist even if they consciously hate white people.

There are many that would claim that this is no part of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Such people insist that King was a classical liberal, whose vision was of a society where everyone was evaluated as an individual, and who would be as opposed to reverse discrimination and anti-white attitudes as he was to discrimination against his own people. For evidence of their claim they point to his “I have a dream” speech. Others, however, believe that King’s vision was much more radical than this, that he believed that racism pervaded the very structure of American society, which would need to be torn down and rebuilt to eliminate the injustice created by slavery and segregation. While this debate has to be regarded as the inevitable result of King’s apotheosis – those who accept the new deity but hold opposing visions of society each try to claim the deity for their own side - it is quite clear from his words and actions which side he, a self-avowed Marxist, leaned towards.

As for King's dream of a day when his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, consider what happened in the United States five years ago and again last year.  "Race is only skin deep", progressives insist confusing the outward indicators of race, such as skin colour, with its essential meaning, which is lineage, ancestry, and descent.  In 2008 a man was elected President of the United States, whose skin colour was all that he really shared with the American black community.  Barack Obama's father was a Kenyan - his ancestors were not brought to America as slaves, nor did they live through segregation.   His mother was a white liberal.   When he was elected he received a huge percentage of the black vote and much of the white vote as well and his skin colour was a significant contributing factor to his receiving both the black and the white liberal vote.   His victory was declared by many to be the triumph of King's dream.   The largest irony in all of this is that they were absolutely right.  Obama's election was  the ultimate triumph of Martin Luther King, over logic and common sense, if not over racism.

For this reason, we must, in obedience to the higher law, refuse to prostrate ourselves before this new idol the progressives have commanded us to worship.







(1) Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1970), p. 211. The book was first published by Harcourt, Brace in 1941.

(2) http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/king.htm

(3) See Theodore Pappas, The Martin Luther King Jr. Plagiarism Story (Rockford, Illinois: The Rockford Institute, 1994).

(4) Samuel T. Francis, “The King Holiday and Its Meaning”, American Renaissance, February, 1998.

(5) See the discussion of this in Paul Craig Roberts & Lawrence M. Stratton, The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing Inc., 1995), pp. 21-50.

(6) See Gail Jarvis, “Birmingham: The Rest of the Story”, LewRockwell.com, November 23, 2003.

(7) The ruling in which this took place was Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1970). See the discussion of this case in Roberts and Stratton, op. cit., pp. 95-102.