Sunday School with Jeff Sessions
Attorney General Jeff Sessions could not have picked a more apt Bible quotation to justify the forcible removal of children from their immigrant parents. Yes, Romans 13 does counsel Christians to obey the law, even says the lawgivers were put in power by God–though God is not the name I would give to the electoral college.
The Biblical quotation is apt because it was used two hundred years ago to justify the return of runaway slaves to their owners. It was used to justify the enforcement of tyrannical Jim Crow laws designed to keep an entire race in a sort of pseudo-slavery. Jeff Sessions is himself a son of the Confederacy, who was turned down for a federal judgeship for being too racist, and who has been quoted using the N-word when he wasn’t quoting scripture.
I don’t know what was in St. Paul’s mind when he wrote that advice to the Roman Church, though I’ve read speculation that it was intended to disarm the government, which had the power to crush the infant sect, and which was almost certainly reading its mail. What I do know is that these words cannot be used to justify a practice that is wrong and immoral and, I should hope, un-Christian.
If Romans 13 is to be held paramount against all that the Bible has to say about befriending the stranger and succoring the weak, then it was the moral duty of every citizen of Germany and German-occupied territories to turn in their Jewish neighbors to the Nazis. It also would heap doubt upon the actions that made Martin Luther King a hero and a prophet. Civil disobedience is by definition unlawful, but it is too often the first very necessary step toward overturning laws that shouldn’t be on the books in the first place. Good lord, it would mean our whole country was founded on a lie, that we had the right to take arms against a tyrannical government. After all, if Romans 13 is to be believed, the British government, by its very existence, was ordained to rule over the colonies.
“But it’s in the Bible,” you protest.
Yes, it is. Here’s what else is in the Bible:
- Slavery–It is enshrined there in both the Old and New Testament. The supposedly enlightened St. Paul even ordered a runaway to return to his master. I never understood why God, who took the trouble to regulate against the mixture of linen with wool, could not have come up with an eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt now hold any man, woman or child in bondage, neither shall ye sell any in the marketplace. For as I delivered thee from the hands of the Egyptian, so shall I deliver the world.”
- Absolute power over your children–Disobedience could be punished by death. Girls were so much the property of their fathers they could not only be given in marriage against their will, but they could also be given up to a mob for the purpose of gang rape, as almost happened to the daughters of Lot.
- Multiple marriages–However much people insist that the only acceptable form of marriage is the union of one man and one woman, the Bible is full of accounts of men with multiple wives and concubines. Abraham had two; Jacob had four; Solomon had a thousand. So if the Bible is to be taken literally, then the early Mormons and their fundamentalist offshoot were right all along.
- Homosexuality punishable by death–No one but a crackpot believes that anymore, but there is no shortage of crackpots.
- Witchcraft punishable by death–Ditto.
- And finally, no cheeseburgers–Yep, God was so opposed to the mixture of meat and milk in the same food that he mentioned it three times.
Considering all that is in the Bible that we now ignore, I see no reason to tear children away from their parents because “the Bible tells me so.”