the whole of the law
#Sanders comments on family separations at the border: “It is very biblical to enforce the law” https://t.co/5DiL1C4FHt — CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics)
Attorney General Jeff Sessions makes a similar argument: "Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”
But when Obama was president the relevant biblical passage wasn’t Romans 13:1, it was Acts 5:29. The goalposts have moved — and when there’s a another Democratic president and/or Congress, they’ll move again. Conservative Christians would never have countenanced electing a president who has been divorced — until Reagan came along. When Bill Clinton was president, character in the occupant of the Oval Office was everything; now it’s nothing, or, really, less than nothing.
The lesson to be drawn here is this: the great majority of Christians in America who call themselves evangelical are simply not formed by Christian teaching or the Christian scriptures. They are, rather, formed by the media they consume — or, more precisely, by the media that consume them. The Bible is just too difficult, and when it’s not difficult it is terrifying. So many Christians simply act tribally, and when challenged to offer a Christian justification for their positions typically grope for a Bible verse or two, with no regard for its context or even its explicit meaning. Or summarize a Sunday-school story that they clearly don’t understand, as when they compare Trump to King David because both sinned without even noticing that David's penitence was even more extravagant than his sins while Trump doesn’t think he needs to repent of anything. But hey, as a Trump supporter once wrote to me: "Now we are fused with him."
And that’s it, that’s the law, that’s the whole of the law.
But I think Jeff Sessions actually knows that the position he and Sanders articulate is inadequate. In his statement he lets slip one dangerous word: "I do not believe scripture or church history or reason condemns a secular nation state for having reasonable immigration laws. If we have them, then they should be enforced.”
Ah, you shouldn’t have let that word sneak in there, Mr. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. It might lead people to ask questions, to wit:
- Are our immigration laws reasonable?
- What do you mean by “reasonable,” anyway? In different contexts the word might mean “appropriate” or “in accordance with reason.” Which is the right one here?
- If it is reasonable to separate asylum-seeking parents from their children, perhaps even forcibly taking a baby from a breast-feeding mother, would it also be reasonable to turn fire-hoses and police dogs on them?
- If not, why not?
Start going down this road and you could end up sitting at your kitchen table trying to parse the way Martin Luther King Jr. distinguishes just and unjust laws in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” And we wouldn’t want that, would we? Better simply to say “Romans 13:1 says it, I believe it, and that settles it” — at least until the Democrats get back in power.