Academic historian Glenn Moots takes up the cudgel of Protestant wranglings with the rights of resistance to the the civil magistrate in Chapter 3 (Resistance and Rebellion) of "Protestant Social Teaching." You can read my previous comments in this series here, here, and here.
Moots begins by situating the Magisterial Protestants in a three-fold context: the tradition of Western Christian (read: Catholic) political theology beginning in the 12th century; the humanist tradition drawing on classical resources; and the Bible. Implicitly rebuking the thinking of many American Christian about political life, Moots notes that "[while] all Reformers consider[ed] Scripture the most authoritative source they could use ... for politics, ... the Reformers were not 'fundamentalists' or 'biblicists.'" Instead, "they did not disqualify the use of non-biblical sources by any presumption of 'total depravity' ..." In other words, they drew on an a wealth historical, theological, and philosophical of resources when developing their political theologies.
Drawing on those resources, the starting point of magisterial political theology was the good of civil government.
Citing Romans 13, Titus 3, and 1 Peter 2:1, Martin Luther urges submission to authority, especially civil authorities. No only should we no deceive or be disloyal to civil authorities, Luther says we also shouldn't even curse them or grumble against them in secret.
How could the champion of the freedom of the conscience make such a claim?
Not even the harm civil authorities can do to us should drive us to chafe against their rules if those rules aren't unjust. A malicious ruler cannot, after all, harm the soul but only the body and property. If protecting our body and property motivates us to sin by disobeying authority when we ought not to, we harm our soul ... So long as the civil magistrate does not presume ecclesiastical or spiritual power, Luther says, we should even be prepared to suffer wrong at his hands.
But there's more:
Whereas pagan societies emphasized civil obedience out of a sense of reciprocity, usefulness, or reverence for tradition or ancestors, Protestant Christians raised the stakes. They emphasized that obedience was a [specifically] Christian duty under the Ten Commandments.
But submission to civil authority isn't all the Magisterial Reformers had to say about the duty of Christians. Moots next considers their political theology with respect to what is now the near-singular concern of American Christians: the right to resist. Before getting to the "good stuff," Moots takes some pains to distinguish the religious/political world of the sixteen century Reformation from the liberal order that developed throughout the eighteenth century. By the time of the American founding, many Protestants in the colonies (and certainly most in the subsequent states) came to believe that churches no longer should rely on the civil government for direct financial support, and that the states should not seek to enforce Christian doctrine in public life. Moreover, public authority was greatly democratized. In other words, and importantly from a Protestant point of view, citizens became magistrates.
Of course, rapid disestablishment did not entail indifference to Christian doctrine or its indirect effects on public life. Both remained important to American civil discourse through the first half of the nineteenth century. Here Moots works out his own thoughts in terms of the notion of "offence."
It is also as true now as it was then that antagonistic religious opinions, where spiritual matters are not at stake, can prompt antagonism from our neighbors. In democratic forms of government, now accentuated by democratic vehicles for self-expression and debate such as social media, offending one's neighbor is arguably equivalent to offending those in charge and will most certainly result in civil strife. ... [W]e should not offend our neighbor unnecessarily, nor should we take a low view of pollical community and concord. ... We should therefore examine ourselves closely with prayer and study before disobeying or railing against civil authorities, including our neighbors, or causing civil strife.
But is this the end of the matter? Is there no place for resistance? No and no. Moots works out the views of the Magisterial Reformers on resistance to the civil magistrate (i) as a Christian and (ii) resistance as a citizen. The former was circumscribed by limiting it to matters of conscience described in the initial quotes above. The latter, however, incorporates a more capacious scope for resistance based on natural law and the political tradition in which (Christian and non-Christian) citizens find themselves.
Moots develops the Protestant limiting insights even with respect to the rights of citizens to resist. These are salutary observations for some (but by no means all!) who don the title of Christian Nationalists. Moots does not, however, develop the positive agenda. For example, he does not address specifically the legitimacy of civil disobedience exercised in the civil rights movement yet he makes a relevant observation. Referencing Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Emer de Vattel (writers well known during the founding era) because citizens have right to self-defense under natural law, civil magistrates "who act against the public good become public enemies."
Such a conclusion does not entail violent resistance. Alternatives to rebellion and the virtue of prudence augur against violence except in the most egregious cases. But one of the alternatives to rebellion, and one for which there are previous examples in American history, is civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is a second-to-last resort, and one to be employed by a Christian-as-citizen only after "prayer and study." But resistance in the form of civil disobedience was and is a legitimate response in American civil-political life. The vagaries of the use of civil disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement makes blanket pronouncements unwise but suffice it to say that Dr. King's careful deployment of civil disobedience in places like Birmingham and Selma are exemplars of the process that should be employed.
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