Why We Go to Jail

YOU MAY REMEMBER the images of disabilities advocates arrested last year, some handcuffed in their wheelchairs, outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office. Or the pastors arrested holding signs that said: “Love Thy Neighbor.” Or the waves of clergy and faith-leader arrests in Ferguson and Standing Rock, and those advocating for Dreamers and opposing tax cuts for the rich.

Maybe you heard about pastor Jarrod McKenna and Delroy Bergsma in Perth, Australia, who suspended themselves four stories above the office of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to persuade the Australian government to act for refugees held on Manus Island without supplies. Or last year’s witness on the steps of the Supreme Court where 18 people of faith were arrested protesting the death penalty. Or the August gathering in Charlottesville, Va., where hundreds of courageous pastors, clergy, and other activists confronted the hatred of torch-bearing neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

These events aren’t about going to jail. They are about countering hatred with nonviolent love.

Civil disobedience is holy work. Gandhi called nonviolent civil disobedience “our sacred duty.” There are many ways to nonviolently resist injustice: Boycotts. Divestment. Writing op-eds. Petitions. Lobbying. Prayer vigils. Groundswell campaigns. Picket lines. Strikes. Die-ins. Sit-ins. Lock-downs. Distributing flyers on street corners. (Famously, the late political scientist Gene Sharp listed 198 methods of nonviolent direct action.)

Going to jail isn’t the only way to resist evil. But it is one way. And a very effective way, with a rich tradition for Christians. Though questions of privilege arise when it comes to risking arrest, what also surfaces is that some people have nothing to lose “but their chains,” as the chant goes. Many marginalized people have found civil disobedience to be a way to rage collectively against injustice and to stop business as usual.

Martin Luther King Jr. saw nonviolent civil disobedience as a creative, constructive outlet for rage. I think of workers who have blocked trains and ports, activists who have shut down federal buildings and police stations and who have dropped banners from buildings and bridges. These are beautiful expressions of holy rage.

Nonviolent civil disobedience is often what tips the balance in social movements. Not everyone will do it, but those who do raise the urgency of the issue. The courage we see in Rosa Parks, Bree Newsome, and Colin Kaepernick is contagious. Their actions get other people to move.

A long and rich tradition

First-century Christians were branded as lawbreakers for refusing to bow to the Roman emperor. Martin Luther broke ecclesiastical laws of the Catholic Church. American abolitionists broke laws to bring about racial equality. During the tyranny of Nazi Germany, Corrie ten Boom’s family protected Jews, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller resisted Hitler’s regime. Anabaptists, Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren communities refused to engage in war. Christians smuggled Bibles into the Soviet Union and other Soviet Bloc nations, and some are still doing that today in places such as North Korea, China, and Iran.

I prefer to think of nonviolent civil disobedience as “divine obedience.” We are obeying God even when human laws stand in the way. Whatever we call it—civil disobedience, moral resistance, direct action, holy troublemaking—disobeying bad laws not only holds a historic place in social change but it has also been an ever-present part of the Christian story.

In the Old Testament, we have the Exodus story of the Hebrew slaves escaping Pharaoh’s plantation—an iconic act of liberation and holy rebellion. Moses’ very birth was an act of civil disobedience. The Hebrew midwives rescued him in defiance of royal orders, and his mother floated him down a river to escape Pharaoh’s slaughter of the innocents.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace for refusing a royal order that violated their commitment to God. Daniel ignored a law prohibiting prayer and King Darius flung him into the den of lions.

Then there’s Jesus, whose life was marked with a subversive twist from birth. The magi protected the baby Jesus, defying Herod’s orders. Jesus challenged Caesar’s power and was accused of insurrection. He was executed on a Roman cross—reserved for the worst agitators in the empire—next to two other rebels.

Just as Jesus went to jail, so did many of his followers, beginning with John the Baptist. The book of Acts and other accounts of the early church are filled with stories of jail time, beatings, and state-sanctioned executions—such as the one about the Spirit breaking Paul and Silas out of jail. Paul’s letter to Philemon urges a former slave owner to welcome back a fugitive slave (Onesimus) and to treat him not as a slave but as a brother.

The martyrs were known for their faithfulness to God over Caesar. When Christians proclaimed, “Jesus is Lord,” they were saying, “Caesar is not.” The early Christians were rebels and revolutionaries, but their revolution was as much for the freedom of the oppressors as the oppressed. It was a nonviolent revolution marked by enemy-love, gentleness, and audacious grace, but a revolution nonetheless. A mob in Thessalonica said of Christians: “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also ... They are all acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus” (Acts 17:6–7).

Quotes from the early centuries of Christianity illustrate the subversive nature of the Jesus movement. Tertullian wrote: “We are charged with being irreligious people and, what is more, irreligious in respect to the emperors since we refuse to pay religious homage to their imperial majesties.”

Origen said: “Christians form ... an obscure and mysterious community founded on revolt and the advantage that accrues from it.” The Roman popular media of the third century said of Christians: “They form a rabble of profane conspiracy ... They despise titles of honor and the purple robe of high government office though hardly able themselves to cover their own nakedness.” Augustine, one of the most prominent ethicists in Christendom, said, “An unjust law is no law at all.” As we look at church history, it is hard to miss the collision between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world.

Jesus promises his disciples that the world will hate them—that if they live real good, they will get beat up real bad. But they are to return love for evil. They are to stare into the face of those who persecute them and say, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

The holy trinity of law and order

Three Bible passages—the holy trinity of law and order—are often used to squash civil disobedience: 1 Peter 2:12–15, Titus 3:1–2, Romans 13:1–2. These passages urge submission to government.

But it takes some serious theological gymnastics to use these few verses to insist that Christians in every time and place should obey their leaders at all times. Was Hitler established by God? What about Saddam Hussein?

It’s important to get the power dynamic right. God is our king, above all other authorities. God allows, rather than consecrates, those in power.

God didn’t want Israel to have a king, but the people demanded a king so they could be “like other nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). God warned them that a king would enslave them, force them to fight in wars, take their best crops in taxes, and more. God later said, “I gave you a king in my anger” (Hosea 13:11).

The same Paul who called for respect for authority in Romans 13 wrote in Romans 12 about not being “conformed to this world” and went to jail himself for subverting authority. In Ephesians, Paul says that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood (people) but against the powers and authorities (using the same word he used in Romans).

When we “submit” to authority, we remember that the authorities of this world are in turn to submit and be accountable to God. I suggest two ways to submit to worldly authority: First, obey the good laws. Second, disobey the bad laws and be willing to suffer the consequences.

The Gospel and the Law
If frequency is any indication, early Christians were quite familiar with the criminal justice system of their day. The following words appear often in the New Testament:
Arrest: 37 times
Prison or prisoner: 63 times
Crucify or crucifixion: 56 times
Court: 9 times
Rebel, rebellious, or rebellion: 9 times
Criminal: 6 times
Guard: 33 times

When my friends and I went to jail in Philadelphia for feeding the homeless and sleeping in the public parks, we raised questions about the anti-homeless laws the city was passing. We were ultimately found not guilty. The police officers who arrested us showed up to argue on our behalf. The judge even said, “If it weren’t for people who broke the bad laws, we wouldn’t have the freedom we have. We’d still have slavery. That’s the story of this country from the Boston Tea Party to the civil rights movement. These folks are not criminals; they are freedom fighters.”

As Gandhi said, “Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.” Resistance work exposes injustice and makes it so uncomfortable that people can’t help but respond.

The power of nonviolence

Humility and nonviolence are central components to faithful civil disobedience. Through suffering rather than armed conflict, we unmask evil and expose injustice. Nonviolence exposes the violence precisely by contrast: by not mirroring the evil we are able to make a spectacle of it.

In Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 “The American Dream” speech, he told his opponents:

Do to us what you will and we will still love you ... Throw us in jail ... Threaten our children and bomb our homes, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our freedom ... we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.

Good resistance work holds up a mirror to the world and changes laws. When you see militarized police spraying nonviolent protesters in Birmingham or Standing Rock, it makes you ask questions about who is on the right side of history.

In 2003, I went to Iraq with a team of pastors and doctors. We took medications to hospitals, hung out with families, and worshiped with Iraqi Christians. This was all technically illegal because of U.S. sanctions during the war. When we returned, the U.S. State Department filed a lawsuit against our group, specifically the doctors, who faced up to 12 years in prison. We argued that the sanctions and bombing violated God’s law to love our neighbors (and enemies, for that matter) as ourselves. And we were willing to go to jail for that.

In the end, no one went to jail. However, some of the doctors were fined around $20,000. In an act of revolutionary subordination, they paid the fine in Iraqi dinar.

More recently, 18 of us held a banner in front of the Supreme Court that said: “Stop Executions!” We were not blocking doors or disruptive in any way, but because the simple act of protest is illegal on Supreme Court property, we faced up to 60 days in prison and fines, all together, of $90,000. At the moment we were arrested, the government was preparing to execute a man in Virginia named Ricky Gray. It is a strange thing to live in a country where it is legal to execute people but illegal to hold a banner in front of our highest court.

Our times demand courageous action. King used the following metaphor: Traffic laws are good things, but when a fire is raging, the rescue team runs the red light. When a person is bleeding, the ambulance speeds through red lights, and other cars get out of the way.

So yes, we go to jail—for getting in the way of wars, the death penalty, and police violence, for supporting vulnerable people and speaking out against hatred and violence.

When my kids ask me why I’ve been in jail, I always tell them: “You can go to jail for doing something wrong. And you can also go to jail for doing something right. We went to jail for doing something right.”