With All Due Respect

Unless we are philosophical anarchists, most of us probably believe that it is right to obey most laws most of the time. (I say "most" because of that 30 m.p.h.. we've driven in a 25 m.p.h. zone.) We recognize that law is a valuable and necessary ordering force in human affairs. It has the potential to help make life both more peaceful and more just in everything from traffic regulations to protecting the civil rights of minorities.

Many people become so enraptured by the majesty of law, however, that they oppose breaking law under any circumstances. Society, they say, must be governed by the rule of law. Law creates structures of authority and justice, which, while admittedly imperfect, are much to be preferred to any lawless alternative. No one has the right to place themselves above the law, for to do so is arrogantly to become a law unto oneself. To pick and choose which laws one will obey or not obey leads to social disorder and, if widely practiced, to a chaos in which everyone's rights and liberties will be sacrificed.

Many Christians join in opposing any disobedience to law. They draw upon St. Paul's teaching in Romans 13 and other biblical passages, which they interpret as making unqualified claims for "civil obedience." According to this view, to resist the authorities and their laws is to resist what God has appointed. But how does this absolutist view of obedience to law stand up when we look at history?

What if you had lived in the United States in the mid-1800s, for example, when the draconian federal Fugitive Slave Law required that all citizens assist in returning escaped slaves without delay to their owners? Would you have gone along with prominent Americans, like Daniel Webster, who supported passage of the slave law as part of the Compromise of 1850 and who branded resistance to the law as "treason"? Or would you have been more drawn to the views of the Quaker poet and abolitionist, John Greenleaf Whittier, who called slavery a "hateful hell" and said, "I would rather die than aid in that wicked law"?

If you had refused to aid in the law and in fact helped fugitive slaves to escape, you would have risked fines, arrest, and imprisonment, as did the hundreds of Christian abolitionists who set up the famous underground railroad to shuttle slaves to their freedom. You would have been a lawbreaker par excellence. Yet looking back on the mid-1800s, I think most reasonable people would agree that those who broke the Fugitive Slave Law, enabling an estimated 100,000 slaves to escape to freedom, acted with greater moral integrity than those who obeyed the law and helped return the slaves to bondage.

Or what if you had lived in Germany in the 1930s and '40s, when Hitler was in power and passing laws requiring Jews to be rounded up and shipped off to the death camps? The vast majority of Germans went along with Hitler's edicts, often using as their justification the need to obey the law and duly constituted authority.

Would you have been part of this law-abiding majority? Or would you have been among the minority who disobeyed Hitler's decrees and whom history now judges as heroes? Would you have acted as did Franz Jagerstatter, the young Austrian peasant farmer, married father of three daughters, who was called to active duty in the Nazi army in 1943 and urged to serve by his pastor, other priests, and his bishop, but refused and was beheaded by the Nazis because he saw Hitler's philosophy as diametrically opposed to his Catholic faith? Or would you have acted as did Adolf Eichmann, who said at his trial that he had no personal hostility toward Jews, but participated in the "final solution" only out of a desire to do his "duty," to obey orders and "the law"? Surely there is hardly a more telling historical example than that of Nazi Germany to show that obedience to law must not be absolutized.

Human history gives many examples of times when people of integrity had to put conscience or faithfulness to God ahead of obedience to human law. Often these people were derided, imprisoned, even killed in their own time, but are now revered.

Christian history contributes heavily to this saga of principled civil disobedience to human law. In its earliest days the primitive church came up against the Roman custom of performing acts of worship to the emperor. To the Romans the Christian affirmation of Christ as Lord seemed seditious, a contradiction of the supremacy and divinity of the emperor.

When Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, was arrested in 156 A.D., the Romans told him that he would be freed if he would simply take the legal oath of allegiance, burn the incense on the altar in the prescribed manner, and show his devotion to Caesar by cursing Christ and affirming, "Caesar is Lord." Polycarp replied, "For 86 years I have been his [Christ's] slave, and he has done me no wrong; how can I blaspheme my king who has saved me?" Moments later, he was burned to death.

In 202 A.D., Septimus Severus issued an edict forbidding conversions to Christianity. If Christians had obeyed it (they of course did not), they would have had to cease all missionary activity. In 249 A.D. the Emperor Decius ordered that all citizens must sacrifice to the gods, an edict which led to the imprisonment and death of Origen, bishop of Rome, and countless other Christian lawbreakers. The persecutions by Emperor Valerian, which began in 257 A.D., threatened Christians with the death penalty if they so much as went to any church meetings or services or even visited a Christian cemetery.

Early Christian civil disobedience also included refusal to fight in the emperor's wars. One example of this refusal is recorded in the case of a centurion named Marcellus, martyred in 298 A.D., of whom it is written, "After throwing down his soldier's belt in front of the legionary standards which were there at the time, he bore witness in a loud voice: 'I am a soldier of Jesus Christ, the eternal king. From now I cease to serve your emperors and I despise the worship of your gods of wood and stone, for they are deaf and dumb images.'"

It is no wonder, then, that civil disobedience has strong roots in Christianity. If early Christians had been totally law-abiding, they would have had to conform to Roman laws which would have made a mockery of their faith and probably driven it out of existence.

In later centuries, when Christianity became the religion of the empire, there was no longer a need to defend the persecuted church against the hostile state. Christian theologians continued to teach, however, that rulers can betray their trust and that citizens have a right to disobey.

The greatest medieval theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, wrote that unjust laws do not bind one's conscience and that a law which contravenes the divine law ought not to be obeyed. "Man is bound to obey secular rulers to the extent that the order of justice requires," Aquinas wrote. "For this reason if such rulers have no just title to power, but have usurped it, or if they command things to be done which are unjust, their subjects are not obligated to obey them."

After the Protestant Reformation, civil disobedience was often the response of persecuted sects in order to survive and affirm their right to free exercise of their faith. This practice of "Godly dissent" helped to secure a number of freedoms which we now cherish.

To give one example, if you were a Quaker trying to hold a meeting for worship in Massachusetts in the 1650s, the law would have made you liable to heavy fines and banishment from the colony. If you tried to return, a law passed in 1658 could impose the death penalty on you. Several Quakers were in fact hanged under this law, and others were beaten, branded, or had their ears cropped.

Controversy around this conscientious defiance of law was the fertile ground out of which grew many of the freedoms and democratic concepts that we take for granted today, such as freedom of worship, the separation of church and state, and the right of people of all persuasions to participate fully in civic affairs. The Quakers in England and the United States, with the anabaptists of Germany and Switzerland, also revived the Christian tradition of refusing military service.

Civil disobedience is sometimes the deeply inward stance of individuals who are simply trying to remain true to personal convictions which obedience to a particular law would make them violate. At other times, it is a more conscious tactic designed to bring about desired social change. Often it is a mixture of inward faithfulness and an outward yearning for social change. In any case, it is important to note that conscientious civil disobedience often has far-reaching social impact.

As Daniel Stevick notes in his book, Civil Disobedience and the Christian:

It is well to remember that such gains as the achievement of religious liberty, the elimination of slavery, the granting of the franchise to women, the recognition of the rights of organized labor, the acknowledgement in law of conscientious objection to military service, the securing of the civil rights of minority groups--not to speak of the very existence of the American nation itself--were all accomplished in part by acts which were at the time illegal.

This beneficial result of civil disobedience is another reason why obedience to law cannot be absolutized.

Take, for example, the question of women's suffrage. Since most American women living today have never in their lifetimes been denied the right to vote, it is easy to forget that women have had the franchise for only a little more than 60 years. And many Americans are not aware of how important a role civil disobedience played in the struggle to secure this basic right.

Alice Paul, a women's suffrage leader, explained her strategy simply: "If a creditor stands before a man's house all day long, demanding payment of his bill, the man must either remove the creditor or pay the bill." Thus, women "creditors" began to stand before the White House in picket lines in 1917, much to the embarrassment of President Woodrow Wilson, who opposed the vote for women but was trying to rally the nation in a war to "make the world safe for democracy." Unready to "pay the bill," the government "removed the creditors" by arresting the women.

Undeterred by increasingly lengthy prison sentences, the women returned again and again to the White House. Hundreds were arrested and scores jailed. Julia Emory alone was arrested 34 times. Other similarly dedicated women toured the country, relating their harrowing experiences in jail. When President Wilson continued to refuse to work for the suffrage amendment, the women highlighted his hypocrisy by publicly burning speeches in which he said he was for freedom.

At first this civil disobedience was widely criticized. The Washington Post noted soberly that the White House picketing had probably blocked passage of a New York state equal suffrage law for five to 10 years. The women were criticized as politically naive and "unwomanly"; their banners were called an insult to the president.

In the heat of war fervor, the women's slogans provoked hostility from onlookers, many of whom were servicemen. "Kaiser Wilson!" a banner said, "Have you forgotten how you sympathized with the poor Germans because they were not self-governed? Twenty million American women are not self-governed. Take the beam out of your own eye!" Such banners were grabbed and destroyed. Picketers were knocked about and bruised. In jail, women went on hunger strikes to protest the prisons' substandard conditions.

Slowly sympathy for the women's courage grew. Newspaper editorials began to change in tone. Congressmen reversed their opposition when they realized that only passage of the suffrage amendment would make the women stop escalating their protest. Even President Wilson eventually gave in and included suffrage in his war aims. The women's right to vote was finally secured with the passage of the 19th Amendment in August, 1920.

Perhaps the advocate of civil disobedience who best articulated the link between conscientious conviction and practical social change was Mohandas Gandhi. He went to India from his successful campaign in South Africa at about the same time that American suffragettes were beginning their demonstrations in front of the White House. Jawaharlal Nehru, a disciple of Gandhi who became first prime minister of an independent India, wrote of Gandhi's method:

Gandhi had placed it before the country not only as the right method but as the most effective one for our purpose....It was a dynamic method, the very opposite of meek submission to a tyrant's will. It was not a coward's refuge from action, but a brave man's defiance of evil and national subjection.

Gandhi acknowledged his indebtedness to the American writer, Henry David Thoreau, for coining the expression "civil disobedience" in what Gandhi called his "masterly treatise" on the subject. (Thoreau's essay, published in 1849, was called, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.") Gandhi described civil disobedience as the necessary resistance which a good person must give to an evil government or law. It was both a way for the individual to draw closer to God, the source of all goodness, and a way for a whole people to remove the "consent of the governed" from an unjust government, thus setting in motion vast forces of positive social change.

Gandhi went beyond Thoreau and made an especially important contribution by stressing both halves of the expression civil disobedience, making it a synthesis of civility and defiance. Disobedience was a necessary part of Gandhi's philosophy of political power, for he believed that people could be governed only as long as they consented to be governed. The maintenance of an unjust or undemocratic regime (in his case, British rule in India), depends on the cooperation, submission,and obedience of the people who obey the government's laws and rules, however grudgingly.

Disobedience meant to remove consent and thus force the government to change, to give in, or even to dissolve. But Gandhi believed that even greater value must be given to the adjective "civil" than to the noun "disobedience." He wrote: "Disobedience without civility, discipline, discrimination, [and] nonviolence is certain destruction. Disobedience combined with love is the living water of life."

Gandhi's campaigns against the British, then, attempted to withdraw all voluntary association with the British government and its laws, while still maintaining goodwill toward the British as individuals. In his 1930-31 civil disobedience campaign, which began with the famous 26-day "salt march," the British faced a mass nonviolent revolt that involved tax refusal, boycotts, nonviolent raids, strikes, illegally raising the Indian flag, refusal to buy British cloth, resignations from government schools and offices, enormous parades, seditious speeches, and other defiance of British rule.

The colonial government responded by arresting some 100,000 Indians, including Gandhi, and subjecting others to beatings, shootings, censorship, fines, and other forms of intimidation. Although the campaign did not win immediate independence, it showed the Indians the strength of nonviolent civil disobedience and laid the groundwork for further actions that did eventually free India from British rule.

Just as Gandhi, the Indian, learned from Thoreau, the American, so Martin Luther King, Jr., the American Christian, drew enormous inspiration from the Hindu Indian, Mohandas Gandhi. King first learned of Gandhi while still a student at Crozier Theological Seminary, and he read avidly about his life and work. Later, in February, 1959, he made a month-long pilgrimage to India to meet with Gandhians and to see firsthand the results of the independence movement.

In Gandhi's example, King found specific tactics for social change that resonated deeply with the biblical Christian faith of the black American churches. Gandhi, King said, "was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful effective social force on a large scale." The truth of this discovery was borne out throughout the 1950s and '60s as black Christians, especially in the South, became the core of a movement whose willingness to suffer harassment, beatings, and imprisonment for the sake of justice moved the conscience of the nation.

King never claimed that nonviolent civil disobedience would cure all ills or bring in the kingdom of God. What he did claim was that it was a powerful force for uprooting the 300-year-old pattern of segregation that denied black people the vote, exposed them to vicious lynch mobs, confronted them day in and day out with humiliating signs reading "white only" and "colored," and denied them simple amenities like ordering a hamburger at a lunch stand. In a decade of nonviolent struggle, in which civil disobedience of segregation laws was a key tactic, the black movement totally shattered that centuries-old pattern that no other strategy had been able to touch.

The civil rights movement was in turn both the inspiration and the breeding ground for the massive popular resistance to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Many of the Gandhian tactics used in the South were carried over to the anti-war struggle.

Civil disobedience played a crucial role in the anti-war movement, with hundreds of thousands of young men refusing conscription into an unjust war. Ever since the early Christians, there have been those who choose suffering and prison rather than taking up arms. There is a uniquely American tradition of draft resistance, especially in this century as both world wars and Korea brought successive generations of resisters into the federal prisons. But the United States had never seen draft resistance on the scale practiced during the Vietnam War.

Again the connection between deeply personal acts of conscience and public policy was clear. Documents later made public in The Pentagon Papers showed that the level of draft resistance had a very practical effect in limiting the possible scope of U.S. military action in Vietnam. While the struggle to get the United States out of Vietnam went on entirely too long, without public resistance here, including civil disobedience, the suffering of the Vietnamese people would probably have been immeasurably worse. Today the refusal of draft registration by more than 500,000 men is already having a similar effect in warning our leaders of the pitfalls of sending U.S. troops into countries like El Salvador.

Civil disobedience, conducted mostly by Christians, has also played an important part in the formation of the current public outcry against the nuclear arms race. Prophetic acts of civil disobedience at various nuclear facilities have alerted many to the danger of the arms race, often for the first time.

Two of the Catholic bishops who have become the most outspoken in urging non-cooperation with the arms race, Bishop Leroy Matthiesen of Amarillo, Texas, and Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, Washington, have said that their conscience was first stirred on the nuclear issue by acts of civil disobedience committed by fellow Christians at nuclear facilities in their dioceses. The stands taken by these two bishops have in turn had a ripple effect in raising the level of debate and concern about the arms race throughout the church and the nation.

As the movement against nuclear weapons continues to gain strength, the growing number of people participating in civil disobedience has become an important indication to the government of the deep commitment of those opposed to its policies.

Civil disobedience, whether practiced as conscientious principle or conscious social change strategy, has a long and illustrious history. It has been basic to the success of the worldwide labor movement, which probably could not have arisen had it not been willing to use strikes and boycotts in defiance of laws that prohibited union formation and activity. It has been used in successful movements to overthrow brutal dictators; for example, the general strike which in 1944 removed from power General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez of El Salvador. It has even been part of effective nonviolent battles against Nazism, as when the Danish people's illegal smuggling operation during World War II made Adolf Eichmann admit that "the action against the Jews of Denmark has been a failure."

Today civil disobedience is being widely used in Latin American movements for human and political rights, as in Brazil, where major figures in the church hierarchy not only speak out for nonviolent struggle, but place their bodies alongside peasants and workers in risky confrontations with the police and military. And now the women of Greenham Common in England are writing a new page in the history of civil disobedience with their encampment protesting the placement of cruise missiles in Britain.

Should we always obey the law? Theoretical discussions of the subject rage on. But a look at history strongly suggests that obedience to law cannot be made absolute. To absolutize obedience to law would mean in history innumerable instances where conscience would be crushed, where evil would triumph through unjust law, and where needed social change would not be achieved.

Law has immense value. It should be given all due respect. But law is like the sabbath. It was made for us, not us for it. If the choice is between following the law and following what is right, we must be willing to be lawbreakers.

Richard Taylor worked with Sojourners peace ministry and was co-author of Nuclear Holocaust and Christian Hope (Inter-Varsity Press, 1982) when this article appeared. He also co-authored "Fighting Fire With Water" in the April 1983 Sojourners.