(Follow Link in Art to David Barton’s Article On Our 1776 Revolution)

Civil Disobedience and Rebellion

That constitutional limits may not be sufficient controls on government leads to questions of civil disobedience and rebellion against a government. Civil disobedience means breaking the law nonviolently for conscientious reasons. The term is recent, but the practice, or something like it, is old. It was present in ancient Greek drama, in the life of the prophet Daniel, and, arguably, in Israel’s exodus from Egypt. More recent noteworthy examples include the campaigns against slavery and the slave trade, the fight for women’s suffrage, Gandhi’s campaigns against the British in South Africa and India, and Martin Luther King’s campaigns for civil rights in the United States. Its tactics can include sit-ins, illegal marches, tax boycotts, and blockades.

Such disobedience is different from full-scale rebellion, revolution, or any other attempt to overthrow a government, a regime, or a political order unconstitutionally and violently. Civil disobedience is not an attempt to overthrow an order, but to dissent from it in some way, and to show that dissent in actions rather than simply words. In some cases, such as blocking a logging road or an abortion clinic, it is an attempt actually to impose an outcome by nonviolent means. It is then not merely a symbol or a statement, though it will usually have these overtones as well, but is an active attempt to stop something from happening, or to start something.

In other cases it may simply be an individual or collective act of conscientious refusal of a tax, a law, or an order, because some people believe that they cannot morally carry out a particular directive from a government. They may have no wish to start a political movement and are not necessarily convinced that their act will alter government policy. They simply will not violate their conscience.

Disobedience can be carried out against an entire regime, against a particular law, or against a particular government action. If against a particular law or action, typically acts of disobedience accept the overall legitimacy of the government as such. People who protest abortion or certain types of logging do not (usually) deny all legitimacy to government or deny the validity of other laws. They grant a basic legitimacy, but nevertheless believe that, in one or more instances, government has overstepped its bounds. Civil disobedience always contains this combination of rejection and acceptance. This is why, though disobedient, it is also called civil.

This combination has commended civil disobedience to many ethicists. It seems to respect the apostle Paul’s stricture that the powers that be are God’s ministers (Rom. 13:1-8) as well as Peter’s claim that “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29. See also 1 Pet. 2:13-14). These can be combined in Jesus’ admonition to give to God the things which are God’s and to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s (Mark 12:13-17). This is why civil disobedience has won the support of people in many different Christian communions, although of course they often disagree on when it is appropriate. It is practiced by groups as divergent as Operation Rescue on abortion, and Sojourners on refugees. Even religious groups who do not think of themselves as engaging in illegal acts, or even as politically active, engage in widespread acts of civil disobedience, such as taking Bibles into closed countries, or making contacts with underground believers in countries such as China or Saudi Arabia, or conducting evangelism in areas where it is forbidden. All these are also acts of civil disobedience.

In more extreme situations, people may go beyond civil disobedience and reject the legitimacy of the regime as such. This situation occurs when people believe a government has become so corrupt and tyrannical that they must disobey not only some of its laws but the regime itself. This is rebellion against a government. While they have always emphasized caution on the matter, most Protestant and Catholic, and some Orthodox, theologians and philosophers have said that such rebellion and resistance may be at times be required.

This position is usually based not so much on the idea that we are rebelling against authority, but that a tyrannical government has itself rebelled against proper authority. If the government is violating basic justice, or even its own laws, it would then be illegitimate to obey it. For instance, we would be quite justified in disobeying a policeman who tried to tell us who we should marry. We are not rebelling against proper authority if we disobey, since the policeman has no proper authority over such things. He has exceeded his authority and need not be followed. He is the one that is rebelling, while we are following constituted authority. In the same way, several con­sistent views of such rebellion portray it not as a rejection of legitimate au­thority, but as obedience to legitimate authority. This is one reason many theologians, including John Calvin, have held that rebellion should spring not from the population at large, but only from those people holding subor­dinate authority—the “lesser magistrates.”

We should be extremely cautious about opposing governments by uncon­stitutional means. For the reasons mentioned above, most classical theolo­gians emphasize not so much a right of disobedience as a duty of disobedi­ence. It is not a matter of personal discretion but a matter of responsibility. This, in turn necessarily raises not only the vexed question of the legitimacy of a ruler, but the complex question of the legitimacy of an opponent of a government. Who properly has the authority to say that the government is wrong and that a law should be disobeyed? The anarchic idea that any indi­vidual person (or congregation) can and should just decide simply to “obey God rather than man” is a manifestation more of extreme Western individ­ualism than biblical insight. What is necessary is some form of legitimate al­ternate means of exercising authority. Within the Christian community, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox can address this, but it is something that Protestants, especially, are loath to face.

It is useful to apply the criteria of just war to civil disobedience or rebel­lion (see the discussion of just war in chapter 8). In particular, we need to ask whether our acts are a last resort, whether all legal avenues have been ex­hausted, whether the actions are appropriate to the cause and their effects are proportionate to the outcomes, and whether they have a specific and achiev­able end.

What we have loosely called democracy—the growth of representative and constitutional government, the division of political power, and the le­gitimizing of legal opposition—raises these questions to a higher pitch. If a government has been constitutionally elected by the population, then who can claim the authority to challenge its laws, and why? The growth of de­mocracy also means that there is a very wide variety of legal means available to oppose particular bad laws, or even a corrupt government as a whole. There are elections, lobbying, media, and party organizations. Too often peo­ple, especially younger ones, find civil disobedience more attractive because it can be easier and more glamorous than the tedious, boring, day-to-day work of politics. But if we have not yet campaigned, organized, voted, and lobbied long and strenuously, and found it utterly futile, then we should not too quickly leap to civil disobedience. It can be a lazy cop-out, and also, by alienating people, can be more of a hindrance than a help.

Paul Marshall, God and the Constitution: Christianity and American Politics (New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 85-87.