There is no divine mandate requiring us to accept an unjust policy or law. You wouldn’t know that by listening to the Trump administration
While sitting in an Alabama jail, Martin Luther King Jr began writing a letter about the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. He invoked the legal maxim originating with St Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all. This week, attorney general Jeff Sessions quoted the bible to justify a cruel policy that is, in fact, not a required law: the forced separation of immigrant families at the border.
Sessions cracked a smile when he said, “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.” The former Alabama senator knows what he’s doing. Surely, he’s familiar with King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. In contempt for a rich tradition of Christian resistance to injustice, he is cherry-picking the bible to serve a despotic white nationalist agenda. Racism under the guise of “law and order” redux.
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