The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and Constitutions; Kennedy, John F.; Model of Christian Charity; Moses; Pilgrims; Reagan, Ronald (Evil Empire Speech)

       For Reference and Further Reading

Balmer, Randall. 2008. God in the White House: A History; How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. New York: HarperOne.

Deneen, Patrick K. 2012. “Cities of Man on a Hill.” American Political Thought 2 (Spring): 29–52.

      Dunn, Richard S. 1987. “An Odd Couple: John Winthrop and William Penn.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Society, Third Series 99: 1–24.

      Holland, Matthew S. 2007. Bonds of Affection: Civic Charity and the Making of America—Winthrop, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

      Johnson, Paul. 1995. “God and the Americans: The City upon a Hill.” Commentary 99 (January): 25–32.

Kennedy, John F. 1961. “The City upon a Hill Speech.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. January 9. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/the-city-upon-a-hill-speech.

      Morgan, Edmund S. 1958. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, Brown.

      Noll, Mark A. 2012. “’We Shall Be as a City upon a Hill’: John Winthrop’s Non-American Exceptionalism.” Review of Faith & International Affairs 10 (May 24): 5–11.

Rodgers, Daniel T. 2018. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

      Schweitzer, Ivy. 2005. “John Winthrop’s ‘Model’ of American Affiliation.” Early American Literature 40(3): 441–69.

Vile, John R., ed. 2015. Founding Documents of America: Documents Decoded. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Civil Disobedience

      Christian leaders throughout history have generally advocated obedience to laws, especially those that were legally enacted for the common good. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39). In Matthew 22:21, Jesus urged followers to “render to Caesar the things that are 106Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s,” and, in the opening verses of Romans 13, Paul urged Christians to submit to governing authorities.

      There are occasions in both the Old and New Testaments, however, that also praise those who have stood up to injustice and disobeyed unjust laws. Exodus praised midwives who refused to carry out orders to slay newborn Hebrew boys. The book of Daniel recorded that his three friends were willing to be cast into a fiery furnace rather than bow down to an idol. King Saul’s own bodyguards refused to carry out his order to kill priests who had fed David, while Hebrew kings were instructed to write out passages from the law to which they were bound to adhere (Waskow n.d.).

      In the New Testament, after religious leaders cautioned early Christians against preaching the gospel, Peter responded in Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than men” (Blankley 2012). Historically, Christians have suffered martyrdom rather than surrendered their faith.

      Many individuals fled to the United States for refuge after being persecuted for their beliefs. Quakers had been harassed for their refusal to duff their hats to rulers, while Puritans hoped to found a purer church than they had left in England.

      Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” better known today as “Civil Disobedience,” which was published in 1849, is one of the more articulate defenses of civil disobedience. In Thoreau’s case, he had refused to pay a poll tax during the Mexican-American War, which he considered to be an attempt at expanding American slave power (Perry 2013, 94–125). Although his perspective was largely that of libertarian individualism, numerous Christians expressed their unwillingness in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War to help enforce fugitive slave laws. One pastor, J. C. W. Pennington, likened such participation to Judas’s decision to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver (Perry 2013, 111). In so doing, opponents of the laws that required the return of escaped slaves appealed to a higher moral law, much as they believed American revolutionaries had done in an earlier generation.

      In the years leading up to the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, American suffragists practiced civil disobedience in order to highlight the cause of women’s voting.

      During the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. combined the idea of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. He eloquently defended his views in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which he wrote in response to a number of pastors and religious leaders who had accused him of being an outsider who was stirring up violence, after he was imprisoned for failing to get a permit to demonstrate.

      Justifying his action in part on the basis of his presidency of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King cited a number of biblical precedents: “Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown” (King 1963).

      107

      Responding to those who urged him to “wait,” he cited the aphorism that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” He further sought to tie civil disobedience to the principles embodied both in the Declaration of Independence and in Scripture. With St. Augustine, King observed that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas, King said that human laws that were not rooted “in eternal and natural law” called for disobedience (King 1963). Drawing from the biblical book of Daniel, he further cited “the refusal of Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved,” as well as “early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire” (King 1963).

      King believed that laws mandating segregation were wrong and represented the unjust will of the majority forcing themselves on a racial minority. Rejecting the accusation that he was an extremist, King contrasted his own nonviolent approach, which he grounded on the New Testament and on the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, with the militant national of Elijah Muhammad and his movement:

      Was not Jesus an extremist in love?—“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice?—“Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream” [Amos 5:24]. Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ?—“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” [Galatians 6:17]. Was not Martin Luther an extremist?—“Here I stand; I can do not other so help me God.” Was not John Bunyan an extremist?—“I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience.” Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist?—“This nation cannot survive СКАЧАТЬ