The Attorney General cites Romans 13 to justify harsh immigration policies
Spiritual Sunday
We have gotten to the point where the attorney general is citing the Bible to justify ripping children from the arms of their mothers, many of whom are themselves fleeing possible murder and rape. In the past, this is when poets like William Blake have stepped forward.
Jeff Sessions gave the following defense of his policies:
“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 the government for his purposes,” Sessions said during a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Ind. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent and fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”
White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders doubled down on the Biblical reference:
“I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible,” she said. “It’s a moral policy to follow and enforce the law.”
A Washington Post article noted that rightwing use of Romans 13 to defend oppressive measures is not new:
“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution.”
The other, Fea said, “is in the 1840s and 1850s, when Romans 13 is invoked by defenders of the South or defenders of slavery to ward off abolitionists who believed that slavery is wrong. I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”
Apparently the passage has also been used to justify “authoritarian rule in Nazi Germany and South African apartheid.”
In another twisted use of the Bible, Republicans have cited it while cutting the social safety net:
Government officials occasionally refer to the Bible as a line of argument — take, for instance, the Republicans who have quoted 2 Thessalonians (“if a man will not work, he shall not eat”) to justify more stringent food stamps requirements.
In Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake lacerates the state and the church for teaming up against the vulnerable. The Church, Blake points out, mandates that people docilely follow the State, even when it consigns children to an early death as chimney sweepers. In his two “Holy Thursday” poems (Holy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper), he calls out the Church for providing religious cover for child cruelty.
In the first, “grey-headed beadles” herd poor children to church, who in their innocence give their hearts to Jesus. Blake sarcastically calls these men “wise guardians of the poor.”
In the Songs of Experience companion poem, Blake exposes as a shameful abomination the sanctimony that we are getting from people like Sessions and Sanders:
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,—
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns,
It is eternal winter there.
For where’er the sun does shine,
And where’er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.
I see that leading Catholic bishops have roundly condemned the Trump administration’s immigration policy. It’s time for Trump’s evangelical supporters to do so as well. And for Congress as well.
