(RNS) — Al Mohler, the Never-Trumper-turned-Trumpist who runs the largest Southern Baptist seminary in the United States, responded to the anti-ICE protests in Minnesota last week by urging Christians to submit to government authorities in obedience to what the Apostle Paul said in his Letter to the Romans.

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established,” Paul wrote in Romans’ Chapter 13. “The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.” 

Mohler applied the passage to Minneapolis, writing: “I do think we need to underline as Christians that Romans 13 principle about lawful authority and anyone who goes on the streets to interfere with a lawful exercise of law enforcement authority, I think that’s inherently problematic.”

“Inherently problematic” understates the force of Paul’s injunction. 

Paul was exhorting the small communities of Jesus followers of his time to pacifically await the end times, and not to behave like many Jews of the time who were bent on retaking their country by force from the Roman Empire. But his words have ever since been used as a cudgel against Christians who contest government policy.

In 1525, Martin Luther reacted to the Peasants’ Revolt by appealing to Romans 13 and declaring, “The fact that the rulers are wicked and unjust does not excuse tumult and rebellion.”

Likewise, during the first Trump administration, then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized those assailing the administration’s family separation policy by saying, “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.” 

But a countertradition has developed over the centuries to justify opposition to duly constituted civil authority, beginning with the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli and among French Huguenot followers of John Calvin. The gist of their arguments was that governments can be resisted when they act against God’s law.  

In America, this tradition was pushed to max by the radical Massachusetts pastor Jonathan Mayhew, who in 1750 delivered a sermon, “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers, ” arguing that Romans 13 didn’t apply to governments acting badly. Acknowledging that Paul urged obedience to “civil rulers” as an “ordinance of God,” Mayhew asked, “But how is this an argument for obedience to such rulers as do not perform the pleasure of God, by doing good; but the pleasure of the devil, by doing evil; and such are not, therefore, God’s ministers, but the devil’s!”

Printed and widely distributed, this justification for resisting British rule has been credited with sparking the Revolution. 

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., early in his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, insisted that Romans 13 “must be interpreted in terms of the historical setting and psychological mood of the age in which they were written.” On the other side of the ideological fence, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America in 1987 interpreted Romans 13 so as to permit opposition to laws permitting abortion.

And, a few days ago, Christianity Today editor-at-large Russell Moore, a former teacher at Mohler’s seminary, criticized Christians who “whenever an agent of the state kills a person in morally questionable circumstances … go right to Romans 13, quoting it before the blood is even cleaned up from the ground.” According to Moore, “Romans 13 is about refusing to become what oppresses you, not about baptizing whatever the oppressor does.”

We may debate whether it is better — wiser or truer to Christianity — to reject the plain meaning of Romans 13 as Mayhew and King did, or to find an intellectual work-around like the early reformers or the PCA or Moore. Either way, Paul’s injunction ends up without much force when Christians feel a moral imperative to oppose the government. As those who wield Paul’s cudgel of obedience have so often discovered.