(RNS) — The closest analogue in American history to the current protests against the Department of Homeland Security’s mass deportation tactics is what happened after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Back then, it was not undocumented immigrants that the government was taking into custody to the dismay of protesters, but those fleeing bondage in the South.

The act, part of a compromise package of measures intended to keep the United States intact, suspended habeas corpus (meaning the government didn’t have to justify imprisoning individuals); denied a jury trial to “runaways”; provided higher fees to officials finding in favor of enslavers; and ordered all citizens, at risk of fine and even imprisonment, to assist in catching fugitives.

The act provoked resistance across the North, not only from citizens Black and white, but also from state legislatures. Vermont’s led the way with a law requiring its judicial and law enforcement officials to assist captured slaves. Northern juries refused to convict people charged with violating the law. The Underground Railroad went into high gear.

Among the evangelical Protestants who dominated the country’s religious life, opinions were divided. On one side were the abolitionists who believed that civil disobedience in this instance was justified by God’s “higher law.” At the extreme opposite end were proslavery radicals — secessionists for whom, as historian Richard Carwardine points out, “northerners’ appeals to the higher law demonstrated the appalling advance of rotten theology and ‘moral and political heresies’ in the free states.”

Regardless of their views on slavery, however, most evangelical leaders, North and South, preached support for the act in order to preserve the Union. As the Rev. Ichabod Spencer, a Presbyterian minister in Brooklyn, New York, put it in a widely circulated sermon denouncing his abolitionist peers, “If we shall have the rebellion, disunion, and civil war, to which these evil principles and these excitements tend, the guilt of such clergymen will not be small!”

It is striking how differently religious opinion is arrayed today. Amid the ongoing protests in Minnesota, support for the administration’s approach has largely come from radicals on the right. Self-described Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson has praised federal agents for dealing a body blow to the left. MAGA influencers Eric Metaxas and Jack Posobiec, meanwhile, denounce the Minneapolis protests as a “communist insurgency.”

More mainstream religious conservatives, by contrast, have mostly confined themselves to assailing the anti-ICE radicals who disrupted that Sunday service at Cities Church, in St. Paul. About the behavior of the federal agents — even regarding the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — they’ve had little or nothing to say.

Case in point: Catholic Bishop Robert Barron of the Minnesota Diocese of Winona-Rochester, a national media personality who regularly supports the Trump administration, repeatedly criticized the church disruption but to date has said nary a word about Pretti, a fellow Catholic.

By contrast, the weight of centrist religious opinion has been against Trump immigration policy and in support of the many clergy who have joined the protests on the ground. This ranges from the call by the National Association of Evangelicals to “stand with our immigrant neighbors” to a request from 300 Catholic leaders asking the U.S. Senate to defund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unless it is reformed, to a joint statement from all non-Orthodox streams of Judaism condemning violent immigration enforcement. (Jewish Orthodoxy stands with conservative evangelicalism in saying nothing.)

Why is religious opinion more critical of federal immigration enforcement today than it was of the Fugitive Slave Act 176 years ago? Any answer should start with a couple of observations.

First, the overwhelmingly peaceful protests have been exercised within the ambit of the First Amendment. And second, the enforcement, lacking specific congressional authorization, has repeatedly violated rights of due process.

In other words, there’s been no need for the protesters to invoke a higher law. That old-time secular law’s been on their side.