There were at least three other commonly held interpretations of Romans 13 as it related to the Fugitive Slave Act. Illinois minister Asa Donaldson took the quiescent view that “the scriptures everywhere treat the worst of human governments as better than anarchy,” and that because no one was forced to participate in “buying and selling slaves” everyone was bound to avoid “all acts of hostility against the laws of the land, however corrupt.” Many anti-slavery activists, by contrast, held that the moral law God had ordained took precedence over the government leaders he had ordained. So without threatening to dissolve the union, they refused to participate in bringing “the fugitive slave back to the master and the bondage” and were willing to “suffer the penalty” for civil disobedience rather than “commit the crime” of helping to re-enslave a person. One Vermont author, for example, argued that the United States, “with its enslavement of the Africans and its extermination of the Indians,” stood outside Paul’s command to obedience. But the most radical of abolitionists came to believe that the Bible did justify slavery, and rejected the Bible on precisely those grounds.

Black Christians were accustomed to hearing from white slaveholders a bowlderized gospel that emphasized texts like Romans 13 and Colossians 3 (“Servants, obey in all things your masters.”) But their own readings of the Bible emphasized the book's themes of deliverance from bondage. The Exodus narrative was a more central text than Romans 13. The black abolitionist David Walker compared the United States to slaveholding Egypt and enslaved African Americans to the children of Israel. “All persons who are acquainted with history, and particularly the Bible,” he wrote, and “who can dispense with prejudice long enough to admit that we are men ... and believe that we feel for our fathers, mothers, wives and children, as well as the whites do for theirs” could see plainly that the Bible was on the side of the oppressed and not the oppressor. As Maria Stewart put it in an 1831 address suffused with scripture, “You may kill, tyrannize, and oppress as much as you choose, until our cry shall come up before the throne of God.”

The debates in the 1850s over whether Romans 13 required obedience or resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, and more broadly over whether the Bible supported enslavement or abolition, fractured the Bible’s authority in the public sphere. Americans’ allegiance to Romans 13 in a democratic society grew even more tenuous. While Southern Christians did keep defending slavery from the Bible even after the Civil War was over, slaveholders could no longer claim that they were “the powers that be.” The text never entered the public discourse again the way that it had in the 1850s.

Where does Jeff Sessions fit in this brief history of Romans 13? Sessions, like so many other Americans throughout history, thinks he has the Bible on his side. The verses Sessions chose to cite, and the interpretation that he has given them, is part of the broader Trump administration strategy of playing to the fears and identities of American evangelicals, who have been bringing Romans 13 back into public discourse since the rise of law-and-order politics and the Christian Right. But the Bible is a text less often read than read into. As many of his “church friends” persist in pointing out, Sessions did not cite the verse later in Romans 13 where Paul writes that God’s laws “are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” with the word “neighbor” echoing both parable of the Good Samaritan and the countless verses in the Law and the Prophets on treating the stranger and the immigrant with mercy. Sessions may claim the Bible’s contested authority, but what the attorney general actually has on his side is the thread of American history that justifies oppression and domination in the name of law and order.

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