Jeff Sessions, the United States attorney general, speaks often of his deep religious faith and regularly attends the White House Bible study group. So it is little surprise that he would quote the holy book to defend himself from criticism over the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border and detaining the children in massive warehouses.

“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 told law enforcement officers in Indiana, an argument he’s been making since at least 2016. “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.”

Asked to explain Sessions’s comments and the morality of the administration’s policy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders told CNN’s Jim Acosta, “It is very biblical to enforce the law, that is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible.” If biblical scholars ran their own Politifact, they’d rate Sanders’s claim “partially true.” Sessions has put forward a selective reading of Romans 13; the chapter also contains passages that undermine the very policy he’s trying to defend. “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law,” the Apostle Paul wrote to this disciples.

But exegesis belongs to the realm of theologians. Sessions’s comments are troublesome not because they misrepresent the Bible or constitute a needlessly religious justification for a secular policy, but because they echo some of the darkest chapters in American history.

As Christian historian John Fea told The Washington Post on Thursday, American southerners frequently cited Romans 13 in defense of the institution of slavery. “[I]n 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,” he said. “I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.” Slavery was legal, after all; to question Southern law was to question God.