Insurrectionists Widely Respected

USA Today has a story today about the return of militias. All week the newspapers and the internet has been filled with stories about the Oklahoma gubernatorial candidate who thinks the state needs its own militia to for citizens "to protect themselves from an overreaching federal government."

Everywhere I go I run into people shaking their heads in disbelief about these developments. Most of them think that a collective neurosis has settled on the minds of some people on the fringes of society. They are shocked and suprised when I tell them that many are just expressing sentiments that were fully articulated by such widely respected right-wing intellectuals as the late Francis Schaeffer and and the late Richard John Neuhaus.

In his 1982 Christian Manifesto Schaeffer cited the thinking of John Knox and Samuel Rutherford to provide criteria for Christians to follow when they feel they must resist governmental authority. He was concerned about a case then before the supreme court that would require such action:

"If there was ever a clearer example of the lower “magistrates” being treated with tyranny, it would be hard to find. And this would be a time, if the appeals courts finally rule tyrannically, for the state government to protest and refuse to submit. This fits Rutherford’s proper procedures exactly." (pp. 109-110)

"There comes a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate. The Christian is not to take the law into his own hands and become a law unto himself. But when all avenues of flight and protest have closed, force in the defensive posture is appropriate." (p. 117)

The "tyranny" Schaeffer was protesting was a ruling that the state of Arkansas could not mandate that creationism be taught in public schools. The supreme court did uphold that decision.

Richard John Neuhaus was equally concerned about "judicial tyranny" for a different reason. When the ninth circuit court of appeals affirmed a right for mentally competent persons who were terminally ill to choose to die by physician assisted suicide, Neuhaus wrote an editorial in the May 1996 issue of First Things Magazine saying:

"If the decision of the Ninth Circuit is declared the law of the land, our public life will move from widespread alienation and protest to open insurrection. No sensible person should welcome that prospect. But if it comes, the guilt will surely fall on judges who arrogated to themselves the political and moral authority that once belonged to the people of this democratic republic. History will show that, with that arrogation, the compact was broken, the consent of the governed was nullified, and this constitutional order was undone."

A crisis was averted by the Supreme Court's reversing the appellate court's decision, but the rhetoric of insurrection remained and continued to resonate with the readers of First Things Magazine. In November 1996, a special issue of First Things magazine entitled The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics was published. According to Damon Linker, former editor of the magazine, the articles asserted that "a morally justified revolution on the part of the country’s most religious citizens might very well be around the corner." (The Theocons, p. 88)

Among those who have been impressed by Neuhaus and his work with First Things Magazine is Robert Sloan, former President of Baylor University and current President of Houston Baptist University.