“Romans 13 says Christians must obey the government.”

VerdictContested

Romans 13 really does tell Christians to “be subject unto the higher powers.” Whether it means Christians must obey the government always, follow every law or back a particular leader has been argued among American Christians since before the founding. The patriots of 1776 read it one way, the loyalists another, and the same split returned over the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, border policy in 2018 and church closures in 2020.Last checked October 2026

On October 20, 2026, at a campaign rally in Conroe, Texas, a pastor prayed over Texas Attorney General and U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton and turned to a familiar passage. “Romans 13 says that you are God’s minister for righteousness; that you don’t bear the sword in vain,” said James Buntrock, executive director of My God Votes, calling Paxton “an avenger against evil” (Christian Post).

Romans 13 is one of the most quoted Bible passages in American politics, and the belief behind this claim deserves a fair hearing. Most Christians, in most traditions, read the chapter as a real call to respect lawful order, pay taxes and honor public officials. Paul wrote it, and it is in every Christian Bible. What God requires is a question for readers and their churches. This page checks something narrower: whether “Romans 13 says obey the government” has ever settled an American political fight. The documents show Americans quoting it on both sides of nearly every one.

What does Romans 13 say?

Here are the opening verses in the King James Version, the Bible most of the Americans on this page used:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. (Romans 13:1–2, KJV)

Verses 3 and 4 add that rulers “are not a terror to good works, but to the evil,” and that the ruler “is the minister of God to thee for good.” That’s the phrase behind the rally prayer; the King James wording is “minister of God to thee for good” and “a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” Peter’s first letter says something similar: “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,” ending “Fear God. Honour the king” (1 Peter 2:13–17, KJV).

Christians who see limits on that duty usually point to other verses. When Jesus was asked whether to pay taxes to Rome, he answered, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21, KJV). When the high priest and council in Jerusalem reminded the apostles they had been ordered not to “teach in this name,” Peter and the other apostles replied, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29, KJV).

Christians weigh these passages differently, and sincerely. The question this page can check is how Americans have used them.

Romans 13 and the American Revolution

On the Sunday after January 30, 1750, a 29-year-old minister named Jonathan Mayhew climbed into the pulpit of Boston’s West Meeting-House to mark an anniversary. A century earlier, England had executed King Charles I, and some Anglicans honored the dead king as a saint and a martyr.

Mayhew’s title borrowed a phrase from Romans 13, “the higher powers,” and his text was Romans 13:1–8. He argued that a ruler who governs for the public good deserves obedience, and a ruler who doesn’t has no claim on it. “Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not intitled to obedience,” he said (the spelling is his printer’s). The people who resisted Charles had made “a most righteous and glorious stand, made in defence of the natural and legal rights of the people” (A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, Boston, 1750, full text). The sermon’s modern editor at the University of Nebraska calls it a “bridge between the radical Puritan past and the American Revolutionary future.”

Title page of Jonathan Mayhew's 1750 sermon on Romans 13, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers, printed in Boston by D. Fowle and D. Gookin
Title page of Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 sermon on Romans 13, printed in Boston by D. Fowle and D. Gookin. Library of Congress, public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

A generation later, both sides of the Revolution were quoting Paul. Jonathan Boucher, a Church of England priest in Maryland, was a close friend of George Washington and tutor to his stepson. He was also a loyalist. By the end of his ministry he was preaching with “two loaded pistols” on his pulpit, and he returned to England in 1775 (George Washington’s Mount Vernon). In “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Nonresistance,” a sermon answering the patriot clergyman Jacob Duché (who had led the Continental Congress’s first prayer in 1774), Boucher said that “mankind are nowhere in the scriptures commanded to resist authority,” and that “Obedience to government is every man’s duty because it is every man’s interest” (Boucher’s sermon, excerpted from the 1797 London edition; Constitution Society headnote).

Patriot ministers read the same chapter the other way. The Anglican priest and regimental chaplain David Griffith, quoted by historian Lincoln Mullen, said Paul “never meant … to give sanction to the crimes of wicked and despotic men” (Mullen, republished by The Aquila Report). Kaitlyn Schiess, author of The Ballot and the Bible, sums up the pattern: in the Revolution it was “primarily loyalist priests who were arguing against the validity of the Revolution, relying on Romans 13” (Religion Unplugged).

Benjamin Franklin, serving on the committee to design a national seal in the summer of 1776, proposed a scene of Moses extending his hand over the sea as it overwhelms Pharaoh, with the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God” (Franklin’s proposal, Founders Online). The seal adopted in 1782 didn’t use it. On Boucher’s reading, though, the Revolution itself was resistance to “the ordinance of God.” The country exists because the side that rejected that reading won. (For what the founders did and didn’t build into the new government, see was America founded as a Christian nation?)

Romans 13 and the Fugitive Slave Act (1850)

The next great fight over the passage came with the Fugitive Slave Act, approved September 18, 1850. It set up federal machinery for returning people who had escaped slavery, and it declared that “all good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law.” Hiding a fugitive could cost up to $1,000 and six months in jail (American Battlefield Trust, text of the act).

Some Northerners appealed to a “higher law.” Senator William Seward had told the Senate on March 11, 1850, that the new territories were governed by a “higher law than the Constitution” (U.S. Senate Historical Office).

On November 24, 1850, the Rev. Ichabod Spencer answered them from the pulpit of Brooklyn’s Second Presbyterian Church. His texts were Titus 3:1 and Romans 13:1–7, and his title was The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law. Spencer was careful to say, “I am not justifying the fugitive-slave Law,” and, “The question is not, whether slavery is right, or the Fugitive Slave Law right.” On the appeal to conscience he was blunt: “There are no such higher laws.” His charge to the congregation: “Be obedient to the laws of your land. Do not resist these ordinances of God” (Spencer’s sermon, Project Gutenberg edition of the 1850 New York printing).

Earlier that year Moses Stuart, “lately a professor in the theological seminary at Andover” (as the title of William Jay’s 1850 reply described him), had published Conscience and the Constitution, defending Daniel Webster’s Senate speech on slavery. Critics answered fast. At an August 1, 1850, meeting in Guilford, Connecticut, the Rev. G. W. Perkins summarized Stuart’s position that the law to return fugitives “must be obeyed,” and his argument from Paul’s letter to Philemon: “Paul, he says, sent back a fugitive slave.” Perkins replied: “Did Paul arrest Onesimus? Did he deliver him over to slave catchers and brutal agents?” And then: “The law forces me to decide whether I will obey God or man” (Perkins, Prof. Stuart and Slave Catching, 1850).

Both sides had scripture. As the publisher’s summary of Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis puts it, Christians on all sides “agreed that the Bible was authoritative,” but “their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis” (UNC Press).

Jeff Sessions and Romans 13 (2018)

On June 14, 2018, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Attorney General Jeff Sessions responded to church leaders who had criticized the administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border. He cited “the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13,” which he summarized as a command “to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.” He added: “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful” (Department of Justice).

That’s a real argument: laws protect people, and Christians have long taught respect for lawful order. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders backed him: “It is very biblical to enforce the law” (RNS).

The pushback crossed denominational lines, from the African Methodist Episcopal Church to the Quakers to the Jesuit writer James Martin. Franklin Graham called the policy “disgraceful.” Johnnie Moore, an informal evangelical adviser to the president, said Sessions “has demonstrated he is no theologian” (RNS). More than 600 members of Sessions’s own United Methodist Church filed a formal church complaint against him (National Catholic Reporter). The complaints were dismissed that August. “A political action is not personal conduct when the political officer is carrying out official policy,” said Bishop David Graves of the Alabama-West Florida Conference (Michigan Conference, UMC).

When churches said Romans 13 has limits (2020)

Two years later the roles flipped. During the pandemic, California limited church gatherings, and on July 24, 2020, the pastors and elders of John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church in Sun Valley published “Christ, not Caesar, Is Head of the Church.” They affirmed that “Scripture does mandate careful, conscientious obedience to all governing authority,” and then drew a line: “neither of those texts (nor any other) grants civic rulers jurisdiction over the church.” Their conclusion: “we cannot and will not acquiesce to a government-imposed moratorium on our weekly congregational worship” (Grace Community Church).

Others read the same passage the opposite way. Schiess, in a 2023 interview, notes that people have reached for Romans 13 to say “you have to follow COVID-19 restrictions,” or that Christians can’t “protest racial justice in the streets” (Religion Unplugged). For the Grace Community pastors, the passage Sessions had quoted for obedience in 2018 described a duty with boundaries; for others, it was a reason to comply. Sincere Christians landed on both sides, and the verse alone didn’t decide the case.

Engaging the counterargument

“The patriots twisted Romans 13. The loyalists read it straight.” This is a serious position, held by serious Christian scholars. Historian Gregg Frazer, in God against the Revolution (University Press of Kansas, 2018), argues that the loyalist clergy built their case on Scripture, history and law, and that patriot clergy leaned on “theory, fear, and John Locke.” A reviewer in Christianity Today, John D. Wilsey of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, summarizes Frazer’s view that pro-revolution pastors “read their own biases into passages like Romans 13” (Christianity Today). Followed through, the loyalist reading treats the Revolution as Boucher did: resistance to “the ordinance of God.” Historians and theologians still disagree, which is why this page rates the claim contested.

“Resistance led by lawful officials is consistent with Romans 13.” This is a long-standing Protestant answer, and it’s a real one. John Calvin taught that private people owe obedience even to bad rulers, “I speak only of private men,” but that the situation differs “when popular magistrates have been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings” (Institutes 4.20.31, CCEL). Colonial assemblies and the Continental Congress fit that description in many patriots’ eyes. It is still a reading of the passage, and it means Romans 13 requires a judgment about which officials hold lawful authority. The text doesn’t make that judgment for anyone.

“Quoting Romans 13 isn’t Christian nationalism.” Agreed. Christians of every tradition read it, and most read it as a call to respect lawful order. Quoting it doesn’t make anyone a Christian nationalist.

Why this matters: Romans 13 and Christian nationalism

The pattern worth noticing is narrower. Again and again, the passage has been used to say that a particular policy, office-holder or candidate carries God’s own authority, so opposing them means opposing God. Christian nationalism, as this site uses the term, fuses Christian identity with national power, and treating one side of a political fight as “the ordinance of God” is one of the quickest ways to make that fusion. A prayer that calls a candidate “God’s minister” and “an avenger against evil” two weeks before an election is a fresh example of that move; Sessions’s border remarks were another, and so were the 1850 sermons.

The takeaway

  • Romans 13 does call Christians to “be subject unto the higher powers.” That part is in the text.
  • American Christians have quoted it on both sides of nearly every big fight over authority: for the king and against him, for the Fugitive Slave Act and against it, for state orders and against them.
  • The passage alone has never settled whether a specific law, policy or leader deserves obedience. When someone cites it in a political argument, it’s fair to ask the question Mayhew asked in 1750: is this government acting as Romans 13’s “minister of God to thee for good”? And who decides?

Related claims

Further reading

Sources

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