Taking a stand

Henry David Thoreau lay on a cot in a jail cell in Massachusetts and decided it wasn’t so bad. I take comfort in that as I sit here contemplating the possibility of civil disobedience and its aftermath. Now that the camel’s nose is under the tent with the Houston mayor’s subpoena of church sermons, I expect it will be only a matter of time for outspoken magazine essays.

On that score (jail time), C.S. Lewis had already taught me a helpful existential truth, that the dreaded hypothetical is never what one expected: “This is important. One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst” (A Grief Observed).

Author-naturalist-abolitionist tax resister Thoreau found the state accommodations bearable enough: “The rooms were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in the town. … I soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the history of the various occupants of that room. … Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed. … I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them” (Civil Disobedience).

Of course, Thoreau was only in the joint for one night (“for someone interfered, and paid that tax”), and he might have sung a different tune if his had been a longer bit.

The Affordable Care Act is 11,000 pages long, but the Manhattan Declaration line in the sand against government tyranny is a delightfully manageable nine pages, so I decided to read it. I signed on “to speak and act in defense of [the proposition that] no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence” on three points: the sanctity of human life, marriage as a union of one man and one woman, and religious liberty.

The apostles couldn’t help but speak of what they had seen and heard, but Thoreau laments that most of us would rather lie low and not shake the applecart.

The signing was easy enough, especially with computer convenience. And I was settled in my spirit about it too, esteeming myself in good company with Peter and John who violated Romans 13 and broke civil law for the sake of a higher law, with no qualms of conscience: “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19-20).

The apostles couldn’t help but speak of what they had seen and heard, but Thoreau laments that most of us would rather lie low and not shake the applecart: “There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery … who yet in effect do nothing to put an end [to it]; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing. … [The fellow] whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good repair … who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.”

Not long ago a sweet woman in my state of Pennsylvania was fired from a low-level college administrative job for speaking innocently of Jesus and sharing her thoughts on marriage in a conversation initiated by a colleague. I wrote about her case for the magazine, and the woman really believed that as a result of that public exposure she would receive justice and be reinstated in her place of employment. What the Christian world will have to come to terms with in the future is that it’s OK to take a stand for Christ, as long as you don’t think it will necessarily improve your life. The Western Christian world, I mean. The Middle Eastern fold already gets that.

Being personally familiar with some of the inner workings of prisons, I have reason to hope I will be able to continue reading WORLD uninterrupted. Though maybe only in the day room.

Email aseupeterson@wng.org