Consent of the Governed

Sharkey for President

Romans 13, Part I
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, March 19, 2010

At the glorious close of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the war-weathered hobbits come back to the Shire, and find that it needed a scouring.

"All right, all right!" said Sam. "That's quite enough. I don't want to hear no more. No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead" (The Return of the King, p. 977).

"What's all this?" said Frodo, feeling inclined to laugh.
"This is what it is, Mr. Baggins," said the leader of the Shirriffs, a two-feather hobbit: "You're arrested for Gate-breaking, and Tearing up of Rules, and Assaulting Gate-keepers, and Trespassing, and Sleeping in Shire-buildings without Leave, and Bribing Guards with Food."
And what else?" said Frodo.
"That'll do to go on with," said the Shirriff-leader.
"I can add some more, if you'd like it," said Sam. "Calling your Chief Names, Wishing to punch his Pimply Face, and Thinking you Shirriffs look a lot of Tom-fools" (p. 978).

"We're not allowed to," said Robin.
"If I hear not allowed much oftener," said Sam, "I'm going to get angry" (p. 979).

But many evangelicals, badly taught, sound far more like Robin than Sam. They have come to believe that "not allowed" is the necessary meaning of -- all together now! -- Romans 13. When you get back to the Shire, whatever the sallow-faced thug leaning against the gate says you have to do, you have to do. He is leaning against the gate, isn't he? I know there is nothing in the Constitution about that, but the Supreme Court said there was. And they are leaning against the gate too.

The doctrine is a convenient one, and it comports well with those who would make cravenness into a theological virtue. A great deal can be said about Romans 13 (which I hope to do, Lord permitting, in the weeks to come), but in the meantime, let this suffice.

Although the populations of different nations and cultures have different threshholds for what they will put up with, the consent of the governed is still a bedrock principle. At a certain point, it becomes obvious that the "consent of the governed" is not an ideal for democracies to strive for, but is rather an unalterable reality under every form of government. Every regime, however tyrannical, at some point discovers what the tipping point is. And when that tipping point is past, and the teeter to the previous totter sets in, all the military might in the world will not protect those rulers who forgot where their center of gravity was. I will never forget the closing days of the Soviet Union, one of the world's nuclear superpowers, in their standoff with Boris Yeltsin, a Russian with a drinking problem holed up in a house. What happened?

When a nation is blessed by God, the consent of the governed is managed in an orderly way. Elections are relatively honest, and you don't have to make your way to the polling place by walking past concertina wire and armed guards. Tanks are not out on the street in case the election goes the wrong way. But in other nations, the elections are rigged, the dead vote, and powerful interests consider a politician honest if, when bought, he stays bought. But this does not mean that the consent of the governed is not operative under such conditions. It is most certainly operative -- it is just that the center of gravity is in a different place. Different bodies have different shapes, and hence the balancing point is different. But there still is a center of gravity. In an orderly government, the consent of the governed is counted and honestly weighed. Under tyrannies and despotisms, whether hard or soft, the rulers can wake up on any given morning and discover that the consent just evaporated.

Sometimes there is a battle over that tipping point, which the commies won at Tiananmen Square, and which is currently an ongoing affair in the streets of Iran. The communists bought themselves some extra decades via some brutal repression and with regard to Iran, we shall see. But other times and places, the consent just . . . evaporates.

What does that have to do with us? All the tawdry dishonesty on exhibit in Congress right now has been there for a long time. Those who understand biblical principles of governance have understood that, and have been writing about it for decades. And (I am convinced) they were right, at least as far as the argument goes. But there is an immense practical difference between a naked emperor that just one boy sees and a naked emperor that the whole populace sees. If it were a matter of simple argument, he is naked the whole time, and point taken. But it is not until everyone sees it that it becomes a political problem for the emperor.

When support for a system just evaporates, as I am convinced it is in the process of doing with ours, the whole thing is a mystery to the folks it is happening to. They are judicially blinded. The denizens of Congress know that they have been logrolling up there for year after weary year, and so they are naturally shocked when all of sudden everybody sees it and is appalled -- like it was a recent development or something. In vain they point to all those previous examples of deeming and reconciling and bribing and cajoling. Okay, everybody says. So?

What about Romans 13? When this consent evaporates, it is like . . . what is it like? It is like a sodden hillside in California giving way. It is like an avalanche in Colorado, started by a trivial noise. It is like a sinkhole in Florida, just appearing in the middle of a suburban neighborhood. It is like a forest fire in central Idaho. It is like "the powers that be." Try telling them to stop. Good luck.