Our religious mandate to civic disobedience and what that might mean in practical terms.
Why do human beings have such big brains? Look at those starlings swooping and wheeling in their murmuration; these birds have tiny brains which are mostly eye, yet they can do everything necessary to find food, choose a mate, build a nest and rear young so perpetuating their species. Our large brains comprise some 86 billion neurons which form 100 trillion connections to each other. It seems probable that we need them to understand and negotiate the complexities of our human social life, including developing language skills more complex than any other species. It takes about 20 years for an individual human to learn about and manage their social life. Our social lives have an objective of maximising the utility of mutual help to be found in communities of human beings whilst avoiding the negative effect of antagonisms, by managing them when we cannot avoid them. Those 20 years are believed to be similar to the time it takes for our brains to fully develop.
Managing antagonisms perhaps comes nearest to the centre of arguments concerning civic disobedience and whether it is justified or not. We humans have complicated beliefs about the world, about other people and how they should be managed. We live in communities and share conventions on how we should behave. Those conventions of life within our communities comprise our civic obligations. Sometimes those civic obligations are enforced by law, as far as the community is able to implement law. The word civil merely defines the difference between civilian and military groups.
Here is a topical use of the word “civic”: “Inside the citadel, the hordes are incinerating America’s traditions of law, civility and restraint. The civic-minded cry in the wilderness.”
(Ref: Edward Luce: America's Barbarians Inside the Gate Financial Times 20/01/2026}
Both Plato and St Paul are very conservative and reject breaking the rules of the community of which you are apart. In Plato's Crito Socrates presents an adherence to his civic obligations which is both affectionate and absolute. He says that this city has raised him, supported him and educated both him and his children. It is impossible for him to go against its laws. This is extraordinary as he has just been sentenced to death for corrupting youth and for impiety. He had denied himself the opportunity to be exiled because his adherence to Athens is absolute. He blames his unjust sentence on humans not on the city or its laws.
St Paul (Romans 13: 1-7) also sets out the necessity of obeying the law, this time because those who rule by law have been put there by God and so must be obeyed, the ruler “is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer”. So going against such rulers is to defy God. No doubt St Paul must have been motivated to some extent by the fact he was leading a new political and religious movement and did not want to start of by offending local rulers, especially as these were the Romans who were dealing with discontent within the Jewish communities they had chosen to subjugate. That discontent later flared into the three Jewish revolts, the first of which in 70 C.E led to the destruction of the second temple and ended with the Roman legions killing many Jewish people and driving their communities out into the diaspora after they defeated the third revolt led by Simon bar Kokhba in 136 C.E
The modern reality is rather different. Northern Ireland is quite a good example of civic disobedience because it involved the often antagonistic interactions of an immensely complicated series of groups. There were the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, but also between groups within these communities especially within Catholic communities complicated by the fact that different religious groups often lived in different areas which risked becoming enclaves, attempting to excluding the other. There were also antagonisms between these communities and the UK government based in London.
Civic disobedience took a variety of forms. There was a spectrum of protest which varied from outright, violent attempts at revolution to overthrow the Northern Ireland government on the one hand, to quiet or silent protests including self harming protests such as hunger strikes over very narrow, particular and well defined simple issues. There were aggressive, intimidatory marches of one group through the housing estates of the other. There were also riots but also outright terrorism with shootings and bombs. There must be some doubt that the use of bombs and guns can be called civic disobedience and is better termed terrorism.
As an example of the complexity of the troubles I would like to present the simple comment of the Rev. Des Wilson a catholic priest in Northern Ireland who was active during the troubles. He said “when I give money to the poor they call me a saint; when I ask why these people are poor, I am called a Communist.”
Wikipedia describes Des Wilson thus: “Active in working-class and Irish nationalist west Belfast, he defended the right of communities failed by the state to create “alternative education, alternative welfare, alternative theatre, broadcasting, theological and political discussion, public inquiries and much else”. More controversially, he did not condemn paramilitary groups when they presented themselves, in his words, as “alternative police and alternative armies”
It can be argued that such comments are symptomatic of a total break down of governance and law and order or you can congratulate Des Wilson on getting to the heart of the complex problems besetting people living in N Ireland, the bewildering, aggressive complexity of it all. Eventually Rev Des Wilson worked with the Rev Alec Reid who lived for 40 years at The Redemptorist Monastery at Clonard which stands on the interface between the Catholic nationalist Falls Road and the Protestant loyalist Shankill Road areas of west Belfast – right in the thick of it one might say. Over a period of years these two first stopped the deadly feuding between different factions of the IRA and then went on to develop broader cooperation and trust between more moderate groups and the two priests, together with community leaders and some British politicians, eventually arranged the Good Friday agreement which reduced the violence in Northern Ireland and which is generally regarded as having provided a solution to The Troubles.
Perhaps Christian priests have a special skill in reducing conflict because Christianity was born at a time of tension between Roman Imperialism and Jewish nationalism and also because of Christs demanding commandment that one loves one neighbour and even ones enemies.
Doubtless many of us when confronted with the problem of a religious mandate for civil disobedience in the last couple of weeks thought immediately of the fate of Mrs. Renee Good shot by a representative of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota whilst monitoring that group during its activities to take up people off the street on the suspicion that they might be illegal immigrants. Although she was clearly an innocent, members of the US government described her as “a domestic terrorist” a propaganda move which showed the fear that the murder of someone undertaking the mild form of civic disobedience in which she was involved might be effective in turning people against the heavy handed action against immigrant communities which ICE was conducting. Likewise in the UK the present government has been condemned for arresting people for terrorism offences whilst they were holding up cardboard placards supporting an activist group in Gaza which the government had declared to be a terrorist group but without revealing a specific reason for that designation. This has caused considerable confusion as members of the group are accused of criminal damage of HM armed forces aircraft, a serious offence, but not terrorism.
The history of the present divisions in the USA can be written as a timeline from civil disobedience involving the ideological pursuit of the small state and a general antagonism to central government. A cattle owner and rancher active in Nevada named Cliven Bundy refused to pay the government's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) the grazing fees for the use of the government land where his cattle roamed. The BLM sent in people to remove Bundy's cattle, he in turn summoned help from right wing groups, notably the Proud Boys who turned up with firearms. Despite numerous court cases which all dismissed Bundy's complex claims on the land, ultimately BLM seems to have caved in because they were afraid for the safety of their staff. That was victory for armed groups practising Civic disobedience.
The Proud Boys, are a very right wing, white supremacist group supportive of a small state. They combined with the Oath Keepers, to play a major role in the attempt to take over the US Capitol building in Washington DC to prevent the verification of the election of Democrat Biden. It was only the determined refusal of Republican Deputy President Mike Pence to leave the Capitol and his determination to stop the subversion of the Presidential election which allowed Biden to be re-elected. This was a full on act of Civic disobedience but its mandate remains in doubt.
The shift in attitudes to immigrants after the re-election of Trump in 2024 led to the death of Renée Good who was undertaking the mildest of Civil Disobedience actions as a devout Christian attempting to provide information on the mistreatment of immigrants by ICE. ICE have played the role that the Brownshirts played in pre-war Germany when they pursued and persecuted Jewish people and other nationalities such as Slavs designated as Untermensch. Trump did not need to form a new paramilitary organisation using groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers because he already had ICE who had some training in oppressive behaviour. It has recently been suggested that men from these paramilitary groups have joined ICE. So it is not only Christians who pursue Civic disobedience.
An essential element in the decline of the USA which has recently become salient, is the weakness of the US judicial system. There was a major attempt to subvert the result of the 2020 election through the take over and occupation of the Capitol building on 6th January to prevent verification of the elected President in 2021. That was supported by armed paramilitary groups such as the Oath Keepers and The Proud Boys, both of which are antagonistic to central government. Although many participants were gaoled, the prosecution of Trump for his involvement just faded away. Likewise the prosecution of the armed group the Oath Keepers for their support of the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy who refused to pay $1 million grazing fees he owed to the government extended over from 1993 to 2018 but ultimately the government lost out. It lost out in two ways, it failed to persuade courts of law to back its claim and it failed to deal with armed groups who threatened its employees.
The main problem here seems to be that the US judicial system is not independent of political influence. The accusations against Trump were not brought to trial in a reasonable time frame and were dismissed after Trump returned to power, after five years had passsed, on the grounds that the DoJ did not prosecute sitting Presidents. (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_(election_obstruction_case)
The lack of an independent judiciary is a key weakness of the US polity and is largely responsible for the decline of the USA as a political force in the world. Trump returned legitimately to power but his first act was to free those involved in the attack on the Capitol building. No country with such a weak judicial system can survive for long, especially when it has armed groups actively dedicated to undermining central government and picking fights with other groups or individuals with whom they disagree on ideological grounds.
Whether civic disobedience has a role useful to play in improving the lot of the individual making a protest, is a difficult question to answer. In very authoritarian regimes those pursuing such a policy tend to get swept away by government violence in the way that Renée Good was swept away. In more democratic environments acts of civil disobediences may draw attention to social or political grievances that would otherwise go unnoticed and unanswered.
In the USA today few of its citizens demonstrate the uncontaminated allegiance to the support of their state or country as Socrates did, on the grounds that the state has given them much in terms of personal support and personal identity. Today's societies East and West seem to follow St Paul's expectation that the ruler is to be obeyed. That does not leave the Christian with much leeway in terms of Civil disobedience but of course the second part of the great commandment to love thy neighbour might lead to very different conclusions. After all was not Christ's life one of degrees of disobedience from his desertion of his parents at the age of 12 so he could start his work in the temple of Jerusalem, through his contravention of the Jewish Sabbath law when he led his disciples in gathering and eating the seeds of wheat in a field to his only violent act of overturning the tables of the merchants and money lenders in the temple? Of course God's final devastating act followed on from the first of emptying himself of all divinity, taking on the shape of a man and allowing himself to be crucified on a false charge of blasphemy. That is a hard act to follow especially on the human level.
Peace,
Paul Munton 24th January 2026.
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