The shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis while she was attempting to murder an ICE agent with a vehicle captivated the United States. Liberals, understandably, mourned Good as a martyr for their cause while Americans had little qualms about her death because the use of force was entirely justified. But Russell Moore is mad that Christians would cite Romans 13 for why ICE agents should not be attacked.
Russell Moore wrote a column titled Christians, Let’s Stop Abusing Romans 13 to obfuscate what really took place.
An ICE agent shot protester Renee Good this week and killed her. Videos record one of the agents cursing her as she died. I knew immediately that many Christians would be morally shaken by this, and rightfully so. And I knew many of them would soothe their troubled consciences with a predictable passage of Scripture, and it isn’t “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Instead, whenever an agent of the state kills a person in morally questionable circumstances, many Christians go right to Romans 13, quoting it before the blood is even cleaned up from the ground.
Russell Moore, being an open borders liberal, views Renee Good’s death as morally questionable, something that would morally shake Christians. He even frames her as a protester instead of an agitator or terrorist.
Russell Moore supported tyrannical lockdowns in 2020, but wants to explain that Romans 13 cannot be used to assuage the consciences of guilty parties who abuse power and those who support it.
Moore will write a lot of filler before eventually circling back to the issue at the end.
Paul knew of what he spoke. In his prior life, he had persecuted the church—with legal warrants and the full force of law. He did not see that legality of that action as being in any way an excuse (1 Tim. 1:12–14).
Romans 13 is about refusing to become what oppresses you, not about baptizing whatever the oppressor does. And Romans 13 puts moral limits around what authorities can and cannot do—it tells them to use the sword against “the wrongdoer,” for instance. Paul wrote Romans 13 not to protect the state from critique but to shield the church from vengeance.
To use Romans 13 to automatically justify state violence is not the equivalent of first-century Christians seeing their calling as not to overthrow the empire. To use it that way is more like if Daniel in Babylon had said that the fiery oven is the lawful punishment for civil disobedience against worshiping the king’s image, and therefore Nebuchadnezzar is right that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego should be burned alive.
There are legitimate uses of tragically necessary lethal force on the part of law enforcement officers. Watch the video, if you can, and decide for yourself if you think, morally, that this was one of them. But don’t simply turn away from the violence and refuse to ask any questions at all. And if you decide that whatever is done with government power is beyond moral scrutiny, don’t blame Romans 13. That’s not what it tells you to do.
Russell Moore employs a Rose Tiko line about Romans 13 being about refusing to “become what oppresses you” in a major instance of eisegesis of the text. Not having any sense about what punishing evil and rewarding good mean, Russell Moore does not view Renee Good as the objective wrongdoer because he agrees with her cause, and the ICE agents said booboo words to and about her.
It’s not that Christians believe that the government is beyond moral scrutiny; it’s that the death of the terrorist, Renee Good, was entirely justified as she tried to kill an American in defense of foreign invaders.
