When Romans 13 Becomes Anti-Christ

Reading Paul Through the Lens of Jesus, Not Empire

What happens when a single verse gets pulled from its context and used to bless the machinery of harm? What happens when Christians confuse obedience with holiness, and call domination “order”?

In the wake of yet another tragedy, Renee Good’s death at the hands of an ICE agent, Romans 13 is being invoked again. As justification. As final word. As divine permission.

This post is my refusal.

It’s a deep dive into what Romans 13 really says, what it has been used to justify, and how we can return to a reading of Scripture that heals instead of harms. It’s for people of faith, people on the edge of it, and people who’ve walked away because of how it’s been wielded.

This is not a takedown. It’s an invitation. To read more deeply. To stay human. To see Jesus again.

Because when the sword is praised and the towel forgotten, it’s not just theology that suffers. It’s lives.

Let’s talk about it.

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The Whole Story

Romans 13.

That is the scripture I have been seeing everywhere lately.

It shows up in feeds with tidy typography and warm beige backgrounds. It shows up in sermon clips and “hot take” reels. It shows up in comment sections after someone names an injustice, like a stamped seal meant to end the conversation.

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.”

It is shared by politicians as they blend church and state. It is echoed by Christian leaders who talk about “order” as if order is the same thing as goodness. It is posted by former classmates from seminary like it is a divine mic drop, like quoting Paul means you do not have to do the harder work of discernment.

And recently it has been used again as a justification, not just for policy, but for blood.

In the wake of ICE raids. After protests. And now, as people try to justify the killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman shot by an ICE agent during a federal operation in Minneapolis.

They quote Romans 13 like it settles everything. As if violence done by government agents is sanctified by a single sentence pulled out of a letter.

But this reading of Romans 13 is not just flawed. It is an abuse of the text. And in its consequences, in the harm it blesses, it is fundamentally anti-Christ.

I do not say that lightly. I am not trying to win a debate. I am trying to protect the possibility of human dignity, especially for the people who get crushed when Christians confuse obedience with holiness.

Because the goal of spiritual life is not to be correct. The goal is to step into the fullness of your humanity. And Jesus, the Human One, shows us that becoming human always involves solidarity with the vulnerable, not alignment with the machinery that keeps them vulnerable.

This Post Is For You … Whoever You Are

This is for you if you have posted Romans 13 in the last week. If you shared it with good intentions, thinking you were defending order or honoring authority. If you quoted it in a comment thread, confident that it settled something. If you used it to silence someone grieving, to justify a death, or to sanctify violence done by people wearing badges.

I am not here to shame you. I am here to tell you the truth. You have been handed a verse stripped of its context, its history, and its humanity. And the way you are using it is causing harm. Real harm. To real people. To the vulnerable. To the witness of the church. To your own soul.

So this post is an invitation. Not to shame. To repentance. To realignment. To stepping back into the river of the whole story, where love is the law and Jesus is the lens.

If that feels uncomfortable, good. Holy discomfort is where growth happens.

This is also for you if you are a person of faith who has felt something twist inside when you hear Romans 13 quoted this way. If you have sat in church or scrolled through feeds and thought, “That does not sound like Jesus.” If you have wrestled with whether you are allowed to question, whether your discomfort is rebellion or discernment. If you have been told that good Christians submit, and yet something in you keeps resisting.

You are not crazy. You are not rebellious. You are awake. And your discomfort is a gift. It is the Spirit refusing to let you confuse obedience with love. It is your conscience doing exactly what it is supposed to do: naming misalignment.

This post is permission. Permission to trust what you feel. Permission to read Scripture with Jesus as the lens, not empire as the framework. Permission to say, “I do not think God blesses cruelty, no matter who is doing it.”

You are not losing your faith. You are finding it.

And finally, this is for you if you are outside the Christian faith entirely. If you have watched this unfold and thought, “So this is what Christians are about.” If you have seen the verse-slinging and the cold justifications and concluded that Christianity is fundamentally aligned with power, control, and violence. I do not blame you. The evidence is everywhere.

But I want you to know something. What you are seeing is not the whole story. It is not even the true story. It is a distortion. A loud, well-funded, politically powerful distortion. But it is not what Jesus was about.

Jesus was about solidarity with the vulnerable. Jesus was about naming systems that crush people and refusing to bless them. Jesus was about love that looks like presence, not domination. Jesus was executed by the state for being a threat to the order Romans 13 is now being used to defend.

So if you have written off Christianity because of what you are hearing right now, I understand. But I also want to offer you a different lens. Not to convert you. To tell you the truth. The truth is that the gospel has always been good news to the oppressed and bad news to the comfortable. The truth is that every time the church has aligned with empire, it has betrayed its calling.

The truth is that there is a deeper stream, a wider tradition, a truer witness. And it sounds nothing like what you are hearing from the people quoting Romans 13 to justify a killing.

So whoever you are, wherever you are in relation to this conversation, this post is for you.

Because staying human requires us to tell the truth. Even when it is uncomfortable. Even when it costs us something. Even when it means naming harm done in God’s name.

System analysis: how Romans 13 becomes a tool of dehumanization

Now, to be clear, this is not the first time Romans 13 has been weaponized. It has a long and bruised history of misuse, and part of the reason this matters is because history leaves fingerprints on the present.

In the American South, Romans 13 was used to defend slavery, warning Christians not to interfere with “God ordained” systems of bondage.

In Nazi Germany, it echoed from pulpits to justify obedience to Hitler’s regime, to silence dissent, and to bless conformity.

In Apartheid South Africa, it propped up racial segregation from church lecterns.

In the United States during the Civil Rights era, white clergy cited it to chastise Black leaders for civil disobedience.

In 2018, a U.S. Attorney General invoked it to defend the forced separation of immigrant children from their parents.

And now, it is being quoted to excuse a government killing.

This pattern is not an accident.

A verse that sounds like “submit” will always be attractive to those who benefit from the current arrangement of power. A verse that sounds like “submit” will always be used against those who are already being told, in a thousand different ways, that their lives are less worthy of protection.

When we take sacred story and turn it into a weapon for the powerful, we lose our witness. But more than that, we lose our humanity. Because the Bible was never meant to be a blunt instrument.

Scripture is a sacred meta-story. It is a living narrative that shapes collective imagination. It is not a static rulebook where you can pull out one sentence and ignore the river it belongs to. When we forget that, we stop reading scripture as a mirror. We start using scripture as a club. And a club in the hands of the powerful is never neutral.

Empire is not only a government. Empire is a pattern. Empire is any arrangement where the comfort of the powerful is secured by the vulnerability of the many. Empire is a story that says safety is built through control. Empire is a story that says scarcity is inevitable. Empire is a story that says some people are problems. Empire is a story that says violence is the price of peace.

You can watch that story work its way into the Christian imagination. We start to treat “law and order” like a sacrament. We start to treat punishment like protection. We start to believe that if people are suffering, it must be because they “broke the rules.” We start to confuse compliance with virtue.

And then a verse like Romans 13 becomes the perfect spiritual shortcut. It lets us avoid grief. It lets us avoid complexity. It lets us avoid the harder, slower work of asking whether the rules themselves are harming people.

It gives anxious bodies a way to feel clean. It gives fearful hearts a way to feel righteous. It gives privileged lives a way to stay unbothered.

The problem is that the gospel does not exist to keep us unbothered. The gospel exists to wake us up. The gospel exists to make us more human.

If your theology makes you less tender, less awake, and less capable of solidarity, it is not formation. It is deformation. And that deformation does not just live in ideas. It lives in bodies.

It lives in the way we tense up around the “wrong” people. It lives in the way we withhold eye contact. It lives in the way we assume guilt. It lives in the way we stop listening. It lives in the way we rush toward certainty because certainty feels like safety.

What Romans actually is, and why that matters

One of the most damaging habits in modern Christianity is treating the Bible like a stack of fortune cookies.

We crack it open. We pull out a line. We tape it to a moment. We call that “faithfulness.”

But Romans is not a collection of disconnected chapters. It is a letter. It is a long, carefully constructed argument written by Paul to a struggling, divided church in the heart of empire.

Rome was not a neutral setting. Rome was a system. Rome was a machine. Rome was a story about power. And the Christian communities in Rome were fractured by ethnic tension, split by privilege, confused about what it meant to follow Jesus when Caesar still ruled the streets.

So Romans builds. From chapter one through twelve, Paul is constructing a theological arc. He is naming how both Jew and Gentile get trapped in false stories of belonging. He is naming how human beings participate in systems that fracture relationship with self, with neighbor, with creation, and with God. He is announcing that Christ is the revelation of a new way of being.

Not through force. Through sacrificial love. Not through dominance. Through mercy. Not through control. Through presence.

Romans 12 is a manifesto for what it means to be human in light of Jesus. “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world.” “Bless those who persecute you.” “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.” “Overcome evil with good.”

That is the river Paul is standing in when he writes Romans 13. So if your interpretation of Romans 13 contradicts Romans 12, you are not reading Paul. You are using Paul.

And I want to say this with tenderness and firmness. Using Paul is not the same thing as following Jesus. Because following Jesus always drags us toward the vulnerable. Following Jesus does not allow us to stay safely aligned with power while pretending it is holiness.

Romans 13 is not a blank check for violence

Romans 13 does not say governments always act justly. Romans 13 does not say their violence is God’s will. Romans 13 does not say, “Do not resist.” Romans 13 does not say, “Whatever the state does is sacred.” What it does say, in context, is something more complicated and more human.

It acknowledges that Christians are living inside structures of power, and it calls them to live wisely and distinctly within those structures.

Not passively. Subversively. With discernment. With humility. With love as the law.

Paul is not writing as someone dazzled by empire. Paul knew the Roman Empire. Paul was beaten by it. Imprisoned by it. Eventually killed by it. So no, he is not offering a theology of submission as moral virtue. He is offering a strategy for staying human under a system designed to erase humanity.

That phrase matters to me. Staying human. Because what empire does best is flatten people into categories. Citizens and non-citizens. Legal and illegal. Deserving and undeserving. Pure and impure. In group and out group.

And the moment we allow those categories to override the image of God in our neighbor, we have already begun to die. Not physically. Spiritually. Relationally. Imaginatively.

We become less capable of presence. Less capable of compassion. Less capable of truth.

A theology check: God is love, not a permission slip

If your reading of Romans 13 makes God sound like a violent bureaucrat, that reading is not aligned with the God revealed in Jesus.

God is love, fully and always. Love is not a strategy or sentiment. Love is the elemental fabric of the divine.

That means something simple and terrifying. God does not endorse cruelty. God does not sanctify domination. God does not outsource holiness to the state. God does not become more righteous when the vulnerable become more afraid.

Just because God can work through anything does not mean God endorses everything.

If the state punishes, God is not automatically applauding. If the state kills, God is not automatically sanctifying. If the state enforces borders with brutality, God is not automatically “establishing authority.”

We can talk about providence without turning every event into divine approval. We can acknowledge that Presence moves through the world without imagining Presence as the puppet master of violence. Because God is love.

So if something looks like domination, exploitation, exclusion, or cruelty, I do not care how many verses you quote. It is out of alignment with the heart of God. And if your theology requires you to call cruelty “good,” it is time to re-story God.

Not into a safer, softer god. Into the truer God. The Beloved. The Breath. The Radiance. The One Jesus reveals.

Authority, in Scripture, is always on trial

One reason Romans 13 gets distorted is because we treat “authority” like a holy substance. But the biblical story does not treat authority that way. The biblical story is suspicious of authority.

It is honest about kings. It is brutally realistic about rulers. It is clear-eyed about how power corrupts.

Israel asked for a king, and the prophet Samuel basically said: are you sure? Kings take. Kings tax. Kings conscript. Kings build their own security on the backs of the vulnerable.

That is not cynicism. That is wisdom.

And then Jesus shows up, and what does he do with authority? He refuses to use it like Caesar. He heals instead of harms. He touches lepers instead of quarantining them into shame. He eats with outcasts instead of protecting his reputation. He tells his followers not to lord power over each other.

And when he is arrested by state and religious authorities working together, he does not say, “This is God’s will because they are the authorities.”

He names the violence. He endures it. He exposes it. And in resurrection, he announces that the violence of empire does not get the last word.

So if your reading of Romans 13 trains you to bless the violence that Jesus refused, something has gone wrong. Not just intellectually. Spiritually.

The deeper story: from power-over to love

There is a pattern beneath the politics. It is the ancient pattern of power-over. The taking form of existence. The instinct to secure yourself by controlling someone else. The instinct to manage anxiety by enforcing order. The instinct to treat human beings like problems to be solved instead of mirrors of God.

And then there is the forgiving form of love. The way of vulnerability. The way of presence. The way of shared power. The way of communion.

The reason Romans 13 becomes so dangerous is because it can be made to sound like God endorses power-over.

But the whole gospel, from Exodus to Jesus to resurrection, is God undoing power-over from the inside. It is God refusing to be the kind of god empire expects. It is God choosing a manger over a palace. A cross over a throne. A towel over a sword.

If Romans 13 is used to bless domination, it is being used against the gospel.

A wider lens: from exploitation to solidarity

Part of staying human is learning to see suffering in its larger context. Not to excuse anyone. To tell the truth.

ICE raids do not happen in a vacuum. They are the fruit of policies, narratives, and social agreements that treat some bodies as disposable. They are tied to histories of colonization, racial hierarchy, and economic extraction. They are tied to the story that some people deserve to move freely, and others should be caged.

When someone like Renee Good dies in the machinery of that system, the question is not only, “What happened in that moment?” The question is, “What kind of world makes that death feel acceptable to so many people?” And the church, if it is truly following Jesus, does not exist to make that world feel normal.

The church exists to interrupt it. To tell the truth. To mourn. To organize. To protect. To practice solidarity.

Not as a political brand. As a spiritual posture. Because love takes the shape of solidarity when it shows up in history.

If you want to understand the conflict in our moment, do not start with partisan labels. Start with bodies. Start with who is allowed to breathe without being watched. Start with whose kids get to sleep without a knock on the door. Start with who gets to be presumed innocent. Start with who gets to be presumed human. That is the place where the gospel becomes concrete.

And this is where I want to say something that might sound like a contradiction. Solidarity is not the same thing as hatred. To stand with the vulnerable is not to dehumanize the people inside the system. That includes agents. That includes officers. That includes bureaucrats.

It is possible to name harm clearly and still refuse to become what we resist. It is possible to say, “This system kills,” without telling ourselves that the only path forward is revenge. This is part of what I hear Paul trying to do in Romans. Not to quiet the church. To keep the church from becoming another empire.

A natural metaphor: what happens when we confuse fences for gardens

Here is an image that keeps returning for me. I think about a garden. A healthy garden has boundaries, yes. Fences can keep out deer. Borders can protect tender seedlings.

But a fence is not the garden. A fence can be necessary and still be used wrongly. If you build the fence too tight, you choke the soil. You block the pollinators. You trap heat. You turn protection into control. And if you worship the fence, you forget why you planted anything in the first place.

Some Christians have turned authority into a fence they worship. They confuse control with cultivation. They confuse enforcement with flourishing. They talk about “law and order” as if it were the fruit of the Spirit.

But Jesus is not a fence. Jesus is the seed. Jesus is the gardener. Jesus is the composting love that turns death into nourishment. Jesus is the table where enemies become kin.

So when Christians quote Romans 13 to justify violence, it is like pointing at a fence while the garden burns. It is like protecting the structure while forgetting the life.

Alternative vision: authority as towel, not sword

If you want a Christian vision of authority, you do not start with Caesar. You start with a basin and a towel. You start with Jesus kneeling. You start with a teacher who takes the lowest place. That is authority in the kingdom.

Not the power to take. The power to give. Not the power to dominate. The power to serve. Not the power to protect your own. The power to expand the circle of belonging.

So when the state claims authority, Christians should ask: does this authority look like towel or sword? Does it move toward the vulnerable? Does it protect dignity? Does it make room for breath? Or does it make people disappear?

The gospel is not neutral on those questions. And for those of us who claim Jesus, the towel always gets the final word.

Scripture in mixed-belief rooms

I know not everyone reading this shares my faith. Some of you are inside Christianity and exhausted by what it has become. Some of you are outside it and wary, for good reason. Some of you carry spiritual trauma. Scripture was used against you. God was used to control you. “Authority” was used as a threat.

If that is you, I want to say this plainly. You are not broken because your body flinches. You are not faithless because you mistrust power. You are not beyond grace because you have questions.

The God I trust is not offended by your resistance to abuse. The Beloved does not demand that you surrender your discernment. The Breath does not ask you to stop being human.

If scripture is going to be used in rooms like ours, it must be handled like fire. Not fire used to burn people. Fire used to warm, to illuminate, to purify the lies.

If a reading makes the vulnerable less safe, it is not holy. If a reading demands silence from the oppressed, it is not faithful. If a reading makes cruelty feel righteous, it is not the way of Jesus.

A gentle re-reading of “submit”

When most people hear the word “submit,” they hear a collapsing. They hear a shrinking. They hear the old religious script that says your job is to be small.

But the way of Jesus is not smallness. It is humility, which is different. Humility is not self-erasure. Humility is clarity about what is true. Humility is knowing you are beloved dust, fragile and finite, and still worthy. Humility is refusing the seduction of power-over.

So what if “be subject” in Romans 13 is not Paul asking Christians to collapse? What if it is Paul asking Christians to live with a kind of grounded realism? A kind of nervous-system steadiness? A kind of social wisdom?

Not because the empire is holy. Because Christians are called to be holy. Not because the state is always right. Because the church is called to be unmistakably different.

When a system wants you to become reactive, holy nonconformity looks like presence. When a system wants you to become violent, holy resistance looks like creative nonviolence. When a system wants you to become numb, holy faithfulness looks like grief. When a system wants you to become cruel, holy love looks like tenderness that does not collapse.

Paul is not naive. Paul knows that empire punishes. So in Romans 13, I hear him saying something like: Do not give empire an easy excuse. Do not let your method betray your message. Do not let your rage become the same taking form of existence you are resisting.

And that is not permission for the state. It is a warning for the church.

From shame to embrace: what this does inside a person

I want to name another layer that often gets missed.

Romans 13 does not only get weaponized outwardly, against immigrants, against protestors, against the people the state wants to mark as dangerous. It also gets weaponized inwardly.

Some of us grew up in religious environments where “authority” was the unchallengeable god. The pastor. The father. The husband. The elder. The institution. The leader who claimed spiritual power and demanded silence.

For people with that history, Romans 13 does not just bring up politics. It brings up your childhood. It brings up your body. It brings up the moment you learned that disagreeing was “rebellion.” It brings up the moment you learned that your instincts were dangerous. It brings up the moment you learned that your questions made you unworthy. So if Romans 13 is landing in you as dread, you are not weak.

You might be waking up. The body is the sacred interface. The soul speaks through skin, breath, and tears. That means your reaction is not just a problem to fix. It might be an invitation to listen. To ask where fear lives in flesh. To ask what you had to do to survive. To bless the part of you that got you through.

Shame will tell you, “You are wrong for feeling this.” Grace will tell you, “Of course you feel this. Come closer.”

The point is not to bully your nervous system into compliance. The point is to let love re-form you. From performance to authenticity. From exploitation to solidarity. From power-over to love.

A note about trauma and “good people” inside harmful systems

When we talk about state violence, it is easy to collapse into simple stories. There are monsters, and there are victims. There are villains, and there are heroes. But real life is messier than that.

That is not an excuse. It is an invitation to stay awake.

Because systems do not run on monsters. Systems run on ordinary people who have learned to go numb. Systems run on incentives. Systems run on fear. Systems run on propaganda. Systems run on the human desire to belong.

You can be a “good person” and still participate in harm. You can be kind at home and still enforce policies that break families. You can care about your kids and still dehumanize someone else’s.

This is one reason I refuse the easy comfort of hatred. Hatred keeps me from seeing the parts of the story where I am also capable of numbness. Hatred keeps me from seeing how the same empire that cages immigrants also trains me to perform and produce and compete. Hatred keeps me from seeing how the “other side” is not the only place where power-over lives.

If we are going to stay human, we have to be able to name harm without surrendering to dehumanization. That is not softness. That is strength. That is spiritual maturity. That is what love looks like when it refuses to become a mirror of empire.

A deeper reading: Paul, Rome, and the art of subversive survival

Sometimes people ask, “Okay, but what do we do with the words themselves?” It is a fair question. Because it is one thing to say, “Context matters,” and another thing to actually let context change the way you hear the sentence.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Paul is writing to a vulnerable minority community in the belly of Rome. He is writing to people who can be targeted. He is writing to people who can be accused. He is writing to people who can be crushed.

This is not the same as a majority church speaking from comfort. It is not the same as Christians being the cultural default. It is not the same as a pastor with a platform telling everyone else to “submit.”

When Paul tells a community to live peaceably, to overcome evil with good, to refuse vengeance, to pay what is owed, he is not trying to baptize Rome. He is trying to keep the Jesus movement alive. He is trying to help the church refuse the empire’s bait. Because empires love to provoke the oppressed into reactivity.

They love a riot they can point to. They love a narrative where violence is necessary. They love a story where the state becomes savior.

So part of what Paul is offering is strategy. A way to inhabit a dangerous world without becoming what the world is. A way to live in the cracks. A way to practice nonconformity that does not get the whole community wiped out.

This does not mean Paul is endorsing Rome. It means Paul is dealing with reality. The same way Jesus dealt with reality.

Jesus told people to turn the other cheek, not as a call to passivity, but as a way of refusing humiliation. Jesus told people to go the extra mile, not because empire is good, but because empire’s scripts can be interrupted. Jesus told people to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, not because Caesar is holy, but because Caesar is not God.

What if Romans 13 is closer to that kind of teaching than we want to admit? Not “obey because God loves the state,” but “live with wisdom because empire will use your reactivity against you.” Not “submit because authority is sacred,” but “stay human because your humanity is sacred.”

This is where the verse becomes less like a weapon and more like a mirror. It forces the church to ask: are we using scripture to protect life, or to protect control?

Alternative vision: the state is not the source of your belovedness

One reason Romans 13 gets used so aggressively is because we have forgotten where belovedness comes from.

If your belonging depends on being “law-abiding,” then the law becomes a god. If your dignity depends on being “respectable,” then respectability becomes a god. If your safety depends on the state being strong, then the state becomes a god.

But belovedness does not come from the state. Belovedness comes from Love. Belovedness is not earned. Belovedness is not revoked. Belovedness is not a reward for compliance. Belovedness is the starting place. Grace is the operating system.

So when Christians invoke Romans 13 to argue that some people deserve what they get, what they are really doing is preaching a theology of performance. They are saying, “If you are good enough, you are safe.” That is not gospel. That is a transactional religion. And transactional religion always needs scapegoats.

It needs someone to blame. It needs someone to punish. It needs someone to keep the illusion of control alive.

The way of Jesus is not transactional. The way of Jesus is relational. The way of Jesus begins with embrace. And from that embrace, we begin the slow work of staying human.

Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity. While these practices are usually behind the paywall, this week they are my gift to you.