To the extent that his book even hints at “more severe measures,” they aren’t being recommended if civil disobedience fails. Rather, he’s suggesting that Christians have the right to consider using “defensive force” in situations where civil disobedience isn’t permitted — as in Nazi Germany in the 1940s, or in British-occupied Boston in the 1770s.

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza has posted a response to my criticisms of the way his recent profile of Michele Bachmann portrayed the evangelical writer and activist Francis Schaeffer. In his post, Lizza attempts to justify his article’s claim that Schaeffer’s 198o book “A Christian Manifesto” urges “the violent overthrow of the government if Roe v. Wade isn’t reversed.”

I had disputed this point, noting that Schaeffer only urged Christians to consider acts of non-violent civil disobedience against the post-Roe abortion regime (offering examples like the non-payment of taxes and public sit-ins), while explicitly warning his readers against an “overreaction [that] crosses the line from force to violence.” Lizza counters that Schaeffer did write that actual political violence was sometimes justified, citing this passage from the “Manifesto” as an example:

There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate. The Christian is not to take the law into his own hands and become a law unto himself. But when all avenues to flight and protest have closed, force in the defensive posture is appropriate.

This was the situation of the American Revolution. The colonists used force in defending themselves. Great Britain, because of its policy toward the colonies, was seen as a foreign power invading America. The colonists defended their homeland. As such, the American Revolution was a conservative counter-revolution. The colonists saw the British as the revolutionaries trying to overthrow the legitimate colonial governments.

A true Christian in Hitler’s Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state and hidden his Jewish neighbors from German SS troops. The government had abrogated its authority, and it had no right to make any demands.

This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States—the issue of abortion …

Lizza also cites the following passage, which again invokes the case of the American revolution:

The thirteen colonies concluded that the time had come and they disobeyed. We must understand that for Rutherford and Locke, and for the Founding Fathers, the bottom line was not an abstract point of conversation over a tea table; at a creation point it had to be acted upon. The thirteen colonies reached the bottom line: they acted in civil disobedience. That civil disobedience led to open war in which men and women died. And that led to the founding of the United States of America.
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HT – MP