127. When may we and when should we disobey unjust laws?
127. WHEN MAY WE AND WHEN SHOULD WE DISOBEY UNJUST LAWS?
Obedience to human law is part of our religious obligation (#126); yet disobedience to human law may be part of our religious obligation when that human law is unjust or when it conflicts with God’s law, as the Apostles said, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). When does this happen?
. . . [L]aws may be unjust in two ways: first, by being contrary to human good. (These are) acts of violence rather than laws, because, as Augustine says, a law that is not just seems to be no law at all. Wherefore such laws do not bind in conscience except perhaps in order to avoid scandal or disturbance, for which cause a man should even yield his right, according to Matthew 5:40-41: If a man . . . take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him; and whosoever will force thee one mile, go with him other two. . .
Secondly, laws may be unjust through being opposed to the divine good: such are the laws of tyrants inducing to idolatry or to anything else contrary to the divine law; and laws of this kind must in no wise be observed, because, as stated in Acts 5:29, we ought to obey God rather than men (I-II,96,4).
St. Thomas’ two moral points here are the following:
(1) We have a moral right to disobey any unjust law, any law that is “contrary to human good”, unless there is a weightier moral reason to obey it for the sake of preventing a greater human evil, such as the avoidance of moral scandal or grave public disorder or riot or civil war, or to give a more effective testimony to unbelievers (as in the example from Matthew’s Gospel quoted by St. Thomas).
(2) We have not just a right but a moral duty to disobey any law that is unjust because it is directly opposed to the will of God.
This is not a tricky political point, but an absolutely basic, simple one. It follows from the very existence of God. God alone is God; God alone is the absolute; He measures us, we do not measure Him; therefore His law measures our laws, not vice versa. The point is a logical one, not just a theological one, although St. Thomas quotes Scripture to support it theologically. The point is that the very idea of “an unjust human law” makes no sense—is literally meaningless, self-contradictory—unless there is a Justice above the human law. Either God’s will, manifested in the natural law, or else man’s will, as manifested in human law, is the absolute law. One kind of law must judge the other; it can’t be both. You can’t have two absolutes.
If, as the majority of intellectuals today believe (especially those who teach in law schools!), there is no higher law than human law (which is called “positive law” today, so that this position is called “legal positivism”); if there no real universal, objective natural law or divine law; or if this “higher law” exists but is allowed only in private and subjectively and individually but not in public; then what St. Thomas says here is nonsense: we can have no right, and a fortiori no duty, to disobey any human law, ever. So to be a modern legal positivist is, logically, to be a “stick in the mud” conservative and to take the existing order as the highest standard. On the other hand, to believe in the traditional “natural law” is the only way to be a principled nonconformist, a rebel, “liberal”, or “progressive”. “Progress” means “improvement”, and improvement means not just change, moving forward in time along the horizontal time axis, but changing for the better, moving upward in value along the vertical axis. Unless there is a vertical axis, unless there is something transcending time and change, unless there is an eternal Good, the very idea of “progress” or “progressivism” is meaningless. That’s not religion, that’s simple logic.
This is why secularist rulers have always been suspicious of intelligent and committed religious people. (See A Man for All Seasons for a classic example of this.) This is why there will always be a tension between a purely secular state and real religion, until the end of time. They are following different drummers, playing different tunes. Their two musics need not always be in conflict, but they can never be identical.