Where Does the Bible Say Obey the King?
I asked an evangelical Christian friend of mine a genuine question: what is it about Christianity that makes it politically conservative? I’ve been reading the Bible seriously for about a year now, and the New Testament does not read conservative to me. I wouldn’t call it liberal either — Jesus wasn’t political in any modern sense, and I don’t think his teachings scale cleanly to a nation of millions. But conservative? I wasn’t seeing it.
She said Christianity is conservative because it requires obedience.
I thought about that for a moment. And then I thought — yes. We are supposed to obey. God, not man. The kingdom is within us. As a practicing Quaker, this is important to me — as we obey the still small voice.
…and after the fire a still small voice.
She changed the subject.
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I keep encountering men with microphones — podcasts, YouTube, pulpits — who insist that God commands obedience to government. That resistance to authority is resistance to God. And I’ve noticed this argument does a lot of work in conservative Christian spaces, including explaining away political activism. Even though we live in a representative democracy that requires civic engagement to function. Not just voting — communicating with representatives, applying pressure, reminding elected officials that they serve the people. In a monarchy, submission to government is passive. In a democracy, doing nothing is a political act. It’s a vote for whoever already has power.
But to this line of thinking, any of that is defiance. Which is convenient.
I have read the entire New Testament. I’ve read the Gospels over and over. I’ve read much of the Hebrew Bible. And I know enough to notice that most Christian Nationalists quote heavily from the Hebrew Bible, and when they do reach for the New Testament, it’s usually something Paul said.
I’ll be honest — I have trust issues with Paul — he feels like a figure whose work functioned as domestication. Whatever his intent, the effect of Paul’s version of the gospel was a Jesus movement that empire could live with. And that’s worth pondering.
But it’s more complicated than that. Because Paul is not one Paul.
Scholars distinguish between the letters they’re confident Paul actually wrote — Galatians, Romans, 1 Corinthians, Philippians — and the letters that are disputed. The tone is different. The undisputed letters carry a Paul who is genuinely radical in places, who writes in Galatians that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. That’s not a safe thing to say in an empire built on those distinctions.
The household codes are mostly somewhere else. Wives submit. Slaves obey. Citizens comply. Those passages cluster in Ephesians and Colossians — the disputed letters. The ones scholars think may have been written in Paul’s name after his death.
The state eventually kills Paul. And then someone may have finished the job theologically — writing letters under his name that put the movement back in its box. That’s not conspiracy. That’s just how power works. It doesn’t always silence dangerous ideas with violence. Sometimes it domesticates them. Lets them spread, absorbs them, rewrites the ending.
Which would explain why Paul feels so contradictory. He might be two different people collapsed into one name.
Paul was also an influencer in the most literal sense. Think Charlie Kirk — someone whose job is to bring a particular audience to a particular conclusion using the rhetorical tools of their world, meeting them where they are. Kirk is a useful comparison not just for the strategy but for the effect: customize your rhetoric enough to different audiences and you end up with conflicting accounts of who you actually are. Which might explain why Paul feels so contradictory. I’m not entirely sure that’s an insult. You can’t build bridges without that kind of strategy. But it makes me wonder what Paul would look like today. And when I look at the Christian Nationalist movement — the way it has taken a liberation theology and made it safe for empire — I think I’m looking at the answer.
I’m still on the fence about Paul. But I’m paying attention to which Paul gets quoted — and by whom.
So when I went looking for the biblical basis for the idea that God commands obedience to government, I found one passage in the New Testament.
One.
Romans 13:1-7. The same verses quoted every time.
That’s the entire architecture. One letter from Paul to one specific community in Rome — most likely a vulnerable minority group being counseled not to invite unnecessary confrontation — has been stretched into a universal political theology commanding submission to state power.
And it has been used, every single time, by the people the hierarchy protects. Slaveholders used it to demand compliance from enslaved people. The German Christians used it to support Hitler — the Barmen Declaration was written specifically to push back. Apartheid theology leaned on it. Colonial missions used it to demand indigenous submission to European powers. Christian patriarchy uses it to keep women under domestic authority.
Same verses. Same argument. Different century, same beneficiaries. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Meanwhile the actual biblical record on kingship is a long argument against it.
Israel was never supposed to have a king. When they demanded one in 1 Samuel 8, God told Samuel: they haven’t rejected you, they’ve rejected me. And then God listed exactly what kings do — take your sons for war, take your daughters for their kitchens, take your fields, take a tenth of everything. It reads like a warning, not an endorsement. God granted the request as a concession to human stubbornness.
Then came centuries of prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah — telling kings they were wrong and God was not on their side. That’s a huge portion of the Old Testament.
And Jesus was executed by the state. The charge on the cross was sedition. The resurrection is God vindicating the one the empire killed. That’s not a subtle political statement.
Acts 5:29 is unambiguous: We must obey God rather than human beings.
The single passage in Romans is swimming against a very strong current. And the people who needed it to be a universal command were almost always the ones it protected.
My friend said Christianity is conservative because it demands obedience.
She’s not wrong that obedience is central. But obedience to what, and to whom — that’s the whole question. And the answer the Gospels keep giving is not the one that keeps people in their place.
Jesus is actually very hard to conscript for that project. He keeps slipping out of it.
P.S. This is part of an ongoing series on what the Bible actually says versus what we’ve been told it says. I am not a theologian. I am a person who reluctantly started reading it — only to discover it’s not exactly what I’ve been told it is.