Honor all men; love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king. I Peter 2.17

            In 1961 researcher Stanley Milgram, fascinated by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, and perplexed by the complicity of the German people in the Holocaust, devised an experiment he conducted at Yale University which would test how obedient average people would be to an authority figure who is clearly ordering them to hurt another human being.  In the experiment, two paid participants would receive a designation as either "teacher" or "learner."  The learner was connected to electrodes, and told to memorize word pairs.  The teacher, who could hear, but not see the learner was to test the learner on the pairs and administer an increasingly powerful jolt of electric shock for every wrong answer.  What the "teachers" didn't know was that the "learners" were actors who intentionally got questions wrong, cried out in pain, complained of heart trouble, mimicked heart attacks, and even death.  When "teachers" protested they were told they had no option, they had been paid (in the original experiment participants were paid $4.50), and must see the experiment through to the end.  In a survey of psychologists done before the experiment, the prediction was that 3 to 5% of participants would continue to obey authority, to the point of giving a fatal dose of electric shock to another human being.  The outcome was that 65% of participants, sometimes in tears, would obey authority and deliver a fatal dose of electricity.  The experiment has been repeated many times since 1961, across continents, cultures, languages, and including all ages and both genders of adults, and the results have been consistent.  Roughly two-thirds of us will comply with authority even if it means someone we know to be innocent will die.

            Milgram, in a paper summarizing his experiment* writes: "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.  Moreover, even when the effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

            That phrase "relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority" made me think of the tens of thousands of Christians who did just that in the last decades of the first century A.D., and the hundreds of thousands who resisted authority for two centuries more until the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.) made it legal to be a Christian.

            I want to assert that defiance (not disrespect) is sometimes a virtue.  Moses, David, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Peter, Paul, and Jesus teach us that it is sometimes (perhaps often) necessary to look authority in the eye and say "I will not comply."

Remembering the men I mentioned above, we see that none of them acted selfishly, disrespectfully, or destructively.  We notice that they defied authority for reasons of faith and faith alone.  Their personal acts of defiance were not for human reasons, no matter how admirable.  But they all stood their ground, and refused to obey, refused to back down.

            Let us not forget that a man who backs down is in no position to turn the other cheek, only the man who stands his ground can do that (Matthew 5.39). Let us not equate defiance with disrespect — Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego said to Nebuchadnezzar when they refused to bow to the golden image he erected, "we don't need to give you an answer about this matter, O King," (Daniel 3.16) — their loyalty and good service were never in question — but they followed with "We are not going to serve your gods," (v.18).

            The "resources" one needs to make such a stand come from God.  It was devotion to God that incited David to stand up to Goliath.  The verse we cited at the beginning of this piece makes clear that our relationships with God, and with the King are qualitatively different.  We respect authority, we "honor" the King, but we do not fear him.  We fear God, and God alone.  We obey God and God alone.  If we obey the king it is because God tells us to (Romans 13.1-7), and only if his laws do not violate God's laws.  When they do, we defy them.

* Stanley Milgram, "The Perils of Obedience," in Harpers, May 1974.