(RNS) — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is punishing Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly for publicly affirming a principle the U.S. military has long claimed to honor: that soldiers are not obligated to obey unlawful orders. After Kelly, a former naval officer, urged soldiers to disobey illegal commands, Hegseth accused him of sedition and moved to demote the veteran and slash his retirement pay.
This is bigger than a spat between bureaucrats. It’s an attempt to remove the nuisance of conscience from President Donald Trump’s aspiring authoritarian state. Yet Hegseth’s demand for absolute compliance clashes with the Christian faith he claims to impose on the military.
Disobedience to corrupt power is an essential part of Christian practice. If Hegseth wants a military force shaped by Christian values — a contradiction in itself — he shouldn’t expect absolute compliance.
The Christian Scriptures side with the disobedient. From the midwives who defied Pharaoh’s orders to drown male babies to John’s seditious apocalypse imagining the fall of Rome, the Bible repeatedly depicts people choosing obedience to conscience over compliance with power. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Book of Acts, where disobedience to authority is presented as an act of Christian faithfulness.
Luke reports that the apostles were jailed for teaching in Jesus’ name, only for God to break them out — asserting emphatic divine endorsement of their defiance. When religious leaders confronted them for preaching again, insisting, “We told you to stop teaching in this name,” the apostles replied with a line that has echoed through Christian history: “We should obey God rather than man.”
Christian tradition also sides with the disobedient. “An unjust law is no law at all,” wrote the reformer Martin Luther, a claim echoed centuries later by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who insisted that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” The Quakers defied the Fugitive Slave Act to help the enslaved escape to freedom. “Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God” was a popular axiom among suffragettes as they fought for the franchise.
These Christians were not exceptions. They were heirs to a tradition that has long concluded that when conscience collides with the unjust demands of power, faithfulness requires defiance.
As a Christian, Hegseth should agree with Kelly that there are orders soldiers must feel compelled to disobey. But he disagrees because he understands something authoritarians always have: Obedience is power. If soldiers begin choosing conscience over command, the machinery of state violence stalls — sometimes even collapses.
In a moment when the U.S. military is increasingly deployed to terrorize migrants, suppress dissent and dominate Black and brown populations abroad, the most consequential act of resistance is refusal — and no one is positioned to halt the unlawful commands driving Trump’s assault on global democracy more directly than soldiers themselves.
To be sure, some Christians cite Paul’s claim that all authority is derived from God as a command to submit to earthly power, even corrupt earthly power. But Paul wrote those words from prison. If he believed in unconditional submission to authority, he’d have stopped preaching the gospel altogether.
If choosing conscience makes Kelly a traitor, he stands in good company.