Romans 13:1, much to my chagrin, reads, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”
I’ve been on the receiving end of a pointed quotation of this passage more than once; usually when I’ve questioned the governance of a particular leader or advocated for someone who has broken a law. But all too often, these words seem to vanish from my critics’ memories when their preferred leader is out of power. The Bible is decidedly nuanced in its opinions on this matter.
The foundational story in Exodus is one of civil disobedience and resistance across decades, all to liberate a people. Stories from the exile, like that of Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, feature similar prophetic resistance to unjust authority. The New Testament is similarly full of stories of heroic disobedience, including stories from the life of Jesus himself. Even Paul, who wrote Romans, did some of his best writing behind bars.
Suffice to say, the biblical witness on “crime” is more nuanced than selective verse-quoting can encapsulate. There are certain times, and in solidarity with certain people, that the reign of God overrules the law of the land, especially when the law targets the most vulnerable. Right now is one of those times.
Capital Crackdowns
Under President Donald Trump’s deployment of the Nation Guard, the nation’s capital, and soon to be Memphis, Tenn.—wait, wasn’t it supposed to be Chicago?—find themselves in this same murky reality. What is considered crime, what crimes are enforced, and who gets swept up in these processes is, as many have pointed out, a testing ground for widescale fascism.
Among the most affected are those who experience homelessness. This has been their lived reality for decades, even as it’s intensified of late. I’ve spent the last decade working with those experiencing homelessness, who experience firsthand the grey areas of legality and criminal “justice.” Their daily reality exists between the shifting goalposts of the law and their survival. It varies day to day, neighborhood to neighborhood, or even officer to officer. So, I’m not surprised that homelessness is lumped into the category of crime, despite data constantly demonstrating otherwise.
When this began, Trump declared, “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”
In this phrasing we see so much at work: misinformation about crime statistics, insinuations about what and who ought to be criminalized, what crimes are considered emergencies, and who will ultimately bear the brunt of enforcement.
To unpack this, we must wade into the ambiguous grey areas of crime and punishment, guided by the experience of the unhoused, who have, by necessity, forged their makeshift communities on the outskirts of “law and order.”
Criminalizing Homelessness
It is not uncommon for governments to attempt to address complex issues by criminalizing them, be it poverty, mental illness, drug use, or homelessness. It may not actually solve the problem, but it offers a solution that is often agreeable enough—through willful ignorance—to those with power: Move the problem out of sight, at the expense of human rights.
The complexities of homelessness call for a lot of patience and grace, even if we could all agree on the solutions. By many metrics, homelessness is as bad as it’s ever been in the U.S., and it’s getting worse. For decades, corporations and speculators have exploited the housing market. As a result, housing encampments have had to expand into parks, downtown districts, and seemingly everywhere else. It’s enticing to entertain a fix that makes encampments simply disappear. This becomes even more viable when we can brand unhoused people as criminals—allowing our complex anxiety and frustration to devolve into reactive fear and retribution.
READ MORE: Debunking Homelessness Myths
And bad actors stand ready to exploit this temptation by selectively criminalizing actions carried out by particular people. This has long been recognized in our drug laws: While crack cocaine and powdered cocaine are the same drug, harsher penalties have often been levied against the former, which was more dominant in Black communities. Today, opioid fentanyl is used as a boogeyman to justify harsher border laws and deportations, even though most fentanyl is brought into the country by legal citizens. Our understandable anxiety of the opioid crisis is leveraged to justify a xenophobic aim.
With homelessness, this criminalization comes in many forms. It can look like new laws such as “camping bans” that prohibit sleeping on public property. (Notably, sleeping on private property is already trespassing, so these laws effectively make sleeping—an essential biological function—illegal if you don’t have a home.) Other times, it looks like the selective enforcement of existing laws like loitering, blocking the sidewalk, or parking restrictions.
Another variation comes in the severity of the response. Even though people in encampments are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators, criminal activity is often the excuse for sweeping an encampment. One criminal act, or even the appearance of it, can result in the displacement of an entire community. This would never happen in a traditional housing setting: It would be unimaginable if a single criminal act in an apartment resulted in the demolition of the whole building. But in the context of homelessness, we simply accept it.
For particular crimes, there is swift and aggressive enforcement; for others, a “complaint form” and a bureaucratic shrug. Meanwhile the public discourse becomes even more toxic; just days ago, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade said that unhoused people who refuse forced treatment should receive “involuntary lethal injection” (Kilmeade has since apologized).
A Better Way Forward
The way of Jesus moves in the opposite direction of these laws. Where Trump and those of his way satiate the endless desires of the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable, Jesus gave himself and promised his kingdom to those who experienced the blunt end of such power. Jesus’ political agenda pressed in from the margins, rather than out from the center, and still offers us all a better way to live.
On a policy level, offering housing with supporting services to the homeless is not only more Christlike—it’s more effective. The Veteran’s Administration embraced this in a bipartisan effort and dropped veteran homelessness to a fifteen-year low. This Housing First methodology is cheaper than criminalizing; even before including the $1 million per day that Trump’s D.C. insurgence is costing, we overspend on sheltering, policing, jailing, and treating the medical ramifications of unsheltered living compared to the cost of simply housing and serving them.
Enacting policies like this on a broad scale takes political courage over and against those who profit from the way things are. Because not only is criminalizing homelessness tempting as a quick fix, it’s also a very profitable one. Take Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the surveillance company Palantir, which has lucrative contracts with ICE and other law enforcement agencies. Lonsdale then founded the Cicero Institute, a political think-tank that has ghost-written much of anti-homeless legislation passed in the last half decade.
More than 220 such bills have passed since the Supreme Court ruled last summer in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that the criminalization of sleeping outdoors on public land does not amount to “cruel and unusual punishment.” And now that Trump is taking his federal enforcement apparatus on a tour of the cities he has decided are the most dangerous, we may well see this insidious conflation of crime and poverty inflicted on a massive scale. Given that more than half of Americans self-report that they are one missed paycheck or crisis away from homelessness, much of the country is at risk of being labeled “criminal” simply because of what happens to them, and not any choice they’ve made.
The biblical witness to crime and punishment matches our own complicated reality. The law, and the circumstances of its enforcement, is no substitute for the priorities of God’s desires for the world. At times, they are even in stark contrast, especially when those with power prey on the vulnerable. The way of Jesus refuses to sacrifice the most vulnerable for the comfort of the community. In the same way, we must prioritize the wellbeing of the most vulnerable as the pathway to communal flourishing. No human is expendable, and wherever society’s castoffs forge community is where the gospel finds its most generative soil.
To know this, though, we must be near to the poor—not just intellectually or philosophically, but literally. The lies that fuel these hollow laws are exposed best when we are enmeshed in community with the people they misrepresent. We have been cultured to fear and flee from the unhoused, but I’ve spent the last decade of my life in their company, and I know this to be true with all my heart: Salvation—for all of us—is found in our meeting and mutual transformation.
In times like these, the gospel calls us to stand on the side of “law breakers,” in the name of the highest law. This law is summarized by our favorite misquoted troublemaker Paul just a few verses after his words about governing authorities, when he tells us: “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10).
The way of Jesus refuses to sacrifice the most vulnerable for the comfort of the community.
Kevin Nye is a writer and advocate for the unhoused living in Minneapolis. His first book, Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness, was released in August 2022.
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