There is a question that most pastors and church leaders will instinctively recoil from, and I intend to press it directly: should Christians help prisoners obtain and use cell phones in violation of prison regulations or public policy? My answer—after five years, five months of incarceration, after observing the systematic deprivation of basic human communication by the state, after considering the suffering of wives deprived of their husbands, after contemplating the reality of suicidal tendencies that arise in the minds of prisoners and their need for encouragement or even to speak to someone in their own language, and after watching men deteriorate psychologically under conditions of enforced isolation from their families, their churches, and their legal counsel—is yes. And I believe Scripture, Baptist history, and a sober analysis of the state’s true motives in prohibiting these devices all support that answer.

This is not a position I hold lightly. I am not an antinomian, nor am I a statist who believes that public policy under democratic regimes can enact legislation or decrees that define what sin is, i.e., what is right and wrong. But the relationship between the Christian and the state is at the center of what I have been arguing throughout this book—most extensively in chapter 19 above, endnote 12 of chapter 26 above, and in my earlier Bible and Government (2003), Christian Theology of Public Policy (2006), and Suffering Unjustly (2026/2027). Let me now recapitulate the theology and develop it further.

The short version is this: civil government in this fallen age is not God’s deputy in any general moral sense. God ordains the secular authority (Romans 13:1) in the same way He ordains Satan and his demons in His sovereign decree—but ordination is not endorsement. Jesus stated this principle plainly to Pilate himself, the magistrate then unjustly condemning Him: “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (John 19:11). The ordination is real; the ordained one is condemning the Son of God. Ordination plainly does not mean endorsement. The fact that something exists by God’s decree does not mean that thing is good.

The state functions, in actual historical practice, as one of the three great earthly powers that war against the saints (Satan, the state, and false religion); it serves as Satan’s henchman in the Earth; it is also God’s instrument to work “all things together for good” to those who love Him (Romans 8:28; cf. 13:4; 15:2; 16:19) and to judge evil nations, including Jerusalem and the Jews in 587 B.C. and 70 A.D. However, states have never, not once in any era or culture, completely or even mostly upheld the law of God or governed by God’s principles in public policy. It governs by its own principles, and those principles shift from generation to generation as the rulers’ interests shift, including varying degrees of God’s principles for good measure. “The most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest [lowliest, שְׁפַל (shephal)] of men” (Daniel 4:17). Cultures that have been more widely influenced by Christianity will tend to have a greater dosage of God’s standard in their public policy. But the Bible is written for all nations of the world, and thus its precepts must apply equally everywhere, making the revitalized Divine Right of Kings claims far less credible in countries like Laos, Zimbabwe, Congo, Madagascar, Niger, Tunisia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Yemen, Qatar, Mongolia, North Korea, Japan, Thailand, Libya, and so forth that have little Christian foundation.

A further linguistic observation reinforces the reading just defended. The Greek prepositional phrase translated “for good” in Romans 13:4—εἰς τὸ ἀγαθόν (eis to agathon)—is the same construction Paul uses in Romans 8:28: “all things work together εἰς ἀγαθόν to those who love God.” That construction, with the preposition eis governing the singular neuter agathon, occurs nowhere else in the New Testament outside Romans, where it appears four times—and all four are sanctification language. God works all things εἰς ἀγαθόν for those whom He is conforming to the image of His Son, often through suffering (Romans 8:28-29). The magistrate is God’s servant σοὶ εἰς τὸ ἀγαθόν, “to thee for good” (Romans 13:4). The Christian is to please his neighbor εἰς τὸ ἀγαθὸν πρὸς οἰκοδομήν, “unto the good, for edification” (Romans 15:2). And Paul tells the Roman believers, σοφοὺς εἶναι εἰς τὸ ἀγαθόν, “be wise unto the good” (Romans 16:19). The “good” Paul has in view in 13:4 is therefore not whatever a particular state happens to declare socially useful; it is the same sanctifying good toward which God works all things—often, in fact, through the very suffering inflicted by the magistrates Paul is describing. Nero is not “good”; Nero is, in the divine economy, an instrument of sanctification for those whom God is calling to Himself. That, and that alone, is the sense in which a civil ruler in this fallen age is εἰς τὸ ἀγαθόν. Paul’s εἰς τὸ ἀγαθόν sanctification logic has its Hebrew Bible counterpart in Joseph's words to his brothers: “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good” (Genesis 50:20). The brothers’ evil—including the betrayal, enslavement, and false accusation that landed Joseph in an Egyptian prison—was the very means God used for the good of His chosen people. The state is “good” for us in that it provides opportunities for our sanctification, and little or nothing more.

The conclusion of who appoints state leaders and why forces a hard reckoning with Romans 13:1-4. The passage is genuinely ambiguous on the central question—who defines “good” and “evil” in verse 3? If God’s law is the standard (“sin is the transgression of the law,” 1 John 3:4), then the magistrate’s authority is bounded by it, and any civil command contradicting God’s revealed will dissolves the obligation to submit. If the state itself, or “public policy,” is the standard, then Romans 13 commends submission to whatever the civil authority—in any culture or era—declares to be good or evil, a posture against which Isaiah 5:20 pronounces explicit woe. The hermeneutical question turns on the historical referent, given that the Bible is for all peoples of all eras. Substitute “Nero”—the emperor actually reigning when Paul wrote—or any subsequent tyrant, such as Genghis Khan, Stalin, or Pol Pot, for the abstract noun “authority” throughout Romans 13:1-4, and Paul appears to commend the absurd. Greg Bahnsen, a leading theonomist of the Twentieth Century, avoided this difficulty by holding that Paul was, in fact, describing the future Christian magistracy of the postmillennial era—a framework worked out across Theonomy in Christian Ethics (1984), chs. 17–19 (especially 19), with its postmillennial underpinnings most explicit in By This Standard: The Authority of God’s Law Today (1985). I find that reading untenable. The only sensible alternative, given the First-Century setting in which Paul actually wrote, is that he describes the state as the entity that, in actual practice, defines for itself what it treats as good and evil—a description of political reality, not an endorsement of it. Self-serving rulers from King James I onward have predictably preferred the contrary reading, which conveniently identifies their own pronouncements with God’s law; James himself laid out the absolutist version in The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598), arguing that the king answers to God alone and that subjects owe him obedience even when his commands are unjust. The dominant Reformed reading of Romans 13:1-4 has functionally licensed the very tyranny Paul’s letter is sometimes invoked to justify—a reformed or revitalized Divine Right of Kings doctrine, dressed in covenantal vocabulary but substantively continuous with the absolutist political theology the Stuart monarchs found so congenial.1

Acts 5:29—“we ought to obey God rather than men”—therefore is not a narrow exception to a general rule of submission. It is the controlling principle. As I argued in chapter 19, the Apostle Peter himself, writing under Nero’s reign, encoded exactly this priority order in his first epistle: “Fear God. Honor the king” (1 Peter 2:17). The sequence is not accidental, and neither is the deliberate change of verbs. Peter uses phobeō (τὸν θεὸν φοβεῖσθε)—fear, reverence, awe—for God, but timaō (τὸν βασιλέα τιμᾶτε)—honor, respect—for the king. These are categorically different responses. The king is to be honored as a parent or elder is honored, with respect appropriate to his station, but he is never to be feared, as God alone is feared. The revitalized Divine Right of Kings doctrine collapses Peter’s careful distinction, treating the monarch as a secondary object of religious reverence. Peter’s own vocabulary refuses that move. Indeed, Peter uses timaō twice in the verse—once for “all men” and once for the king—signaling, to emphasize the point, that the king is owed no honor beyond what is owed to any man. If anything, the more emphatic aorist timēsate—the form Greek uses for summary, programmatic commands—is reserved for “all men,” while the king receives only the present continuous (timate), undercutting any reading that elevates royal honor above the honor due to humanity in general. Fear of God comes first; honor of the king comes second; the two are not the same kind of response, and where the second contradicts the first, the second must yield.

Peter places the king in the same response category as humanity in general. The four imperatives of 1 Peter 2:17 are precisely structured: honor (timaō) all men, love (agapaō) the brotherhood, fear (phobeō) God, honor (timaō) the king. Honor is what one owes to other men; love is what one owes to fellow believers; fear is what one owes to God alone. The king receives the same response category as “all men”—no more, no less. Peter explicitly refuses to grant the king any quasi-divine status that would mediate between humanity and God. Divine-Right advocates inevitably elevate the king (or, in modern dress, the President, Prime Minister, or Premier) into precisely such a mediating category, contradicting the explicit grammar of Peter’s own apostolic instruction.

When the state’s command contradicts God’s command, or when the state’s prohibition prevents a Christian from fulfilling an obligation God Himself has imposed, the believer is not merely permitted but obligated to disobey. The Acts 5:29 declaration was not the apostles’ first statement of the principle. One chapter earlier, when first arrested and ordered to stop preaching, Peter and John had already replied: “Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19-20). Acts 5:29 is the second, more pointed restatement.

The Biblical Basis for Civil Disobedience

The phrase that governs this entire discussion is found in Acts 5:29: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” This was not a casual remark. It was the apostles’ formal declaration before the Sanhedrin—the highest legal authority in Israel—after they had been arrested, imprisoned, and commanded to cease preaching in the name of Jesus. Peter and the other apostles did not merely assert a right to disobey; they asserted a duty to disobey. The word “ought” (dei in the Greek) carries the force of divine necessity. When human law contradicts divine obligation, the Christian must follow God regardless of the consequences.

This principle is not confined to the New Testament. It is the biblical norm, not the exception. The Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah defied Pharaoh’s explicit command to kill the male children of Israel, “because the midwives feared God” (Exodus 1:17). The text is unambiguous about God’s response: “Therefore God dealt well with the midwives… and because the midwives feared God, he made them houses” (Exodus 1:20-21). God rewarded their disobedience to the state because their disobedience was obedience to Him. Rahab hid the Israelite spies in direct defiance of the king of Jericho’s command to surrender them (Joshua 2:1-6), and lied to the king’s messengers—and the New Testament holds her up as an exemplar of faith (Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25). Daniel prayed to Jehovah despite a royal decree punishing prayer to any god other than the king with death in the lions’ den (Daniel 6:10). Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image (Daniel 3:16-18). The midwives, Moses’ parents, Rahab, Ehud, Elijah, the three Hebrews, Daniel, Esther, Mordecai, Amos, the magi who deceived Herod, Peter, James, and John, Paul, Stephen, John the Baptist—the catalog is so long and the principle so consistent that one wonders how the contrary impression ever became dominant in modern evangelical preaching. In every case, the pattern is identical: when the state commands what God forbids or forbids what God commands, the believer’s allegiance to God takes precedence.

The Baptist tradition, moreover, has a heritage of civil disobedience that is richer and more costly than any Protestant tradition. John Bunyan spent twelve years in Bedford jail—twelve years—for the crime of preaching without a state license. He could have been released at any time by agreeing to stop preaching. He refused, declaring in his own A Confession of My Faith that he was determined “to suffer, if frail life might continue so long, even till the moss shall grow on mine eyebrows, rather than thus to violate my faith and principles.”2 Obadiah Holmes was publicly whipped in Puritan Massachusetts in 1651 for conducting Baptist worship in a home—thirty lashes with a three-corded whip that left him unable to rest except on his knees and elbows for weeks; “you have struck me as with roses,” he told his persecutors.3 Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts for advocating liberty of conscience. Early American Baptist pastors Isaac Backus and John Leland spent decades fighting established churches and the taxes that supported them. These men understood what too many modern Christians have forgotten: the state is not God, and its commands do not carry divine authority when they transgress the law of God or biblical principles.

Why Cell Phones Matter in Prison

The reader who has not been incarcerated may wonder why a cell phone—a device taken for granted in the free world—would be important enough to warrant and justify civil disobedience. The answer lies in the realities of prison communication that people outside simply do not comprehend. Scripture explicitly commands prisoner-encouragement: “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body” (Hebrews 13:3). The state’s communication infrastructure routinely makes obedience to this command impossible without civil disobedience.

People outside do not think about the many inconveniences and minor hassles that reos (Chilean inmates) or prisoners anywhere have to deal with daily. They do not consider that prisoners must unplug phone chargers or remove SIM cards from their phones daily to avoid confiscation or to ensure that, if the phone is taken, they do not lose their contacts. They do not imagine what it means to have your only connection to your wife and children subject to the arbitrary schedules, moods, and corruption of prison officials. They do not understand the crushing monotony—day after identical day in a concrete box—without access to the intellectual and spiritual resources that a connected device provides. Consider the biblical obligations that a cell phone enables a prisoner to fulfill:

Communication with family. Paul commands husbands to love their wives “even as Christ also loved the church” (Ephesians 5:25). How can he do this without a tender word, showing affection (even if written in an instant message), expressing his love for her, and listening to her needs if he has no means of regular communication? God commands fathers to bring up their children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). And he delivers one of the most severe warnings in all of Scripture to those who neglect family responsibility: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8). Provision is not merely financial; it is emotional, spiritual, relational. A father who cannot speak to his children, a husband who cannot comfort his wife, a son who cannot counsel his aging mother—these are men who are being prevented by the state from fulfilling obligations that God Himself has imposed. When the state’s communication infrastructure is inadequate, exploitative, or deliberately restricted, and when the church or individual Christians can provide an alternative, the moral calculus is clear.

I still vividly recall how much it hurt me when my daughter Grace and her husband Joseph decided to stop speaking to me over the cell phone mid-way through my prison term because it was illegal. I lost the right to speak to my three or four grandchildren, along with the restriction. Their Presbyterian pastors—Peter Van Doodewaard and Caleb Harriman of the Covenant Community Orthodox Presbyterian church in Taylors, South Carolina, at least one of them strongly influenced by revitalized Divine Right of Kings thinking—had encouraged them to subordinate the clear command to honor their father and to encourage a suffering brother in prison to the dubious command to submit to state authority, which ran contrary to biblical principles. For them, submitting to public policy superseded submitting to God, although they sadly believed they were submitting to God in doing so. Only my son David and his wife, Anthia, Baptists, were willing to speak with me during my entire imprisonment period. Five of my other six children effectively divorced me or put me on hold, some citing obedience to civil government as their justification. Paul, who was only a teenager, did not divorce me, and had no way of easily communicating with me, but probably did not try too hard to do so either. He could have found out my phone number from a sibling, but in his youthful thinking, likely under his disturbed mother’s pressure, he did not deem it important. I did not find out his cell phone number until he was age 19 and I was on parole.

Attending worship services. “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is” (Hebrews 10:25). During my imprisonment, my Thursday and Sunday evening Zoom meetings with the Bautistas Históricos (Historic Baptists) congregation were a lifeline—not merely a convenience, but a genuine means of grace that sustained my faith through years of isolation. Through a cell phone, I could participate in corporate worship, hear faithful preaching, receive prayer support from my co-pastor Valentín, my wife, Pamela, and several from the congregation, and maintain the pastoral relationships that were essential to my calling. Without that device, I would have been severed entirely from the body of Christ for years at a time. The state that prohibits a prisoner’s access to worship has overstepped its legitimate authority, even for those enamored with the revitalized Divine Right of Kings perspective.

Studying God’s word. A cell phone with a Bible application, access to commentaries, and the ability to listen to sermons provides a theological library in one’s pocket. I listened to Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s sermons through a Bluetooth headset—hundreds of hours of the Prince of Preachers, feeding my soul in a concrete cell. I accessed the Treasury of David, Matthew Henry’s Commentary, John Gill’s Exposition, and other Reformed expositors. I studied the meanings of Greek and Hebrew words. Without a phone, my theological resources would have been limited to whatever physical books managed to survive the guards’ periodic searches and confiscations.

Communication with lawyers. The right to counsel is supposedly guaranteed by every civilized legal system, yet in practice, communication with attorneys through official prison channels is slow, monitored, and frequently inadequate. A cell phone allows a prisoner to communicate with his lawyer promptly and privately—an essential requirement for any meaningful defense against the state’s prosecutorial machinery.

Mental health. The psychological toll of incarceration is severe, and the literature on this subject is voluminous. Isolation, monotony, loss of autonomy, and the constant stress of an unpredictable and often hostile environment produce depression, anxiety, and cognitive deterioration. Connection to the outside world—hearing a child’s voice, reading the news, listening to music, participating in a conversation that is not about prison—is not a luxury. It is a basic requirement of human psychological survival.

Finding work and starting businesses. Men need to work to support their families, and to the extent that cell phones allow them to do so, they should use them. I am certainly not speaking of undertaking illicit or anti-biblical endeavors. I am not imagining that normal income can replace the household income his wife has lost. But even if he can replace ten percent of his earnings, he should do so. Some examples of online work include translating, medical transcription, editing, teaching, trading stocks and options, managing real estate, selling website applications, drafting documents for lawyers, managing databases, completing marketing surveys, building websites, sending email campaigns, training AI models, and advertising on X.

The State’s Prohibition Is Unjust

The state prohibits cell phones in prison. But why does the state prohibit them? The official justification is security: phones can be used to coordinate criminal activity, intimidate witnesses, or arrange escapes. They are also used for extortion and blackmail schemes by a minority of inmates. These concerns are not trivial, and I do not dismiss them. But the honest observer must acknowledge that the prohibition’s primary function is not security but control. Moreover, the misuse by a few is used as a justification to deny cell phones to all. Should people who use knives to cook and eat be denied them because a few people use them to assault others? That is the logic often presented in prisons. Nevertheless, the clearer reason is that the state maintains a monopoly on prisoner communication because communication is power, and the state is jealous of its power over those it has caged. Another reason is that guards enjoy much higher prices (and profits) on the cell phones they sell to prisoners on the black market when they are illegal, especially when those who sell them are under great scrutiny and the risks from selling rise.

Consider the economics of alternatives for prisoners in the United States. (In Chile, only the Rancagua Penitentiary had expensive, coin-operated pay phones for prisoners to use; Valparaíso and Casablanca did not, although one could sometimes request special permission to call on occasion in the latter jail.) Prison phone systems in the United States have historically been operated by monopoly contractors—Securus Technologies and ViaPath Technologies (formerly Global Tel Link) together control over eighty percent of the U.S. prison communications market, which charges rates that would be unconscionable in any competitive market. A fifteen-minute call that costs pennies on a personal phone has historically cost between U.S. $1.80 and U.S. $6.00 through the prison system, with video visits charged at 20 U.S. cents to U.S. $1.50 per minute.4 The Federal Communications Commission’s 2024 order finally capped these rates after more than a decade of litigation and complaint, but even the new caps fall heavily on families who are disproportionately poor.5 When the state prohibits cell phones while simultaneously profiting from a monopoly communication system, its claim to be motivated by security rather than revenue becomes, to put it charitably, difficult to credit.

The case of South Carolina is instructive. Governor Henry McMaster’s FY 2024–2025 Executive Budget earmarked $23 million for contraband cell phone interdiction across all twenty-one state prisons, expanding a pilot program begun at Lee Correctional Institution after the 2018 riot.6 By the FY 2025–2026 budget cycle, that figure had grown into a $43.2 million package of new Department of Corrections appropriations, with contraband interdiction continuing as one of its priority components. These are tens of millions of dollars that could have funded rehabilitation programs, vocational training, education, or infrastructure for family visitation. Instead, the state chose to spend those resources on preventing communication. This tells you everything you need to know about the state’s priorities: control over rehabilitation, punishment over restoration, dominion over the caged rather than preparation for their return to society.

From a libertarian perspective—a perspective informed both by my training as an economist and especially by my understanding of public choice theory—the state’s behavior in this area is entirely predictable. Government agencies, like all institutions, pursue their own interests at the expense of taxpayers and the public interest. Prison administrators benefit from docile, isolated inmates who lack the ability to communicate their grievances, document abuses, or organize resistance to institutional misconduct. Guards benefit even more by selling cell phones at two to four times what they paid for them on the street. Permitting cell phones threatens such arrangements and opportunities. The prohibition, therefore, primarily serves the institution’s interests and guards not the public’s safety.