Submit? No Way!

The county told me that I cannot do what I want to do with my twenty acre parcel in rural Clackamas County, Oregon.  I called them on several occasions trying to find a way to develop my land -- something more than just one dwelling and nineteen acres of Christmas trees and timber.  First I asked if I could legally partition the land into five-acre parcels. “Absolutely not”, came their reply, “because it is zoned Ag-25, allowing no more than one dwelling per twenty-five acre parcel.”  And they assured me that there was no hope that the zoning would change any time before the end of the world. “Don’t bother to apply for a zoning change.”

I had only recently watched a former county planning department employee build an apartment as part of a huge new shop on his property.  He lived on only 3 acres, and already had a large house. The county told me that his permit was for a shop and a studio.  I told them that the “apartment” had two stories, a full kitchen with counters, two restrooms with bath and shower.  But they said that it did not have a laundry facility nor a 220–volt hookup for a stove.  So it did not qualify as a living space. “Hey, I‘m no dummy,” I told them. “I know exactly what that studio was intended to become.”

Another good Christian friend has a 20-acre parcel farther out in the woods than mine.  He has an apartment over his barn that he used while he built their house.  After they moved into their house they started renting out the apartment.  Then he built a shop.  After the inspectors were gone he turned one of the bays into an apartment for their son and daughter-in-law.  That apartment will become another rental in due time.  Three living sites on a parcel zoned for one.  So I thought to myself, why should I be a dummy and abide by the law.  No one else takes the zoning laws seriously. I must be stupid to submit to regulations that I don’t like and certainly don’t agree with.

But goody two-shoes me, I called the county again and asked exactly what I could build.  I was told I could add onto the existing house, but it could not become a duplex. No kitchen, no laundry. It could only be additional living area for the existing house. If I wanted to build a stand-alone structure, a guest quarters, it could not be larger than 600 square feet, and once again, no kitchen, no laundry.  And all I really want to do is build a little “mother-in-law” type apartment for me and Carol to retire in.

Help came to me from a very unlikely source.  John Calvin.  Yes, that John Calvin. The granddaddy of the Reformers. He moved to Geneva to escape persecution in France (I think, maybe, he didn’t like submitting to authorities either). He founded a Protestant-political utopian society.  He wrote the Institutes, which have become the foundational truth of most Reformed and Calvinist theology, to this day.  One of his lesser known themes is that of “mutual submission”.  Today it is applied more to the roles of men and women, and husbands and wives. (Whether that is massaging the Scriptures to one’s own liking is debatable.) But Calvin applied it more directly to government and the people governed.  His teachings became the groundwork for the grand concepts of republicanism, and capitalism.  At the heart of his theology was the cavalier teaching that the government should submit to the people, mutually, not just the governed submit to authority.

Now it all makes sense to me.  I think I now know why we evangelical, Bible toting, NRA loving, NASCAR rooting, conservative, red-neck American Christians believe so much in individual rights, and understand so poorly the Godly concept of submission¹.  We got it from the father of capitalism, John Calvin.  We don’t need to respect Obama or Trump. We can thumb our nose at the county planning department. We don’t need to drive the speed-limit, or put away our cell phone while driving.  We can fudge on our taxes and call it mutual submission. And surely, with a clear conscience, I can ignore the county and build what I want, where I want, the way I want.  Hallelujah!  Thank you, Calvin.  We love mutual submission!

Here I go!  Bring on the excavator! In fact, I may just go all in.  Why should I even bother to get permits?  Hey, then they won’t know to increase my property taxes.  Wow! This is sounding better all the time!

¹  Submission, simply stated, is trusting the God-appointed authority and leadership of others. But in the modern church it has become a dirty word, a teaching point to be avoided at all costs, or a concept to be massaged to fit the new cultural norm.