Chris’s message this week on the biblical call to submit to the authorities God has put (or at least allowed to be) over us brought to my mind a memory from 25 years ago. At the time I was a senior at our denomination’s college in Nyack, New York. That year I had been privileged to have the responsibility of being managing editor of The Forum, the student newspaper.

It was spring, and my class was approaching graduation. To celebrate, about 80 Seniors chartered a big boat (either the Spirit of NJ or the Spirit of NY, I don’t recall which) to take them around Manhattan Island for an evening. These vessels were known for their large on-board dance floors.

Therein lays the tale.

All Nyack College students had signed a pledge when we enrolled at the school to abstain from drinking, smoking, “public displays of romantic affection”, etc., etc. In doing so we promised not to do any of these things for the duration of our four years as undergrads, both on and off campus. One of the “etcetera’s” happened to be “social dancing.” We were not to dance with members of the opposite sex, not cheek to cheek, not on the same dance floor, basically not anywhere. This, we were told, was because it tended to “break down the reserve between the sexes.” In other words, more of those public (and private) displays of romantic affection were likely to occur if any dancing happened.

On the night of the cruise about 65 of the 80 students aboard blatantly ignored the “no-dancing pledge” and hit the boat’s dance floor. This included, by the way, just about all the student leaders at the college. One of the 15 or so hold-outs approached someone; I believe it was one of the dancing leaders, and reminded them they had signed that pledge four years earlier. The response was basically “what are they going to do? Suspend all of us?”

That little statement got back to the Nyack administration, apparently verbatim. The following week all 65 “dancing Seniors” got a two day suspension. To say it was the talk of the campus was an understatement and I felt, as editor of the paper, that we needed to run an editorial about the incident and its aftermath. The responsibility to write it I felt to be my own (I should mention here that I had opted not to go on the trip).

My editorial consisted of two sections. In the first I made it clear that, in my opinion, the suspensions were absolutely justified. This was a case of a very public and flagrant defiance of school rules, rules that we all committed to follow as students (and professed Christian students to boot). When faced with such a blatant act of “in your face” rebellion I could not see where the Dean of Students had much choice in the matter. He had to act and I made it clear that The Forum felt he did too.

The second section was equally emphatic. I wrote that the dancing rule was archaic and had to go. We had just started promoting ourselves as the most ethnically and racially diverse Christian college in the country. A lot of that diversity included people for which dancing was an integral part of their culture and a blanket prohibition of dancing involving, yes, both genders was soon going to be unenforceable, and rightly so in my opinion. I believe I discussed other reasons for changing the rule, too, but that was the gist.

Point? If you say, especially in writing , that you are going to submit to rules put in place by authorities presumably instituted by God you need to either submit, drop-out, or expect to rightfully receive discipline from said authorities.

Your only other option for change is to work for it, at least in this case, within the rules.

One place to do that was in the editorial pages of the student paper.