No Respecter of Persons

Abstract

In Mede’s anecdote, this obstreperous individual represented the excesses to which a lay or “mechanick” preacher might go in asserting the priesthood of all believers. Yet in his refusal to “doff and don” his hat—that is, to pay hat honor—to the Commissioners, the oatmeal maker also revealed himself to be an enthusiastic amateur acting on one biblical injunction in particular: “God is no respecter of persons” (KJV). The anecdote provokes a key question for citation practices, and how they assign honor or shame. This statement of God’s impartiality in Acts 10:34—as well as Jas 2:1 and Rom 2:11—can sound jarring to modern ears. Contemporary liberal egalitarianism, after all, relies on the neo-Kantian language of respect for persons and its demand that every individual qua moral agent or “person” be treated with “equal concern and respect.”2 In the everyday micropolitics of egalitarian interaction, this means