What Christianity and Anarchy Have in Common

FROM THE STREETS of Ferguson to Charlottesville and from Occupy to Standing Rock, anarchists represent a prominent part of today’s activist mix. How might Christians understand this tradition of political engagement?

In popular culture, anarchism is often trivialized as a cipher for generalized chaos, based on a caricature of hooded black bloc brawlers smashing store windows at protests. On the other hand, some anarchists settle for mere sloganeering, with little analysis or strategy. But simplistic stereotypes fail to recognize that, as social critic Cornel West put it, anarchism represents “a powerful critique of concentration of power in the nation-state.”

The label derives from the Greek anarchos, meaning “without rulers” (not, as some libertarians wrongly assume, without rules). Anarchists work for voluntary, nonhierarchical forms of self-organization and against state coercion and oppression.

As a social movement and ideological orientation, political anarchism began coalescing in the wake of the failed social revolutions of 1848 around Europe. Early anarchists critiqued the state as the root of all human oppression, and as the “left of the left” challenged Marxist assumptions that revolutions could only be accomplished by changing state structures from the top down. Some proposed communal self-rule and “mutual aid” as an alternative to social Darwinism.

The majority of the tradition was (and remains) decidedly atheist—“no gods, no masters.” But Pierre-Joseph Proudhon allowed that early Christianity was essentially anarchist until the church sold out to Constantine, while Peter Kropotkin argued the same about popular radical religious movements of the late Middle Ages. Indeed, there have been Christian dissidents who have drawn on the teachings of Jesus to reject the legitimacy of the state, such as Anabaptists during the Reformation.

In the late 19th century, Leo Tolstoy developed anarcho-pacifist convictions by reading the Sermon on the Mount and encouraged alternative communities that rejected the coercive authority of church, state, and private property. Tolstoy’s philosophy of nonresistance was later developed into nonviolent action by Mohandas Gandhi. Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day was also shaped by Tolstoy, as well as by American Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman and French Catholic agrarian personalist Peter Maurin. For almost a century the Catholic Worker movement has been the most significant proponent of gospel anarcho-pacifism.

A few 20th century Protestant theologians echoed anarchist critiques, most notably Jacques Ellul and Vernard Eller. More recently many young post-evangelicals have embraced various expressions of “Christianarchy” in activism and lifestyle (see for example jesusradicals.com).

The oldest tradition of anarchism, however, pre-dates civilization itself. For 99 percent of our time on the planet, human lifeways were organized in small bands that were bioregionally self-sufficient, cooperative, and essentially egalitarian—until the rise of predatory, hierarchical societies beginning roughly 6,000 years ago (as argued most recently in James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States).

One of the earliest expressions of tribalized resistance to state domination in the ancient Near East is found in the Bible. A strong skepticism of centralized power weaves throughout our scriptures, from Jotham’s parable of the trees (Judges 9:7-21) parodying hierarchical politics to Samuel’s sober warning against kingship models (1 Samuel 8), and from Jesus’ rejection of empire to Paul’s network of small communities that repudiated Caesar’s “lordship” and practiced mutual aid (2 Corinthians 8-9).

Both Christian and anarchist traditions are rooted in a deep past, imagine a visionary future, and embody strategies of social resistance and renewal here and now—striving, as Dorothy Day put it, “to build a new society in the shell of the old.” Which is why they ought to be in thoughtful conversation.