Christian Anarchy

Christian anarchism is a Christian movement in political theology that claims anarchism is inherent in Christianity and the Gospels. It is grounded in the belief that there is only one source of authority to which Christians are ultimately answerable—the authority of God as embodied in the teachings of Jesus. It therefore rejects the idea that human governments have ultimate authority over human societies. Christian anarchists denounce the state, believing it is violent, deceitful and, when glorified, idolatrous.

Christian anarchists hold that the "Reign of God" is the proper expression of the relationship between God and humanity. Under the "Reign of God", human relationships would be characterized by divided authority, servant leadership, and universal compassion—not by the hierarchical, authoritarian structures that are normally attributed to religious social order. Most Christian anarchists are pacifists who reject war and the use of violence.

More than any other Bible source, the Sermon on the Mount is used as the basis for Christian anarchism. Leo Tolstoy's ''The Kingdom of God Is Within You'' is often regarded as a key text for modern Christian anarchism.

Origins

Old Testament

Jacques Ellul, a French philosopher and Christian anarchist, notes that the final verse of the Book of Judges ( Judges 21:25) states that there was no king in Israel and that "everyone did as they saw fit". Subsequently, as recorded in the first Book of Samuel (1 Samuel 8) the people of Israel wanted a king "so as to be like other nations".

God declared that the people had rejected him as their king. He warned that a human king would lead to militarism, conscription and taxation, and that their pleas for mercy from the king's demands would go unanswered. Samuel passed on God's warning to the Israelites but they still demanded a king, and Saul became their ruler. Much of the subsequent Old Testament chronicles the Israelites trying to live with this decision.

New Testament

More than any other Bible source, the Sermon on the Mount is used as the basis for Christian anarchism. Alexandre Christoyannopoulos explains that the Sermon perfectly illustrates Jesus's central teaching of love and forgiveness. Christian anarchists claim that the state, founded on violence, contravenes the Sermon and Jesus' call to love one's enemies.

The gospels tell of Jesus's temptation in the desert. For the final temptation, Jesus is taken up to a high mountain by Satan and told that if he bows down to Satan he will give him all the kingdoms of the world. Christian anarchists use this as evidence that all Earthly kingdoms and governments are ruled by Satan, otherwise they would not be Satan's to give. Jesus refuses the temptation, choosing to serve God instead, implying that Jesus is aware of the corrupting nature of Earthly power.

Christian eschatology and various Christian anarchists, such as Jacques Ellul, have identified the state and political power as the Beast in the Book of Revelation.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Frank Seaver Billings criticize Christianity and anarchism by arguing that they are the same thing.

Early Church

According to Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, several of the Church Fathers' writings suggest anarchism as God's ideal. The first Christians opposed the primacy of the state: "We must obey God as ruler rather than men" (Acts 4:19, 5:29, 1 Corinthians 6:1-6); "Stripping the governments and the authorities bare, he exhibited them in open public as conquered, leading them in a triumphal procession by means of it." (Colossians 2:15). Also, some early Christian communities appear to have practised anarchist communism, such as the Jerusalem group described in Acts, who shared their money and labour equally and fairly among the members. Roman Montero claims that using an anthropological framework, such as that of the anarchist David Graeber, one can plausibly reconstruct the communism of the early Christian communities and that the practices were widespread, long-lasting, and substantial. Christian anarchists, such as Kevin Craig, insist that the communities were centred on true love and care for one another, rather than liturgy. They also allege that the reason for the early Christians were persecuted was not that they worshipped Jesus Christ but that they refused to worship human idols claiming divine status (see Imperial cult). Since they refused to worship the Roman Emperor, they refused to swear any oath of allegiance to the Roman Empire. When requested that he swear by the emperor, Speratus, spokesperson of the Scillitan Martyrs, said in 180CE, "I recognize not the empire of this world... because I know my Lord, the King of kings and Emperor of all nations.

In his introduction to a translation of the ''Sayings of the Desert Fathers'', Thomas Merton describes the early monastics as "Truly in certain sense 'anarchists,' and it will do no harm to think of them as such."

During the Ante-Nicene Period, there were several independent sects who took a radically different approach to Christianity from that of the Proto-Orthodox Church and displayed anarchist tendencies by relying on direct revelation, rather than scripture, such as:
* Gnosticism, particularly Valentinianism (2nd to 4th centuries) – reliance on revealed knowledge from a transcendent, unknowable God, who was a distinct divinity from the Demiurge who created and oversees the material world.
* Montanism (2nd century) – relied on prophetic revelations from the Holy Spirit.

Conversion of the Roman Empire

For Christian anarchists, the moment that epitomised the degeneration of Christianity was the conversion of Emperor Constantine after his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. Christianity was then legalized under the Edict of Milan in 313, which hastened the Church's transformation from a humble bottom-up sect to an authoritarian top-down organization. Christian anarchists point out that marked the beginning of the "Constantinian shift" in which Christianity gradually came to be identified with the will of the ruling elite by becoming the state church of the Roman Empire and in some cases (such as the Crusades, Inquisition, and the French Wars of Religion) a religious justification for violence.

Peasant revolts in the Post-Reformation era

Various libertarian socialist authors have identified the written work of the English Protestant social reformer Gerrard Winstanley and the social activism of his group, the Diggers, as anticipating their line of thought. For the anarchist historian George Woodcock, "Although (Pierre Joseph) Proudhon was the first writer to call himself an anarchist, at least two predecessors outlined systems that contain all the basic elements of anarchism. The first was Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676), a linen draper who led the small movement of the Diggers during the Commonwealth. Winstanley and his followers protested in the name of a radical Christianity against the economic distress that followed the Civil War and against the inequality that the grandees of the New Model Army seemed intent on preserving.

In 1649–1650, the Diggers squatted on stretches of common land in southern England and attempted to set up communities based on work on the land and the sharing of goods. The communities failed following a crackdown by the English authorities, but a series of pamphlets by Winstanley survived, of which ''The New Law of Righteousness'' (1649) was the most important. Advocating a rational Christianity, Winstanley equated Christ with “the universal liberty” and declared the universally corrupting nature of authority. He saw “an equal privilege to share in the blessing of liberty” and detected an intimate link between the institution of property and the lack of freedom." For Murray Bookchin "In the modern world, anarchism first appeared as a movement of the peasantry and yeomanry against declining feudal institutions. In Germany its foremost spokesman during the Peasant Wars was Thomas Müntzer; in England, Gerrard Winstanley, a leading participant in the Digger movement. The concepts held by Müntzer and Winstanley were superbly attuned to the needs of their time — a historical period when the majority of the population lived in the countryside and when the most militant revolutionary forces came from an agrarian world. It would be painfully academic to argue whether Müntzer and Winstanley could have achieved their ideals. What is of real importance is that they spoke to their time; their anarchist concepts followed naturally from the rural society that furnished the bands of the peasant armies in Germany and the New Model in England."

Modern era

The 19th-century Christian abolitionists Adin Ballou and William Lloyd Garrison were critical of all human governments and believed that they would be eventually supplanted by a new order in which individuals are guided solely by their love for God. Ballou and Garrison advocated Christian nonresistance to evil, as they saw Christ as the embodiment of "passive nonresistance," or nonviolent praxis against the state. They both condemned violence against southern slave owners and advocated instead for moral suasion or consistent rebukes against the institution of slavery in efforts to persuade racist southerns and indifferent northerners to the abolitionist' cause. At the outbreak of the Civil War, however, Garrison later embraced the armed struggle for black liberation and the Lincoln administration. Ballou remained a lifelong pacifist and condemned the Civil War for fear of the eventual retaliation by white southerns on freed black Americans.

Ballou's and Garrison's writings heavily influenced Leo Tolstoy, who was inspired by their lifelong commitment to abolitionism. Tolstoy wrote extensively on his burgeoning Christian anarchist principles in nonfiction books like ''The Kingdom of God is Within You'', which is considered a key Christian anarchist text. Tolstoy sought to separate Russian Orthodox Christianity, which was merged with the state, from what he believed was the true message of Jesus as contained in the Gospels, specifically in the Sermon on the Mount. He took the viewpoint that all governments that wage war and churches that in turn support those governments, are an affront to the Christian principles of nonviolence. Although Tolstoy never actually used the term "Christian anarchism" in ''The Kingdom of God Is Within You'', reviews of the book after its publication in 1894 appear to have coined the term.

The antireligious former priest Thomas J. Hagerty was a primary author of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Preamble ("an injury to one is an injury to all"). IWW members included Christian anarchists like Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy.

Dorothy Day was a journalist turned social activist who became known for her social justice campaigns in defense of the poor. Alongside Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, which espoused nonviolence and hospitality for the impoverished and the downtrodden. Day was declared Servant of God when a cause for sainthood was opened for her by Pope John Paul II. Day's distributist economic views are very similar to Proudhon's mutualism by which she was influenced. Day also named the phrase "precarious work." based on the former anarchocommunist Léonce Crenier's embrace of poverty. Peter Maurin's vision to transform the social order consisted of establishing urban houses of hospitality to care for the destitute, rural farming communities to teach city dwellers agrarianism and encourage a movement back-to-the-land, and roundtable discussions in community centres to clarify thought and initiate action.

Simone Weil was a French philosopher who was very early animated by a great compassion for the exploited. She was first a socialist and then an anarchist. In 1930s, she converted to "love of Christ." During her experience, she explains that she suddenly felt that Christianity was the religion of the slaves and that she, like other slaves, could not resist adhering to it. She is considered a "Christian mystic" and an "anarchist Christian".

Anarchist biblical views and practices

Church authority

With some notable exceptions such as the Catholic Worker Movement, many Christian anarchists are critical of Church dogma and rituals. Christian anarchists tend to wish that Christians were less preoccupied with performing rituals and preaching dogmatic theology, and more with following Jesus' teaching and practices. Jacques Ellul and Dave Andrews claim that Jesus did not intend to be the founder of an institutional religion, while Michael Elliot believes one of Jesus' intentions was to bypass human intermediaries and do away with priests.

Pacifism and nonviolence

Christian anarchists, such as David Lipscomb, Leo Tolstoy, Ammon Hennacy, Jacques Ellul, and Dave Andrews, follow Jesus' call to not resist evil but turn the other cheek. They argue that this teaching can only imply a condemnation of the state, as the police and army hold a monopoly over the legitimate use of force. They believe freedom will only be guided by the grace of God if they show compassion to others and turn the other cheek when confronted with violence. Christian anarchists believe violence begets violence and the ends never justify the means.

Many Christian anarchists practice the principles of nonviolence, nonresistance, and turning the other cheek. To illustrate how nonresistance works in practice, Alexandre Christoyannopoulos offers the following Christian anarchist response to terrorism:

Simple living

Christian anarchists such as Ammon Hennacy, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day often advocate voluntary poverty