Christian Anarchism

For anyone interested in the links between Chrisitanity and Anarchism, here is the paper i wrote on it. I broke it up into few sections since it's a bit long.

Christian Anarchism: Part One

I am a Christian Anarchist, well somewhat. However, it was not always this way. I grew up as a “normal” Christian who pledged allegiance to both God and country and gave little thought to the connection between the two. For many the very idea of Christian Anarchism seems to be a paradox of drastic proportions. “Surely the Anarchists are all about chaos and the Christians about order,” you might say. In fact it seems near ludicrous to say that there ever could exist such a thing as a, “Christian Anarchist.” Many people—Christians, Secularists, and Anarchists, would say that the two ideologies of the Christian Faith and the Anarchistic movement are simply incompatible. And while this is true to a certain extent, the two ideologies also have a multitude of common ground between them.

Christianity and Anarchy are similar in some ways and yet wholly different. The hardest part about defining the idea of “Christian Anarchism” is semantics. The ideas of Anarchy and Christianity both mean very different things to a large number of people, and even within each of these categories are more subcategories. However, for a common understanding in this essay, a “Christian” will be defined simply as someone who believes in God and does their best to follow Jesus’ teaching, with no emphasis on particular denominations or theologies. The idea of Anarchy on the other hand, takes a bit more defining, because of the many associations and ideas associated with it.
Anarchists are generally known as a group that attempts to overthrow or subvert government authority and society with no intention of restoring order (usually in a violent manner). The Anarchist movement is an attempt to advocate for a state of natural order with no government or ruling authority in place. Anarchists are usually associated with destructive, dangerous behavior (which is not the case for Christian Anarchists) and even viewed as terrorists. The Anarchist revolts against existing laws, orders, and customs that they believe impedes the freedom of the individual. Sometimes the goal is overthrowing government; sometimes it is simply to abstain from government. The central claim or slogan of the Anarchist movement is, “No gods, no masters,” which means a number of different things, but mainly the belief first and foremost in freedom, which lies not in serving the government and religious institutions, but in the fraternity of the human race. These ideas constitute a general understanding of the Anarchist Movement, and while many years ago I would have been incapable of noticing the connections between this ideology and Christianity, today is a different story.

Christian Anarchy is essentially summed up in the call to “resist the empire,” the empire basically meaning the government and the systems of power within it. There are a surprising number of theological and historical figures who have proposed connections between Christianity and Anarchy, with just a few including renowned Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Workers movement, Professor Jacques Ellul, and Mennonite John Howard Yoder. They are some of the foremost thinkers on the idea of Christian Anarchy, as well as two contemporary authors and activists, Greg Boyd and Shane Claiborne. The word anarchy comes from “an” meaning, “without,” and “archy”, meaning “human authority” as writer, professor, and philosopher Jacques Ellul says in his article “Christianity and Anarchy,” (14.) So anarchy essentially means “without human authority.” Now, the idea of Christian Anarchy is not a subcategory of Anarchy, but more a subcategory of Christianity, (though it could be a completely different category altogether). The Christian belief in anarchy stems from the definition of “without human authority,” claiming that Christians are without human authority and subject to God alone. There are a few different branches or strands of Christian Anarchy, and the following are some broad generalizations of each. The first of these is the belief in a complete abstaining from all forms of government—living beneath the tax line, not voting, nomadic living arrangements and some even so far as abstaining from the use of currency.

The next form would be that of the Mennonites or Amish, a group of people by and large separate from society and who have their own way of sustainable living apart from any sort of government. The last form would be a more neutral version, where the Christian takes part in some systems of government—voting, taxes, and such things, but by and large still believes in and does their best to live in such a way that government is both unnecessary and contradictory to the systems of power that it represents. I think I am in the last category, but really I don’t like being thrown in categories.