On Christian Anarchists

Last updated on: August 10, 2009 at 5:19 pm by Henry Karlson

On Christian Anarchists 2009-08-10T17:19:17-05:00 Henry Karlson

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Christian anarchists are often given a bad reputation because of the associations one normally has with the words “anarchy” and “anarchist.” One can say that there is a universal use of propaganda by which these associations have been made; whatever social structure one finds oneself in, anarchy has been systematically represented as a bad idea and figures who have been known to be “anarchists,” whose morals and actions have been quite questionable, have been used by this propaganda as the proper representatives of the anarchist position. Socialists and capitalists come together to present this image of the anarchist, hoping beyond hope that benign anarchists will forever be ignored and the questions that anarchists raise about the nature of the state will forever be squashed. Civilization must go on, and any form of government is better than the chaos anarchists desire, because they all bring order to the world as they help civilization continue its utopian advance to the future. Of course, no such utopia will ever be established, but that does not matter, as long as civilization can always claim it is getting better over time. And it is getting better, isn’t it?

G.K. Chesterton once noted that democracy and civilization, despite appearances to the contrary, were foes to one another, for democracy was always broken down by the complexities of civilization. “To this day the comparatively simple agricultural communities are by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilisation. Anyone who likes may state it by saying that democracy is the foe of civilisation. But he must remember that some of us really prefer democracy to civilisation, in the sense of preferring democracy to complexity.”[1] Now it must be said that what Chesterton means by democracy here is far from what we mean by democracy when we think of “democratic forms of government” in modern political parlance. Rather, he is going back to the idea of the simple rule of the people, where they make agreements in common without the need of any external force than their common agreement; this is why it was possible under small agricultural communities, and why this form of life was broken up as society became complex and moved beyond the local community. Once rules of law enforced by some sort of police action is brought into play, this dynamic is changed, and true democratic interaction is slowly lost and replaced by a new form of “democracy” which puts the rules of law above the people themselves, and thus the law becomes its own external entity which assumes authority for itself. In other words, the rule of law with its institutions used to enforce, interpret, and create new laws ends up replacing cooperative anarchy. Of course there are benefits which come from this, but they are often less than normally perceived, and come with a price which is often left obscured: personal liberty. This is not to say anarchists are, therefore, libertine; some certainly are, but many others believe in the good will of humanity when it is brought together and works together without the interference of some outside influence (the state); they believe that regulatory, absolute laws are not needed, and indeed, provoke and encourage people to break them when put in place.[2] It this second kind in which one finds Christian anarchists; they know what sin is, and oppose it. They think it is a sham to think the state has any ability to oppose evil as a whole, and indeed, they see the state as primarily relying one or more forms of sin as a means of propagating itself and therefore should be rejected by any Christian who seeks to follow God’s will. Certainly some good is done, but one must not be distracted by that good, and ignore the evil which is being done to sustain that good. The ends do not justify the means.

Ellul, one of the most famous Christian anarchists, explained his anarchism in the following way: “By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence.”[3] Now this might seem like a peculiar definition. Certainly it rejects outright those “anarchists” that people bring to mind when they think of anarchy: mad bombers that, caring less about collateral damage, seek to damage some governmental institution or another. Yet, as Ellul points out elsewhere, the state and its power, its authority, all comes from its use of violence. “Now how does a government stay in power? By violence, simply by violence. It has to eliminate its enemies, set up new structures; and that, of course, can be done only by violence And even when the situation seems to be normalized, the government cannot endure except by repeated exercise of violence. Where is the line between police brutality and brutality exercised by others? Is the difference that the former is legal? But it is common knowledge that laws can be so drawn up as to justify violence.”[4] Ellul is quick to point out, though one might try to make legal distinctions between force and violence, these distinctions merely represent an attempt to justify one kind of violence over another: force is inherently violent. One must understand that violence need not be merely physical; psychological and spiritual violence is often employed as means of control. Looking specifically at the United States, he sees it is a rather benign state and yet one which proves his point: “After two centuries of optimistic idealism, violence arose in the U.S.A. That is to say, during those two centuries the nation refused to face reality and piously threw a veil over the facts. I shall not point to Negro slavery, as most critics of America do. I refer rather to the slow, sanctimonious extermination of Indians, the system of occupying the land (Faustrecht), the competitive methods of leading capitalistic groups, the annexation of California along with the retrieval of Texas – all this and much besides show that the United States has always been ridden by violence, though the truth was covered over by a legalistic ideology and a moralistic Christianity.”[5] The state, for its power, must find something to sacrifice, and that sacrifice is taken by one kind of violent force or another (soldiers, propaganda, etc).

Now it is understandable that one might look at this, and agree in spirit – one would desire to live in a society where governmental structures with its violent means of sustaining the peace is not needed, but the reality of the world, the reality of sin, is that there will be no utopia, and government of sort is still needed to combat the necessity of sin. Ellul himself agrees, and in this way, he even says he is not a “real anarchist”: “The true anarchist thinks that an anarchist society – with no state, no organization, no hierarchy, and no authorities – is possible, livable, and practicable. But I do not. In other words, I believe that the anarchist fight, the struggle for an anarchist society, is essential, but I also think that the realizing of such a society is impossible.”[6] While one should work for such freedom, Ellul understands that worldly necessity requires government, while it is only Christian freedom which can overcome it. The Christian should not be ruled by the affairs of the world, but rather, the Christian should judge them based upon love. One who submits to the state and its affairs loses their Christian freedom and returns to a fallen mode of naturalistic necessity, while the Christian who keeps themselves above the state, lives in Christ a true free man and over the law and its necessities. “We must accept and try to understand this man who does not know Christ’s freedom. But let us distinguish clearly between him and the man who has known Christ and calls himself a Christian. The latter cannot be excused if he uses violence for his own ends. So, too, the capitalist or the colonialist who exploits and oppresses his fellow men, and the government leader who uses police or military violence, are to be radically condemned. Toward them, the church can only take the attitude that St. Ambrose took toward Theodore.”[7] Christian freedom properly understood is over and above all laws, not because it rejects the morals within them, but because a Christian can now be free to follow the good without the need of some external threat to force them to do so. The kingdom of God leads us to being brothers and sisters of the Lord, to being his friends and not his servants: love overcomes such demands.

But it is Ellul’s caveat which leads me to Tolkien and his political thoughts: “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered by men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.”[8] The two – monarchy and anarchy – often seem to contradict each other, but we need only to see how the kingdom of God establishes both principles together to note Tolkien has a good precedent for this: Christian freedom, without need of “laws,” work together under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, a Lordship founded not upon Christ seeking authority for himself, but upon the Son of God divesting himself of it all on the cross as the means of its proper execution. And since Tolkien was interested in personal liberty, and being free from all kind of external imposition upon himself, as one can note in his story, “Leaf by Niggle,” we can understand why anarchy was attractive to him. Indeed, it was what he desired, and he believed, in limited form it could be had, if not permanently, at least for a time, as shown with the development of the Shire. Tolkien chose monarchy as the form of government which most satisfied him because, looking to history and knowing how monarchies worked, he saw that monarchs rarely were concerned about the lives of ordinary people and let them therefore live, as they would like, as long as the people themselves did not organize themselves as a threat to the monarch’s power (despite what “democratic” propaganda might suggest). Again, the Shire presents this picture well, because the Shire existed in its anarchical state under the auspices of Gondor; the king in theory had authority to dictate laws, but in practice, rarely had the need to do so because the people of the Shire caused no major disruption when left to themselves. Tolkien thus understood that monarchies, by their very nature, tended to be more anarchical, and this makes sense, because there is, in theory, far less heads and people vying for (and claiming) power in a monarchy than in other forms of government.

Thus, if one wants to understand Christian anarchists, the best thing to understand is not that anarchy can come under one of two forms: those who repudiate the law to become something less than the law, and those who repudiate the law because they surpass it. It is the second kind which Christian anarchists follow when they look to the law and criticize it. They are anarchists because they are Christians, free in Christ. But this does not mean they will repudiate morality, indeed it is because the follow the morality of love that they are motivated to call into question all legalism which seeks to rule by force. The rule of law must only be seen for what it is, a relative convention, not an absolute.

Footnotes

[1] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1925), 51.

[2] Christianity obviously sees a danger here: what is one to do with sin, and its ability to corrupt people so that they become self-centered and incapable of working together with others for the common good? This is one of the reasons why some form of government is seen as necessary: its rules and institutions seek to put the power of sin in check. But does it really do this? Perhaps it did at one time, imperfectly, and in small principalities, but what about now, in a secular world, where sin is no longer understood? What exactly is the foundation for secular governments and how do they justify themselves when they interfere with the liberties of its people? Clearly there ends up being no universal answers; ideologies are established and used to respond to this question, but when the ideologies are questioned, all that remains is the rule of force, where the ones in power try to preserve their ideologies, and those not in power try to accumulate enough power so that their ideology can replace what is currently in place. It becomes quite clear, government ends up seeking their own interests first, and this is one of the complaints that Christian anarchists have with modern secular governments: the dark underbelly of governmental authority shows itself without remorse.

[3] Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity. trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 11.

[4] Jacques Ellul, Violence. trans. Cecilia Gaul Kings (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969), 85.

[5] Ibid., 88.

[6] Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity, 19.

[7] Jacues Ellul, Violence, 131-2.

[8] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), 63.

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