Christian Anarchism

2600 words, 12 minute read

Christian Anarchism? An oxymoron, right? Isn’t Christianity is all about order?

o   The order of a world created by God (Genesis).

o   The ordering principle (logos) through which all things came to be. (John)

o   The hierarchy of the Church. (Acts)

o   The 10 Commandments and the other 603 Mitzvah of the Law. (Torah).

o   A second-grade classroom in a 1950’s parochial school with fifty pupils, one teacher, and ‘pin drop’ silence. That’s order; that’s Christianity! Right?

Not so fast! Obviously, anarchy has no place in the ‘Christian Cosmos’…if by ‘anarchy’ you mean ‘chaos, disorder, violence or entropy (S)per se’. On the other hand, if you understand ‘anarchy’ as a lack ofexternally imposedorder (an exoskeleton), the situation gets a bit murkier. 

The lack of artificial order does not preclude the spontaneous emergence of organic order (endoskeleton); in fact, it requires it! Where S is at its maximum, there is Neant (nothingness). Put another way, Heat Death (Big Freeze) is synonymous with Max Entropy and therefore Being is synonymous with Order.

“God said, Let there be light, and there was light. God…separated the light from the dark; the light shone in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (Genesis 1: 3 – 5 & John 1: 5) Being = order!

Mikhail Bakunin, the ‘St. Paul of Anarchists’, underscored this point: “Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far be from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker… Each directs and is directed in his (sic) turn, therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and above all, voluntary authority.” (God and State)

What of Torah, God’s law? Clearly, it is imposed by a transcendent entity…and yet not so much! Torah is God’s law, but it emerges both from the will of God (Nature) and from the human heart (Conscience): Torah is one side of a Covenant between YHWH and his people – a covenant that repeatedly requires and receives renewed consent.

Jewish tradition speaks of two Torahs – the Written Torah (aka the Pentateuch) and the Oral Torah (embedded in the laws of nature and in the human heart). A genius of Judaism is the ‘=’ sign it places between the two. No surprise then that in the Book of Job, God uses ecology to illustrate the concept of Justice. Justice is a species and a manifestation of organic order.

God is Justice; human beings are just ‘just’, and that only potentially. There would be no such thing as a ‘just act’ in the absence of divine Justice but it is by ‘just acts’ that Justice becomes immanent in spatiotemporal events.  

Perhaps then we should not be surprised after all to find the rudiments of Anarchism embedded in the Social Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1250) himself affirmed that all are required to follow the validly enacted laws of their respective societies, regardless of the legislative process; but Thomas added a crucial qualifier: laws are valid only when they do not conflict with the ‘will of God’, i.e. Justice. 

After the Aquinas, the doctrine of Christian Anarchism next took center stage during the Protestant Reformation, particularly among the Huguenots (French Calvinists). A Defense Against Tyrants was published pseudonymously (c. 1580) by Hubert Languay and/or Phillipe de Mornay. In it they argue that it is not only lawful to resist a government that contravenes the will of God (Justice) but obligatory.

Fast forward three hundred years: Leo XIII is elected Pope (1878) and immediately faces a crisis of social disintegration. Europe seems hopelessly divided by class, by nation, and by ideology. Karl Marx had thrown down the gauntlet 30 years earlier when he wrote: “A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.” (Communist Manifesto) It was high time the Church responded…and Leo did just that!

Christian tradition supports the legitimacy of the State as defined by Joshua,GideonHot Link, Samuel and David… not Mussolini or Stalin. The ‘state’ as it appears in history is notnecessarily the State envisioned by theology. 

In our epoch, for instance, the concept of State entails the subjugation of the individual to the collective. But this ‘collective’ does not develop organically out of freely formed interpersonal relations,a la Rousseau. Rather, it is ‘ananti-logos imposed onall social interaction by a limited segment of the body politic’. Is there a modern nation state, from the US to the USSR, that does not fit this description?

In modern political theory, the nation state is the ultimate sovereign entity (Hegel). It confers limited, subsidiary sovereignty on smaller political and social units, it recognizes (at its sole discretion) certain human and civil rights, it preserves certain ‘useful’ institutions (e.g., family, church), but it reserves the right to regulate the behavior of all individuals and groups according to its conception of the ‘general welfare’. 

Christianity, in my view, argues the reverse: (1) the individual, family, and local community are the foundations of society, (2) human and civil rights are ‘inalienable’ and derive from God (Declaration of Independence) , and (3) no state has the right to infringe on them.

The rather vague notion of ‘general welfare’ (a so-called ‘end’) is given further structure by the Utilitarian meme: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number. According to such a ‘value system’, colonialism and imperialism are not only justified but mandated. War, slavery, and all manner of human exploitation (so-called ‘means’) can be overlooked as long as they are in service of ‘the greater good’ (end).

Sound familiar? Indeed, we are 500 years into a social order outlined by Machiavelli early in the 16^th century. Like a funnel with two mouths and one neck, the Machiavellian ethic (ends > means) inputs the wisdom of Ancient Greece and Medieval Rome, shrinks it down to the size of a city-state (Firenze), and then broadcasts it back out into the world under various guises: Renaissance (Medici), Reformation (Luther), Enlightenment (Laplace), Liberalism (Locke), Socialism (Bentham), Utilitarianism (Mill), Capitalism (Smith), Communism (Red), Consumerism (Green), etc. But the entire framework is wrong because there is no ‘general welfare’, there is no ‘greater good’, there is just Good.

Anarchism, on the other hand, celebrates true order that grows naturally from its roots: the mustard seed that becomes a tree offering shelter to flocks of migrating birds. This is not to say that there is no role for differentiated social orders. Priests marched at the head of Joshua’s column as it ‘liberated’ Jericho. And according to Marxist-Leninist social theory, a revolution must be led by a vanguard.

Liberalism is an elaborate mask for the hierarchical State. Its ‘consent of the governed’ is merely an ‘origin myth’. Furthermore, it offers no logical reason why the consent of one generation should be binding on the next. The ‘sins of the parent’ need not be visited on the great grandchildren.

The phenomenon of State today is very different from the concept in Christian theology. According to RCC papal encyclicals, the ‘state’ is the broadest, most general, epiphenomenal expression of natural community. Such a state recognizes the sovereignty of human organizations and associations provided they are voluntary and consistent with the ecological order.

Anarchism does not oppose order; au contraire, it liberates us so that we can create genuine, organic order. The ability of human beings to form just communities is one of our species’ defining characteristics. Even Cain built cities! 

‘Statists’ do not view order as natural. They understand society as ‘fallen’ and therefore in need of an externally imposed standard of right conduct. Anarchists deny this reasoning altogether. They view humans as God’s partners in an orderly process of co-creation.

To the statist, sovereignty rests at the most general level of association, the nation state, or now perhaps the so-called New World Order. The Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity views society through the other end of the telescope. Sovereignty rests at the level of the individual and her proximate social networks (e.g. family). According to such a model, ‘consent of the governed’ is not ‘one and done’ but a perpetual process, happening, or not, at multiple levels, every minute of every day.

The notion that Anarchism is inconsistent with Christianity is ahistorical. After the successful Exodus, and the years (40) that followed in the Sinai wilderness, the Israelites conquered Jericho and began a 250-year long social experiment. From the death of Moses to the coronation of Saul (c. 1050 BCE), society, guided by the grace of God and the precepts of Torah, functioned without a permanent political class and without any formal central government.

At that time, Israel was a Theocracy by Anarchic Means (as the US is a Republic by Democratic Means and the UK a Monarchy by Democratic Means). Authority was vested in God, his people, and a series of charismatic judges (from Joshua through Samuel’s sons) whose ambient authority derived solely from the favor of God and the consent of the governed (often expressed through a council of elders).

The Exodus had given the Israelites one of history’s rarest opportunities…a do over. Unlike the Jacobins of 1789 or the Bolsheviks of 1917, the Hebrews had no Ancien Regime to eradicate. They did not inherit old political structures in need of reform, and for the most part, they were free of foreign entanglements. They were given a chance to build a society, ab initio, from the bottom up…and they did just that, brilliantly.

This lengthy period in Jewish history is recounted in three books of the Old Testament: Joshua, Judges, and the first 7 chapters of 1 Samuel. The final line of Judges summarizes the entire era: “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (21: 25)

In our era, we are used to folks seeking to liberate themselves from physical bondage, cultural oppression, and political tyranny. Over the course of history, however, humans have just as often agreed to trade their existential liberty for the promise, always empty, of security and prosperity. Erich Fromm explored this phenomenon in his book,Escape from Freedom. So did the author of1 Samuel: The people cried out to Samuel, “Appoint a king over us, like the nations, to rule us…Give us a king to rule us.”

Samuel, with God’s help, tried in vain to talk the people out of their folly: “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses…and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest… He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.” (1 Samuel 8: 11 – 17)

Leo XIII glosses 1 Samuel in three of his most famous papal encyclicals (designated D, ID, RN below):

“All public power must proceed from God, for God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world. Everything, without exception, must be subject to Him and serve Him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single source, namely God, the sovereign ruler of all.” (ID #3)  

“Whatever be the nature (form) of government, rulers must bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world and must set Him before themselves in the administration of the State.“ (ID #4)

“If the will of rulers is opposed to the will and the laws of God, they themselves exceed the bounds of their own authority and pervert justice; nor can their authority then be valid, which, when there is not justice, is null.” (D #15)

“Civil laws…so long as they are just, derive from the law of nature their binding force (RN #11)… Laws bind only when they are in accordance with right reason and, hence, with the eternal law of God.” (RN #52)

“Man (sic) precedes the state, and possesses, prior to the formation of any state, the right of providing for the sustenance of his body.” (RN #7) Jean Valjean (Les Misérables) was wrongly convicted!

100 years later, Pope John Paul II glossed Rerum Novarum: “The right of association is a natural right of the human being, which therefore precedes his or her incorporation into political society.” (CA #7) “A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order.” (CA #48) Star Trek’s Prime Directive?

Back to Leo: “Bystatewe here understand…any government conformable in its institutions to right reason and natural law, and to…dictates of the divine wisdom.” (RN #32) Leo is not just jousting with heretical states; he is ‘disestablishing’ them!

In this, Leo is recapitulating Samuel: When Saul disobeyed God’s command, Samuel did not hesitate; he declared: “You reign no more over Israel!” (1 Samuel 15: 23) Although sometime passed before David replaced Saul as king, from the moment of Samuel’s decree, Saul’s edicts no longer had the force of law, they were no longer morally binding.

An unjust state is not a bad state in the way that a stubborn child might be called, “a bad boy”…but still be a boy. An unjust state is no state at all. There are no ‘bad states’…only states and pseudo-states. A state is a ‘state’ only when and to the extent that it is an agent of divine Justice. An unjust pseudo-state has forfeited its (God given) right to govern.

Jesus began his ministry (Luke 4:21) by proclaiming a Jubilee year (the immediate redistribution of all productive property); in the same way, Leo proclaimed the withering of Europe’s heretical states. But like Samuel, and unlike Marx, Leo did not promise the eventual dissolution of the heretical State; he dissolved it by fiat in real time!

Leo gets the last word: “Human law is only law by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and it is thus manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.” (RN #52) Amen to that!

D = Diuturnum, 1881

ID = Immortale Dei, 1885

RN = Rerum Novarum, 1891

CA = Centesimus Annus, 1991

Image: James Tissot (French, 1836-1902). Woe unto You, Scribes and Pharisees (Malheur à vous, scribes et pharisiens), 1886-1894. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Image: 6 11/16 x 10 3/8 in. (17 x 26.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchased by public subscription, 00.159.209 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum). 

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.

Return to Groundhog Issue 2025https://www.aletheiatoday.com/thoughtswhileshaving/the-machiavellian-heresyhttps://www.aletheiatoday.com/thoughtswhileshaving/job-%26-the-prime-directive