Christ-archy

Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation. — Mikhail Bakunin

I used to consider myself an “anarchist Christian”, or a “Christian anarchist”, or however you want to put it, but the term I prefer for myself now is “Christ-archist”. “Christ-archy” should not be confused with desiring a theocracy, but what it does mean is that I absolutely, unequivocally believe God to be the source of all authority, and the one to whom all authority is accountable. Any authority that does not submit itself to God and seek to operate according to the politics of Jesus is illegitimate. Since I’m not aware of many earthly authorities who do this, that means there are a lot of bastard governments (and corporations, other economic entities, and social organizations) running around out there!

Anarchism as a political philosophy is widely misunderstood. It is not about chaos or anything-goes. An anarchist society would not be defined by vigilante justice or never-ending unrest. Anarchism is rather about people having the ability to govern themselves in such a way that people make for themselves the decisions that will affect their lives. It is very nearly a direct inversion of the usual way we’re used to thinking of power, from a top-down pyramid scheme to a bottom-up, dynamic structure, close to what people think of when they hear the term “grassroots.” Anarchism, at its most fundamental level, is a basic opposition to any concentration of power that imposes an illegitimate will upon a human being, to any kind of rulership. There are numerous and diverse ways in which that principle is worked out by different groups of anarchists, but it is common to anarchism as a whole.

That is not to say that an anarchist society would be a utopia, nor that anarchism is utopianism. It is not; the classical anarchists  had a fairly pragmatic view of the selfishness of human nature and recognized that struggle is inherent to existence. They would have agreed with American abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty–power is ever stealing from the many to the few.” Or, as Jacques Ellul (a Christian thinker) said, freedom is not found in a natural state in which we can indwell; there is no such thing as a “state of freedom.” Any time we think we are living in freedom, we have in fact been enslaved in a way not yet identified. True freedom is found in identifying that which oppresses us and resisting it. Any time we look for a form of utopian existance we not only miss the point but in fact make ourselves potentially subject to another form of enslavement. However, it was their belief that dismantling the oppressive, top-down authority structures that enslave people would go a long way towards helping people to live more cooperatively. In the words of Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin, they envisioned a society where it would be easier for people to be good. Anarchy is not chaos, but order without control.

Anarchism, then, is resisting the human impulse to collect power in the attempt to create a society where power is shared, where voluntary submission characterizes our interactions with each other instead of domination, and where we seek alternative ways of being. “Anarchy” comes from the Greek anarchos, from an- “no” and archos “ruler.” Archos, more fully, refers to the beginning, the order of things. The archos, then, when pertaining to a ruler, was the one in whom is the beginning, the one who puts things in their order, the one to whom belongs allegiance. En arche en ho logos are the first words of the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the word.” It echoes the Greek translation of Genesis, when “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Christ is the archos, and no human or governmental system created by humans is – just like Paul writes in Colossians 1:15-20, using language that echoes and subverts Roman imperial propaganda. It is not just that Paul is claiming certain things to be true about Jesus, he is claiming that these truths about Jesus refute and deny the claims to legitimate, divinely-ordained authority made by Caesar and his lobbyists.

I have a strong affinity with anarchist politics, but I am more likely to refer to myself not as an anarchist, but as a “Christ-archist.” I have come to my political beliefs through my studies of Scripture, the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and of the church, both in the ways it has succeeded and in how it has failed to live faithfully to Jesus’ example. I believe that on the cross Jesus demonstrated the vacuity of the Roman claims to rule the lives of its subjects and the falsehood of the Jewish Temple Establishment’s claim to define who could have access to God (and how), and he took the powers and principalities that ruled his world, both visible and invisible, earthly and spiritual, and disarmed them through allowing them to do their worst to him. This includes not only the power of sin in the lives of individuals, but also social, political, and economic structures that oppress and do violence (see Colossians 2:15). In that vein, then, perhaps one could frame the Resurrection in the light of God committing an act of civil disobedience: the governing powers said to Jesus, “Die!” but God said, “Live!”

Perhaps the best way for me to express it is that just as I see in Nietzsche a profound expression of the Christian doctrine of the Fall from a secular thinker, I see in anarchist theories profound political expressions that demonstrate ways to live that resist the Fall, to resist our tendencies to follow in the ways of Adam and Eve and try to be like God, to usurp God and introduce relations of domination instead of co-existance and cooperation, of mutual submission. Instead of the classic anarchist credo, “No gods, no masters,” the Christ-archist says, “No master but God, no lord but Christ, no nation but the Kingdom.”

I realize that the discussion is complex, the issues are many, and even that in some ways claiming to provide a comprehensive philosophy of Christian anarchy is both impossible and undesirable. I realize there are ways that I have uncritically ingested assumptions of the world that surrounds me, there are ways that my vision of God is limited and corrupted. I only hope that God will be merciful to constantly remake me in the image of Christ as I live in this world, proclaiming freedom to captives, sight to the blind, life to the dying. I want to take part in the prophetic imagination, to cast an alternative vision to that which the powers (both spiritual and worldly) would have us accept on their terms, without reflection and alternative experience. I want to proclaim that another world is possible, and not only that but that other world is, in fact, victorious over the empires that would oppress us.You could say it’s a particular outlook towards working out the idea that “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1).

Let me say, then, that for me anarchy is a BEGINNING, not an end. Deconstruction is the necessary precursor to an experience of Truth. Only when our systems fail can we experience freedom without limit – The system of the spirit, which is a dynamic conduit into the infinite depths of God who is eternity-in-the-then-now-and-when, giving rise to a liberated imagination for the subversion of the world machine, pointing towards the day when it will, finally, be destroyed. Then we will know Immanuel, even as we are fully known.