INTRODUCTION
PETER MARSHALL“Neither God nor Master.”1
—Michael Bakunin
“Love, and do what you will.”2
—Augustine
Is religious anarchism a contradiction in terms? Is not anarchy the very
opposite of hierarchy which in the original Greek means the “rule of the
priests”? Is not an all-powerful God who threatens wayward humanity
with terrible punishments necessarily evil? Is not submission or obedience
to the authority of God slavish?
Given the close historic link between the church and the state in the
West, it is not surprising that the classic anarchist thinkers of the
nineteenth century, steeped in the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment,
should have generally opposed religion as a heavy fetter holding back the
liberation of humanity. For the most part, they shared Marx’s view that
religion was the “opium of the people,” offering workers and peasants
extravagant fantasies of pie in the sky while sapping their energy to
improve things on earth. Like the philosophes, they generally held the
practices and beliefs of religion to be part of the ignorance and superstition
left over from the Dark Ages. Above all, they rejected unquestioning
obedience to a supernatural power having ultimate control over their
destiny. Man, they concluded, was not made in God’s image, but God in
the image of some of the worst aspects of humanity.
They were standing in a long radical tradition in Europe which
opposed the authoritarian and hierarchical nature of organised religion.
Popular peasant revolts during the Middle Ages attempted to throw off the
triple yoke of priest, landlord and magistrate who lived off their backs and
1 Anarchist slogan, usually attributed to Michael Bakunin.
2 Augustine, “Seventh Homily on the First Epistle of St John,” in Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. H. Browne (Buffalo,
N. Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1888), para 8.-----
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who threatened, fined and whipped them into sullen obedience. As
capitalism began to develop, the downtrodden and dispossessed further
rejected the Protestant ethic which saw success in making money as a sign
of divine grace. Many during the French Revolution looked forward to that
splendid time when the last priest would be hanged by the entrails of the
last aristocrat.
In the nineteenth century, the individualist Max Stirner argued that
religion was a “spook” in the mind, a manifestation of our alienation from
our true humanity.3 But amongst the classic anarchist thinkers, it was
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Michael Bakunin who most virulently
opposed organised religion, the unholy alliance of church and state, and
the notion of an omniscient God. Proudhon, brought up in Catholic
France, put it simply: “God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy
and falsehood; God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil.”4 Bakunin, a
militant atheist like Marx, was no less iconoclastic. In his view, “all
religions are cruel; all founded in blood.” As for monotheism, he declared:
“The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is
the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the
enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.” Indeed, turning
Voltaire on his head, he argued that “If God really existed, it would be
necessary to abolish him.”5
Anarchists after them have not only criticised the church as a
hierarchical and authoritarian institution but have condemned its repressive
morality. Its concept of sin, they have pointed out, encourage feelings of
fear and guilt which can cripple the spontaneous generosity and
playfulness of humans. In short, the agents of institutionalised religion
have turned the sun-blessed garden of love into a mouldy cemetery of
desire.
That is the main thrust of the anarchist case against religion. But have
all anarchists agreed? As the wide-ranging, thought-provoking and
scholarly essays in this excellent collection demonstrate, religion has in
the past been and can still be a source of inspiration for anarchists.
Anarchism is not inherently atheistic, denying the existence of God, or
even humanist, giving a central place to humanity within nature. Nor is it
wedded to any particular metaphysics, religion or even ethics; it is a wide
river with many tributaries, currents and eddies. What unites anarchists is
3 Max Stirner, The Ego & Its Own, trans. Steven T. Byington (1963) (London:
Rebel Press, 1982), 39.
4 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Système des contradications économiques, ou
philosophie de la misère (1846) (Paris: Rivière, 1923), I, 384.
5 Michael Bakunin, God and the State (New York: Mother Earth, 1916), chapter 2.-----
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a common rejection of coercive power and imposed authority and a call
for freedom to shape their own lives and realise their full potential.
Within the Christian tradition, there has always been an ambivalent
attitude to government and the state. Despite Paul’s teaching in Romans 13
and Jesus’ famous “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and
unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21) many early
Christians saw obedience to God and imitation of the life of Christ as
taking precedence over any obligation to worldly powers or temporal
authority. In this, they took inspiration from Romans 11:36: “For of him,
and through him, and to him, are all things.”
Early in the fifth century, for example, the British theologian Pelagius
denied original sin, emphasised free will and claimed that all human
beings can achieve spiritual perfection without external assistance. They
could also have their basic needs easily satisfied if it were not for the
avarice of the rich. Again, in the twelfth century the Cistercian monk
Joachim of Fiore predicted the imminent realisation of the Kingdom of
God on earth in which free individuals would live together in loving
harmony and ecstatic joy.
In the Middle Ages, there were waves of religious libertarian and
millenarian movements inspired by such beliefs in north and central
Europe. Most notable were the Brethren of the Free Spirit who emerged in
the thirteenth century. These mystical libertarians were antinomians,
believing that they could be saved by faith alone and that the bestowal of
grace released them from any obligation to moral law. They took literally
Augustine’s adage: “Love, and do what you will.” Many of the
revolutionaries in the peasant rebellions which swept through Europe,
especially the English Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the Hussite
Revolution in Bohemia in 1419-21, were tinged with these ideas. Peter
Chelčický, recognized by Kropotkin as a forerunner of anarchism and
much appreciated by Tolstoy, was not only opposed to the “two whales”
of the church and state but following the example of Christ turned the
other cheek and refused to take up arms. During the Reformation, a loose
movement of Anabaptists (who believed in adult baptism) and Spiritualists
(who believed God was within) called for the separation of church and
state and the building of a New Jerusalem on earth. It was not easy. When
the puritanical Anabaptists in Münster in 1534 pooled their resources and
tried to create a community based on love they ended up burning books
and introducing a draconian new legal code.
The revolutionary and anarchistic tendency within Christianity came to
a fore during the upheavals of the English Revolution and civil war in the
seventeenth century. The Diggers wished only to obey the “law of
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righteousness” and were willing to break the laws of England and to work
the land as a common treasury. Gerrard Winstanley spoke on their behalf
when he declared: “True freedom lies in the community in spirit and
community in the earthly treasury, and this is Christ the true-man-child
spread abroad in the creation.”6 The most extreme antinomians at this time
however were the Ranters, lawless and masterless women and men, who
believed that since they were in a state of grace, they could commit no sin.
They shared their goods and practiced free love. Abiezer Coppe in his
marvellous Fiery Flying Rolls made clear that since God dwells within “to
the pure all things are pure” and “sinne and transgression is finished.”7
At the time of the French Revolution, William Blake was an offshoot
of this underground religious libertarian tradition. Rejecting the
constricting, judgemental and authoritarian Jehovah God of the Old
Testament, he saw Jesus as a revolutionary force of love and forgiveness,
bringing balm to heal the God-beaten heads of downtrodden humanity. In
his view, Jesus not only broke the Ten Commandments but was “all virtue,
and acted from impulse, not from rules.” Indeed, for Blake, “The Gospel is
Forgiveness of Sins & Has No Moral Precepts.”8
William Godwin, a one-time minister, may have been an atheist when
he wrote his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) but it was by
extending the Dissenters’ right to private judgement to the political realm
that he reached anarchist conclusions. The kind of voluntary communism
he advocated moreover can be traced back to the Calvinist sect of
Sandemanians among whom he moved as a teenager. Later in life, he
began to talk of a “Great Spirit” which pervaded all nature.
Of the great anarchist thinkers, it was however Tolstoy who was most
inspired by Christianity. A radical interpretation of the “Sermon on the
Mount,” with its emphasis on love and forgiveness, helped him reject all
governments as immoral forms organised violence. Since the “Kingdom of
God” is within us and we can all be guided by the divine light of reason,
governments are both unnecessary and harmful. Tolstoy died on his way to
a monastery. Among the many religious groups influenced by him were
the Nazarenes in Hungary and the Christian anarchists in the Netherlands
6 Gerrard Winstanley, A Watch-Word to the City of London (1649), in The Law of
Freedom and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill (Cambridge University Press,
1983), 128.
7 Andrew Hopton, ed., Abiezer Coppe: Selected Writings (London: Aporia Press,
1987), 27.
8 Geoffrey Keynes, ed., Blake: Complete Writings (Oxford University Press,
1972), 158, 395.-----
xvii
who refused to bear arms and pooled their resources in intentional
communities close to the land.
While not strictly speaking anarchist, a stance of indifference to the
state, developed philosophically by the Danish theologian Søren
Kierkegaard, was widespread among Christian anarchists who believed
like him that the love of God and the imitation of Christ lead to withdrawal
from the state. In the twentieth century in the United States, Dorothy Day,
Ammon Hennacy and their fellow Catholic Workers further argued that
the law of God overrides all man-made laws and supersedes any obligation
to obey governments. As Hennacy put it colourfully, a Christian anarchist
is “one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneylenders,
and who does not need a cop to tell him how to behave.”9 The
French thinker Jacques Ellul equally claimed that Christianity means a
rejection of temporal power and argued that a form of non-violent
anarchism is the only sensible and moral way forward.
For Christian anarchists, if there be any conflict between God and
Caesar, a benevolent God will always take precedence. Love of God and
love of one’s neighbours are paramount. It is not a question of Bakunin’s
“Neither God nor Master” but rather “No Master apart from God.” While
they reject the church as a hierarchical and authoritarian institution, most
Christian anarchists see the church in the universal sense of a community
of believers as a place for resistance against the nation-state and the racism
and inequality it engenders.
Although anarchism as a self-conscious body of ideas and practices
was largely a product of the European Enlightenment, many indigenous
peoples, from the pygmies in the African rainforest to the Dalits in rural
India, have been “anarchic” in their religious practices by worshipping
without leaders and institutions. Even the humanist Kropotkin argued that
morality among humans had evolved naturally prior to the state and
recognised that religion had played an important role in encouraging the
practice of mutual aid.
As with Christianity, religious traditions and beliefs throughout the
world have had their libertarian movements and have inspired anarchist
beliefs. The Judaic God of the Old Testament certainly cast the sinful into
hell and called for an eye for an eye, yet the Hasidic mystical tradition
which developed within Judaism in the eighteenth century brought out the
importance of “loving kindness” (the Hebrew root word of Hasidism).
Many Jews have been drawn to anarchism. The libertarian philosopher
9 Ammon Hennacy, Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist (New York: Catholic
Worker Books, 1954), preface.-----
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Martin Buber, strongly influenced by his anarchist friend Gustav
Landauer, also saw the kibbutz movement as one of the possible Paths to
Utopia (1949). Although it has largely lost its way under the pressure of
war, some Jewish anarchists still see the possibility of creating a network
of libertarian communes to replace the need for the brute force of
government.
Islam of course is a monotheistic religion like Judaism and Christianity
whose prophets it recognises. At first sight, and certainly for many in the
West, it would seem to be fundamentally authoritarian and violent. But
this view is largely based on ignorance and prejudice; historically,
Christianity has been no less given to violence and coercion than Islam
when linked to temporal powers and misled by political leaders.
The very word “Islam” means “submission” or “surrender” and Islam
calls for submission to the teaching of the Koran and surrender to the
authority of God. The primary commitment of all Muslims is to obey God
and God alone. Yet within Islam, there has been a libertarian tendency.
The brotherhood and sisterhood of Muslims go beyond national
boundaries and their morality transcends the laws of the state and the
dictates of government. While sharia has crystallised into a rigid set of
laws and rules it was originally a form of ethics for everyday life. There is
moreover no institutional hierarchy in Islam and a strong emphasis on the
search for consensus (ijma) within the community (umma).
Among Islamic sects, the Qarâmita, the Ismailis (especially the socalled
Assassins) and the Sufis have all had anarchist-leaning groups. The
Berbers and the Bedouin lived in a form of tribal anarchy. In the ninth
century, the Najdiyya and members of the Kharijites felt that since imams
had a tendency to turn into kings and rulers, it was better not to set them
up in the first pace. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century,
antinomian dervishes, such as the Qalandars and Haydarîs, went their own
idiosyncratic way, either rejecting or embracing the world as unruly
friends of God. Like Christian anarchists, they refused to obey any master
apart from God. The mystical sect of Sufis, who preach universal love and
tolerance, are particularly libertarian and egalitarian—so much so that
Ataturk, the founder of the modern secular state of Turkey, banned them.
Sufism has had a growing influence in the West. The anarchist Hakim Bey
(Peter Lamborn Wilson) in particular has espoused Islam and celebrated
its heretics and outcasts.
Unlike Christianity and Islam, Hinduism has no room for a supreme
God in its unruly pantheon of gods and goddesses. At the same time, it
stresses the divine nature of the unique individual and encourages personal
autonomy. Its ethics can be summed up by the phrase ahimsa, meaning
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“no harm.” Like all the major religious traditions, it too has had its
libertarian movements and thinkers. The religious philosopher Aurobindo
Ghose, for example, argued that the ideal of humanity is to be found in the
natural association of free individuals outside the constricting and
mechanical nation-state. Although brought up as a Brahmin, Gandhi was
strongly influenced by Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism. He too considered a
form of “enlightened anarchy” to be the highest form of society where
“everyone is his own ruler, and . . . there is not political power because
there is no State.”10 He had a profound belief in the power of truth and like
Godwin believed that it would ultimately be victorious over error. In the
long run there was no need for government in a self-managing and
decentralised society based on the village councils. Society would then
become a community of communities. The Sarvodaya (“Welfare for All”)
movement in India and Sri Lanka continues to apply Gandhian principles
of non-violent resistance and the voluntary pooling of land and resources.
In the Far East, modern Daoism has taken on many of the attributes
and rituals of a religion but in its original form it was a strongly libertarian
philosophical and moral system. The Dao is older than any god and by its
very nature escapes concepts and words. The wise person goes with the
flow of the Dao. As the Daodejing, the most beautiful, oldest and
profound libertarian text in the world, puts it: “The world is ruled by
letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.”11 The
conclusions of the Daoist text Zhuang Zi are even more anarchistic: to
attempt to govern people with laws and regulations is impossible, “as well
as try to wade through the sea, to hew a passage through a river, or make a
mosquito fly away with a mountain!”12 If the natural dispositions of
humans are not perverted, there is simply no need for government. Some
later Daoists like Wu Nengzi were prepared to accept a degree of
governmental rule if not attached or deceived by it usefulness but the early
Daoists were undoubtedly forerunners of anarchism when they embraced
the universe as a whole, accepted the underlying unity and equality of all
things and beings, and advocated letting them go their own beneficial way.
Like Daoism, Buddhism is non-theistic. In its pure form it is more of a
system of ethics than a religion. Buddha is not considered divine but as a
symbol and living example of the enlightened person. Buddhism does not
therefore worship a personal deity or divine being but is concerned with
10 Mohandas Gandhi, Democracy: Real and Deceptive (Ahmedabad: Navajivan,
1961), 28-9.
11 Tao te ching, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Vintage, 1972),
section 48.
12 Chuang Tzu, trans. H. A. Giles (London: Unwin, 1980), 87.-------
xx
self-development. In self-disciplined freedom, all are equally capable of
enlightenment. Although it became institutionalised and sclerotic like
other world religions, its original message is deeply libertarian. While
recommending the teaching of the wise, as the Kalama Sutta makes clear,
it encourages free enquiry. Its practice of personal autonomy and selfdisciple
makes external government superfluous. Combined with Daoism
to form Zen, it can have profound nation-shaking and state-transforming
implications. And as Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth understood, living
the life of Buddha in the East or West does not need the law or the state.
It should by now be clear that religion itself is not inherently
authoritarian and hierarchical but that organised religions have an
unpleasant tendency to become so. The original message of the great
religious teachers to live a simple life, to share the wealth of the earth, to
treat each other with love and respect, to tolerate others and to live in
peace invariably gets lost as worldly institutions take over. Religious
leaders, like their political counterparts, accrue power to themselves, draw
up dogmas, and wage war on dissenters in their own ranks and the
followers of other religions. They seek protection from temporal rulers,
bestowing on them in return a supernatural legitimacy and magical aura.
They weave webs of mystery and mystification around naked power; they
join the sword with the cross and the crescent. As a result, in nearly all
cases organised religions have lost the peaceful and tolerant message of
their founding fathers, whether it be Buddha, Jesus or Mohammed.
For these reasons, anarchists, whatever their religious beliefs or lack of
them, have questioned and opposed the authority of religious leaders and
the rule of priests. They have tried to end the close alliance of church,
mosque and temple with government and the state. They have insisted on
the freedom of belief as well as the freedom of thought and action.
An increasing number of libertarian socialists and anarchists, including
myself, feel that the arguments against the existence of a tyrannical God
and the need for hierarchical institutions have been won. At the same time,
they are prepared to call themselves “spiritual” in a loose sense. While
continuing to oppose organised religion, the hierarchy and domination of
the church and mosque, and the imposition of a repressive morality, they
recognise that life is sacred, that the cosmos is inherently good, that all is
ultimately one. They believe that every created thing is divine. As mystics
have always known, to attain “union with God” or to be “at one” with the
universe goes beyond all organised religion, temporal laws, governments
and states. It involves a transformative experience which breaks down the
narrow boundaries of ego, nation and race and connects with all beings
and the cosmos as a whole.
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We can be spiritual without being a member of an authoritarian sect;
religious without joining a hierarchical organisation; moral without
obeying religious leaders or laws. We can be at one with God or the
universe and at the same time work for the betterment of humanity and the
well-being of the earth. We can read sacred texts and listen to the wise and
still think, judge and act for ourselves. We can enjoy voluntary poverty,
peace, fellowship and forgiveness in the garden of love. In short, we can
be deeply spiritual and still profoundly anarchist, one strand enriching and
enlarging the other in a widening circle of freedom.
http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/978-1-4438- ... sample.pdf 
. Christians struggle against governments, rulers, and spiritual wickedness (Ephesians 6:12). Honest people are too busy making an honest living to accept political power, so only the corruptible will accept political power (Judges 9:7-15 The Parable of the Trees). The devil offers all kingdoms to Jesus in return for worshipping him (Matthew 4:8-10). Also, Christian anarchists cite the Ten Commandments and its prohibition of theft as well as murder (both of which are associated with state power).
