Today some people claim that Christianity, rather than being an outdated superstition, can be a part of anarchism. They have started groups of “christian anarchists.” Have they any real claim to serious consideration?

What is anarchism? Anarchism means “no power”, no violent power, no power over people not exercised by themselves, no State. A State is also an organisation of people, but of a group of people who have taken all the power in a society into their hands to the detriment of the rest of society. Understood in this way, is anarchism at all compatible with Christian teachings?

The anarchism developed by Michael Bakunin was clearly anti-Christian. God is a Lord, a master. How can a slave of God be free? Impossible, said Bakunin. That’s why Bakunin urged anarchists to fight every religion, in particular Christendom. The “evil black book” should be burned: not even a museum reference copy is needed in the new free society.

The French philosopher and political scientist Jacques Ellul, a prominent theoretician of 20th century xtian anarchism, was a Protestant who based his xtian anarchism on the Old, not on the New Testament. He pointed to the fact that the Old Testament describes the life of Israel as rather anarchistic, that is if we see anarchism as hostility to the State, which is clearly the only functional definition of anarchism, not violence or terrorism. This brings another question. For many years Israel was governed by judges, and there was no monarchy. When God gave in and gave Israel a king he did this with the warning that he had given them a king and a big State because of their stubbornness, but that with a king they would be far worse off than without a king. Of the protagonists and godly persons of the Old Testament, Ellul (as a Protestant he gave great authority to the Old Testament) points out that strictly speaking only Joseph the Beautiful and the prophet Daniel collaborated with the State, with all the consequences this had. The vast majority of the prophets of the Old Testament, says Ellul, were anarchists, that is people who were absolutely not prepared to submit to those in power. They were prepared to lay down their lives and wanted to tell nothing but the truth to the king.

I don’t agree with Jacques Ellul, because the power of the judges was an embryonic form of the later authoritarian monarchical power. The power of the judges was not based on the general consensus of the community but on the decision of some charismatic talented person who took all the power into his hands, and this resulted in power usurpation in general. Once there are people at the top of some more or less local community why not put somebody at the top of the biggest community, the people, in this case the people of Israel? And this happened. At that point religion took on a new characteristic not seen previously: it became authoritarian.

The authoritarian element in religion made the priest into a bureaucrat, a leader, a commander, that is to say somebody who is not only a distributor of God’s graces, who not only calls, persuades and speaks about good and better, but who is a ruler, an expert in laws that have to be implemented and who compels people to implement those laws. This has led to the tragedy of the modern state supported by religion. Examples include the first and second world wars, where both sides were xtian, and had xtian priests bless the troops before they rush out to slaughter the other people of the other xtian country.

And then there is the letter of the apostle Paul to the Romans, the famous chapter 13, in which he says that everybody should submit to those in power. Xtian Statism was based on this text during the Middle Ages. Isn’t that shameful? After all, the apostle Paul spoke not only to the Middle Ages but he said at the very dawn of Christendom that we must submit to those in power. Where is the demarcation line, what is acceptable, what not? We won’t digress into the women-hating aspects of Paul’s character here, but much has been said on that issue by anarcho-feminists in particular.

Xtian anarchists often call attention to “Jesus’ temptation in the desert” describing how Satan offered Jesus power over all the kingdoms of the world if he worshipped him. Some xtian commentators, among them Jacques Ellul, stress that this means that State power comes from Satan because it is power combined with violence and coercion. The Gospels also tell of the unique miracle that happened when Jesus paid temple tax, a State tax due by all the Jews. Jesus asked the apostles to catch a fish and in its mouth they found a coin. By the ideas of those days this was a joke on the tax gatherers. It meant that the expression “give to the emperor what you owe to the emperor” doesn’t mean that one should give the emperor more but that one should give to the emperor just what one owes to him, not one cent more.

In this sense the exhortation of the apostle Paul means only that one should obey those in power, not go to extremes, not refuse to obey, but “Brothers, you are called to freedom”. Freedom is what it is all about for the apostle and his call to obey is made in the context of his sermon “On love”, where love is ready to do much, even to humiliate oneself. This leads to the question: when did the authoritarian principle get the upper hand in the xtian church? We must also note that Paul and most of the early xtian hierarchy fully endorsed the concept of slavery. And xtians right up to Lincoln’s proclamation abolishing slavery in the USA thumped the pulpit and used biblical verses to back up the fact that God likes slavery. A somewhat different approach from anarchists, and leads us to conclude that Bakunin was correct to urge that the “evil black book” should be burned. Bakunin would turn in his grave to hear that some modern folk consider themselves xtian anarchists, and thus take that evil book and its dodgy exhortations seriously.