I don’t believe in “creation care”. ¹ Creation care is too little too late. We are past the time when any of the changes that creation care advocates recommend will make any significant difference in our environmental situation. Recycling, changing light bulbs, riding bicycles, or starting a garden will not be sufficient to address the magnitude of the challenge before us.

I suspect creation care is a moralistic cover for our ongoing complicity in an evil system that is wreaking havoc on this planet. Creation care doesn’t recognize the depth of the mess we’re in. We are, as psychologist Bill Plotkin has asserted, an adolescent society that has not yet come to grips with what being a mature human being in this world requires. ² We use more energy to live our lives each day than any society in human history. We sustain an extractive economy that utilizes nonrenewable resources which have taken thousands of years to develop, and then expends them in a matter of decades.

Governments and corporations are working together now to do whatever it takes to keep this economic system going. We will drill deeper wells, cut down more trees, fight more wars, and cause more and more environmental chaos; all for the sake of economic growth and having more.

But we don’t have to monitor the ozone layer, measure melting glaciers, or count species depletion to know the destruction we are causing. We carry the environmental crisis in our bodies. We carry it in our bones. We talk about “environmental illness” as if the environment is killing us; but the environment is not our enemy. We are killing ourselves. The problem is not “out there”. ³

I don’t believe in creation care because the creation doesn’t need our care. The planet will survive even if the human species became extinct. The natural environment is astonishingly robust and resilient. West Virginia’s strip-mined mountains, the land fills in Calumet, and the polluted beaches in Louisiana horrify us. We should be angry and we should work on as many fronts as possible to end these violations of the earth. But nature will eventually flourish once again. We get fooled because the natural world works differently than we do. The time of the earth is not human time. Nature is not interested in speed.

The Bible tells us that God does not ignore the environmental destruction of our civilization. If need be God will enforce the Sabbath rest that God intended from the time of creation. Listen to Leviticus 26:34-35:

Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbath years as long as it lies desolate, or you are in the land of your enemies; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbath years. As long as it lies desolate, it shall have the rest it did not have on your Sabbath when you were living on it.

These verses are about Sabbath. They explain one reason why Israel is in exile. They are in exile because they did not give the land the rest it needed. God sends them away. The land “shall have the rest it did not have . . . when you were living on it.” God enforces Sabbath.

The environmental destruction being waged upon this planet is the result of our neglect of Sabbath. Hebrew religion took Sabbath so seriously they believed God had woven the Sabbath principle into the very grain of the universe. The pinnacle of the seven-day creation story was not the creation of woman and man, but Sabbath – the seventh day. If the people honor the Sabbath and “keep it holy” they and their children will be blessed. If the people will not honor the Sabbath then God will intervene and the land will lie desolate until it finds its rest. “It shall have the rest it did not have.”

Globalization has peaked and is already coming to an end. It is literally running out of fuel. Globalization is a finite process; despite its surface health and the appearance of being a powerful force overcoming all cultural and natural obstacles. Globalization is already coming to an end. The world will either willingly enter into a post-carbon age or be forced to do so. The earth “shall have the rest it did not have.”

But clearly globalization still has a lot of fuel left in the tank. The fact that it is a finite process fueled by finite physical and spiritual resources (yes, the demonic principalities and powers are also finite!) does not mean that globalization is not a force to be taken seriously, to be struggled against and to be resisted with every spiritual weapon at our disposal. Sabbath is one of those weapons.

Globalization is a set of practices contrary to everything that Sabbath demands. We cannot serve globalization and Sabbath. Sabbath is a revolutionary practice contrary to everything that the global economy demands. The work of Sabbath is perhaps the primary form of communal resistance for Christians in the years ahead. But our practice of Sabbath must be much broader and more systemic than just taking a regular day off. ⁴

The work of Sabbath will confront globalization head-on in terms of our energy use. One place I am looking to with hope and encouragement in these dark ages is the Transition Town movement. ⁵ Transition Towns is an international grassroots network of communities working to a post-carbon society. The aim of this movement is to equip local communities for the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil.

The key word for the Transition Town movement is not “creation care” but “energy descent” and the key practice is not “sustainability” but “resilience”. The human use of energy that began its ascent at the time of the Industrial Revolution must now begin to descend. “Energy descent” refers to the continual decline in the net energy it takes to support human society. This descent will be a long, bumpy, and perilous journey.

In working toward energy descent the crucial capacity that we need to develop is “resilience”. Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change. Resilience is the capacity of a local community to not break down as the environment around it becomes unstable. Resilience is a way of avoiding despair or being paralyzed by the overwhelming challenges ahead.

I do believe there are reasons to be hopeful. A post-carbon world beyond globalization need not be a barren, apocalyptic nightmare. Christians must once again do the work that Jesus called us to in announcing the kingdom of God. By announcing that kingdom Jesus was challenging us to begin re-imagining the shape of our lives. This is our calling today as well. ⁶

What does human life look like, what does Christian community life look like on the other side of peak oil and climate change? Given the certainty that dramatic changes are ahead of us how can we begin to live differently right now? We must begin to live into this coming Sabbath with the deep conviction that this will not be a lesser life than we have lived, but in fact a better life, a fuller life, a more beautiful life, a more abundant life. If we do not respond to the global crisis on our own, then God will enforce Sabbath, and the “land will have its rest”.

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series. For part one, go here.

There are many models for uprooting oppression in our communities. To offer one of many, the Hosanna! People’s Seminary approach is to discern particular areas of privilege and poverty within a community through a three part process: awareness of privilege and oppression in the community; accountability in the community to the oppressed party and to the continued education and development of the privileged party through ally training; and solidarity in relationship with the oppressed party or those allying with the oppressed party outside of the community.

For example, a group committed to rooting out abelism in their community and work would first grow in awareness of any ability-based disparities in privilege in the circle. To assist them in this task, they may seek out the help of an anti-oppression trainer, a trusted advisor, or a tool such as an accessibility audit.

In the second stage, the group would become accountable to fighting abelism in their community by taking tangible measures such as sustained study and prayer (which would heighten awareness), making structural changes to community spaces (to improve accessibility), and changing prayer language and challenging theological assumptions (for example where disability is equated with immorality). They might also identify areas where they are currently unwilling to change and be accountable to that decision.

For example, if their weekly vigil location is inaccessible, they may make a statement on their website or newsletter acknowledging that this is the case and share something about their process. This might include some of the following: an expression of awareness: We are aware that this makes our vigil inaccessible for those who use wheelchairs; a clarification of priorities in conflict: We feel that convening on the front steps of the capitol building is of high enough symbolic and strategic value to the vigil that we will continue to meet there; an expression of dissatisfaction and sadness with the present situation: We mourn the fact that this will block some friends and new members from joining…; a commitment to pursuing this issue with due diligence through other avenues: and are committed to creating opportunities where those with disabilities are able to fully participate; an expression of openness to the situation changing in the future: We are still praying on these kinds of decisions and; a request for feedback and praying-with: hope you pray with us and share your insights with us. Where change is not possible right away, this type of admission helps to break the normalizing impact of silence. ¹

Finally, the community will grow in solidarity around this issue outside of their work, strengthening the wider movement for the oppressed group. They may join an action alert network (to know when local legislation is threatening, say, public transportation resources for people living with disabilities), give a presentation on their process to become a more accessible, just community at a regional gathering of similar communities or organizations, or give disability activists space in their platforms (for example, allowing a disabled veterans group to speak at their anti-war vigil).

Of course, most communities will find themselves in a few of these stages at once, circling continually in an unending process of becoming. Moreover, if we are indeed living decentered, multi-centered lives across and in between multiple borders, the process of undoing oppression in our communities will be a decentered, multi-centered process. As such, we gather at the roundtable in turns as representatives of the ruling class and the underdogs. Even as we keep our seats, the seat of true and false power shifts easily with the sudden interjection of a new idea—but what about us people of color in this conversation? What about us women? What about us poor people? And whatever the language of “allies” and “the oppressed,” those poor souls with the most privilege at the table may need the most attentive care. Jesus warned after all that the rich man would have the greatest difficulty entering the Kin-dom. ²

To prepare for such work, several tools and attitudes might be cultivated. Most practically, in addition to choosing one or two anti-oppression/ally training modalities, there must be some framework or community agreement which lays out basic truth claims of the circle, aims and means, and processes for conflict transformation.

Important to this framework is a commitment to approaching anti-oppression/liberation work not as fight against any particular people but rather always as a fight against the powers and principalities which bind everyone to the evil of oppression in all its forms. In this light those most intimately impacted by an issue at hand, their supportive friends, as well as those who have not come to understand the value of addressing the issue are all held in love and concern by those doing anti-oppression/liberation work in the circle, even where some people are detrimental to the process.

Equally important to this is making sacred space for those who do believe in the importance of the work to build roundtable ministries to express their feelings, tell their stories, craft their messages, gain tools and resources, and build networks of support. When we find our gifts turned away at the primary tables of our communities, churches, jobs, or neighborhoods—when we are turned away hungry from those tables—we need to find places to feed one another and be fed. This ensures that those who are ready to feast together may do so undeterred by organizational dynamics of denial and delay. I have witnessed the value of these safe and challenging spaces in my work.

Last year I was a part of an interracial young women’s theological space where most of the participants were members of white dominant organizations or working in fields where anti-racism work may be viewed as distracting or divisive. These women were able to build a roundtable mission of mutual solidarity against racism, sexism, and homophobia, learning to articulate the stories of their own sacred hunger (and sacrilegious glut) without being told they were distracting from more important issues or divisive to the community. From this base of new friendship and support, some were able to address oppression in their communities and some were simply better able to cope with the oppression they experienced because of the moral and spiritual support of their secondary group.

After a community has earnestly prayed in gratitude for the grace that will transform them and taken practical steps toward building a roundtable mission of mutual solidarity by engaging in anti-oppression/liberation modalities and other tools, and forming communities of support, the community is ready for step three. Start again. The unfinalizable ³ work of theological praxis for radical community building is just that: unfinalizable. If a community perseveres in prayer as they begin to uproot one injustice, their vision will expand just enough to reveal the incompleteness of their efforts. To start again, and again, and again, a community must grow in humility and humor, and build sustaining friendships with those outside of the community who can offer encouragement, guidance, and fresh inspiration.

Most importantly, those of us doing this work must not do it in the hopes of building perfect roundtable missions. We work with the ingredients (ideas, prayers, resources, and so on) we have acquired by gift or harvest at any one given time. We cook and eat with whoever comes to the table. We cannot go “shopping” for the Spirit nor can we fix the menu at her table. Let us therefore cook and feed and be fed by one another simply for the joy of making room for one more, and one more again, all around the roundtable.

“The real transformation of society will come only in love, in work, and in stillness.” – Gustav Landauer, 1907

For two centuries, anarchism has been a dynamic conversation centered around the nature of freedom and authority, the roots of domination, practices of decentralization and organization from below, the relationship between means and ends, and visions of what an alternative to authoritarian society might look like.  This conversation has encompassed a dizzying array of perspectives: syndicalist, primitivist, red, green, left, post-left, anti-left, feminist, insurrectionary, platformist, post-structuralist, individualist, communitarian, violent, pacifist, and on and on. While frequently trenchant in their social analysis, and sometimes beautiful in their practice, these myriad anarchisms have nevertheless suffered from a dogged secularity and superficiality — and have neglected the necessity of an inward, spiritual revolution.

But gradually, the anarchisms of the 21st century are shedding their modernist trappings (e.g. progress, rationality and scientism).  Hopefully this opening will provide space in the conversation for one person from the past who could shed light on the next step forward: Gustav Landauer. Landauer—writer, journalist, translator, activist, mystic, university dropout, and, many believe, saint—has remained relatively anonymous due to his penchant for mysticism as well as the dearth of English translations of his works.  In recent years, however, that has begun to change, thanks in part to the new translation of Gustav Landauer’s political writings (Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader). We now have the opportunity to welcome a one hundred-year-old voice back into the conversation of re-imagining a new society. This voice, which I’m calling ‘a contemplative anarchism,’ rests on two pillars: an inward transformation and prefiguring alternatives to power and domination.

Born in 1870 to middle-class, Jewish parents in southern Germany, in his youth Landauer began to flirt with Marxism and worked as a union organizer. He saw up close the vast misery of the poor and working class of Berlin.  More than their material poverty, however, the “spiritual degeneration” Landauer witnessed left the biggest impact on him. He observed the rapid industrialization and urbanization of Germany and deemed it noxious to the spiritual lives of Germans.  He began to develop an anti-political politics that sought the abolition, rather than the dictatorship, of the proletariat, and fleshed out his evolving anarchism in the paper that he helped edit, Der Sozialist (ironically, an anarchist paper.)

Repeatedly imprisoned in the 1890’s for his ‘libelous’ writing, Landauer found in jail a kind of monastery where he discovered the sermons and writings of the medieval Dominican monk, Meister Eckhart.  Following his prison experience, Landauer wrote that if we “allow ourselves to sink to the depths of our being and to reach the inner core of our most hidden nature, then we will find the most ancient and complete community: a community encompassing not only all of humanity but the entire universe.”  Freedom, Landauer discovered, was only in a political activism borne out of spiritual experience.  The anarchist, he mused, was one who “has unearthed the desire that tells him who he truly wants to be.” This was not some ethereal escape, however; Landauer believed that in the end this mystical consciousness led to life in relationship and community.

Not surprisingly, Landauer was viewed as highly idiosyncratic by many of his radical contemporaries.  He had little interest in the industrial order, the anarcho-syndicalist program, or cities—this last fact illustrated by his move in 1903 from Berlin to an old village outside the city with his wife and children.  Reverberating through his writings are words and phrases like quiet, stillness, contemplation, spirit, life, creativity, regeneration, and inner balance.  To be radical is to be the opposite of superficial. “Those who want to create life,” he wrote in 1901, “must be reborn from within.”

In the anarchist conversations of his day, Landauer was never averse to criticizing those who saw the ends as justifying the means.  In the midst of his spiritual awakening, anarchism suddenly erupted on the world scene: in September of 1901, U.S. president William McKinley was assassinated by a self-described anarchist. Shortly after, Landauer published an essay, perhaps his finest, “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism.” “Whoever kills,” Landauer seethed, “dies.” The anarchists of the so-called ‘propaganda of the deed’ were not “anarchic” enough, reminding him of “simple-minded reform politics.”  In contrast to the violence of both the state and these anarchists, Landauer asserted that there is only “one real power: the power of the spirit—as demonstrated by Jesus.”

Though Landauer never became a Christian—his spirituality was often nebulous and hard to pin down—he was inspired by Peter Chelcicky (who he calls a “Christian anarchist”) and the Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy. In part because of his friendship with the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, Landauer always maintained his Judaism, later in life becoming fascinated with the Hasidics and in particular the great spiritual master, the Baal Shem Tov. Landauer had the reputation for being sometime of a conservative, for he saw, unlike the Bakuninist anarchists of his day who believed in the destruction of all customs and institutions, much worth conserving from the past. For instance, in a letter written to a woman who proposed abolishing marriage, Landauer responded, “It would be madness to dream of abolishing the few forms of union that remain to us! We need form, not formlessness. We need tradition.”

Many of the traditions of the past Landauer admired were found in what he called “the Christian era”—i.e. the middle ages.  With its folk traditions, guilds, peasantry, mysticism, and art, Landauer saw in their social organization a “society of societies” much healthier than the urban, technological world of modern Germany. With a medieval nostalgia, he called for autonomous rural communities: places where people could return to “natural labor” and the “union of intellectual and manual labor, of artisanry and agriculture, of education and work, of play and work”.

Landauer wanted his critics in the movement to understand that a contemplative anarchism did not imply isolation, insularity or resignation:

“Oh, no! One acts with others…[O]ne supports farmers’, consumers’, and tenants’ cooperatives; one creates public gardens and libraries; one leaves the cities and works with spade and shovel; one simplifies one’s material life for the sake of spiritual luxury; one organizes and educates; one struggles for the creation of new schools and forms of education…[But] [n]one of this will really bring us forward if it is not based on a new spirit won by the conquest of one’s inner self.”

In these words we find a manifesto-like description of his entire project: economic alternatives via cooperatives, work on the land, pursuing alternative education, voluntary poverty, and, most significantly, a robust (albeit vague) spirituality.<

Landauer’s most famous words appear in a 1910 article, “Weak Statesmen, Weaker People!” in which he was the first to break with classical anarchism’s notion that domination primarily came from capitalism and the state, and therefore the physical destruction of those institutions would bring about a radical transformation of society:

“The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.”

These words anticipate the 21st century anarchist analysis that power is a network, residing throughout society and even within the individual.  Although the state is certainly a network of institutions and places (prisons, police stations, armies, INS, etc.), it is also, significantly, a vast decentralized network of surveillance and power relations in which we govern each other (what Foucault called ‘governmentality.’) “[I]t is becoming increasingly obvious,” Landauer wrote, “that the state is not based on men of strong spirit and natural power. It is increasingly based on the ignorance and passiveness of the people.” We have voluntarily, if unconsciously, become slaves to power.

Landauer did not believe that we need to wait for ‘The Revolution’ to topple ‘The System.’  Instead, it is something we can begin now by “relating to one another differently.”  Rather than ‘smashing the state,’ Landauer sought to ‘opt out’—that is, refuse to give any positive energy to the state through voting, lobbying, or paying taxes. The General Strike was important to Landauer’s tactical strategy. If people could work for themselves and their needs within small, decentralized communities, and not for their capitalist bosses, there might be a chance of rendering the state superfluous.

Occupy Wall Street, the latest movement to join the ongoing anarchist conversation, appears to be putting into practice elements of Gustav Landauer’s anti-political politics.  To the extent that this movement becomes a protest movement—making demands on, and thus legitimizing, the powers-that-be—Occupy will lose its value.  But if it continues to follow (consciously or not) the strategy of Landauer, which seems to be happening, a new culture could emerge. “Look for the cracks in capitalism and find ways to escape the economic war,” Landauer cautioned. “Figure out how to no longer produce for capitalism’s commodity market, but to satisfy your own needs.” The proliferation of kitchens, libraries, health clinics, media centers, and new economic structures such as perma-banking (based on the gift economy), are all manifestations of people acting on their real freedom here and now.

Any individual or community attempting to create a vibrant, healthy society free from domination—whether Occupy, the Catholic Worker, or one of Hakim Bey’s “autonomous zones”–would do well to take seriously  Landauer’s advice that we need to be spiritually rooted, and able to live now in the society we wish to create. Without spiritual rootedness, movements will lack the interiority to resist dominating one another or to be a subject of domination. And without a means to sustain our bodily needs, these movements will be forced to depend, ultimately, on the oppressive relationships that fuel capitalism and the state. Landauer believed both practices could happen best on the land, for he saw that the profound damage we have incurred from the afflictions of domination could most acutely be healed when closer to the rhythms of nature and the land, and that these roots offer a locus to meet our basic needs.  So let’s welcome the wise voice of Gustav Landauer back into this critical conversation.

In this episode, Mark and Sarah interview Shannon T.L. Kearns.

Shannon writes as the anarchist reverend. He is a seminary graduate (M.Div 2009 from Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York) on the ordination path who also happens to be a transsexual man. Many of his theological musings are on the intersection of theology and being trans*. He also writes about Christian anarchism and his dreams for the future.

He is the co-founder and co-director of Camp Osiris, a camp for young adults aged 18-23 to come together and talk about the intersections between their sexualities/gender identities and their various spiritualities. The camp is located in Minnesota and welcomes youth from all over the country.

He is also the founder of House of the Transfiguration, a new church plant in Minneapolis.

He is the winner of the 2008 Queertopia homoletics preaching competition and has preached numerous times in various churches. He has also provided churches and other groups with Transgender 101 workshops and discussions.  The anarchist reverend resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Download this interview for 99¢ suggested cost. However, you can give as much or as little (even zero) as you choose.

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Intro and bumper music for this episode is De Usuahia a la Quiaca by Gustavo Santaolalla.

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth of a series offering a primer on Christian Anarchism. Please read part one, part two, and part three before proceeding. 

In working through this series (where I’ve oh-so-briefly explored the complementarity of the way of Jesus and anarchism and the way the anarchic impulse has been expressed in Christian scriptures and history), I’ve realized a few things. Firstly, so much more work needs to be done. Commenters in earlier parts of this series have rightfully pointed out weak spots in my analysis, neglected historical figures, or unfleshed biblical strands.

Secondly, no matter how sophisticated or compelling one’s arguments, people have always (and will always) declare with certainty that anarchism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible. Let me give a classic example. Someone reposted part one of this series on anarchistnews.org. Predictably, many comments reflected this sentiment:

What’s anarchistic with worshipping and serving a man, anyways? Socialist perhaps… fascistic, absolutely.

Many anarchists I know assume that, at best, Christian Anarchists are either anarchists who refuse to let go of their childhood fantasies or Christians who really don’t understand anarchism. To be fair, I suspect that their suspicions are correct, more often than not.

Anarchism, particularly as a loose set of principles, doesn’t often “play well” with Christianity. For one to be a Christian Anarchist, one would be considered fringe by the vast majority of Christians in history. But one would also be considered fringe by most anarchists as well. After all, “no gods, no masters” is a well-embraced slogan by most anarchists.

According to the Anarchist FAQ:

So there is a minority tradition within anarchism which draws anarchist conclusions from religion. However, as we noted in section A.2.20, most anarchists disagree, arguing that anarchism implies atheism and it is no coincidence that the biblical thought has, historically, been associated with hierarchy and defence of earthly rulers. Thus the vast majority of anarchists have been and are atheists, for “to worship or revere any being, natural or supernatural, will always be a form of self-subjugation and servitude that will give rise to social domination. As [Bookchin] writes: ‘The moment that human beings fall on their knees before anything that is ‘higher’ than themselves, hierarchy will have made its first triumph over freedom.’”

…Clearly, a Christian anarchist would have to be as highly selective as non-anarchist believers when it comes to applying the teachings of the Bible…if non-anarchist believers are to be considered as ignoring the teachings of the Bible by anarchist ones, the same can be said of them by those they attack…

Moreover idea that Christianity is basically anarchism is hard to reconcile with its history. The Bible has been used to defend injustice far more than it has been to combat it. In countries where Churches hold de facto political power, such as in Ireland, in parts of South America, in nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain and so forth, typically anarchists are strongly anti-religious because the Church has the power to suppress dissent and class struggle. Thus the actual role of the Church belies the claim that the Bible is an anarchist text.

Before I dig in, I want to raise, as honestly as possible, some the challenges to the pairing of “Christianity” and “anarchism.” I’m not talking about the obvious ones that your gun-toting baptist uncle would tell you. I’m talking about the tensions that arise between Christian and “secular” anarchists. This isn’t an exhaustive list, so feel free to add more in the comments section. However, they are the ones I hear most often.

Religion is based upon hierarchy and authority, but anarchists reject such crap. 

Sure. Some definitions of religion assume a controlling dominant God. Furthermore, most definitions and expressions of religion also assume social structures and hierarchies that most anarchists reject. Christian Anarchists usually get at this in one of two ways: a) They say the anarchist critique doesn’t apply to God and God-ordained systems…that anarchism is only about “man-made” things. b) They suggest that it is possible to hold communally shared spiritual beliefs and practices and stories without affirming social hierarchies and authority (as typically defined).

I fall into that second category. I don’t believe that it makes any sense to say “God is such a big King that he obliterates all other kings…therefore, I’m an anarchist.” Rather, I would say “The way in which God sustains and shapes existence…and calls us to be in deeper relationship is the opposite of how Kings function…therefore, I am an anarchist.” To quote the late Dorothee Soelle:

Obedience presupposes duality: one who speaks and one who listens; one who knows and one who is ignorant; a ruler and ruled ones. Religious groups who broke away from the spirit of dependency and obedience cherish different values such as mutuality and interdependence…The main virtue of an authoritarian religion is obedience…God’s love and righteousness are less important than God’s power…why do people worship a God whose supreme quality is power, not justice; whose interest lies in subjection, not in mutuality; who fears equality?” ¹

Jesus is an unking. I worship the one who calls me friend. But I don’t think it would be accurate to say that I “obey” him in the way that servants obey masters. That is just a first step–a metaphor. Just as most green anarchists believe they should respect, cherish, and affirm nature, I am called to worship and love the source of life. Semantics? Not to me.

Christianity affirms things like “discipleship” and “submission”, whereas anarchists would reject such concepts.

But what about the very clear language of discipleship and submission in the New Testament? I’ve already explored the anarchist impulse in the New Testament, so I’m not going to argue about whether or not the New Testament supports social hierarchies (I think some of it does, and some of it doesn’t–but I don’t worship the New Testament…nor do I think my goal in life is to follow the New Testament). Rather, my focus here is how one can be anti-authoritarian and still affirm discipleship and submission.

Let’s tackle submission first. I’m a big fan of mutual submission (all of those one-another statements in the New Testament make it clear that our goal is interdependence and mutuality, not individual freedom). To me, this shouldn’t pose a problem for anarcho-communists or those group who affirm consensus. After all, consensus is simply a structure for mutual submission. To me, mutual submission goes deeper than consensus. Consensus recognizes the value of each voice. But, as the apostle Paul teaches regarding spiritual gifts and mutuality, sometimes we need to submit to the one in our midst who is clearly speaking a spirit-filled word.

Our goal isn’t simply to all agree with one another. Rather, it is to discern the Spirit in our midst, and all agree together concerning the way in which the Spirit is moving.

And it is assumed that there are some who are wiser about discerning the Spirit–who have deeper practices in the way of Jesus. These folks are often considered elders and they can mentor folks just starting out in the way of Jesus. This is what discipleship is all about. Is it hierarchical? Perhaps, but if it is, it is a dynamic hierarchy rather than a static one. The goal of discipleship should never be to have permanent leaders. Rather, it should be to recognize wisdom where it is found, and to learn from that wisdom. Even anarchists do that.

Many (perhaps most) anarchists support the use of revolutionary violence. But most “Christian anarchists” are pacifists.

Not all Christian anarchists are pacifists. Just as not all “secular” anarchists reject nonviolence. Nevertheless, Christian anarchists tend towards pacifism. While some traditional groups (like traditional Anabaptists) embrace a meeker pacifism of passive nonresistance, most Christian groups with an anarchic impulse support a more proactive nonviolence. Why? Because Jesus’ challenged his followers to love their enemies and “turn the other cheek” when struck. For many (if not most) Christian anarchists, the anarchic vision begins with Jesus’ loving mutuality that challenges social divisions and triumphs over the Powers.

Furthermore, many Christian anarchists are inspired by a future vision of shalom free from violence (even violence against non-human animals). And, since many also believe (exemplified, perhaps, by the Quakers) that the Inner Light exists within all people, Christian Anarchism tends to have a hopeful view of God’s ability to transform all people.

To many anarchists, these items of faith are foolish distractions that, at best, make Christian anarchists dopey and irrelevant. At worst, Christian anarchists are pawns of oppression (folks like Ward Churchill and Peter Gelderloos have been particularly vocal in rejecting anarcho-pacifism).

To be fair, this tension exists apart from Christian anarchism, though most proponents of nonviolence have been influenced by those great modern figures who were, in turn, influenced by Jesus Christ (such as Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King).

To be honest, I’m not sure I see this tension ever being resolved. Perhaps the best way to live with each other in our shared hopes for a new world is for proponents of nonviolence to remain humble about their critique of revolutionary violence while those who want to utilize a “diversity of tactics” should recognize the wisdom to be learned from nonviolent traditions.

It is also important, I think, to remember that Jesus’ teachings aren’t the same as Gandhi’s. Many Christians have mistakenly assumed that, based upon Jesus’ life and teachings, that everything we think of as “violent” is off-limits. When, clearly, Jesus engaged in such things as property destruction, verbal abuse, and civil disobedience. rather than developing an absolutist code, we would be better served by engaging Scripture in the midst of the practice of communal discernment in particular contexts.

Anarchists are against structures like the State, whereas many who profess “Christian Anarchism” are merely indifferent to the State, advocating a sort of “Two Kingdoms” theology.

This is a subtle issue. Many traditional Anabaptists and many neo-Anabaptists hold the view that there are two kingdoms, each of which should be kept totally separate. The idea is that, once you become a Christian, you have nothing to do with the kingdom of the world, since you are now a part of the Kingdom of God. You can’t be a soldier or in the government. You shouldn’t vote. But, if folks want to be soldiers or in the government or engage in oppression in that “other” kingdom–the kingdom of this world–that is their choice and we should leave them to it. We’ll render to God what is God’s and let Caesar go about his regular business.

This has led some folks (like Greg Boyd) to conclude that we shouldn’t get involved with protesting. Many who have read Boyd and Yoder come to the conclusion that our prophetic witness is in being a Kingdom alternative, not in directly challenging the State (or, perhaps, other structures of oppression?).

I reject this line of thinking, as do many other Christian anarchists. I don’t believe that our only witness results in pulling people out of oppressive structures into radical Christian community. I used to think that way, but I’ve found that you can’t create a healthy alternative without also becoming adept at naming and engaging in acts of resistance against systems of oppression. Yes, there is a danger of simply getting sucked into the system with its ways of managing oppression. But if we are too afraid of getting out hands “dirty,” we will simply end up with little farms and urban intentional communities that think they are free from taint, yet still (unwittingly) embodying the oppressiveness found in larger society within their own mini-societies.

At least Christians are diverse. Anarchism is young, white, and male.

I am a white male. And so are a majority of self-described anarchists. However, most self-described Christians are neither white nor male. This is due to a whole host of reasons (having to do with the history of colonialism and the birth of early anarchism). This difference is probably worth a whole series of posts (by someone far better suited for addressing it than I). However, it remains that while Christianity has found ways of sparking liberatory imaginations among marginalized groups in ways that aren’t true for anarchists. This isn’t because of the superiority of Christianity (history reveals that Christianity has been pretty shitty at undoing oppressions). And it may be because 1 billion people are more likely to nurture pockets of diversity than thousands of anarchists are. Nevertheless, the diversity of Christian expressions provides more opportunities for people of color, older people, and non-males to have a voice.

It is a frequently a challenge to find a place within anarchist circles if you aren’t a white male.

When you join Christianity and anarchism, it gets even harder to nurture a safe place. It is like combining the whiteness of anarchism with the heteronormativity and latent patriarchalism of Christianity. Which certainly gives us a great deal to work on here, doesn’t it?

* * * * *

That’s it for now. I’ve barely scratched the surface. Consider this more of an invitation to dialogue than a definitive article. If you think I’ve skipped anything important (which I’m sure I have), feel free to add more tensions (and discuss them) in the comments.

The challenge here, I think, is to recognize that it is fair to see Christian anarchism as both a part of the development of early anarchism as well as a unique tradition in its own right. Whether we like it or not, those who embrace Christian anarchism are going to find it difficult to really “fit in” with the mainstream anarchist crowd or with the mainstream Christian crowd.

The temptation is to try to force it. To try to show why our views fit “perfectly” within our theological traditions or to show anarchists how we’re just like them (except that we pray). I don’t think we should try too hard to fit in at all, rather, we should own our peculiarity and let it become our strength. Let us focus on how we can offer a unique perspective and give flesh to that perspective. Instead of trying to blend in, we should find a way to speak loudly and forge a path that seeks to be faithful to be Jesus in increasingly poignant ways.

In my next post, I’ll summarize with an exploration on why, given the history of Christianity and the tensions with other anarchic approaches, it is better to embrace a Christianity that affirms the anarchic trajectory of the Way of Jesus on its own terms than adding “Christian Anarchism” to the pile of various anarchisms.

I. Shades of Green

In Dorothy Day’s reminiscences of her Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin, she recalled his attraction to the grass that stubbornly grew up between the cobblestones of New York City, and how he knew that the concrete of the metropolis could not entirely eliminate the teeming green world underneath it. Peter, a village peasant by birth (and at heart), believed that the source of the problems of modern society lay in the sterile life of industrialism. He used the metaphor of a “blind alley” to describe our contemporary predicament.  “We cannot move forward to get out.  We can only go back,” he quipped. Peter believed that we could escape the alley by embracing what he called a “Green Revolution” which was imbued with the culture of the middle ages, where villagers and monks lived a leisurely ¹ existence close to the earth, practiced subsistence farming on communally owned land, extended hospitality, and participated in a local guild and crafts-based society.

Peter originally envisaged the Catholic Worker as a movement rooted in the land, one that would send people out to be apostles to marginalized city dwellers. And though they primarily flocked to the city houses, many of the early Catholic Workers saw their simple, communal, low-tech lifestyle not only as a way to create a society where it is easier to be good, but also as a resistance to the social order centered around the insidious machine. “The Catholic Worker is a revolutionary movement,” wrote early Catholic Worker farmer Catherine Reser, adding provocatively, “It intends the destruction of the present industrial society.”

Given the radicalism of the movement, it is not surprising that many Catholic Workers have turned towards anarchism – defined as the attempt to eradicate all domination – as the political philosophy and way of life to channel their revolutionary impulses. Notably, however, Peter largely eschewed the label “anarchist,” ² perhaps stemming from his dissatisfaction with the insufficient depth of analysis of the anarchists of his day, who, with few exceptions, desired the re-ordering of industrial society, not its dissolution.

In the early days of the Worker, anarchists were largely “red,” ³ seeking a communist order from below, circumventing the State in their creation of such a society. Focused principally on the abolition of capitalism and the nation-state, such anarchists left unchallenged the urban, techno-industrial foundation of the social order. In the last decade, however, a different flavor of anarchism has emerged, one that has a certain harmony with at least some of those early Catholic Worker aims: green anarchism.

In his essay, “Twilight of the Machines,” John Zerzan, undoubtedly the most outspoken and uncompromising green anarchist in North America today, nicely summarizes several of the new emphases within anarchism. “Until now,” Zerzan writes, “every modern anti-capitalist movement had at its core an acceptance of the expansion of the means of production and the continuing development of technology. Now there is an explicit refusal of this productionist orientation.” One might gripe that Zerzan is here ignoring the witness, imperfect as it is, of the Catholic Worker movement.  After all, when asked about the use of machines, Peter Maurin tersely responded, “let them rust.” Or Dorothy Day, frequently miscast as a union-urbanist, often noted the ugliness of industrialism. In a remarkable reflection on work in the fall of 1946, Day wrote, “At one time the fathers of the desert led men out by the fifty thousand. There were mass movements from the cities…Now is the call [away] from the cities.” One otherwise admiring historian of the movement fumes about what he calls Day’s “loom-and-hoe luddism,” ⁴ wondering why she won’t just get with the technological program.  Other less-known writers filled the pages of The Catholic Worker in the early days with diatribes against specialization, the denigration of the whole person through factory life, and the mechanization of agriculture.

Those early Catholic Workers, radical as they were, primarily had access to—and  were therefore influenced by—Euro-American history. Thus, they saw in the European Middle Ages a kind of pre-industrial and pre-capitalist Golden Age, in which a sacramental view of the material world pervaded all aspects of life and society. While green anarchists also “look back” in order to find the way forward, they broaden the scope far beyond the Middle Ages in their search for a more sane way of life. Green anarchists have engaged deeply the recent developments within archeological and anthropological circles that have upended the long-held assumption that pre-civilized life was, as Thomas Hobbes famously wrote, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The evidence shows that the hunter-gatherer way of life—that is, the way of life for 99% of human existence on this earth—was, and still is, much more leisurely and peaceable than our own modern culture. Living without police, laws, taxes, slavery, environmental ruin, cities, kings, or money, hunter-gatherers were, one might say (anarchronistically), the first anarchists. With this insight into pre-history, green anarchists thus see industrialism, capitalism, globalization, and the nation-state as merely the most pernicious symptoms of what they understand to be the fundamental problem—the 10,000 year-old malady we call civilization.

Defined as the ‘culture of cities,’ civilization denotes the historical transition from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer way of life (‘paleolithic’) to a sedentary, agricultural one (‘neolithic’). Agriculture led to the development of surplus, which initiated, inexorably, a variety of hierarchies that created a wealthy, hoarding elite.  From there, increased concentration of resources led to social stratification, the institution of kingship, and perhaps most significantly, the birth of the city.

Tragically, only a few hunter-gatherers still exist, although some tribes have managed to resist the global tidal wave of civilization. One particularly fascinating community that has received much attention in recent years is the Piraha, an Amazonian tribe indigenous to central Brazil, about whose non-civilized lives Daniel Everett, a linguist and once missionary, has written extensively. Everett sees the Piraha’s “immediacy of experience” as crucial to understanding this unusual people. They live almost entirely without symbolic culture and abstraction.  Fascinatingly, they have no words for colors, only descriptions from their daily lives (e.g. red is a certain shade of blood or a flower in the forest). Like other primitive peoples, they don’t feel anxiety about the future or the past. They have no concept of time. For instance, they could be hunting at 3am or 3pm. What food is foraged, grown, or hunted is immediately shared.  When asked about surplus, the Piraha say that they store food “in their brother’s belly.” In contrast to western civilization’s frequent equation of work with drudgery, they imbue all of their labor with joy and playfulness. And, as Everett observed, any tasks that modern society could label as “work,” spans no more than 20 hours a week. Without idealizing them, we can see in the Piraha many illustrations of what a more balanced culture looks like.

Inspired by such tribal societies, green anarchists yearn to break free from the human illusion of control that arose with the advent of agriculture and civilization. Much like Catholic Workers, who seek to create a new society within the shell of the old, green anarchists wish to live in a world abounding with mutual aid, undomesticated spontaneity, oneness, and presence.

II. Blowing the Dynamite

Peter Maurin referred to the Green Revolution as both an intellectual synthesis and a technique of action. The current cross-pollination between green anarchism and radical Christianity, and in particular the Catholic Worker movement, is a unique and potentially fruitful opportunity for broadening this synthesis and sharpening our technique through mutual learning, a deepening analysis, skill-sharing, and overall collaboration. If Catholic Workers, whose steady witness of community, practice of hospitality, work on the land, and familiarity with resistance work, could partner with green anarchists, who put forward an astute assessment of our society’s predicament, the potential is limitless. The remainder of this essay suggests some specific areas—though certainly not a comprehensive list—for such cooperation.

Re-inhabitation of the land. Green anarchism helps to remind the Catholic Worker of Peter Maurin’s original vision, for as important as it was to him to practice the works of mercy, he knew that, ultimately, we could only create a new society by going to the roots – ‘back to the land, back to Christ!’, he would proclaim. Unfortunately, since Peter’s death, many Catholic Workers, like the broader culture around them, too frequently have tended to be unstable, migratory, and urban; namely, rootless. As a step toward integrating all three points of Peter’s “three-point program,” Catholic Workers would do well to enact the green anarchist proposal to truly inhabit, intimately and over the long haul, the bioregions in which we dwell.

Gary Snyder, ⁵ a green anarchist who was a key developer of a bioregional consciousness, sought to re-articulate a politics centered around watersheds, or shared eco-systems in general, rather than around artificial boundaries such as cities, states, or nations. He argues that it is in everybody’s interest to practice good stewardship of the land, regardless of political affiliation. The land, Snyder observes, “will welcome whoever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there.”

One of the first ingredients in re-inhabitation of the land is, of course, the knowledge of how to produce one’s own food. As much as the hunter-gatherer way of living was viable for so much of humanity’s existence, most people, including green anarchists, would admit that it is nearly impossible for our entire population to return to that state. But neither can society afford to rely on increasingly industrialized, distant, and genetically altered “food” (even if it does happen to be found in a dumpster.) Even many organic farms fall prey to the logic of industrialist agriculture, becoming more and more reliant on oil-consuming machines. ⁶ Fortunately, alternatives that take into account the inherent problems of agriculture (concentration, social stratification, cities), but which also take seriously the need to feed people, are slowly gaining traction within Catholic Worker circles – Masanobu Fukuoka’s natural farming, Wes Jackson’s no-till perennial polyculture, Wendell Berry’s pre-industrial agriculture, and Bill Mollison’s permanent agriculture. All four of these philosopher-practitioners have been making significant contributions to a budding counter-paradigm in food production.

Green Anarchism Meets Scripture. Following in the footsteps of Jacques Ellul, a biblical scholar who engaged anarchism as the main political option for Christians, Ched Myers is a current theologian utilizing a green anarchist lens to re-read Scripture. Myers has persuasively argued that the Bible “represents the world’s first systematic ideology of resistance to the project of civilization.”

As the Judeo-Christian narrative of origins goes, Eden was a locus of natural abundance, a place where God and creation, including humans, enjoyed full harmony with one another.  But after Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, humanity was doomed to a life of agricultural toil. Their son Cain was the world’s first murderer and founder of the first city, “Enoch.” Humanity’s Fall continued, arriving finally at that ultimate symbol of standardization, the Tower of Babel. Their “ascent” was, in fact, a descent into civilization.  In ten chapters of the book of Genesis we have a sharp juxtaposition: leisurely abundance and harmony with God in paradise against the doomed project of centralization, standardization, and civilization.  God, however, sought a new people, a wilderness people who would witness against the hubris of the Tower.  He called Abram out of civilization into the wilderness to create a people distinct from the reigning city-states.

Deserts, rocks, mountain tops, burning bushes, caves, forests, hills, rivers, and oak trees are all places where the central characters of Scripture encounter divinity. Jesus himself began his subversive ministry with a vision quest in the wilderness. Jesus’ anti-civilization stance is clear when, for instance, he says that “Solomon in all his glory” (an allusion, Myers tells us, to the “zenith of Israel’s civilization”) does not even compare in beauty to a single wild flower. The early Christians knew that they had on earth, as the writers of Hebrews put it, “no lasting city” (Heb. 13:14). Instead, they awaited an eschatological city unlike any city of man, with rivers flowing through the middle of streets with the Tree of Life on either side (Rev. 22:1f.). ⁷

This lens of scripture offers Christians a way to embrace a green anarchist reading of history without having to adopt a new-age spirituality or a cafeteria cosmology. Instead, we can welcome the green anarchist challenge to broaden, not abandon, our Christianity.

The Technological Question. Technology is the propulsive force for what the Chilean poet and green anarchist Jesus Sepulveda considers the defining feature of civilization: standardization.  In his definition, standardization is a mode of domination that attempts to subsume everything under its singular image. In contrast to this artificial uniformity, there is the way of nature and community, which are made up of what he calls “constellations of peculiarities.” Standardization demands a complex division of labor in its desire for efficiency, which creates a society of specialists who focus exclusively on their individual task, unable to see the whole. What gets masked in the process is the vast waste and inefficiency—from the mining, fuel and pollution, to the advertising, transportation, and repairs—that the technological process creates.

As the dominance of technology becomes more and more pervasive, liberation from the technological matrix will hopefully become another central task of the 21st century Catholic Worker. The Piraha’s emphasis on community rather than on technology rings true for both green anarchists and Catholic Workers, who stress the value of face-to-face relationships, free of the dominance of the mediating machine. Technology, green anarchists assert, disconnects and isolates, even as it purports to bring together.

A significant form of our resistance needs to include a radically intentional discernment of the appropriate use of technology. What makes for appropriate technology is a contested debate within green anarchism.  Some, such as John Zerzan and the primitivist element, contend that only technologies that don’t require division of labor are legitimate (such as levers or inclines.) Sepulveda, on the other hand, calls for “[e]ngineering based on the human heart, like bicycles or wind or solar energy…[as] concrete alternatives to industrial pollution.” It would be worthwhile for Catholic Workers to return to some of our own latter-day luddites, like the early Catholic Workers quoted above, and more recent skeptics of technological “progress” like Kassie Temple and Chuck Trapkus (the latter of whom wrote, only half in jest, that Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays are all about “envisioning a computer-free society.”) Perhaps, as Trapkus suggested, the very act of making such decisions, whichever form of appropriate technology a community decides upon, is itself an act of resistance to the idolatry of technology.

Resistance and Creation. A central concern for green anarchists is the practice of resistance against industrial civilization. John Zerzan makes note of a CIA report, “Global Trends 2015,” predicting “that the biggest obstacle to globalization in the new millennium would be a possible joining together of the ‘First World’ protest movements with the struggles of indigenous people to maintain their integrity against encroaching capital and technology.” ⁸ Many green anarchists, for instance, have literally taken to the trees to stop the destruction of old-growth forests. Furthermore, many green anarchists advocate property destruction against such places as greenhouse laboratories for the development of genetically modified organisms. This is an important challenge for the Catholic Worker, a movement that is always experimenting with active nonviolence.  Do those who support Berrigan-style ⁹ resistance also support property destruction as a means to stop the all-encroaching institutions of civilization?

However, as green anarchist Terra Greenbrier admits in her essay “Against Civilization, For Reconnection to Life!” direct action is merely one aspect of resistance to civilization.  She takes into account the likelihood that civilization won’t disappear overnight.  If civilization is 10,000 years in the making, she reasons, maybe it will take longer than that to undo its full affects. And so “we are creating,” she writes, “examples of possibilities outside of, and in opposition to, the institutions that control us.” She cites a few examples of “scattering seeds,” such as unschooling and ecologically based home-schooling, edible landscaping, wild-food foraging, earthen building, subsistence hunting, and the practice of radical honesty in our land-based communities. Greenbrier provides a solid start in brainstorming strategies for what she calls “the infinity of possible futures.”

Other beautiful actions come to mind for on-going cross-pollination between green anarchism and the Catholic Worker, a few of which are already being adopted in Catholic Worker communities: alternatives to industrial medicine such as midwifery, herbal medicine, diet, prayer, meditation, hospice care, and long-term living with the aging and mentally ill; alternatives to retribution and prisons through restorative justice (a practice drawn explicitly from indigenous traditions); meeting our own needs through gift and barter,  craft, natural building, horticulture and permaculture; celebrations through liturgies, feast days, sharing food, song, and dance; and alternative ways of ‘being family’ via attachment and communal parenting.  All of these practices can enhance what Catholic Workers already do well, like living in community and extending hospitality to the marginalized.

In the end, the crisis that we now face—soil erosion, species extinction, loneliness and isolation, permanent war, meaningless jobs, the increasing dominance of mediation and technology, a widening chasm between rich and poor—demands a new intellectual analysis, an analysis that has been developing in the Catholic Worker for nearly eighty years. Peter Maurin insightfully noted that we need to update our thought every twenty years. With the accelerating speed by which society is changing, it is likely that we will need to update it even more frequently than that. The synthesis of the “Green Revolution” of the Catholic Worker with green anarchism provides some of that important updating. To find our way forward—and Peter would be proud—we are continuing to look backwards.

For More Reading:

Ched Myers, “Cultural/Linguistic Diversity and Deep Social Ecology”
“Anarcho-Primitivism and the Bible”
“Surely this is the gate of heaven! The Bible and Earth Spirituality”
Who Will Roll Away the Stone?
Jesus Sepulveda, Garden of Peculiarities
John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines
Terra Greenbrier “Against Civilization, For Reconnection to Life!” (from Igniting the Revolution)
Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a radio program about the current Republican primary candidates. At one point a woman called in complaining that the candidates are not talking enough about welfare reform. She went on to say that she is a single mom working 60 hours a week to pay for a lifestyle her son’s friends get for free, because in their households one or more parents aren’t working, in some cases by choice. When I told my husband about this later, we had a good laugh about the idea that public assistance and welfare benefits pay for “lifestyle.” As a family who has been on multiple kinds of welfare over the last 5 years, from Medicaid to Food Stamps to WIC, we couldn’t help but wonder what we were missing out on. Where were our IKEA stamps?

When I hear an average citizen make the mistake of conflating public benefits with “lifestyle” benefits, I recognize it as a dangerous ignorance arising out of having little or no contact with the welfare system or anyone who is in it. When a current or formerly elected official with experience working for the government says something like Newt Gingrich, who publicly claimed that some people were taking their food stamp money and going on vacation to Hawaii, I recognize this as a dangerous lie.

The political discourse in our media about welfare has skewed the national conversation such that many citizens actually believe that it is both easy to get benefits, and that you can use benefits any which way you want. The reality could not be more different. Getting into the welfare system requires intense levels of documentation (including but not limited to: social security cards for all adults applying; birth certificates for all children in the family; marriage licenses; utility bills; lease agreements; vehicle titles; proofs of income; bank statements for any accounts you hold; documentation of any daycare expenses; documentation of any school expenses; etc). Most public benefits offices are set up to screen people out of the system, rather than in, which means that any applicant must jump through a variety of hoops (including having their application and documentation “lost” and having to start the whole process over again), miss work or school to attend multiple appointments, and then wait a month or more from their application date for their benefits to kick in.

Once benefits are in hand, they can only be used in a specific way. For example, Food Stamp benefits (also known as food assistance, or SNAP) come in the form of an EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) card. It looks like a State ID card, and works like a debit card. The benefits on the card can only be used to buy food. An attempt to buy anything other than food-i.e., beer, cigarettes, or a plane ticket to Hawaii-will be rejected by the card. WIC (Women, Infants, and Children food assistance) is even more specific, because it comes in the form of a series of checks that are handed directly to the cashier. Each check outlines which items can be bought with it, and they come with an accompanying guide that outlines which brands of these items are approved and which are not. A grocery shop with WIC checks can actually take twice as long as a normal shop because the items are so intensely regulated.

So, are frauds perpetrated within this system? Certainly. But in my experience of helping people negotiate these systems, the most frequent fraud perpetrated is this: NOT reporting all of the income a family earns. For example, people who are self-employed may choose to not report all of their income because they know that if they do, the result is being kicked out of the system. The reason these kinds of frauds are committed is very simple: survival. The public benefits system is set up to take into account ONLY the most basic expenses a family will have-rent, utilities, school, and child care-in its evaluation of whether or not a family qualifies to receive benefits. The system does not take into account cost of living variations around the country, or a host of other expenses that the average family either requires or incurs: transportation to/from work/school/daycare; clothes and diapers; student loans and other kinds of debt repayment; phone and internet bills. These are all things that most citizens would agree are necessary for the average family to function in this country. Yet these expenses are not included in an evaluation of whether or not a family needs health or food support.

So if we can recognize that the kind of fraud that usually takes place is under-reporting of money earned, rather than the myth of using food stamps to pay for vacations, then we begin to paint a different story than the one repeated in the national media. This alternative story is that people ARE working, but are unable to report their income for fear of losing their benefits. And fear they should. For we live in an economy where people are penalized and made homeless for not being able to pay back their loans on time, even though this aspect of our collective financial duress is left out of the process of evaluating whether or not people need public assistance. The notion that this system needs reforming in the direction of screening MORE people out of the system is just plain false. And dangerous.

However, I also do not want to come across as defending the notion that all adults should be working for an income and that there is something wrong with people “choosing not to work.” I have noticed a transition in the national discourse about this question from when I was a kid. It used to be that mainstream American society lamented the fact that in most two-parent households, both parents have to work. In the last decade, among conservatives and progressives, this has shifted to an expectation that both parents should work, and a criticism of those who “choose” not to work. There is an underlying assumption here that goes unquestioned and unexplored: that all of the other things we do in our homes and lives-things like cooking, cleaning, raising children, volunteering-are not work, and therefore have no value within our economy. We no longer recognize the value in a parent choosing to stay home with their children, because this is not considered “work.” How bizarre. And this notion that both parents MUST work comes with an additional accompanying assumption that goes unquestioned and unexplored: that both parents are working for themselves and their children to have a particular middle class lifestyle replete with multiple cars, phones, and other gadgets, which is inherently more valuable than the lifestyle they might otherwise have.

As a full-time mother who must also do part-time to full-time contract work in order to make ends meet, I recognize that public benefits have been critical to my family’s ability to survive. I expect the government to take responsibility for citizens by redirecting resources in this way and I think it is one of the few things our government could do quite well if it was not so busy funding wars. I find it painful to realize that many public political figures, when faced with a choice between providing these necessary benefits and allowing children to starve because their parents are not able to afford food, would choose to allow children to starve-even if their position is only rhetorical. The politicians who espouse these dangerous ideas are the same people who claim to uphold Christian values and to defend the family. The hypocrisy is painful to witness, especially because it allows non-elected citizens to feel comfortable and confident sitting in judgment of those who have less than them, from a place of unacknowledged privilege and unabashed indifference.

When we allow this dialectic to go unchallenged, we reinforce the stigma attached to receiving assistance that results in our country’s public benefits being underutilized (in point of fact, close to half of all citizens who are eligible to receive food assistance never do).  We also reinforce the notion that the only appropriate way for individuals and families to receive assistance is through religious charity, which is hugely problematic because these forms of assistance play out primarily within private institutions with few accountability protocols to protect those in need from being abused by those who help them. We reinforce the idea that people in need are only deserving of what those in power are willing to give.

I would much rather put in place systems that reinforce the alternative idea: from each according to their ability, and to each according to their need. Systems where we all have enough to eat, and the health care we need, and a warm house to make a home. We can have fullness, wholeness, and wellness. And maybe go on vacation to Hawaii, too.

When I was 14 years old in 1968, I doorbelled for Sen. Eugene McCarthy as he ran a strong anti-war campaign for president. I lamented when Bobby Kennedy stole McCarthy’s thunder and took the California primary, only to be gunned down by one of several “lone gunmen” during that period. ¹ I joined my high school classmates in a protest on campus that involved overturning a local police car. My first act of civil disobedience was refusing to register for the draft. I thought everyone in the military was a stupid, violent, warmonger and I was doing what I could to have no part it the whole damn thing.

My generation was pretty good at opposing the Vietnam War, but not so good at embodying compassion for the victims of the war on “our side”: the young, mostly poor people who saw the military as a means for an education, for personal glory, or even to defend their country against “communism.”

All this changed for me many years later when I had left being a lawyer and was studying theology and ministry in Seattle in 1985. One of my classmates, Joseph, had recently been a neuroscientist at the UCLA brain institute. However, at the end of one of his research projects, he was called upon systematically to gas to death the remaining lab kittens. After one dead kitten after another, Joseph cracked. He walked away from it all: his job, his wife, his nice house and his life. Delayed PTSD had kicked in, almost 20 years after he came home from Vietnam.

He spent some time wandering, homeless, around California, before eventually ending up in Oregon. He was taken in and nurtured by some local Jesuits. After some healing, he discerned a call to learn about and to be reconciled with God. Not the “god’ who had told him that his rite of passage as a young man was to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and “prove” himself in battle, but a different God altogether. He struggled and wrestled with accepting the God of Jesus who proclaimed and embodied unconditional love and compassion for everyone. He ended up forming and serving vets’ groups, and became a father of three children, now living happily in Michigan.

Getting to know Joseph was a gamechanger for me. He broke open my self-righteousness and revealed his own broken heart and life. I cherish the many years that we walked together before his journey took him away from the Northwest.

I’m writing this piece because a Park Ranger was shot and killed yesterday in Mt Rainier National Park, allegedly by an Iraq veteran who had gone on a shooting spree in Seattle before seeking refuge in the snowy mountains. The CBS story of the finding of his frozen body included this line: “”The shooting renewed debate about a federal law that made it legal for people to take loaded weapons into national parks.” I posted the quote and a rejoinder on Facebook: “What it should generate is renewed debate on arming and training young people to kill and then bringing them home and providing no jobs or much PTSD care for them. We should expect a wave of such violence from the young, damaged people who are coming from another generation’s stupid, useless wars.” A wave of “likes” and responses poured in, including Eda Uca-Dorn’s plea that I write something about it here.

Vets from Iraq and Afghanistan are a shockingly high percentage of our homeless population, and the numbers will only grow as more vets return home. ² According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, returning vets have an astounding 30% unemployment rate. The percentage of unemployed vets age 18-24 is more than double the overall unemployment rate for that age group. ³ Who wants to hire someone who has spend their last years learning to kill and putting those skills into practice?

Meanwhile, the right wing resist increased federal funding for PTSD, arguing that it is best handled “privately.” Maybe so.

As people who gather here under the banner of “Christian anarchism,” what is our responsibility to our sisters and brothers who return home from the battlefield shattered by the unspeakable trauma of war? At the absolute minimum, I think it means learning a lesson in compassion from my generation’s failure. We can and must love returning vets at least as much as we claim to love the poor and other victims of “empire.” How many of the people we share food and coffee with at our local meals here in Issaquah, WA or at your own are such vets?
But I think there is much more to do, too. The Occupy Movement has taken up the injustices that flow from our imperial economy. But one of those injustices is how we ignore the young people we’ve destroyed to serve the interests of the 1%. Many decades ago, courageous Marine Major General Smedley Butler penned his now famous screed, War is a Racket. ⁴ He laid out in simple terms, backed by facts and his own long experience, how war is fought not for democracy or peace, but to protect the profits of the elite. It has always been so. The unemployed, confused, broken young people like the one who died on Mt Rainier demand that we include their cause in our protests. It’s what Jesus would do.

(Or, Why Are All the Anarchists Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?) ¹

Editor’s Note: This piece is part one of a series of call and response between Amaryah Armstrong and Nekeisha Alexis-Baker as they consider what possibilities Christian anarchy can provide for marginalized peoples. The conversation grows out of friendship and mutual respect for each other, and from our commitments to living lives of liberation. We aim for to be an ongoing dialogue that builds on each call and response. As a result, we strongly encourage you to begin at the beginning and follow along from there. You can read Nekeisha’s response here.

I must confess, I simply don’t know what to do with Christian anarchists.

I am anti-domination, anti-capitalism, critical of technology, more than a little suspicious of the nation-state, and all about my citizenship being in heaven and thus having a commitment to radical politics on earth. But still, something about “Christian anarchists” just doesn’t sit well with me. It could be the irony of Christian anarchy being anti-domination and yet being predicated on domination by White men. But this is no different from other Christian identified radical groups. Exclusion is a practice we all participate in. Perhaps it is that I have yet to see or read or participate in sustained Christian anarchist discussions of White supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity that go beyond the niceties of anti-racism/sexism/homophobia 101 training. Or maybe it is because explications of why anarchy is a valuable way to dismantle these systems of evil never seems to offer anything radical feminist, black, and queer Christian critiques have not already begun to deal with.

Let me show my cards here and share honest reflections about my hang-ups with Christian Anarchy: as a Queer, black woman, I have yet to see many reasons why Christian anarchy would provide a space that would do the work that needs to be done to fight White supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. Critiques of the state and domination are all well and good, but folks who haven’t seen themselves as anarchist have held radical critiques of power, of war, of domination and have also given attention to the ways race, sex, and heterosexism become the occasions for the articulation of dominance and power. What is unique about the way anarchy wants to talk about power and domination that makes it compatible with Christianity? Perhaps you all may try to point me to Mark’s recent primers on Christian Anarchy or some of Jacques Ellul’s work. Thanks, I’ve read those. And I still have my questions.

To me, the tent of “Christian Anarchy” might have more potential as a radicalizing space for white folks to organize under than as a multi-racial tent for a collective of people from the margins and the center. What I mean is this: it is easy to suggest that Christian anarchism provides valuable critiques and resources for how we might live more faithfully to God. But it is not as easy to see and remedy the fact that the resources available on this site themselves are woefully lacking in representation from anyone who is not a White man. And this is not to unfairly castigate the folks who spend much of their time and resources providing a space where radical discussions of Christianity can take place, or to suggest that if something is lacking from this website, I can’t work to fill it (which is part of the reason I’m writing this in the first place). But it is to say, that those voices who get cited as the core of a Christian anarchist movement don’t seem to look like me at all. And they not only don’t look like me (because one doesn’t have to look like me to have powerful critiques of domination), but radical voices who do come from social locations more like mine also become a secondary addendum to that canon. These voices which are, in my eyes, inseparable from any struggle for liberation, become voices that gird up the claims that have already been made by white men, rather than leading the discussion. What I’m trying to point out, then, is the way the narrative already gets structured from the beginning to be one that has to be pried open to include others and the way this inclusive expansion can act more as a way of soothing guilt after the fact than as a catalyst to disrupt the ways Christian anarchy continues to begin from a particular place of domination by white men in order to move towards a more inclusive place. ² I want to know: how long must this story be told this way?

I also wanted to speak to the strand of anarcho-primitivism that also seems to be popular in Christian anarchist circles. I want to ask how does anarcho-primitivism not become simply another strand of the larger American imagination that has been obsessed with the primitive ³, and particularly the ways black and brown bodies have been seen as closer to primitive because they are not White? ⁴ What about an anarcho-primitivist narrative, if anything, distinguishes it from the subsuming and homogenizing project of White Western colonialism? What about an anarcho-primitivist narrative calls for transformation of White folks from collusion with White supremacy to solidarity with folks of color? Beyond dreading hair, or buying indigenous jewelry, what about Whiteness is transformed by anarcho-primitivism? I ask this, not because I like picking on White folks, but because the cultural appropriation that takes place within these circles is so rampant, and is done in spaces that are divorced from sustained critiques of White supremacy and accountability to persons of color. Also, I think once we can begin to converse about how Whiteness must become transgressive, bodies of color do not have to be relied on for the articulation of White subjectivity. Now, I’m not trying to be rude or spiteful just for the sake of it (some of my best friends are white guys with dreads), but because I do view Jesus Radicals as a valuable website, and the annual conference as a wonderful resource for radical Christianity. But I also see how this space might never expand beyond a primarily white hetero audience because of its structure and the places power resides in secret.

So, I’ve taken to calling myself a Queer Black Feminist with anarchist impulses and I think that suits me well because anarchy seems to work better as an adjective than a noun, for me, but I wonder what work anarchy does for Christians who might identify in that way? The recent Occupy movement has done a lot to confirm my sneaking suspicion that anarchist ideas are not simply anarchist, but can be radically feminist, queer, black, and Christian. But there have also been issues that have confirmed my sneaking suspicion that anarchist ideas are not radically feminist, queer, black, or Christian. Am I wrong in my perception? I am hoping this will be a conversation that will produce fruitful and respectful conversations.

(Or, I hope it is because we are all recovering hierarchists trying to find another way forward)

Editor’s Note: This piece is part two of a series of call and response between Amaryah Armstrong and Nekeisha Alexis-Baker as they consider what possibilities Christian anarchy can provide for marginalized peoples. The conversation grows out of friendship and mutual respect for each other, and from our commitments to living lives of liberation. We aim for to be an ongoing dialogue that builds on each call and response. As a result, we strongly encourage you to begin at the beginning and follow along from there. You can read part one from Amaryah here.

Many things came to mind as I reflected on your questions—some of which I still ask myself almost a decade after unwittingly co-creating this thing we call Jesus Radicals. I had to smile at the “Black Queer Feminist with anarchist impulses” identity you’ve adopted because it reminded me of when I called myself “a Christian with anarchist tendencies” as I sorted out whether anarchism was for me.

Which brings me to my first response. What I value most about anarchism is the integrative and intersectional possibilities the analysis offers. Understood most basically as resistance to hierarchy and domination, and as a method of organizing ourselves that values justice and mutual sharing of power, anarchism holds together for me what are often disparate movements that don’t always speak to one another (despite having myriad similarities at their roots). I’ve seen anti-war activists who aren’t anti-capitalist; anti-capitalists who aren’t feminist; feminists who aren’t anti-racist; anti-racists who are heterosexist; anti-heterosexists who are speciesist; anti-speciesists who still laud the state; and anti-statists who don’t question civilization, even though I see all of these are forms of oppression as closely related. Anarchism, on the other hand, “seeks to challenge domination at all levels of the social order” ¹ and “encourages us to see struggles as interconnected, and to act appropriately by building alliances and solidarity between them.” ² That, I think, is its great potential.

Done rightly, anarchism involves all of the analyses mentioned above, in addition to being consensus-building, justice-building, community-building, liberation-seeking, personalist, mutually-aiding, direct acting, and interested in constructing alternative relationships and systems that are life-giving and -affirming. That many anarchists, Christian and otherwise, on this site and elsewhere, do not always knit these various critiques together—that we often focus on one part of the web while ignoring others—seems to me to be shortsightedness on our part rather than a shortcoming within the political theory itself. Anarchism, at its core, should embrace these various critiques and practices, not as an addendums, but because they each reflect a part of what being “against archy” is supposed to be about.

I came to see the value in anarchism while reevaluating what it means to be Christian, which is why I see it as part of living out my faith. And yet, I don’t call myself a “Christian anarchist.” Personally, I see key tensions between that make me hesitate to join them into a Brangelina-esque “squish name” like that one. Instead, I am a Christian who is anarchist or a Christian-comma-anarchist. I see overlaps between the two, but they are distinct entities that argue at times, even as they bring out the best in each other—and I prefer to acknowledge that in my naming.

Nevertheless, it was rediscovering Jesus and the fullness of his mission, starting with an introduction to the Sermon on the Mount that led me to seriously consider integrating anarchism into my identity. Seeing Jesus as one of the oppressed; as refugee from birth; as one who engaged the powers in ways neither his followers nor his detractors expected; as one who lauded the peacemakers; who upset social, religious and political norms and got himself killed (and raised from the dead) in the process—seeing that Jesus made me wonder if being an anti-war race-conscious Democrat was enough. As my conversation with anarchism and Christianity continued, it was white dudes like Jacques Ellul and John Howard Yoder that first helped me uncover the implications of 1 Samuel 8, of Jesus’ temptations and crucifixion, of the new community in Acts, of the critiques of hierarchical power throughout the biblical text. During that time, non-anarchist and other-than-Christian writers and speakers were also enriching my ongoing thinking—people like the anarchist Black panther who came to our first conference, the professors and the authors I read in my college Africana studies program, and the womanist and feminist theologians, and animal rights advocates I encountered in seminary. Today, other voices continue to deepen my understanding of anarchism and Christianity in the areas of sexuality especially. The “recovery” continues.

As you rightly notice, however, the site does not reflect this diversity and this is a problem that requires both confession and explanation. When my spouse/fellow co-founder Andy and I were the only ones running the site, he was the one who had time and energy to develop the content. And he did so by 1) drawing on resources and thinkers that were formative for him at that time; 2) emphasizing Christian critique of the state and violence since nationalism and war-making remain pervasive sins among churches in America; and 3) creating a comprehensive library of major anarchist and Christian thinker Ellul. So those sections are literally one white heterosexual man’s perspective, with input from me and one or two others as time allowed, rather than even the tip of the iceberg of what this conversation offers. ³ Since that time our thinking has expanded, our partnership has extended to others, and our emphasis has widened—but that section has not been significantly updated, even though each of the organizers knows it needs to be. It is, for all intents and purposes, a frozen section in large part because our energy and our time remain stretched and limited.

That said, if we ever get the time to “add more stuff”—or, better yet, if people out there would take a less consumerist approach to the site ⁴—I think another rubric is still needed. This is a budding thought here, but instead of highlighting resources from “Christian anarchists,” perhaps a more inclusive method would be to collect resources from people that reflect the spirit and intent of anarchism, whether or not its authors identify themselves as such (something that I hope we are accomplishing through the Iconocast), and to list resources from writers and speakers that are anarchist who can deepen the radical Christian conversation, even if the authors themselves do not hold that faith commitment. I think making a move like that could better reflect the breadth of voices on both sides of these movements, voices which include anarchist people of color from around the globe and people from various perspectives who challenge Christians to go beyond “can’t we all just get along” 101. I welcome your feedback on this idea since it only started percolating as a possible solution in light of your piece.

Finally, I just want to affirm your observations about anarcho-primitivism. As I’ve said in other places, the very name itself strikes me as problematic in that it feels inhospitable to the very people for whom “being primitive” has been the justification for their exploitation and colonization, and it actually is a negative word civilization gave to those “others” that they repressed. Although the aims of the movement are to learn from and affirm the practices of pre-civilized people from much earlier in the human record, and to use those insights as a means to critique the madness we live in now, I’ve tried to be both respectful and honest about my reservations. Since I am much less committed to it than others though, I think it is only fair to let those for whom the thought has been transformative respond to your questions (if they haven’t already by the time this piece is posted).

So this is my response to your first call. Does it increase those anarchist impulses or squelch them? Does it shine some light on anarchism’s potential to be more than a “radicalizing space for white folks to organize under” or raise more questions about its usefulness? Looking forward to another call as we dialogue together.