On appreciating our governments and state officials, and on Christianity as anarchy

Views that are not only compatible, but necessary

“But this is gain for a land in every way: a king committed to cultivated fields.”

¹I spent this morning sitting against a mature scarlet oak with my daddy’s rifle resting on a small poplar to my left, watching a chilly breeze stir the trees and chipmunks and squirrels stir beneath them, while gunshots echoed sporadically through the steep hollows and ridges that surrounded me on the irregular boundary between Tennessee’s outer central basin and eastern highland rim. It’s one of the most beautiful ecological regions in the world, and I’m grateful to call it home.

A common winter sight in places like Cannon, Dekalb, Jackson, and Clay counties of Tennessee

I didn’t own the land I was sitting on, nor did I own the deer I was hoping would come home in my truck bed²—or rather, in the spirit of the North American wildlife ethic, I have a stake in their ownership along with everyone else, no matter if they were in the woods with me on the opening day of gun season or if they’ve never even dreamed of going hunting. On the way out, I paused to talk to a game warden—it turned out we knew each other from school—and he urged me and the other hunters present to comment on some potential regulatory changes to the season.

The North American wildlife ethic,³ which developed only through witnessing our extreme errors—sins!—in the past, has a lot going for it. I’m incredibly grateful for public land and the way the state, in much of the country, does such a good job protecting it and managing it in ways that enable humans to partake in ecology and, to some extent, wilderness. Where it works, it works not because of benevolent biologist-politicians who magnanimously write perfect regulations that maximize a balance of hunter opportunity and herd health, but because most everyone involved—the hunters, the biologists, the game wardens, the legislators, the ecologists⁴—have “bought in.”

In other words, it’s a cultural solution to what was once, in America, a cultural problem.⁵ The state is one very helpful piece of the puzzle, but it only works because there are enough “we the people” who care about the health of our renewable, biological resources. Unfortunately, increasingly throughout the States, this societal ethic we fought so hard to develop is eroding. But that’s a topic for another day.

As you likely know, my perspective on human authorities and the “powers that be” is situated squarely under the Anabaptist umbrella: critical, apocalyptic, and oppositional. I think it’s part of the biblical message, but so is appreciation, respect, and humility toward those authorities:

Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.

Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust.⁶

The biblical role of the Christian is a revolutionary, prophetic one that envisions a world no longer in need of political bodies—in other words, it is the role of embodying a healed culture in which all individuals are neither atomized nor members of a state but rather form the unified body of Christ. It is to “buy in” to a better way of life and invite your neighbors on every socioeconomic stratum to do the same, just like most locals in my region have done with wildlife and habitat management on public land. But in embodying the eschaton and renouncing the gods of this world we must not forget to work with our fellow brothers and sisters who care for humanity and are, knowingly or not, also God’s children.

“It is quite evident that to become neighbors again is the duty of every Christian.” — Jacques Ellul

⁷Beautifully and seemingly paradoxically, the earthly goal of Christianity is to vanquish the powers that be by loving them, heaping burning coals on their heads.⁸ If we forget either aspect (the Christian’s opposition to the exousiai⁹ and self-subjection to them), we err and become vulnerable to embroiling ourselves in unhelpful separatism¹⁰ or militant authoritarianism. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche saw clearly that Christians and anarchists have much in common as destroyers of hierarchical power,¹¹ but he failed to understand the Truth-ness and God-ness in being meek and loving—“pitying,” says Nietzsche— both the oppressed and the oppressor, the weak and the strong:¹²

Indeed, it makes a difference to what end one lies: whether one preserves or destroys. One may posit a perfect equation between Christian and anarchist: their aim, their instinct, are directed only toward destruction…These holy anarchists made it a matter of “piety” for themselves to destroy “the world,” that is, the imperium Romanum, until not one stone remained on the other, until even Teutons and other louts could become masters over it.

The Christian and the anarchist: both decadents, both incapable of having any effect other than disintegrating, poisoning, withering, bloodsucking; both the instinct of mortal hatred against everything that stands, that stands in greatness, that has duration, that promises life a future. Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum: overnight it undid the tremendous deed of the Romans—who had won the ground for a great culture that would have time.”¹³

No, the destruction wrought by Jesus-like actions lays the very foundation for something better than Nietzsche’s Overman. It is the very cornerstone.¹⁴

Once we understand the essence of our confoundingly loving defiant stance, we realize that Christian behavior is not to be systematic and neither aligns nor misaligns with any political system. Carefully and with conviction, we can work alongside—and even with—so-called “secular”¹⁵ institutions that seek the good of what is God’s: “the earth…and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it”.¹⁶

“the body of Christ is enacted in both grand and mundane gestures, some as prosaic as peeling potatoes for a soup kitchen.” — William Cavanaugh

¹⁷It’s not actually paradoxical or self-contradictory to recognize and participate in the beneficial aspects of the very state one seeks to abolish. Noam Chomsky points this out in regard to anarchists, but it holds word-for-word for Christians:

This broad tendency in human development [broadly, libertarian and/or socialist thought and action] seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority and domination that constrain human development, and then subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself.

If these structures can’t meet that challenge, they should be dismantled—and, anarchists believe, “refashioned from below,” as commentator Nathan Schneider observes.

In part this sounds like a truism: Why should anyone defend illegitimate structures in institutions? But truisms at least have the merit of being true, which distinguishes them from a good deal of political discourse. And I think they provide useful stepping stones to finding the common good…

Today, anarchists dedicated to these goals often support state power to protect people, society and the earth itself from the ravages of concentrated private capital. That’s no contradiction. People live and suffer and endure in the existing society. Available means should be used to safeguard and benefit them, even if a long-term goal is to construct preferable alternatives.¹⁸

We must always seek the action that is loving towards our neighbor near and far, no matter whether it appears incoherent to the worldly eye. The Christian philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and anarchist Jacques Ellul puts it eloquently, if a little abrasively for my fellow Americans:

Positions that seem contradictory can be equally sound, depending on the times, insofar as they express in history a faithfulness to God’s design. So they must not maintain loyalty to an idea, doctrine, or political outcome. What the world calls loyalty is usually habit or obstinacy. Christians can move right or left, can be liberal or socialist, according to the circumstances and the position that seems more conformed to God’s will at this time. These positions are contradictory, it is true, from the human point of view. They must draw their unity from pursuing the kingdom that is to come. Christians are called to judge the present circumstances in light of this kingdom. These circumstances cannot be judged by their particular moral or political content, any more than by their relation to a human doctrine or their attachment to the past, but simply by their always-existing relation to the parousia. This is a difficult position, full of pitfalls and dangers, but it is also the only one that appears true to the Christian life. And we have never been told that the Christian life should be easy or secure.¹⁹

Not only can we work with our neighbors all over the various spectrums for good, as Ellul says, but we can even use the powers that be to delegitimize said powers. This gets to the heart of our loving defiance of the oppressive actions of our modern governments. Theologian Walter Wink comments on the Sermon on the Mount and helps us to avoid forgetting either our opposition or self-subjection to the exousiai in striving for Jesus’s “third way”:²⁰

Jesus is saying, Do not continue to acquiesce in your oppression by the Powers; but do not react violently to it either. Rather, find a third way, a way that is neither submission nor assault, flight nor fight, a way that can secure your human dignity and begin to change the power equation, even now, before the revolution. Turn your cheek, thus indicating to the one who backhands you that his attempts to shame you into servility have failed. Strip naked and parade out of court, thus taking the momentum of the law and the whole debt economy and flipping them, jujitsulike, in a burlesque of legality. Walk a second mile, surprising the occupation troops by placing them in jeopardy with their superiors. In short, take the law and push it to the point of absurdity…

The logic of Jesus’ examples in Matthew 5:39b-41 goes beyond both inaction and overreaction to a new response, fired in the crucible of love, that promises to liberate the oppressed from evil even as it fees the oppressor from sin. Do not react violently to evil, do not counter evil in kind, do not let evil dictate the terms of your opposition, do not let violence lead you to mirror your opponent—this forms the revolutionary principle that Jesus articulates as the basis for nonviolently engaging the Powers.²¹

I’m grateful for the hard work so many people in positions of power do to take care of others, and I’m hoping to spend a few more mornings this year benefiting directly from their work as I sit in the woods on public land with a gun. There’s biblical tension, but there’s no contradiction in loving the exousiai as my neighbors. I subject myself to the state and all other powers, but always I “must obey God rather than men.”²²

Wendell Berry provides a fitting conclusion:

“This has become, to some extent at least, an argument against institutional solutions. Such solutions necessarily fail to solve the problems to which they are addressed because, by definition, they cannot consider the real causes. The only real, practical, hope-giving way to remedy the fragmentation that is the disease of the modern spirit is a small and humble way—a way that a government or agency or organization or institution will never think of, though a person may think of it: one must begin in one’s own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.”²³

1. Ecc 5:9, ESV. The verse is notoriously difficult to translate and this is but one of several possibilities, each with significant differences in meaning. I cannot speak usefully on matters of textual criticism, but I’m partial to this particular translation for the way it suggests that a good king is one who cares about the land of his people, a king who participates in the cultural values of the commoner, a king who is a gardener.

2. Alas, I went home with the same number of rifle rounds I left with.

3. The American forester Aldo Leopold was helpful in developing and promulgating this ethic. I reference Leopold extensively in this post about land and eschatology.

4. By no means should these categories be seen as separate. There is significant overlap among each.

5. There were (and are) other problems too, of course. Much overhunting was the result of hunger, which has its own set of causes.

6. 1 Pet 2:13-18, ESV. Cf. Rom 12-13.

7. Quote from Presence in the Modern World (1948), translated by Lisa Richmond (2016).

8. cf. Rom 12:14-21.

9. “Authorities.”

10. Cf. Luke 16:1-13. I discuss this passage in regard to the dangers of separatism here.

11. This is precisely what the throng who put Jesus to death understood: “Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar” (John 19:12, NIV).

12. I do not mean to suggest that all persons in positions of authority, such as elected officials, are oppressors, despite my distaste for nation-states.

13. The Antichrist (1888), translated by Walter Kaufmann (1954).

14. Regarding the obvious historical failure of Christians to live up to this goal, I would like to share a helpful word from Gil Bailie: “The church, like Peter, is both a stumbling block and a cornerstone. It is the latter only when it is consciously contrite for being, and having been, the former.”

15. The supposed dichotomy of “secular” vs “religious” is false. In the words of William Cavanaugh, the distinction “was not discovered but invented.”

16. Psa 24:1, NIV.

17. Quote from Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (1998), pg 14.

18. What is the Common Good? (2014), adapted from a lecture Chomsky gave the previous year. This excerpt can be found in Because We Say So by Chomsky (2015), pg 147-148.

19. Presence in the Modern World (1948), translated by Lisa Richmond (2016).

20. Matt 5-7, cf. Luke 6:17-49.

21. The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millenium (1998), pg 110-111.

22. Acts 5:29, ESV.

23. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.