God Is an Anarchist

Gary Chartier (author of Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society) writes the foreword and states: “Anarchists frequently view religion as exemplifying or sustaining arbitrary authority. Consider Mikhail Bakunin’s God and the State, suggesting that subservience to the state is disturbingly similar to religious belief, and Daniel Guerin’s No Gods, No Masters, effectively treating religious and socio-political authority as coordinate. When religious institutions are intertwined with a society’s power structure, just as when those institutions reinforce submissiveness to authority by denigrating or otherwise resisting critical thinking, it’s easy to see why they might be seen as anarchism’s enemies. But it is also surely crucial to recognize alternative strands in the history of multiple religious traditions. In the Abrahamic traditions, which I know best, it is clear, for instance, that belief in divine transcendence has undermined the idolization of political authority; that belief in individual access to God and to divine truth has strengthened belief in the capacity of ordinary people to make their own political decisions; and that Jesus’ praise of peace has inspired rejection of state-made wars and the search for a truly consensual society. Religion and authoritarianism may sometimes be allies, but the story is too mixed to make it reasonable to insist that they have to be. Cam Rea’s God is an Anarchist is an attempt to explore the anti-authoritarian side of Christianity. It is structured primarily as a reading of the Bible, with a focus on biblical passages that might be thought to lend support to the state’s putative legitimacy, as well as on those that can be seen as counting against it.”