Why Christian Anarchists Want to ‘Burn It Down’

BEN WILDFLOWER IS a self-described “high-church lowlife.” He lives in Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood that’s also home to intravenous drug users and sex workers. Wildflower—the surname he and his wife adopted after their marriage—is white, bearded, and male; he grew up among conservative evangelicals but now attends an Episcopal church (“a wonderful, welcoming space for so many people alienated by the church,” he said, “but also a bizarre, bourgeois institution”). Sometimes he fixes his roommates’ bikes to cover rent; he aims to live on very little.

I came across Wildflower through his handmade religious prints that resemble the black-and-white woodcuts found in The Catholic Worker , albeit with a little more attitude: “O Mary conceived without white supremacy,” reads one of Wildflower’s prints featuring the Holy Mother using aerosol flamethrowers to destroy Confederate and Nazi symbols, “pray for us trying to dismantle this shit.”

Wildflower doesn’t love the word “anarchist” because it sounds too self-assured (“like how a super-duper Reformed person has answers for everything”) and often evokes scenes of white dudes eager to break stuff and punch cops. But he sticks with it: “I’m an anarchist because I oppose hierarchical power structures,” said Wildflower. “You apply it to sex and gender, you have ‘feminism.’ You apply it to white supremacy and racism, and you have ‘anti-racism.’ So what is it when you apply it to the modern state? I guess we don’t have a word better than ‘anarchism.’”

Does it bring joy?

IN THE PAST four years, it’s been tempting to believe the main problem with U.S. democracy is the current occupant of the White House and the electoral politics that paved his way to office. But Christian anarchists offer a different perspective.

“The thought of America crumbling should bring you joy,” Wildflower told me in an interview last spring. As Christian anarchists see it, the problems that exist in our nation—poverty, white supremacy, militarism, economic inequality, and on down the list—are not aberrations in an otherwise good system, but rather inescapable outcomes of any system where some people have been put in power over others. And as people of God, Christian anarchists feel called to dismantle these oppressive systems and create radical alternatives.

Take prisons: “I think people are valuable and shouldn’t be warehoused in cages,” said Wildflower. “I don’t think [prison] changes people; I don’t think it makes us safer; I think it’s a tool to control and impoverish communities of color. I want it to be destroyed.” Though he participates in what he calls “reformist” actions, such as voting for a better district attorney or advocating to change sentencing laws—something his younger anarchist self would have scoffed at, but that he felt was important after listening to women and people of color in his community—he doesn’t feel those actions will ever fix the underlying problem. “A system that holds people accountable for injustices looks so unimaginably different than the prison system, that I’m still totally on the ‘burn it down’ side.”

Hearing talk about burning and destruction makes me anxious, even though I know Wildflower isn’t advocating violence (a violent revolution “hurts the already-poor and the already-oppressed more than the already-rich,” he told me later). It’s not that I don’t see the structural problems he identifies (I do), nor that I want to preserve the status quo (I don’t). But I’m still skeptical: Even if we could nonviolently dismantle something like the U.S. penal system, how do we know the new thing built in its place would be free of the problems we’re already facing? Shouldn’t we just keep working—Organize! Advocate! Speak truth to power!—to fix what we already have?

“The fact is, the Exodus is good news for God’s people and it’s really bad news for Pharaoh and his people,” Wildflower told me when I shared my skepticism. “When we’re scared to hear ‘Well, what about a world with no prisons?’ who is that scariest to? It’s scarier to the white community than it is to the black community. It’s scarier to rich people than poor people.” And if talking about anarchism makes me—a white woman with a job, health insurance, and shoes I bought via Instagram—anxious, maybe Wildflower has a point.

Down with chaos

“GOOD LUCK,” A colleague told me as I shoved a carton of milk into the staff fridge. “It’s anarchy in there.”

In most conversations, anarchy means lawlessness, chaos, and stubborn resistance to organization. As a political ideology, however, anarchism isn’t “burn it all down and anything goes.” Yes, anarchists seek to end the state, along with white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and any other -ism that puts some people in control over others.

But the anarchist ideal has never been to replace oppressive structures with an amorphous free-for-all. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in 1840, was the first to declare, “I am an anarchist”; he described himself in the same breath as “a firm friend of order.” In the 1800s, European anarchist thinkers such as Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin envisioned replacing the centralized state with tidy, egalitarian societies where workers would opt-in to self-governed, mutually beneficial cooperatives. To achieve these ends, they called not for a top-down revolution, but a bottom-up movement of the people to liberate themselves by creating something better.

These values—autonomy, anti-authoritarianism, egalitarian relationships, and mutual aid—still echo through contemporary anarchist practice: During the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampment, anarchists (and other participants) practiced decision making through direct democracy rather than electing leaders. Anarchists have filled neglected potholes, distributed free bikes, aided each other in farming cooperatives, outfitted abandoned buildings as refugee accommodations, and turned unsold food into free vegetarian meals.

That said, rejecting authority makes anarchists ideologically diverse. Some anarchists practice nonviolence; others—like the anarchists and anti-fascists who smashed windows on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration—don’t. There are anarcho-primitivists (who want to return to a hunter-gatherer society), eco-anarchists (who emphasize the liberation of human and nonhuman animals), “anarcho-capitalists” (whose extreme free-market libertarianism is rejected by most other anarchists), and, to the surprise of many, Christian anarchists.

Jesus anarchists

ThE ANARCHIST THINKERS of the 1800s deeply influenced a number of European and American Christians—including Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker co-founder, Peter Maurin, as well as Leo Tolstoy, Ammon Hennacy, Jacques Ellul, and Vernard Eller. For these Christians, anarchism deeply resonated with Jesus’ own challenge to the political forces of his day—and sharply contrasted the cozy church-state relationship Christians had often enjoyed. In his 2011 study, Alexandre Christoyannopoulos defined Christian anarchism as a belief that “Jesus’ teaching implies a critique of the state, and an honest and consistent application of Christianity would lead to a stateless society.”

What would this look like? Many Christian anarchists point to the witness of dissident Christian movements throughout church history: the Jerusalem church’s common-purse practices described in Acts, the Beguines’ and Beghard’s egalitarian communities of the late Middle Ages, early Anabaptists’ indifference to secular government, the common land experiment of the Diggers in the 17th century, and the consensus-seeking Quakers. Though these movements didn’t think of themselves as anarchists, they exhibited what Mark Van Steenwyk describes in That Holy Anarchist as an “anarchic impulse” that “emerges and re-emerges” throughout the various branches of the Christian tradition.

The most enduring expression of Christian anarchism is the Catholic Worker and its 203 communities that offer hospitality to the homeless. Its members—who are all considered equal volunteers—still reject capitalism, militarism, and the “bigness of government,” and instead encourage a decentralized society of “family farms, rural and urban land trusts, worker ownership and management of small factories, homesteading projects, food, housing, and other cooperatives.” When asked about her anarchist beliefs in a 1970s interview, Dorothy Day cited Kropotkin’s belief in bottom-up societal change: “You do away with banks by credit unions, you do away with interest by mutual aid, you do away with possession of goods by sharing. Unions, credit unions, farming communes, cooperatives, all these things,” said Day, are part of “the nonviolent anarchist point of view.”

According to Van Steenwyk, co-founder of the Mennonite Worker in Minneapolis, other examples of contemporary Christian anarchism tend to bubble up from folks within the Anabaptist tradition, intentional communities with evangelical-ish roots, and people “engaging politics on the Far Left who are also engaging Christianity.” But in the past decade, he explained, a lot of the Christian anarchist movement has “gotten absorbed into the larger anti-authoritarian Left.”

“There’s this suspicion that after Trump goes away, the Christian Left will go back to the way it was before and Christian anarchists will still be here, pushing the Far Left edge,” he said.

Beyond the state

NEKEISHA ALAYNA ALEXIS also identifies as a Christian anarchist. Born in Trinidad and raised Catholic, Alexis and her family drifted toward evangelicalism after they moved to the U.S. After becoming an anarchist—a journey that involved reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in high school, debating gun control on the message board of a Christian rock band, protesting the Iraq war, and becoming Mennonite—Alexis co-founded a website in the early 2000s that evolved into Jesus Radicals, a network for Jesus-loving anarchists. For 10 years, she helped organize the group’s blog and annual conference (on an indefinite hiatus since 2013), which offered an introduction to Christian anarchism as well as trainings on topics such as consensus building, economic disobedience, and community living.

As a black woman, Alexis is a minority within the Christian anarchist community and sometimes struggles to get her fellow Christian anarchists—especially white men—to move past questions about “the state.” “How we deal with the state is one aspect of what it means to be trying to live, as much as humanly possible, a life that is resistant to oppressive structures, oppressive patterns, and oppressive patterns of relating to each other.” But Christian anarchism is also about “looking for ways of living that do bring out life more abundantly, that are [more] faithful and freer than the structures that are offered to us.”

In Elkhart, Ind., where Alexis lives, this means finding creative ways to resist gentrification and other policies that affect “people who are routinely disrespected” in her community: creating a concert series to highlight the city’s diverse musical talent, joining an African dance company, and providing accompaniment to a family feeling the pain of police violence. She is a vegan and an animal liberationist. “What I eat, what I wear, what’s in my home, is all an attempt to step back from these structures that oppress people, the environment, and of course other animals.”

When developers announced plans to build luxury apartments downtown, Alexis started going to city council meetings to protest and advocate for more affordable housing. As an anarchist, Alexis already believed representative democracy was unjust, but watching council members ignore community input and cater to special interests in real time was “eye-opening.” When the council voted to close a local community center, she did something radical for an anarchist: she started volunteering with a local mayoral campaign.

Alexis recognizes the irony of an anarchist working on a mayoral campaign; she hasn’t voted for a presidential candidate since Bush v. Gore and believes the money and energy that’s poured into elections could be better directed elsewhere. But after serious discernment, she felt it was the right thing to do, despite the criticism she knew she’d face from other anarchists. Anarchism has always upheld local autonomy, she explained, and in a town as small as Elkhart, it “really, really, really matters whether there’s somebody who’s going to perpetuate the same nonsense.”

Alexis’ candidate won in November 2019. She described the experience as “an inside view of the possibilites and limitations within electoral politics. Though she’s glad she participated, “I’m not planning to make this a habit,” she said.

A failure of Christian imagination

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Christian anarchism through the Psalters, a folk-punk band and sometimes-Philadelphia-based intentional community that toured anarchist gatherings and Christian festivals in a black school bus. The band’s music—which featured accordions, banjos, a djembe, and, I’m pretty sure, a shofar—had an apocalyptic circus feel. Sample lyrics: “Destruction or deliverance, how’s it gonna end? Sometimes you gotta knock it down, so it can be born again.”

Call it resurrection, rebirth, or baptism, the mysterious pattern of Jesus is that new life begins with death. Christian anarchists understand this: Where I see only the danger of destruction, Christian anarchists see an opportunity to make way for something closer to the reign of God. Where I feel doubtful that we could create structures that are free—or freer—of injustice, Christian anarchists believe God can do something new in our midst. Christian anarchists see the church’s reluctance to think beyond current political systems as a failure of Christian imagination—limiting who Christians are called to be and what we expect God to do.

I asked Alexis, Wildflower, and Van Steenwyk what they’d like to tell Christians like me—people who care about justice but aren’t anarchists.

Alexis wants Christians to know that while her “speech might not always be fluffy and warm,” she believes—as a Christian and an anarchist—that “we can do better.” “It’s out of a position of hope that I critique,” she said. “It’s out of a position of care that I’m critical.” She advised U.S. Christians to dig into the not-often-told stories of oppression within our nation’s history. “I don’t think people often really know the history of things,” she explained.

Wildflower “wouldn’t try to make them anarchist,” he admitted. “I’d probably just try to encourage them in their struggle for justice.”

Van Steenwyk urged Christians into deeper solidarity with those who’ve been screwed by the system. “The Spirit is with those who are suffering oppression, and we can’t be the church until we go there with our bodies,” he says. “If we start doing that—if we start getting in real solidarity with folks who experience oppression—we will become much more revolutionary people, even if we’re not comfortable with the idea of upending the system because it changes your vantage point.”