Finding Christianity at the Nexus of Anarchy and Blackness

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

In Against Me!’s song “I Was a Teenage Anarchist,” Laura Jane Grace sings, “I was a teenage anarchist / But the politics were too convenient.” The song is a catchy tune that has stuck with me, even if I’ve outgrown the punk-rock-emo scene. But unlike Grace, I have not outgrown my anarchistic impulses.

Popularly, anarchy is associated with “chaos,” but I think of it more in terms of avant-garde jazz, where everyone is working together in their own unique way to create a sort of consensus.

So, when I recently heard of a new book focused entirely on the nexus between anarchism and Christianity, I had to investigate.

Terry J. Stokes’ Jesus and the Abolitionists is dissimilar to any book on anarchy, abolition, Black studies, and Christianity I’ve ever read. It is funny, well-sourced without being bloated, and stylishly written. Stokes manages to use biographical details, sharing how he experienced an intense shift in his politics during the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd protests, to invite the reader into questioning their own assumptions about authority, the nation state, Black history, and democracy.

Beyond being an author, Stokes is associate minister at his home church, Union Baptist Church in Trenton, N.J. When he’s not pastoring or writing, he is a director with Urban Promise Trenton, an after-school program for youth.

I spoke with Stokes about what anarchist Christians should do when it comes to the upcoming presidential election, how to define Blackness, and why he believes Christianity necessarily leads to anarchism.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: Tell me about Jesus and the Abolitionists and what inspired you to write it.

Terry J. Stokes: I had written a collection of prayers that came out in 2021. And that kind of came about through my getting confirmed into the Episcopal Church in 2019 and using The Book of Common Prayer.

And then, in 2020, the world was shut down and marches and rallies were happening around the country for Black Lives Matter. So, I had more time on my hands than ever before to dig deep into Black liberation — including police abolitionism and prison abolitionism. I began this journey of reading more and more radical literature: The autobiography of Angela Davis, Mutual Aid by Dean Spade. After finishing that, I talked to a friend about it and she said, “Oh, mutual aid? For all of my anarchist friends, mutual aid is their whole thing.”

Anarchism! That’s this boogeyman that I’d heard but always in a negative context. I’d never considered it as a serious tradition or philosophy to look into.

But after that conversation, I began to look into anarchism and my entry point was a guy named Murray Bookchin, who was a third-wave anarchist and one of his big emphases is post-scarcity thinking. He has a book called Post-Scarcity Anarchism, and that was already very aligned with where I was moving.

I was thinking about how our current society is built on this assumption that scarcity is always going to be with us. Is that true? Is that a reasonable assumption to base our systems on? If not, what’s the alternative?

That led me to dig deep into anarchism and discover a lot of Christian anarchism within the larger tradition. I feel like this book was me screaming into the void to try to find people who were also feeling and thinking similarly.

How do you define Christian anarchism?

I prefer to use the term “anarchist Christianity” both to describe my philosophy and as a self-identifier because I like to think of anarchism as something that is modifying my Christianity, rather than Christianity as something that’s modifying my anarchism.

When I was beginning my journey of studying anarchism, I read a good number of self-identified Christian anarchists and the impression that I got from a lot of them was that their vision of a post-state society was almost like a theocracy where the replacement for the state is God and, of course, God is represented by the church.

One of the things you say in the book is that Christianity necessarily leads to anarchy. Unpack that.

As I was going back through the Bible, and especially the gospels, after becoming more convinced of the beauty and the potency of anarchism, I was taking this new lens to the scripture — especially the Sermon on the Mount.

And looking at sayings like “turn the other cheek,” “give your cloak as well,” “walk the extra mile” — this sort of ethic was predicated on a rejection of coercion, a rejection of domination, and a rejection of competition and scarcity as a way of organizing our way of getting the things that we need in life.

So, [I came to believe that] if you were really to follow the Sermon on the Mount, what you would arrive at is a form of anarchy.

If you were to really structure your personal life as well as design the economy of your community according to these principles that you see in the Sermon on the Mount, what you would have is essentially a system where people are deciding how to produce and distribute the means of life through discussion, deliberation, and reaching consensus that relies on a belief that my goal shouldn’t be to get people on my side.

My goal should be to hear the kernel of the truth that exists in what they’re saying and bring that together with the kernel of truth that I have and find a way to reach a resolution where everyone’s needs are met. We don’t need to dominate one another to get what we need. We don’t need to coerce one another into doing the right thing or the best thing.

What are anarchist Christians to make of electoral politics, especially in our current moment?

I ask myself this question every Sunday when I go to my quintessentially Black church and I hear a message that suggests that the way we organize for a better world, the way we exercise our agency in the world, is to go vote.

I always feel conflicted when hearing that and I’m in Black religious spaces. On one hand, I appreciate the Fannie Lou Hamers of the world who gave up so much to register people to vote. But I also think of a writer like William C.Anderson, who wrote The Nation on No Map and points out that a lot of these folks — including the folks we think of as Civil Rights heroes but then also the more radical folks from our history — if you could go interview them, they wouldn’tsay, “I did all of that just so people could vote.” We could imagine that they would say, “I did all of that so that you would have abundant life, so that you would have full autonomy and self-determination within your communities.”

Electoralism is not accomplishing that for us. I find more people my age and younger open to a kind of disengagement from electoral politics as a way of not just disengaging from politics entirely, but as a way of redirecting some of that energy toward designing autonomous systems.

How can we create restorative justice systems in our community rather than send people through the penal system? How can we create free stores in our community rather than send people through the typical consumer routes of getting the things that they need? So that’s where my excitement and energy lies.

I’m sitting here in a building called the East Trenton Center, which my organization Urban Promise is a tenant of. [The center is a program of the] East Trenton Collaborative, which is a community organizing initiative in this neighborhood. And in the year-and-a-half that I’ve been here, I’ve gotten to see firsthand the residents of the community come together to decide, no, we are the ones who are going to get the lead out of our pipes and out of our soil, we’re the ones that are going to make traffic safer.

We’re the ones who are going to do the things that we need to keep us safe and get us fed. It’s been really encouraging for me to see that, even within the limits of a capitalist state, there are still ways in which we can advance this mindset of it not just being about voting.

Is anarchism for Black people?

The deeper I’ve gotten into anarchism, the more I’ve come to feel that identity is an important category for my self-conception, but it is not the fundamental category.

What that has done for me is allow me to see the interdependence of all kinds of liberation efforts as the fountainhead of any kind of identity struggles that are maybe a little bit further downstream from that. When it comes to the place of my Blackness within the framework of my anarchism or my Christianity, I see it similarly in the sense that Blackness deeply affects how I envision an anarchist world, how I envision and interpret and live out the teachings of Jesus. But it is not the source from which those philosophies or belief systems take their cues.

Because of that, I’m able to deal with the paucity of Black folks or Black traditions. There’s not some essential or genetic or racial element that is essentializing our ability to connect or not connect with anarchism. But, like anything else, there are identifiable historical and cultural factors that are at play. When it comes to anarchism, one of the things that a lot of folks point out is that anarchy is something that you will see in ancient societies.

It’s not something that came about in the late 1800s. What happened in the late 1800s was that it was systematized and formalized into a philosophy, but that doesn’t mean that the Peter Kropotkin’s and the [Pierre-]Joseph Proudhon’s and Mikhail Bakunin’s invented anarchism — it existed before!

Also, just because that iteration of the history of anarchism is European and white doesn’t mean that we can’t reappropriate it. And so it was a big deal for me to begin finding folks like Lucy Parsons, William C. Anderson, Marquis Bey, and The Black Rose Collective — an anarchist collective that is run by people of color and Black people. That was really encouraging to find those resources and to see ways in which those folks had interpreted their Blackness through the lens of anarchy, anarchism and vice versa. I would say the same thing for Christianity, bringing these elements together of my faith, my Blackness, my politics … to me, it just adds more paint to the easel and creates more beauty in my experience.

I really resonated with the way you defined Blackness. You write in the book that “[...] Blackness [is], among other things, a condition of ontological ungovernability and anti-state orientation.” Why do you think the definition that you offer could be helpful and liberating to other folks?

I think the idea of Blackness as an ungovernability or an essential exclusion from a colonial-settler project or a state project is one helpful way to construct Blackness among all the myriad ways that we construct it.

It’s helpful for me because I think it’s an on-ramp for Black people to understand what anarchism is about. Because we’ve been fed this narrative that we can make the state work for us or include us. And our greatest heroes were people who fought for us to be included in the project of the United States or other colonial independence projects around the world.

Like I said earlier, I don’t want to take away from that, but I also want to point to the fact that I think those people were fighting for something a little bit more than that. I don’t think they were fighting just for us to be included. I don’t think they were fighting for reform. I think many of them were fighting for a kind of abolition.

And so you have folks like Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons early in the 20th century advancing the idea of gender liberation before you have the onset of the identity politics of feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. I think I take cues from that in terms of Blackness as well. What does it look like to fight for Black liberation rather than Black inclusion in what’s already existing? The more I read anarchists and Black anarchists in particular, the more I’m convinced that the way for us to honor the people we see as reformists or inclusionists is actually to move beyond what was in their field of vision. I think they would want us to stand on their shoulders and take that next step beyond reformism into liberation.

I think you can replace “Blackness” there with “Christianity.” So then you could rephrase it to read, “Christianity is, among other things, a condition of ontological ungovernability and anti-state orientation.” When I read that, I thought it was a brilliant way to describe Blackness but also a brilliant way to describe Christianity. I wonder what you think about that.

I hadn’t quite made that one-for-one switch of the essential ungovernability within Christianity, but I think that fits perfectly with what I’m arguing in the book, how I read the gospels and the New Testament more broadly.

All of the, “You have heard it said, but I say unto you” statements of the Sermon on the Mount all add up to ungovernability. If we’re not to swear an oath, how could we stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance? If we are to “judge not lest ye be judged,” how are we to engage in the court system or our penal system at all in any meaningful way? If we are to not return evil for evil, how are we to operate with the idea of justice that we have in our society, which is literally predicated on making someone suffer or disappearing them?

To me, all that is inherently contradictory to the teachings of Jesus. I do think that there is an essential ungovernability within Christianity.

Is it possible for anarchist Christians to do anything fun or is it always just raging against the machine?

My entry point into anarchism wasn’t through the punk scene or nihilist philosophy. I have met those people since making more inroads into anarchist spaces. I appreciate their vibes, their perspectives, but that’s not me, and that probably won’t ever be me. What I am trying to bring is this reminder or maybe a [public service announcement] that many people haven’t heard: Anarchism is about freedom. It’s about play. It’s about joy.

One way to put it is that the means have to match the ends. So, if the end that you are fighting for is joy and play, then your means have to match that. Making [fun] the forefront of my work of political education, organizing, and mobilizing is fundamental.

One of the things you are open about in your book is how throughout a two-year period, your political philosophy was constantly changing. For folks who are on a similar journey, what encouragement would you give them?

Stale water is nonpotable. When we find ourselves locked into a certain way of thinking and seeing the world to the point where our ideas can’t change, that is a dangerous and unhealthy place to be. Now, on the flip side, when you are in that place of cognitive dissonance and deconstruction/reconstruction/transformation, it’s not pleasant. That two-year period for me in seminary where I was going through all these changes was tough because I felt like I was betraying myself. I felt like I was betraying where I came from and who I came from. I felt like I didn’t have solid ground to stand on. I couldn’t see where I would land in the future.

And because of our economic system, if you are someone that’s trying to go into some kind of ministry vocation, but even outside of that, your belonging or even your ability to put food on the table depends on you not changing your ideas and your views on things.

So, as I was going through all these different ordination processes, and then finding myself either self-exiled or outwardly exiled from these processes because of my changing views, there was this kind of fear of [lack of] security. How can I ever land on something if the path that I’m following right now to get a livelihood may or may not be compatible with where I end up? My point in all of that is just to say that it’s unpleasant. It’s disorienting. It’s very difficult. And I don’t want to minimize that.

But along the way, one of the rewards for me was being able to be in relationship with people that I was not previously able to be in relationship with.

I think that there was a built-in isolation, alienation, and sometimes paternalism that I would relate to people whose very existences baffled my categories. Coming into seminary and encountering LGBTQ+ theologians who knew the Bible better than I did and prayed more than I did, the cognitive dissonance of that forced me to a place where I could no longer have a paternalistic mindset of, “Oh, they’re misguided.”

It just allowed me to release all of those suppositions and try to enter into relationship with people on the basis of humility. That was the number one thing that pushed me to keep going along that process of cognitive dissonance, because theories and ideas will take you far, but the relationships are what concretize and make real the theories that you are trying to put together. That would be my primary encouragement to people that are going through that kind of process: You will be able to love people that you are not currently positioned or capable of loving.