Christian anarchism

Christian anarchism is a political tradition that rejects state authority as incompatible with Jesus’s teachings, often grounding social order in nonviolence, mutual aid, and voluntary community.

Anarchism: A political philosophy that opposes coercive hierarchy and advocates forms of social organization based on voluntary cooperation. Christian anarchism applies anarchist opposition to domination to political and religious authority.
Early Christianity: The diverse Christian communities and movements that developed during the first centuries after Jesus’s life. Early Christian practices and attitudes toward empire inform later claims that faith resists state power.
Christian nationalism: A political movement that seeks to align national identity and government with a particular understanding of Christianity. It seeks political power for Christianity, opposite to Christian anarchism’s rejection of state authority.
Christian pacifism: The Christian commitment to reject war and, in some forms, all physical violence. Many Christian anarchists make pacifism a practical consequence of following Jesus.
Sermon on the Mount: A collection of Jesus’s teachings in the Gospel of Matthew, including commands to love enemies and reject retaliation. Its commands against retaliation and domination anchor many Christian anarchist arguments.
Leo Tolstoy: A Russian novelist and religious thinker whose late writings developed a radical Christian ethic of nonresistance. Tolstoy gave modern Christian anarchism a widely influential critique of state violence.
Augustinian political theology: A Christian account of political order shaped by Augustine’s distinction between earthly and divine communities. It treats political authority as a limited remedy for disorder rather than inherently illegitimate.
Conscientious objection: Refusal to perform military service or another legal duty because it violates a person’s conscience. It turns opposition to state violence into a direct refusal of military participation.
Kingdom of God: A central New Testament idea describing God’s reign and the transformed order associated with it. Christian anarchists contrast allegiance to God’s reign with obedience to states.
The Kingdom of God Is Within You: Leo Tolstoy’s 1894 book arguing that Jesus’s command of nonresistance rules out state coercion and war. This book articulated Tolstoy’s case against governments in a form later Christian anarchists drew upon.

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