4 major religions with anarchist roots

Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think

Anarchists aren’t typically portrayed as particularly religious; instead, we think of them as violent anti-authoritarians.
While many modern anarchists rankle at today’s religious organizations, the elements of these faiths often express a lot of ideas that anarchists express as well.
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Here are 4 major religions and how they connect back to anarchy.

Generally, we don’t think of anarchists as religious. Anarchists, after all, are anti-authoritarian. What could be more authoritarian than gods and churches? What about the famous anarchist slogan, “No gods, no masters”? There’s good reason to think this way. The majority of anarchists probably are anti-religious, but it would be a mistake to think that all anarchists are not religious. In fact, the philosophies of many major religions have surprising links to anarchy – links that many prominent anarchists have noticed.

Christianity

Surprisingly, both Christian thinkers and the Bible itself have anarchist leanings. In the Old Testament, Judges 21:25 states, “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.” Ultimately, though, the Israelites wanted to have a king in order to be like other nations. In the Book of Samuel, God tells Samuel—the eponymous prophet—that there would be major consequences to choosing a king that ends up reading like a laundry list of an anarchist’s worst nightmare. God tells Samuel, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do […] He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.” This doesn’t exactly sound like a fun time. Though Samuel warns the Israelites about this, they ask him to pick a king anyhow; Samuel ultimately picks Saul.

In the New Testament, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is sometimes seen through an anarchist lens. Most notably, Leo Tolstoy—widely considered one of the greatest writers of all time—was profoundly influenced by the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy, in fact, is arguably one of the foundational figures in Christian anarchism. Tolstoy believed that pacifism was the key takeaway from the Sermon on the Mount—Jesus did say, after all, to turn the other cheek. Because all governments eventually wage war, he believed that this ran counter to Jesus’s teachings and that therefore there should be no governments. Tolstoy also said the Christian church had perverted Jesus’s teachings, ultimately leading to his excommunication.